Category: Random

• Halo 2 for the next generation Xbox
  “The Voodoo Extreme site is reporting that the Bungie team may work on a project to port Halo 2 to the next generation Xbox, adding in additional content and improving overall gameplay and picture quality.”

• Expo rumours continue – competition for Office? Garageband 2? Screenless super-cheap iMacs?
  “Apple will launch its new iWork ’05 productivity suite at Macworld Expo, Think Secret has learned. The software, code-named Sugar (as alluded to in our previous Expo report), will include Keynote 2 as well as a new application, Pages.”

Wow. Dude. 2005. That’s fucked up right here. Two thousand and five years into the Common Era. Which is like only a hundred generations or something. One hundred tiny links in the enormous chain that includes my mum, her gran, some weird hairy ape-like ancestors and a few {large numbers} of protozoa. It’s not really any time at all really. And yet in that time so many dumb ideas have been thought up and discarded. Probably more dumb ideas than in any time in human history. I think we should be proud of this achievement. I mean, god knows what amphibious proto-future-humans might have thought about on their slow evolutionary path to hair-growth, but whatever it was, I reckon we’ve probably topped it fairly nicely. I mean some of the stuff that’s come out of my mouth alone – woah, mama!

At the moment of course it’s 2005 in Europe and it’s 2004 in America, which means that for the next few hours we Europeans get to enjoy our flying cars and jetpacks and stuff before the Americans collapse the wave-function and leave us with Desperate Housewives and Pot Noodle. It all brings new meaning to the William Gibson (?) quote (misquote): “The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet”. Damn right, mister. There’s another 105 minutes before it even comes close to you people…

So anyway, it’s nearly 3.15am in the morning here. It’s nearly 3.15am and it’s the first day of a brand new year. So I’m thinking about how I’m feeling about it so far. Feels a bit sluttier maybe than last year? In aspect if not in action. Otherwise, what am I feeling / thinking? Well, I’m a bit bored. And kind of hungry. My scalp’s a bit itchy. I’m concerned that my flat isn’t as tidy as I’d hoped it would be. I’m thinking maybe I want to know whether you get loads of parasites from eating take-out and going to restaurants all the time. I bet you get lots. I’m wondering what’s on TV, if that’s any insight. And I’m thinking a bit: Are we there yet?

• Video for Futureheads “Decent Days and Nights” – WARNING! RAM FILE!
  The Futureheads are currently occupying a lot of my attention because they sing good British-sounding smart sharp bouncy guitar songs and the lead singer is hot.
  (categories: audio bouncy british fit futureheads good hot lush men music rock sexy)

• Meg Pickard’s Twelve Days of Christmas Some illustrations that Meg did to Celebrate Christmas in 2003, reborn via Flickr…
• Are Google Buying Flickr? I’m not terribly interested in the rumour mill surrounding this one, except to say that if Google were going to try and buy Flickr then I would consider it evidence of their intelligence and good sense…
• WI forces cuts to Little Britain “Complaints by the Women’s Institute have prompted the BBC to make changes to hit comedy show Little Britain.”
• Medium-bunkish article about the role of weblogs in 2004 that compounds the old myth that blogs are more about publishing and punditry than they are about representing the voices of individuals online “But it was in 2004 that debate about the role of the political blog and its impact on society really got under way.”

• Just a reminder – the awesome Radio 3 site in all its glory Ok, basically there was this tiny layout thing that annoyed me about our work on Radio 3 and it’s now been fixed, so I’m just going to tell you all to go enjoy it again…
• BBC News’ in-depth pages on “The Harry Potter Phenomenon” The whole thing is so weird. The book’s not out for six months and is already at #1 (and #2) at Amazon.co.uk – probably to stay there until July…
• Help Stonewall fight homophobic bullying in schools This is a bit of a cause for me, I’m afraid. Anti-gay bullying, rhetoric and language in schools causes incredible harm to young gay people and now we’re free of Section 28 it’s time to start putting it right.

You know what drives me mad? “Happy Christmas”. It’s been driving me a bit nuts for a while now. Surely it’s “Merry Christmas”? Cos otherwise how can you say, “Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year”? Google agrees with me: Merry Christmas (661,000 results) vs. Happy Christmas (183,000 results). So stop it, advertising wankers. Stop it TV people. Stop it, annoying card makers. Merry is better. It means drunk.

Anyway, I’m off to see the family today, so I would imagine posting will be even more sporadic than normal over the next week or so. I hope you all have a good time visiting family and stuff. I’ll be back online properly in a few scant days, no doubt busting at the seams with enthusiasm and turkey and ideas and vim. In the meantime, if you want to do something good in the world, why not donate to Oxfam US, Oxfam UK or to Stonewall. And if that’s all a bit worthy for you and you’ve enjoyed the guff I’ve pumped out over the last hundred years, then why not buy me a present or something. Best wishes… xx Tom

So I’ve been trying to respond to the thread about my apparent obsession with going on about my sexuality (note – they’re talking about this) that’s manifested over at NSLog(); except now all my comments are getting bounced for ‘questionable content’. I’ve tried removing all the rude words from what I write, but god knows it’s hard, and it doesn’t appear to be doing any good. Before anyone goes running at his head suggesting that he’s blocking comments like this to avoid debate, I should point out that I’ve been having problems with the MTBlacklist questionable content filters recently, so I’m not implying anything. Instead I thought I’d just post it here, with all the rude words back in… Feel free to post your own thoughts about this stuff either here or over on his site… But be nice, eh?

If what you’re doing here is warning me that by having my sexuality on a card I might give out to people might stop me getting jobs, then thank you very much. Clearly by my age I wouldn’t have figured that out already.

Figures suggest that people who don’t meet their partners at school or university tend to meet them through work. Clearly this happens by complete coincidence – two people (let’s say they’re straight) are so conscious that they must not be flagrant about their heterosexuality that they avoid all mention of it for years until they happen to bump into each other at some kind of ‘straight bar’, recognise their attraction suddenly and fall into each other’s arms. Clearly there’s absolutely no assumption that it’s okay to flirt with each other at a Christmas party or whatever. Clearly no one talks about what they did at the weekend if it could possibly be construed as to make any reference (direct or indirectly) to whether they’re gay or straight or not. So they wouldn’t say that they’d cooked a meal for their girlfriend, or go to see a film with their boyfriend. Clearly they wouldn’t say out loud that they’d had a birthday party for their 3-year old son. I mean all of these things would be shouting from the rooftops about their sexuality. They may as well be standing outside your house with placards or rutting like Bonobo monkeys on the photocopier.

And quite right, I think, they should be ashamed of themselves – fornicating with their partners at home! Giving birth to children! Socialising with their family! Getting married! The shame. They make me sick.

I can honestly say that I’m stunned by your statement that you cannot see the difference between someone feeling the need to make it clear they were gay to avoid discomfort and awkwardness for themselves and their colleagues, and the fact that straight people simply don’t need to do that stuff. Straight sexuality comes up in conversation a dozen times a day – by association, by reference, however.

At no point during my piece over on plasticbag.org or here have I said that a gay person should ‘go on about’ their sexuality. In fact quite the opposite. As far as I’m concerned, getting it out of the way early means that the whole thing becomes less of an issue – not more. It’s about everyone knowing where they stand, so that they don’t say something crass in the office like, “Oh that photocopier is so gay” while someone over the other side of the room feels it like a kick in the head. It’s so that the gay individual concerned doesn’t have to go through this whole long drawn-out tentative process with each member of staff as issues of boyfriends/girlfriends, what you did at the weekend, what you think about some piece of the news, whether you fancy that bird in accounting come up in idle conversation. Because that stuff is bloody difficult and infuriating and frankly I’m not prepared to go back to a time where I have to go through all that bollocks every time I happen to meet a new human being.

All of which misses the point. I don’t make a secret of my sexuality, but nor do I tend to make a big deal about it. Most people who read my site have no idea that I’m gay. They find it a ‘surprise’ when they find out. I wish that wasn’t the case. I wish that they weren’t assuming that I was straight. I wish it wasn’t an issue at all, but it remains one I’m afraid. I could bring my sexuality into my site all the bloody time if I wanted to, but I don’t. I think I’ve struck a good balance between making my sexuality clear and then getting it off the table to talk about other stuff. And if you don’t like that balance, well frankly tough. I don’t care whether you like it or not. I’ll be damned if I’m going to treat the rest of my life like my teenage years and live in fear of ‘being found out’.

I should also point out that you’ve missed a hell of a lot of qualifying language from my post as well. I mean the very title includes, “In a happier world…”. The text itself calls it a “Tongue-in-cheek-ish slightly-bored early-evening version of what I would kind of like my business card to be like.” I stand by it – if anything your reaction makes me want to use it more – but it was never meant to be anything but a throwaway offhand happy and less formal card that I felt represented me accurately. It’s true that I don’t think that the normal separation of life and work is a reasonable one – that I think that we should act according to our principles in both, that we should care about our work all the time, that it should ideally be a passion and as much of our personality as things like your sexuality or nationality or political beliefs or whatever. I really care about my work and don’t just see it as something that pays the bills, any more than I think my sexuality is just about something that happens in bed with a friend. But just because I’m not as willing to distinguish between the things I get paid to do and the things I do because I think it’s the right and proper way of operating in the world, doesn’t make it reasonable for you to conflate two words on a mock-up of a business card with a form of big swinging-dick sex-obsessed radical queer activism!

Oh and somewhere along the line you also make some comment about how I seem to have a lot of respect for myself, and I’m beginning to think that’s really where a lot of this stuff is coming from. If you find me personally annoying or offensive then just say so and we can talk about that like grown-ups. Seems at the moment that the only person fixating on my sexuality is you.

• Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events Being an episodic and not entirely functional film for children, whose unexpectedly dark, macabre, mournful and witty elements are easily worth the price of admission…
• PopCultureShock interviews Mark Millar “You create these books in a bubble so when I heard from Sam Jackson’s wife that he loves Ultimates or Affleck says he collects Marvel Knights Spider-Man or something I always feel like I’m getting Punk’d.”
• Jon Snow to host New Year’s Eve “Man only” version of Women’s Hour “Snow, who confesses to being hopeless in the kitchen, will also learn how to cook roast partridge under the tutelage of chef Tom Norrington-Davies, and will ask why women spend so long in the bathroom and run up such large phone bills.”
• Ashley Highfield interviewed by Media Guardian “If there is a more muted mood blowing through the BBC corridors, someone has forgotten to tell the ebullient director of new media, Ashley Highfield.”
• Richard MacManus reposts comments by Tim Berners-Lee on the Semantic Web “The Semantic Web is just the application of weblike design to data; it will be many more decades before we will be able to say we have really implemented the Web idea in the full, if ever we can.”
• Oldie but goodie – images glued together to create an endless trippy experience of travelling through imagery Totally stunning and involving and connected to some stuff I’m indirectly involved in at work at the moment.
• What the hell does being gay have to do with getting a job? So here we go – some bloke on a website decides to give me a hard time for mentioning that I’m gay on a mock-up of a business card. As usual the crime is forcing my sexuality down his throat. Get. A. Job.
• Kerry (gay) and Mike (not gay) go to Hooters This naturally begs the question of, “why would a gay man suggest a place like Hooters?” Well you can ask him yourself if you like, but my guess is that he wanted to see if the world would explode when we stepped foot through the door.
• Exquisite Corpse Another blast-from-the-past with the Exquisite Corpse project where people submitted slice-like sections of imagery to produce composite beautiful art projects…
• Name the @ sign I think the name should reflect name and function, ideally. ‘peralpha’ would be a bit of a bastardisation of ‘surrounding an a’, but I prefer diangle or diasper which should be something related to the greek verb ‘to circulate’…

Tongue-in-cheek-ish slightly-bored early-evening version of what I would kind of like my business card to be like. Potentially on the finest, richest paper and with slight ridging for the text or something so it looked like the result of some kind of weird ink pen:

As ever in my fontified handwriting font: Coates.ttf