Monday, 24th July, 2006

Rubber Duckies At Large

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"Plastic toys that keep bob-bob-bobbing along chart the world's oceans" — for Selina, because we were talking about it the other day (The Times)

Fun Things To Do On A Tuesday Monday Lunchtime

random missk

1. Go to Miss K's Blog

2. Admire the CSS for a second

3. Hit ⌘⌥⌃8

4. Chuckle¹

¹ If you're on a Mac, of course

Hmmm — is that browser-specific?

Nah — but it is OS specific. I think I added the footnote after you'd tried it Koan

Oh. Um, Command-Alt-Ctrl-8 should invert the screen.

I thought that might be it — sorry. I have a bad habit of using symbols that people don't recognise. And also calling "alt" "option", and "command" "Apple" — it's a throwback to pre OSX days.

Actually, you know, this isn't a hilarious thing, it's just that a few moments ago a friend called me to see if I knew why his screen had gone big and was scrolling around all over the place. Turns out he'd accidently turned on the 'zoom screen' feature of OSX's accessibility options (⌘⌥8, then ⌘⌥= to zoom in), and while I was helping him turn it off, I hit ⌘⌥⌃8 by mistake, and noticed that my whole mac now looked like the draGnet

Swedish Campground

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"There are too many Apples on the screen! It's ridiculous! We're taking the Apple logo in vain! We've got to stop doing that!" — just thought it was of, you know, special interest... (Folklore.org)

(So yeah, basically all that's on Siobhan's mind today is the three keys at the bottom left of her keyboard )

...

Oh, hold on a moment. It's Monday isn't it?

This is true. Now put that t-shirt back on.

Hmm, not that I know anything about PCs and obscure graphics cards, but I would have been tempted to try ctrl+shift+up myself

Paths Of Self Discovery

anonymity graham siobhan kisa self

Online privacy and anonymity is something that I've covered before in the past, but it's something that's been playing on my mind again recently.

I think one of the things that troubles transvestites (in particular) about interaction and communication in an online space, is the fear that somehow, by Mystic Internet Jiggerypokery™, someone will be able to track them down and find out who they are.

Over the years, I've found that despite increasing ambivalence to keeping personal snippets of information private, anything that I write in whatever spaces have had little or no effect on the general rush to spray-paint the word "poof!" on my door.

Thankfully.

But, with an increasing engagement in spaces that aren't necessarily self-policed, I've been wondering just how much I want people to know about me — and what parts of me should and shouldn't be available to people, depending on their 'entry point' (she said, rather pompously)

Lemme try and explain through the medium of Spending Too Much Time In Illustrator™:

Does that make sense?

Basically, depending on where you start, you can find out about different aspects of my lifestyle by following certain routes. So, for example, if you know about Siobhan, you can pretty easily find out about what I do as Graham and Kisa. If you know about Graham, then a quick check-up on my general interests lead you potentially to my SL explorations.

But, here's the one that I'm still not sure about: If you know Kisa, you can find Siobhan.

...

I've always tried to maintain no link whatsoever from Graham to Siobhan — for my own various reasons. I don't really give a toss if someone who knows about Siobhan knows what my real name is, and I'm not really fussed actually quite keen to express a sense of pride in my real nature within SL.

(Click on my profile in-world, and you get a link to this weblog¹)

I was, a little while ago, about to highlight that green arrow (from Kisa to Siobhan) as a concern — but I think that's misplaced worry. I think the actual issue is the one from Graham to Kisa.

See, what with my ongoing explorations into the ideas of teaching and research within virtual worlds, I'm thinking that at some point, a student is likely to wonder who the hell ths "Kisa Naumova" is, and "why the hell has Graham made himself look like a girl?" And it's at that point that the carefully crafted boundary that I keep on my private life starts to dissolve.

Maybe. Who knows?

There is an obvious answer to this, of course — make an Alt. But I'm not sure in my head that that's what I want to do.

¹ Or, just Google "Kisa Naumova", natch.

Well, yeah — it would seem the most obvious thing wouldn't it? But there are reasons why I'm loathe to — as opposed to just a general feeling of "Nah, I don't want to"...

Part of it is to do with a certain level of personal investment — time-wise, not financial. I put a lot of time and effort into the things that I've done over the past (nearly) year, and that's really important to me. But as well as being important, it's also useful — useful in the sense that having made connections with various people, I'm in a better position to help connect others. And I feel (perhaps wrongly) that I'd have to start from scratch with an alt.¹

I think it's important here, to make a distinction between the type of teaching I'm talking about, and that of "here's how to strech an object". For me, what excites me about the potential of teaching in SL, is not the technical aspects of building or scripting — it's the discussion, collaboration and ideas that can take shape in such a space. In a way, it's very simmilar to what my actual teaching is all about — concentrating on the "why" rather than the "how" (and if you've been reading me for a while now, you'll know just how narked I get when I feel that all I'm doing is showing people how to use Photoshop... )

Part of that 'ideas-based' teaching, for me, involves the relationships that we make with virtual re-presentations of ourselves within different environments (which is, truth be told, the direction my own personal research is starting to move more and more into). And that's something I don't think I'd feel comfortable doing within an avatar that I didn't feel connected with.

As well as that though, theres also a practicality reason why I'd avoid an alt-tactic. I have a hard enough time remembering which 'persona' I'm supposed to be engaging with at the best of times — which email account to send from, which Flickr account to post a comment from, which website to host a particular image² — without having to deal with another. This whole "Who the fuck am I?" obsession that I've been, um, obsessing with recently is a direct result of doing too many things under different pseudonyms — and that image (which is very pretty don't you think? ) above is — in some way — an attempt to try and aggregate myself.

In fact, this thing of "I do lot of things but I can't tell certain people about them" has become a bit of a theme of mine over the past few years. You may recall my various descents into lamentation about how the hell I can share the knowledge and ideas that I've got through doing ← ↑ this ↓ → with people who would actually benefit from it, without coming out to all and sundry.

The thing is though, at this point in time I'm a lot more confident about who I am (or what I am) than I was before. I remember talking to a student about blogging (for example) and wrenching my gut inside that I felt that I couldn't really talk to him about my experiences. But what I've generally found is that for someone to show enough initiative to start clicking through profiles, and Googling names, they have to have a certain amount of intelligence in the first place — and that that intelligence is the sort that appreciates honesty, and can deal with New Things™.

I dunno — I need to think about this more...

¹ Yeah, I know. Unsubstantiated gut feeling. It's kinda like when someone (Looby, I think) asked a long time ago "Why don't you start a new blog as well, with just the non-tranny bits in it" — and it's for the same reasons: it's like climbing half-way up a mountain, then coming to the conclusion that you've climbed up the wrong one. A bit.

² Ever noticed that not all of the images are on Flickr? Sometimes I use the repurposed backend of the site I've developed for work to upload images that don't really fit into a 'Siobhan' or 'Kisa' category. Stuff like screenshots of the telly, or stuff that I don't neccessarily want the denizens of Flickr trawling through. The one above though, is just on Erin — not for any reason other than it's a PNG, and my scripts don't churn out PNGs, yet.

Humans At The Ends Of Queries

search-queries funny

Regular readers¹ will, no doubt be bored to tears well aware of my obsessional reading of search engine queries that lead here. Normally, when flicking down the list of them, I vaguely picture some yellowed-panty-wearing knob-shuffler typing in query after query, until he gets the "dressed like a girl and shagged" photoset he knows must be out there (somewhere). But every once in a while, something appears which makes me stop that mental image (thankfully), and puts a moment of human tragedy into the mix.

"my tooth toothache unbearable"

You poor, poor soul. Here are the things that have (slightly) worked for me in the past:

1. Pain killers. Strong ones. Preferably those disolvable ones which you can put in your mouth right next to the tooth. Dunno how medcally advisable that is, so YMMV

2. Alternating hot and cold water in my mouth. Sounds odd, but it seemed to help. (Not boiling water though. That would be daft)

3. Lying on a bed with a pillow over my head crying and generally going "Gnnnnnnnnnnnnn" — which does nothing for the pain, but the sense of self-pity is wonderful.

4. (Being the one that actually does work, but you're going to hate me for it because it's got all the tone of a mother heaped into it) Going to the dentist.

If someone, however, ever suggests "Chewing on a clove", casually point out to them that if you could use your teeth to chew, then you wouldn't need some sort of pain relief, FFS, before taking one of the clove-encrusted-orange things that they used to use in Mediaeval Times Of Yore™, and shoving up their arse.

¹ I hate saying "Regular readers" — it makes me sound like a right twat. I should just write "You" in future.

Fuck. That was actually unplanned So much for my "carefully crafted boundary" I'd kinda felt that I was OK for someone to have to go through S to get to G from K — for reasons that'll take more coffee than I've got in my system right now to explain.

Thanks for pointing that out Natalie

what is your opinion of Others percieving you as a Trans Artist?

That's a post in itself Wired_Faerie. Lemme think about that one...

Which you would be able to spot quite easily, because it's the one with a gaping hole next to the pillar holding it up...