Author: Tom Coates

So I changed the name of the weblog from Xenolith to Barbelith yesterday, since it seems to be the most substantially operative part of the site at the moment. And now it looks like no one can find the thing. I still prefer Xenolith as a name for it, but I thought it was too confusing – people were calling the site all kinds of different things. Weird, disturbing things…

According to the age guesser, I am 31. I suppose it’s not that far off the mark. Only four years. Still – quite clearly in the wrong direction. It works on quite a cool principle – each answer to each question corresponds with an age, at the end of the series of questions it asks you your actual age. Every question that you answer in the way they expect (eg. answer “duran duran” if you are in your thirties) is weighted slightly more. And every question that you answer in a way that they did not expect (eg. answer “Stretch Armstrong” if you are in your eighties) is weighted slightly less. In time – only the really accurate questions will carry any weight at all. The questionaire is evolving…

The idea of web queeries is really growing on me (now if only I could do something about the name). I’m beginning to see the possibilites of this new form of journalism – a weblog that publishes important and entertaining news and is edited/researched by a variety of people, most of whom will never have met one another. I think when I made the leap from thinking about it in terms of personal content and more towards comment and news, the whole idea made much more sense to me.

No one seems to have got my Voyager reference yesterday, which is probably a good thing to be honest, as I’m sure enough of you think I am a geek as it is. There’s this episode in which Captain Janeway, the slightly jowly woman with the squeeky voice (and rather ‘hands-on’ approach to interstellar diplomacy) has been being attacked by a race called the Krenim (or something like that). As the cast all rock backwards and forwards in stylised “starship been shot at” ways, Janeway scowls and then remarks to herself, “this is turning into the Week of Hell”.

The joke? The episode has the rather less optimistic title “Year of Hell”. Let’s hope I am not similarly ill-fated.

The slightly bizarre baltimorecitypaper.com has a feature about the disinfo.con. And I quote: “Easily the most charismatic speaker of the event was the wiry, shaven-headed Scottish writer Grant Morrison, whom, judging from the enthusiastic applause, is becoming highly regarded … The great underlying truth that makes this so, Morrison said, is that “words are the binding agents for reality,” and hence can bent to our desires”.

Zannah won the blog of the week over at blogger.com. Congratulations, old girl, you deserve it. In other weblog news, Fairvue is a site I haven’t seen before, which drips design savvy and has a wonderfully tiny icon-based links bar. The only problem is, barbelith doesn’t have a logo. Note to self – improve site branding asap. A couple of other nice people have started linking to barbelith – dailybread looks and reads really well. It’s a pity she’s cursed with that damnable GeoCities advert – stuff and rot has said lovely lovely things about the layout around here and has introduced me to a couple of sites I’ll be visiting much more often – and finally, a proto-blog is coming together at Luke’s site o’ stuff. Could it be the world’s first overtly Christian blog?

I’ve just signed up to join web queeries, which is a glbt community blog. I’m a little sceptical about the idea at the moment, mainly because I’m trying to work out what the difference should be between writing for it and writing for barbelith. Should I be “less gay” in my weblog? Should I be only writing “for gay people” in the group one?

If you, like me, pine for the good old days on the net, before IPOs and uber-corporate assimilation, then you will be delighted to know that weblogs are our way back to the future we used to believe in. Wired will show you the way…

Here’s another little microsite that I built for timeout.com – Should Ken Livingstone stand as an independent candidate? Answer the question!

Tonight is my last night out before I move on Saturday – and Nick, Toby and I have decided to say thank you to Ed the Barman (for all his loyal years of helping us get nicely lubricated) by taking him out around Soho and getting him drunk. All very satisfactory.

I don’t know if this is dodgy practice of not, but I’ve checked the other nominees, and at least one of them is doing it as well. Vote for Barbelith’s Xenolith weblog as Pyra’s Blog of the week.

Queer as Folk 2 may have ended with a few slightly odd moments – the revolving car, day turning into night, the epic speech of Stuart Jones – but I haven’t felt as invigorated after a TV program since, well since Queer as Folk 1. This whole episode felt like Thelma and Louise, only with a more uplifting ending. I’d be interested in hearing everyone’s opinion about it.

I have had a really interesting conversation with prolific on the subject of my comments yesterday (writing about friends). Needless to say, our conversation was both thought-provoking and entertaining. She’s using humanclick technology which I tried out a while ago. At the time I couldn’t see why it had advantages over a normal chatroom, but I may be changing my mind.

Final thing for now: G L I F F writes: “Let’s hear it for barbelith, the only openly gay weblogger, (as far as I know, anyway).” I’m terribly flattered to be mentioned at all, but you should all be aware of hit-or-miss.org which includes a whole lesbian and gay weblogger portal. There’s some really good stuff there…

A quick query on the nature of weblogging. One of my friends works in a pretty high-powered capacity in the British film industry. She tells me a fair number of really cool stories, which I generally wouldn’t repeat (and certainly not in a public place like this). In addition to these stories, she has expressed to me a couple of times her feeling that some people try to use her and her friends to get ‘kudos’ – valuing her job and the people she knows more than they do her. For these reasons I made a conscious decision not to talk about her on this weblog.

But then it came to me this afternoon that many webloggers discuss their friends to some extent – and that there really isn’t that much difference between mentioning the exploits of a friend who works in a supermarket and one who is responsible for famous people’s corsetry. What gives me the right to talk about Toby, Nick, Kerry or even Max without their consent, or even (on occasion) their knowledge. I am perturbed.

It’s the final episode of Queer as Folk 2 tonight. It’s difficult to assess quite how much impact this TV series had on gay culture in the UK. The first episode showed all kinds of things that you would never be able to see on an American TV station – a well plotted drama which depicted casual shagging and ‘true love’ in the gay scene, underage sex handled realistically, gay people working in supermarkets and (of course) a whole bundle of pretty people having relatively explicit sexual relations with each other. The trailers for this week’s episode include the immortal Stuart saying “You’re not queer, you’re a straight guy who shags men”. If you want to see more, there are one or two really good screencap archives.