Excerpts from ‘My Big Gay Life’ (6): So you’re in a shop and you see a magazine, and on the cover is some guy that you wanted to be involved with. And you say to yourself, Good Christ. And you send them a text message which reads, Good Christ. And you take the magazine into a bar and order a coke. And you sit down and open the magazine. And then you put the coke down, feel slightly weird, leave the bar, get on a tube and go home.
Grant Morrison, personal god of mine, and my first and only hero, is shortly to take over the writing of the world’s biggest selling comic-book, the X-men. For those of you who promise not to think me a completely ridiculous geek, here (along with some discussion) are some scans of the first two pages.
[After Jason] I’ve submitted a word (‘unsightful’) to the pseudodictionary. Have you?
This is possibly the least helpful article on dealing with a gay teenager that I have ever read. And I can only hope and pray that in ten or twenty years time, comments like “In truth, no parent wishes for a gay child. Who would want their son or daughter to follow a lifestyle that invites ridicule, heartache and prevents grandchildren!” will be considered hopelessly backwards and insulting by all reasonable people.
Excerpts from ‘My Big Gay Life’ (5) So you think you’re angry with Big for the way the evening ended the other day, and you’d chucked him a very brief e-mail designed to assess the lines of communication, to which there had been no reply. So after a conversation with a friend, you decide that what you really want to do is give him a quick ring. So you do. And he hangs up on you. Which makes you think, what the hell? So you sit there for a minute being puzzled and slightly irritable, before deciding to be magnanimous. So you send a text message saying: ‘Fair enough. See you around sometime”. And then he rings up immediately. His dog is playing in the river, and he’s all cheery. What exactly does one say in this situation?
If someone said that they were going away for a week, but that they’d give you a ring once they’d got back, at what stage can one start legitimately getting slightly narked? Your answers please!
I have a quandary. In my flat, we have (to date) four rules of life. Two of these rules (1 and 4) this evening appear to be in direct opposition with one another. The situation is that I might have to go out for a drink with a friend in central London. The rules are as follows: 1) Inside Good, Outside Bad. 2) Everyone’s a **** (i) Men are particularly ****s. 3) Buffy is life. 4) Vodka is our friend. What shall I do? [You have until 9pm GMT to answer this question.]
A tesseract or hypercube is a piece of hypothetical four-dimensional geometry that is generated by dragging a cube across a fourth dimension much as that cube is generated by dragging a square across three dimentional space. There’s a fair amount on the net about them, but my favourite site (simply called Tesseract) includes a projection of the 4-d hypercube onto three dimensions. It’s not entirely clear from the simulation how or what such an entity operates. But for more about this, and other geometric/dimensional wonders, you can’t go far wrong with Flatland.
A fascinatingly political comment from the BBC on The UK Census and Big Brother: “Most appreciate that the information is vital for planning the numbers of schools, hospitals and social services. But many will feel a twinge of unease about invasion of privacy and revealing all to faceless government officials.”
On the peer-to-peer / interconnected / web of trust: This is a rough combination of ideas from epinions, dirk and napster (with a little bit of avondi in there as well).
We all know about Napster. The principle is simple for the few of you that don’t. I have MP3 files on my computer. Napster keeps a record of what I have. While I am online, other people online can search for MP3s, and download them directly from my computer if they want.
Now imagine that every citizen in a country has a program on their computer like Napster. Instead of MP3 files, they present themselves and the skills that they have, or merchandise and products that they produce or work with. That’s stage one – people can do a search for a good or service that they want, and find the individual or company that produced it directly. There is a separate box, optional, for the area in which the service is to operate. The next stage (which is one that is already semi-implemented by Napster) is the integration of instant messaging. All the people that you know on a daily basis and wish to communicate with are on your friends list. Now you integrate epinions‘ ‘Web of Trust’. You can rate your friends (or anyone else on the network) as to their provision of any service that they offer (from cabbages to web design). You can also rate them as a friend, whether they are someone that you intrinically like and / or trust. Now when someone does a search for ‘web design’ they first and foremost get a search that runs down their web of trust. People that they trust, who know people that they trust, might know of someone who they think is a great web designer. Each step removed from the originator lowers the potential trust rating of the person, while a separate geographically random – in order to limit the possibility of cultish behaviour – sampling of five hundred other people’s opinons presents an average of the general faith in the company or institution. Finally, combine this whole thing with an avondi style currency of barter exchange, and you’ve just heavily democritised the entire free-market economy along peer-to-peer lines.