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Random

On Birthdays and The Patriot…

God. There is just so much I want to get through today, and there just isn’t the slightest chance I am going to manage it. Potted summary of a couple of things:

  • Birthday
    Oh god. I’m 28 on Wednesday. The fact horrifies me so completely it’s untrue. Anyway, I had a party on Saturday night which was really strange but quite entertaining. I don’t know that I have much to say about it though. Um. Nope.

  • Interviewed by The Evening Standard
    Yesterday evening I went to be interviewed by a reporter for London’s Evening Standard, who was doing an article on weblogs and weblogging for the IT section. Katy is going to be interviewed as well, to get a “woman’s eye view”. I wonder if there actually is any difference between the genders in the weblogging stakes. It’s never even occurred to me. Anyway – we talked about a lot of weblogs – she knew a lot about the subject, but I’m afraid that my e-vangelical (sorry about the 90s style pun) enthusiasm about the web might have bored her slightly! Two full tapes (both sides) in her dictaphone later (and only one vodka and tonic) we finally part company. I told her if she wrote anything mean then I’d post her name, address and e-mail address up on the site and we’d go and sort her out. I was kidding of course…

  • The Patriot
    I went to see this film finally, thinking that it couldn’t be possibly as bad as the English papers said that it was. It couldn’t be that offensive. Afterwards I went straight over to IMDB and wrote a scathing review of the film. Just in case they don’t publish it, here it is in full:

    I’ve never seen a film with such astonishing revisionist tendencies as The Patriot. Its slamming of the child-eating, church-burner, deviant British is pure racism, and based on eschewing American cultural responsibility for things like slavery. In the film the claymationalike Gabriel says something facetious like, “we are fighting for a new world, and things will be new in it, not like that silly old old world where they have slavery. we’ll not have any of that in the good old US of A”… The fact that the British outlawed slavery forty years before America apparently means nothing. And the fact that when the country actually got around to it they actually had to have another whole war because one side really wanted to keep African Americans in chains – these things mean nothing to the creators of the Patriot, who are only interested in playing the evil, corrupt, power crazed, racist big monarchist bad guys against the simple farmer folk who love black people and freedom and don’t really even WANT to fight and who are actually Australian in upbringing. As films go, this one is insulting to all concerned, and particularly insulting to history and vague formless notions like TRUTH and JUSTICE (and through association, we would LIKE to assume, the American way)…

  • HSX
    Speaking of movie-related stuff, they have finally gotten around to redesigning HSX which is good. It’s still my favourite way of filling in a spare half hour or so, and I have so far managed to extend my initial $2 million investment up to a respectable $24 million. And all that without being in the country to feel the buzz on upcoming films…

  • Meg 14 July
    And I thought everything had been resolved
Categories
Gay Politics Politics

More on Gay Marriage…

A few people seem think I fell from the womb an angry crusader for queer politics. In fact nothing could be further from the truth. I started my big gay life as the biggest anti-queen you can imagine – my main mission was to try to convince people that gay people were basically identical to straight people, and that people who thought differently were basically stereotyping. I still believe that a lot of people who think gay people are different are basically stereotyping, but I’ve become increasingly comfortable with the idea of difference. Fair enough if you want to have a monogamous relationship with someone your entire life. Why call it marriage? Why make a contract out of it? Why do it in front of god? Why does it change your legal status? Your tax status?

Gay people have been hindered by a large number of legal and social restrictions over the last few decades. But along with this absence of rights came the necessity of figuring out how to do relationships between two men or two women that worked. For some people this meant a “butch” partner and a “femme” partner – in a fashion that directly aped heterosexual relationships of power of the time. For others it meant monogamous coupledom. For still others random sex and a tight-knit relationship with friends, multiple partners or no partners. But all of them felt less of a requirement to settle down, find the man/woman of their dreams and move into a house with a white-picket fence. In the past, we have been forced not to be complacent and this has provided some wonderful alternatives to “marriage”.

So it would certainly be my opinion that gay people shouldn’t get married in any legal sense of the word. Why revel in the sanctioning of your particular perversion? Why be legitimated while all the alternatives that have been developed over the last hundred years are still frowned upon? There’s just no need to sign a piece of paper. Instead, make a stand for difference and variety between communities, and between members of the same community. Have a relationship by all means. Move in. Stay with them forever. But don’t get married. And don’t do it for me

One final thought takes us ten, twenty years down the line. When you’ve sucessfully separated the “good/married” gay people from the “bad/non-married/sex-crazed” gay people, what makes you think that the latter won’t be stigmatised again, like they were during the AIDS tensions of the eighties?

Categories
Random

Will Barbelith escape their fire?!

Finally, today I stumbled upon a weblog called Bad Blogs. And how did I stumble upon it? I did a search for barbelith at blogger and it came out top. And I quote: “Barbelith would usually escape our fire…” Phew! – thank goodness for that…

Categories
Personal Publishing

Dreamweaver and Blogger don't bore people. People bore people…

I love A List Apart. I really do. But is anyone bored of the anti-weblog riff? It’s a banal conversation at the best of times. It’s good that they are easy to build (html isn’t exactly the trickiest language itself – would it be better if you had to code in C++? Would the content be any good then?), because it makes the web less elitist – makes the information online and the ability to communicate available to everyone. And so what if you get a fair amount of crap? There are many more crap sites out there which are not powered by blogger than ones that are… If it makes a designer more lazy, well that’s his/her fault – not the fault of the tool.

It’s like my whole thing with Dreamweaver. I look at the tool and think to myself – why is this program popular? It’s an idiotic waste of space that generates messy, unclear, unreadable, fat and buggy code. And yet people use it because it makes their lives easier. I hate the program, but I can’t fault the content of some of the sites built with it. And Blogger doesn’t produce ugly code at all, it just provides a basic and surprisingly flexible way of working with daily content.

Or to put it in a more memorable way: Dreamweaver and Blogger don’t bore people. People bore people.

One final quote:

“What if everyone spoke their minds and actually put some effort into it? How about presenting who you are – what you are made of – what drives your inner being? Take a chance and create without bounds. Don’t waste the power the web has given us in a hit-seeking circle jerk.”

If you haven’t found a weblog that does this stuff, then you haven’t been looking very hard. And if you haven’t been looking very hard, then piss off…

Categories
Random

Coverage of the Yell Awards

I’ve been looking for some coverage of the Yell Awards all over the place, but I can’t seem to find any at all. Has anyone actually seen anything about it anywhere on the web? [E-mail me]

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Random

Tom's Night Out at the Yell.com Web Site Awards…

[Being an expository piece investigating corporate web site hell and a scientific study of the effects of combined alcohol abuse, loud music and the presence of a television crew]

The Yell UK Web Awards is a pretty strange creature. Ostensibly for the public, and televised via BBC World to every single country in the world, except of course the UK, it is almost totally predominated by a corporate view of the web and what it is for. Not here do were have awards for the best designed site – no, here we have awards for the best web design agency. In fact only two of the twelve awards are really for sites which aren’t commercial, and these are named accordingly – “BEST PERSONAL SITE” (a fairly strange category which means any site NOT run by a large multinational) and “BEST SITE FROM A NON PROFIT MAKING ORGANISATION”, which of course prompts the standard jokes about Amazon, Last Minute and the inevitable Boo.com.

Into this corporate creature strides two representatives of timeout.com – one of which is my good self. The site is up for the award “BEST ENTERTAINMENT SITE”, which is extremely flattering, but a bit of a misnomer (yet again) for the Time Out site. [The awards are clearly geared towards “types of business” rather than on type of content.]

Jonathon Ross was presenting the awards, and was generally pretty amusing, even though he was clearly reading mostly promotional fluff copy from Yell itself. Meanwhile, David and I were busy exploring the opportunities for drinking Vodka, which were surprisingly limited.

About halfway through the evening the award for “MOST INNOVATIVE USE OF TECHNOLOGY” arrives, and to my complete surprise, k10k are nominated. Finally, I think to myself, someone here who really deserves an award, who builds a highly creative site without expecting to become an e-millionaire out of it – someone who actually has passion for the medium.

Of course they don’t win. But I start hunting around the room to see if any of the people from the site are actually in the room. I can’t see any sight or sound of them. By this stage our quest for Vodka has driven David out of the TV studio itself and he is roaming the building looking for non-wine. A plan begins to form in my mind as I watch yet another corporate president expressing their delight in their award and thanking everyone who has worked hard to get them to float their IPO. I cease to be interested in what the representative of tescodirect.com might say.

David returns to the table – our barman has finally come up trumps, and I have text messaged David, “Vodka has arrived! Return to Base Camp immediately!” Time Out’s award is up next. I am increasingly nervous for some reason, particularly when I realise that I am going to go up on the stage with David and say a couple of words with him if we win. And win we do.

With my hands in my pockets I sheepishly follow the rather exuberant David up to the platform. We shake Mr Ross’ hand and David turns to the audience with a huge grin on his face, says that everyone seems to have been very serious, thanks Bart Simpson, Eric Cartman from South Park and the barman who supplied our “Special Water” and then stands aside.

Before they get a chance to turn on the dirge-like music which means our little speech-slot is over, I bounce over to the microphone. Lights shine in my face, and two hundred mildly drunk corporate people loom at me out of the darkness.

With mounting horror and staring resolutely at my feet I say something to the effect of: “The heart and soul of the net is the individual creative and personal website – and I’d just like to say that I’m delighted to see that all the representatives of the Personal category and particularly k10k have been recognised here tonight.”

Suddenly extremely embarrassed (and yet proud of myself) I stand aside, shake Jonathon Ross’s hand and stand for the press shots, looking as sheepish as I can possibly imagine. “Nice speech”, he says…

Categories
Random

Go for it, babe!

Considering my current ethical dilemma regarding redesigning, I was delighted to see that Weblog Wannabe is just going for it. Go for it, babe!

Categories
Gay Politics

Why are married people being financially rewarded?

Jonno and Sturtle have been discussing my “anti-gay-marriage” piece.

“I understand what he’s trying to say: historically, marriage has been a sort of institutionalized inequity, so if queer politics are about reshaping norms and ideas of what’s acceptable and getting rid of social inequity, why adopt marriage as one of the planks in our platform? Unfortunately, that sort of philosophy falls on some very hard rocks in the face of legalities that prevent g/l/b/t partners from securing inheritances, visitation rights, and countless other benefits that legally joined partners enjoy (except, of course, in the great state of Vermont).” [Sturtle]

This misses my point, to an extent. I was arguing that we deserved the right to marriage, even if we didn’t take it up, but that if we were going to have “legally sanctioned relationships” at all (which I would rather we didn’t), they should be considerably more diverse. To make a further point: rather than bemoaning equal access to the financial advantages of hetersexual marriage, perhaps we should be removing those advantages and spreading the financial awards between all of us.

This point is particularly relevant for Jonno‘s comments:

“I would’ve agreed with a lot more of what Tom had to say about gay marriage (and the article he quotes at length) before I had a mortgage to deal with and started resenting the fact that Richard and I pay considerably more taxes than a het couple would in our situation.”

But that’s exactly the point, isn’t it? They have chosen to operate in a similar relationship to marriage (even though they have also chosen to ignore aspects of the heterosexual equivalent) and now think it is unfair that they cannot reap the material rewards that go along with it. I’m more interested in why they are not concerned about the unfairness of people who have not chosen to occupy such a relationship helping to subsidy the lives of married straights! And in this I am asking EVERY single person, whether they be straight or gay, promiscuous or monogamous, serially monogamous etc. etc. etc. Why are married people being financially rewarded?

Categories
Random

“I’m sure that’s not words”

Quote of the night: “I’m sure that’s not words.” Name that film…

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Random

Mella's Chocolately Shatner

Kate and I just returned to the Wu-tang name-a-lizer site. Delighted to find out that our flatmate’s name translates into CHOCOLATELY SHATNER, which I believe is some kind of stomach disease or a reference to a Star Trek star’s sick fetish for Milky Ways (boom boom). Mella, we miss you… [Addendum: Apparently there is a weblog called Chocolately Shatner. Bizarre stuff, indeed…]