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…
Month: September 2002
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…
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.
I feel absolutely unbearably bitchy for doing this, but really… A full year after the web goes wild for it, popbitch‘s latest newsletter catches up with the faked moonlanding site…
Dorian, the guy I work next to at an UnnamedMediaService is having a baby! He didn’t tell anyone for ages, and then he kind of mentioned it surreptitiously over AIM. When I turned over to look at him, he had the biggest grin on his face and a kind of conspiratorial wiggle in his eyebrows. A bit like he’d done something wrong at school that he was actually really proud of. Mischievous, maybe? It’s difficult to describe. He looked like he was going to burst any minute – like literally explode. I think it’s the coolest thing that’s ever happened to anyone. Ever. And already there are baby pictures to gawk at… From nine weeks to thirteen weeks… And he’s putting more up soon…
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Hello Kitty 40,000
While working (playing) with a new template for a site that I work on – designing, in fact, a complete “Hello Kitty” skin for it if I’m forced to be honest – I stumbled upon one of the most glorious images I’ve seen in a long long time. In a universe gone mad, will Kitty and her crack troops be able to bring a deathly order back? Hello Kitty 40,000
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It's difficult to know what to say today…
Half a world away from Ground Zero, London is on alert today – worried about whether we might be the targets of some kind of commemorative attack. But these are exaggerated fears. Alerted security forces probably make this the safest day to be in a large city since 9/11 itself. And in and around these tensions the same things go on in our lives. Daily things. Little things. Like me picking up my iPod from the repair shop. Like having been stuck on the bus for hours this morning. Like how beautiful the sky looks today. Like how I overslept because I was loath to wake from a longing but desperate dream and how it’s stayed with me all day. And I’m ashamed because these are the things that have been in my mind. And not the world-breaking, heart-shattering weirdness of a year ago today…
For obvious reasons it’s difficult to know what to write about. I thought about (belatedly) making the whole site monochrome, as Yahoo has done. I thought about long pieces of writing about Infoshare or maybe writing about where I was – what I was thinking – on that early afternoon last September. Except that my first reactions when I heard about the planes was one of complete disbelief – humour even. Who knew that the plane was a passenger jet and not a tiny one-man prop plane? Who knew (who wasn’t near a television) that it was a terrorist attack? Who knew so many people would die… I don’t want to think about that again.
I’ve thought about what I should write all day (and for much of yesterday as well). I can’t think of a single thing that I could convey a thousandth of what needs to be said. Everything would be gestural at best – facile, empty. Everything would be inelegant – although maybe that’s the only kind of thing that would make any sense today anyway. Maybe our thoughts should be large and savage and potent and overwhelming. Maybe they should be as large as they can while there’s time for them to be so, before we have to get on with the business of living in the world again.
The only thing I can think of that comes close to being meaningful is a quote from the novel of a much wiser man than I. In Kurt Vonnegut’s Timequake a world suffers a calamity and no one knows how to deal with life when it’s over. A man walks around telling people, “You were sick, but now you’re well again, and there’s work to be done”. There’s a sentiment to take with you. Look around you now. Think about the world in which we live. And think about the sense of closeted safeness that most of the Western world felt one year and one day ago. And say it with me now, to yourself and to the regimes and leaders all over the world from London and the US, from Afghanistan to Iraq, “You were sick, but now you’re well again, and there’s work to be done”.