Sunday, 19th March, 2006

GoogleTube

geek internet film

Can't remember where I found a link to this (probably Boing Boing, which I want to rant about later), but there's a really cool video about the early origins of ArpaNet made in 1972 on Google Video at the moment.

It's fascinating watching it (if a tad dreary at points), thinking that this little network of computers was the beginnings of what would eventually dominate our lives.

Well, mine anyway

While I was watching it, I noticed something about Google's interface that I hadn't spotted before — that you could download the film for your computer, your iPod, or your PSP. I dunno if I'm, like, the last person in the world to notice that, but I thought it was pretty neat

The thing is though, I really hate the interface to Google Video — only slightly less than I hate YouTube's inteface. The obsession with wrapping media in little skins and boxes, and re-inventing user-controls seems utterly pointless to me.

Flickr is great — especially in the way that it presents the media. No fancy borders (just a 1px #DDDDDD one), no bells and whistles. The emphasis is on the photograph, not the page design.

YouTube, to me, feels clunky. It feels like a Fisher Price web site.

...

Yesterday, I sat down to watch Zardoz again for the first time in ten (or so) years. I bought it the other day, on a bit of an Amazon frenzy after Lindsay mentioned it and popped it back in my memory.

Merits/demerits of the film itself aside (I love it, personally), I decided not to use Apple's DVD Player.app, and give VLC a go instead.

DVD Player.app suffers, to my mind, from exactly the same Fisher Price interface clunkiness as YouTube and Google Video. The brushed metal edges to the screen make it feel like I'm watching something within something else. What I like about VLC, is that it's just the media — no frills, no fancy stuff — just the film, in a window, with no fucking borders.

And, I can take screen grabs

Anyway, whatever. Sorry for the unfocussed rant — I should maybe plan these things more before I write them.

...

Oh, and regardless of whatever I happen to feel about Intellectual Property, I can't help but feel that the French transcription of the European Union Copyright Directive is a Bad Thing™.

Memory Lane

selfpity

Oddness, tinged with melancholy.

It's a friend of mine's birthday tomorrow, and I just went round to give her a card (and a bottle of wine). She's a really good friend — someone I've known for about twelve years (two of which we went out with each other).

I love her to bits — even though we went through a two-year period of not talking to each other (which seems to be my way of coping with a break-up ), we've always been close, to the point where I think I can safely say she's the person in this world that knows me the best.

The thing is though, I've not been round to her house for ages — she always comes to mine.

There's a very good reason for this — namely that she lives a few doors down from Kath, my ex. In fact, I think the last time I was round there was back in September/October, when I borrowed her car.

Today then, was the first time I drove to the other side of Lancaster since Kath and I broke up. It was odd, making my way through the rat-runs that used to be so familiar to me, to think that the last time I drove that way I was still in a wonderful, loving relationship.

I deliberately forced myself to go the same way that I always used to, and pulling round the corner into the street, I noticed that Kath's is up for sale.

You know, sometimes, I wish things were, um, I dunno ... different.

Temptations

gothiloli dress ebay sissy

So, I'm casually trotting through Ebay earlier, and I come across a rather marvellous collection of Gothic Lolita dresses...

I am, I must confess, totally fascinated by Gothic Lolita fashion (Kisa has a couple of outfits herself ). It's a fascination of both (a) a longing for the dresses — which seem sumptuous, but also a (b) isn't that a little bit dodgy?

That's probably just the western prude in me totally missing the point of the look. I was intrigued while reading some stuff about it on morbidoutlook.com (gotta love that domain name), to hear them talking about this:

The women who dress in the Gothic Lolita style do so only on weekends and for “Lives” or concerts. This is a form of escape for them; a way for them to look like their idols and to attract attention.

Only on weekends? A form of escape? Attract attention? That reminds me of another group of people I know...

Just looking through some of the things you can buy online, it makes me feel like a junkie at an opium convention — too many choices. Too many nice things.

Take this dress for a start. That is so me. I could get that, plus some shoes, and a hat, and a jacket, and other stuff ... and then what?

See, I come back to my little internal struggle every time I think about buying things — "where the fuck am I going to get a chance to wear that?" Sure, I could wear it round the house — I could even go completely down the fantasist route of getting a maid's outfit like this and wear it to do the dishes.

(Go on, admit it. I'd look adorable in that )

But, in terms of practicality, I suck. Upstairs, I've got a fuck-off ballgown, God-knows how many flaired-skirt dresses, uniforms, and long flowing frocks. But what I really lack is something I can wear comfortably around the house — just to slob out in.

Currently, my "slobbing around the house" clothes are jeans and a t-shirt.

Mmmm. Sexy

It makes me wonder, sometimes, just where the hell I'm going with all of this. Am I trying to build up a wardrobe of things that I can wear no matter what — boy or girl — that I can feel comfortable in, relax in, enjoy being me in?

Or am I trying to create a complete fantasist's wardrobe full of things that are glorious, sexie, 'dressed-to-kill', and, er, unrepeatable.

(Geddit?)

I realise of course, that I'm just burbling now Maybe to onslaught of pretty things has toasted my brain to the point where I can't actually make a single coherent statement (or maybe, I'm drunk). But I find that there's a huge discrepancy in the way that I dress — on the one hand, young happy comfortable confident trannie not afraid to wear shirts and trousers as long as she looks good, and on the other, full-on sissy maid happy to parade herself in front of a mirror swathed in froth.

...

Gah.

See? See what happens? I start writing something, then halfway through my attention-span kicks in, I start reading something else on line, and I completely forget what I was talking about, and thus write the biggest piece of shit I've written for a long time.

Instead of a serious analytical, um, analysis of the Gothic Lolita fashion scene — and the potential for me as a trannie who loves big poofy dresses to indulge myself, I end up in some kind of existential battle between the two halves of my brain.

Basically, before I descend into a pit of incoherent tripe, can I possibly ask for some help in picking one dress from either of these Ebay shops 1 2. I wanna see how good the clothes are, so I'm prepared to give it a go.

I guess you must have mentioned the movie "Breakfast on Pluto" sometime.

Aye Susan. Here

I did like it, but I was in tears half-way through. Not because of the trannie-thing — it was the bomb-stuff that got my waterworks going.

And even if nobody else wants to play, you deserve to create and enjoy as elaborate of a fun filled fantasy world as you wish.

Well, yeah. I agree. In principle.

Thing is though, in practice, it never really works out that way does it? You put on your finery, you get yourself all dolled up and stand in front of the mirror, and then you think "Somebody else needs to SEE this, dammit"

Maybe that's why we all take pictures of ourselves. Maybe I've said that before

I'm looking at that link, and I'm thinking to myself "Woo! A whole new world to explore!" — and then it dawns on me ... I'm thirty four. I've spent the past fifteen years exploring one world, establishing ideas about myself, putting myself into situations and contexts in order to 'fit in' and meet expectations of those around me.

And I don't know if I've got the energy to do all that again — especially for something that's very much a 'part-time' expedition.

...

It's like code (bear with me). I'm a fairly competent PHP programmer — competent in the 'muddling-through' meaning of the word. There are a lot of things recently that I know I could achieve if I just sat down and read a few books on JavaScript, and Ruby on Rails, and other mumbo-jumbo.

But I haven't got the energy to do that.

As I said a little while ago, I need someone else with excitement and positivity in those things to work with and develop exciting stuff.

And maybe the same goes for my sex life too

The Trouble With Forums

rant forums

One thing that I've noticed Miss K doing to me, is leaving tiny comments, then going off and expanding on them extensively in her own weblog. So I'm going to do the same...

Forums annoy me. I don't like them.

Even the pinnacle of the forum medium — that monolithic behemoth that is Barbelith scared the crap out of me when I actually dipped my toe into it.

(Honestly, I said one thing in there, and ran away screaming in terror. Sorry Loz. Sorry Tom)

My problems with forums are many:

Authenticity

I enjoy, frankly (and big-headedly) a certain amount of kudos for this weblog. Not wanting to blow my own trumpet or anything (damm you extra vertebrae!) I'm not exactly unknown within the Tranniesphere™©.

There are a lot of forums out there — and each one seems to be some kind of competition about who has the mosts posts. Who's said the most things. Who's the bigwigs (as it were).

Forums turn up in my referrer stats a lot. I currently get about five hits a day to an image that's been posted in one that's not even talking about me (who the fuck is Aubrey?! Why is my picture there?!)

The thing with them though, is that whenever you join one of these 'members-only' spaces, you have to run the gauntlet of proving yourself, each and every time.

And that, to me, sucks.

Cliqués

Forums are cliquéy. No doubt about it. One of the reasons I Fear To Tread™ in Roses is just how cliquéy it is — and how detatched from reality it therefore becomes.

K's analogy of "a bunch of angry drivers trapped in hot cars in a traffic jam" is spot on. You're drawn into a completely different world — where your prowess at knowing the smilies is your key to celebrity.

Nobody trusts the new girl — especially if they choose to defy convention and not use a girly name (as my friend Simon will probably testisfy).

You end up with monolithic forum personalities, and...

It All Degrades Into A Pile Of Self-Referrential Crap

I guess that every single forum online starts off with a clear intent by the founders to offer a space in which to discuss topics unique to a certain subset of society.

Sometimes it's trannies, sometimes its designers, sometimes it's racists, sometimes it's odd freaks who like Morris Minors.

The point is (before I get the usual "I have a Morris Minor" comments) is that these communities are built up around one single premise. For a short time, they exist as utopian ideals — places to talk freely about whatever subject it is that brought everyone together.

But the more people rely on the forum as a place to talk about these things, the more they segregate that subject from the rest of their lives. The more they use the forum as an outlet for that pastime, the less the real world impacts on it.

Eventually, within weeks, or months, or years, everything is referred to as "Oh, we talked about this in this thread". The subject matter dries up, and it all descends into pitched battles between sub-groups.

This is why, I feel, that when Joanna launched the new Angels Forum last week, one of the first things that happened was a fetid "TV vs TS" debate.

It felt like "Ah, a new space to rehash the old arguments"

Time Everlasting

One of the things I used to love about my earlier incarnations online, was the ephemeral quality of them. I used to exist soley in chatrooms — rambling long into the night, getting myself into wonderful arguments with American trannies, winding them up incessantly about how maybe Communism was better than what they had.

Oh, how we laughed.

What I loved about it, was the transitory nature of the conversation — whatever I said within it, was lost by the next morning.

It took me a long time to build up some sense of 'person' on it — so that people knew me — and knew when I was just kidding.

I could get away with things on it — because I'd worked hard enough to establish a sense of my personality, and everyone knew that if I did something out-of-character, then I was probably either joking, or drunk.

The problem with forums is this isn't quite so easy. To get a clue about what kind of person someone is, you generally have to read a lot of the things that they've written. And those things are usually disperesed throughout many threads — threads that you kinda feel obliged to read fully, just to get an idea of the context of what they were talking about.

Conversations are so much easier — you can jump into them at any point and ask what's going on. A twelve-page forum discussion is impossible to penetrate.

(I'm now wondering if I'm a total hypocrite here, thinking about what Kath said the other night about my Idiotrannies post )

My problem with forums, basically, is that whatever you say in them, will forever be taken out of context. It's impossible to wrestle control over what the intent behind what you were saying was.

Weblogs Are Better

See, with a weblog, you totally control what you say. Even if — like me — you get so rat-arsed that you don't even know what you're actually typing, you can go back the next morning and ammend what you said.

(Personally, I don't actually ever do this — apart from once ...

WHOAH! HOLY GODDAM FREAKY SHIT! I JUST, ACCIDENTALLY, HIT SHIFT-f10 AND THE WHOLE SCREEN WENT WEIRD — I THOUGHT MY EYES HAD GONE

... I kinda feel that if I said something — even when drunk — I should either stand by it, or apologise for it)

Within a weblog, everything is said on your terms (sorry about that little outburst — I really thought I was passing out for a second). I've often likened this blog to a pub, and I think it's an analogy that holds well. This is basically just me, in a pub, at a table, holding court.

The interestingness and diversity that's been born out of a few people starting weblogs recently (ie. in the past year), to my mind has been incredible. The conversations, and the ideas that have come out of this process has been completely refreshing — and a welcome change to the usual shite that gets perpetuated with closed forums.

In all the time that it's been around — apart from giving one or two trannies the chance to meet each other and a bit of mutual back-slapping support — what exactly has Roses ever achieved?

Those of us who blog — well, we're actually doing something. Something that doesnt involve infighting, bitching (not in public anyway) and insular bollocksy naval gazing that serves no-one — apart from boosting the egos of a few cliquéy up-themselves.

You can smell a troll pretty much from the first sentence of the first post by them that you read.

Yeah. Maybe. But. I. Dunno.

The thing about trolls is, that a lot of them don't know that they're trolls. Trolls, specifically, are people laying down forum posts, and blog comments, and USENET posts, just to whip things up.

The guy you were talking about earlier, seems to me, to just be some intolerant fool — and as loathsome as that is, he's not a troll.

What you do about him, equally, I dunno — and God knows I've had my fair share of them on here over the years. The difficulty is, I feel, that you have a group of people so intollerant to anything outside of their 'norm', that their reason is totally impenetrable.

You can't win — but you can leave gracefully. Which, I think, reading between the lines, is exactly what you did

Aubrey is Aubrey Lynn Frost, a TV from the US who was obsessed with Jeff Goldblum

Thanks anonymous cowards — both of you I've been wondering that for a while. (I've also been wondering for a while if my automagic "anonymous coward" label for people who don't leave names is a bit mean of me — it's a slashdot reference)

I can ask a question, sift through the petty bickering, and get a general consensus. I guess my point is, they have a place.

Perhaps Natalie — but I'd argue that they had their place, and now they're outdated. Can you imagine if the effort and time that went into forums was spent writing weblogs and forming links between them? I think that would be a pretty cool thing

The irony is that hardly anything is ever achieved in a forum, whereas with blogs friendships are formed and discussions are had with people who are genuinely interested

I think there are several reasons behind this — the most notable being the closed nature of forums. It seems to me that part of the very defining nature of forums — their members-only polcies (of which I admit, many aren't) — are created, perhaps, initially to offer a safe space in which to discuss things with like-minded individuals.

The problem is that this 'safety' transforms into something else — it changes into several things.

Firstly, the safety to talk about something that people feel unable to talk about in the open changes into a safety that enables people to make outrageous statements (like the one that K highlighted). The anonymity that allows people to make snidey troll-comments in newsgroups and on weblogs is multiplied.

They feel safe, knowing that the outside world isn't going come listening o the conversation, and, being as they're with friends, they say the most outlandish, hateful things.

What they forget though, is that linking to a weblog will make people come to listen — being as most bloggers are stat-obsessed, referral-checking, curious-as-hell explorers

My own little 'mentioned-on-a-forum' experience (apart from the random picture of me in that one above) was a link from some strange, obscure forum (that discussed something I can't remember). I saw a bunch of people coming to visit, and a load of views to a particular image — so I went along to the forum and joined so I could see what was being said about me.

Turned out it was a group of lads all having a laugh about trannies — one had posted a picture of someone, and they were all finding images to post, laughing about whether they'd ever get drunk enough to "do" us.

Half-way down the page, was a picture of me (not a bad one, as it happens), with the words "can you believe I used to work with this guy?", followed by a general series of abusive comments.

Perhaps I should have waded in and challenged them — but I didn't. I just added the forum to my blocked referrer list, hoping that one of them would notice, and perhaps realise that people do notice when you talk about them online.

The other thing that I think happens to a forum over time, is that it takes on a life of its own. It becomes an entity that the members of it start to revere.

Pub-analogies always seem to work for me, so imagine it like a pub with a group of very hard-core regulars. The kind of pub that you feel slightly intimidated when you walk in — a bit like Eddie's thing with the cat walking into a bar, and the dog playing the piano stops.

When a forum reaches that stage, I think it's very hard for anything positive to come out of it — things are seen as Absolute Truths™ — people get completely obsessive about the forum. It's almost as if cabin fever sets in — they're so ensconsed within the structure of the forum that nothing outside it matters.

Everyone is concerned with how many testimonials they have and how many people have favourited their photos on Flickr and how many comments they've received on a given blog post, and less concerned with getting to know the people leaving testimonials and favouriting and commenting.

This is undeniably true — and I'm as guilty of it as anyone else. I would like to think though, that what sets blogging apart from things like myspace.com (and even Flickr) is that the level of "soul-baring" is enough to really get to know someone.

I've often wondered why it is that I don't get more trolly comments on here. I like to think that it's something to do with just how much personality I put into it. I dunno, I think that the fact that I talk so openly about the things that I do, and the stuff that I think, makes this weblog a very personal thing.

Perhaps.

To an extent, because of my "this weblog is a re-presentation of me" thing, I guess that it doesn't have that 'anonymous' safety to it.

(Or maybe I'm just not interesting enough to troll )

Maybe it's a bit like graffiti If you put up a great big white wall in a public playground, it's going to get tagged within seconds. But if you put it in someone's back yard, then no-one will touch it.

I might be contradicting myself here though (and, actually, you must excuse me for rambling so much — I woke up at 6am and couldn't get beck to sleep, so I decided to just write). I'm kinda saying that a weblog is different because you get a real sense of ownership or person about it — while in a forum (or network, if you like) there's less of that personality. The owners of a forum seem very far away — and things are so widely dispersed that you can say what you like without anyone 'on-high' noticing.

Actually, just on that subject, I've been noticing a lot of photographs on Flickr recently that totally go against the TOS — that old Flashr trick of marking people as your friends and circumventing the TOS by making all your knob-shots visible only to friends seems to be waning, replaced by completely brazen "here is my cock" public photos.

(Sorry. I digress)

There are always going to be jerks everywhere on the net. I just think that, the way things are going at the moment, it's becoming easier and easier for the jerks to take control/wreak havoc/attack people with their anonymity as a shield.

Indeed. Jerks are everywhere — and there's very little we can do about them. The only thing that springs to mind is that episode of the Simpsons where all the advertising things come to life and reek havoc — and the way they're defeated is just by everyone ignoring them.

As K says, "Don't feed the trolls" — but I think it's important to identify which are trolls, and which are genuinely confused/ignorant people having a gut reaction. The comment that K highlighted is definately trollish (re-reading it) — but I've had one or two people leaving messages (or emails) that seemed to be just a hastily composed reactive statement.

The one that springs to mind was those Irish kids who tried to lay into me because I was using one of their names. I'm not sure I handled it too well at the time — I got caught up in a sense of urgency, feeling that I needed to pounce on them and teach them a lesson.

Looking back, they were just kids — kids who didn't really know much about what they were talking about. Kids who didn't really get the idea that there was someone at the end of where their comments were being posted.

I think, perhaps, sometimes it's worth just having one go at trying to open someone random commenter to a new perspective on things — as long as you don't pursue it too much.

Maybe.

Perhaps.

I dunno.

Sod it, I'm going to make coffee and get up...

(Oh, and yeah Tiff — I completely missed that one )

Ladies, the circle has been closed.

Indeed. Let's talk about something else...