Less than a rant, more than a query – today I’m interested in the way Google handles links to pages which contain internal anchors. For example, if you do a search for ‘Greg Dyke’ on my Atomz powered search facility, then you get this exact link, whereas Google if presented with a similar search term (but not exactly the same as Google clearly won’t rate me quite as highly), then you get this page returned. The difference? One has picked up the internal anchor on the page and the other hasn’t. Is there any particular reason why Google doesn’t leap to the relevant internal anchor? Is it to do with the specifics of weblog content?
And while people tell me that there’s still some battles on B3ta‘s mailing list about my post the other day, across the Atlantic a young gay man who’s had enough trouble in his life already is now having to deal with post-coming-out fallout from his parents. Bart did the deed a couple of days ago and their first reaction seemed really positive, but since then things have gone downhill. I feel awful for Bart – completely awful. I think it’s terrible that the world can make it so difficult for young gay men and women. And I just cannot understand how anyone can try and stop accurate information being distributed to parents and children. Or why any religion, society or political persuasion would want to make gay teenagers’ lives any more difficult than they already are. It scares and – frankly – disgusts me.
My own experiences of coming out were very different from Bart’s. In the early nineties, there was no internet to be a first point of call. I had no contact with any other gay people or impartial information of any kind except for a late-night television show. That show was literally the only thing I had in the world that told me that there were other people out there who were like me. And to be honest, they weren’t really like me – they were very politicised, very scary looking people. It wasn’t until my year out before University that I came out to anyone, and that was undertaken in a pretty half-assed way. He didn’t even realise I’d done it for weeks. It just kind of happened in the background. And it took me until my first year at University to come out to anyone else, and it was a few years after that before my mother and I had the fateful argument that ended with me telling her what a bloody difficult woman she was and that, by the way, I was a big homo.
If there are any teenage gay guys out there who are having trouble with their parents, then you could do much worse than send them information about PFLAG. They may sound a bit worthy, but they’re really good decent people. I had the honour of arranging an event at my old university with some people from the English branch. They were amazing. There’s a really good PDF that’s worth downloading too: Our Daughters and Sons: Questions and Answers for Parents of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered People. And feel free to e-mail me if you want to have a talk about anything…
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Best British Weblog… An update…
So it’s four days until the winner of the Guardian’s Best British Weblog is to be announced and interesting new facts are emerging about how it’s being conducted and the attitude of (at least one of) the judges. Via Quinquireme I came upon Bowblog – which is the site of Steve Bowbrick, one of the Guardian-elected arbiters of our huge online community. He talks a bit about the Not the Best Project in vaguely completely-missing-the-point kind of terms, but I’ll pass swiftly over that. What I won’t pass over are these particularly stunning statements:
“I think the competition will prove to be a real validation for the new form and, I hope, a springboard for the weblog’s leap into the mainstream.”
And my particular favourite:
“It’s always difficult to see your clever, groovy, pioneering passion popularised but I’m certain that even the elite would prefer the visibility and influence that competitions like this will provide to obscurity and irrelevance.”
Is there anyone out there who runs a site who feels that weblogs really need validation any more? Three years after they exploded, with hundreds of thousands of sites in the world, talking on every subject possible? Is it really the Guardian’s place to give you permission to feel good about your medium? Bugger off. And looking around the room again, I ask you all – do you really think that the Guardian’s able to rescue us all from the ‘obscurity and irrelevance’ that we’re apparently all languishing in?
Some more interesting information can be gleaned from these couple of posts – the judges have received a list of ‘dozens’ of weblogs. Clearly this doesn’t amount to everyone who entered – when I met Simon Waldman he told me that several hundred people had entered. So who’s been written off the list before it even gets to the judges, and on what grounds? Who the hell is actually judging this thing?
I’ll tell you what – next year make the name less tendentious, conduct the competition openly and honestly, and don’t be so bloody full of what you can do for us – stop treating it as something that a superior grown-up media organisation is doing as a favour for the little tiny people – and maybe some of this year’s grumpy ‘refuseniks’ won’t be able to claim that this is more about co-opting our revolution than it is about promoting the medium… Do that, and I might even enter… In the meantime, I’m going to completely agree with Quinquireme when she says… “Look mate, you’ve totally missed the point. You’re not validating us, we’re invalidating you!”
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My brush with a Pop Idol…
This couldn’t happen in America. Not where they have proper pop-stars who live the lifestyle – wandering between parties and premieres with coke, drink and sexual fluids oozing from their noses. Americans know how to do things properly when it comes to stardom. Except with Anne Robinson. And Simon Cowell. But I’m getting ahead of myself…
Our evening begins, strangely enough, with a discussion between Simon and I about the state of the music industry. As bands get more and more prefabricated, and the audience they’re being pitched towards gets younger and younger – isn’t there a chance that the music industry is gradually pushing itself unsustainably towards blander, less ‘relevant’ music? How long until rhythm, lyric and melody themselves are completely sacrificed to firm, tanned boys pouting at the camera in full-on pre-teen sex-free idol-porn? Only time will tell.
Simon and I were in town to catch up with each other and watch The Bourne Identity, which was empty but diverting. And when it ended we went our separate ways. Him trainwards back to Guildford, me to the Number 6 bus-stop on Regent’s Street. And it’s clearly the bus-stop of stars, because number one recording artist and third-place Britney-murderering PopIdol Darius was also milling around there with a group of friends… After a while they wandered off, just giving me time to send a few apparently-interested-in-a-kind-of-ironic-way-but-actually-quite-excited text messages to a few dozen friends, acquaintances, co-workers and complete strangers, before my bus arrived. Truly – mine is a life of true glamour…
It’s been around for a while, but I’ve never really commented upon it. Blo.gs sems to take over where weblogs.com left off a while ago. You can visit random sites, browse blogs and most importantly track your favourites. The site doesn’t render particularly well on a Mac, but it remains fairly useful…
And just to show that good things happen as well, and that being an unruly poof isn’t entirely about stropping around the place causing fights – Bart from Trabaca has had the best news. He decided to come out to his parents by sending them a letter. He’s been agonising about it on his site for months and he’s been absolutely terrified about their reaction, but in the end he sent a letter and yesterday received a reply from his father saying that they were still best friends and that they’re keen to come and visit him over the weekend and make sure he’s ok. Which is totally, perfectly the best possible thing they could have done. They understood what a big deal it was to him, and completely want to make him feel connected and loved. Bloody genius people.
I was online and chatting to Bart when the letter arrived, and he got a bit freaked so I rang him up (in New York) and we chatted. It was so nice hearing how happy and relieved he was. Good on you, old chap. You’ve earned your spurs, you’re in the union, you’ve got your license to practise…
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One final additional comment about B3ta…
Following on from yesterday’s rant about B3ta, I just want to add that I didn’t make this post to the b3ta board (they managed to spell Barbelith wrong for a start) but that the responses from some of the board’s regulars weren’t exactly heartening… I like my nice liberal forum much more…
The post below may be edited through the day. I have written it in a blaze of fury and irritation, and the language, grammar and spelling has suffered as a consequence.
What the fuck is going on with B3ta? Each and every week there’s the same range of crap jokes – the crap jokes that we’ve come to love – but increasingly one of those jokes each week seems to be about stupid funny gay people and how freakish, stereotypical and generally funny they are. I’m not going to deny that sometimes their jokes are really funny, and I wouldn’t comment in the slightest if it was a relatively rare occurrence – no one wants to live in a world where people can’t make any kind of tasteless jokes at all – but this really seems to be becoming some kind of obsession. And the excuse that I’ve heard is that it’s just ‘schoolyard japery’ – stuff that doesn’t really mean gay at all – like the idiots who wander around the place saying, “Marriage is so gay” – is just bullshit. At a certain point you have to look at the kids who grow up in these schoolyards – gay kids – who are surrounded by anti-gay sentiment each and every day. As a child, you don’t even have to know what being gay means to know fairly early on that it’s not something you’re supposed to be – that it’s bad and wrong and shameful. And b3ta is not only sanctioning this culture in schools, it’s fucking promoting it and extending it to adults!
Let’s start with a bit of a survey of the first few ‘gay offerings’ by B3ta I could find. If you know any others, let me know.
- Gay Computer Game Characters
- Spiderman will make you gay
- Gay Skeletons
- Gaylords
- Gay or Straight
- Motorbikes are gay
- Draw a picture and win gay sex
- Stephen Hawking and Davros
And by way of juxtaposition, a couple of years back I wrote an article On Homophobic Bullying in Schools. Let’s just see what kind of effect ‘gay’ jokes can have on kids…
In November, an inquest heard that a 15-year-old choirboy had been found hanged in his bedroom. Darren Steele had been left at home watching Neighbours by his mother when she went out for the evening. When she returned she found him dead. A note by his body explained that he had killed himself because of the bullying that he was suffering at school.
Darren had been bullied because other students thought he was gay. At the inquest, his friends explained that he had been regularly taunted as a ‘gay boy’ and a ‘poof’ because of his interests in drama and cookery. Over the previous five years he had been systematically punched, verbally abused and even burned with cigarettes by other students. He never told a teacher.
His mother’s statement reads: “I saw Darren kneeling on the far side of the bed. His face was blue. I went downstairs screaming ‘my son is dead’.”
There’s more if you can stomach it.
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Steve Jobs IS Agent Triple (OS) X…
Steve Jobs stars as Xander “Triple (OS) X” Cage, the notorious underground thrill seeker and computer visionary who until now has been deemed grumpy by the press… Download the full wallpaper today!
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Meme Overload…
No! I am Spartacus…
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Addendum: Don’t buy this album. I have no idea whether or not it is good or not. But the challenge went out and I had to rise to it.