Saturday, 7th October, 2006

cont...

you really need to work out a way to continue the conversation over from one day to the next.

For want of a better technique, this'll have to do...

Previously, on Tranniefesto

I have a different standpoint to [...] most here

True Koan. But I don't think it's an irrelevant standpoint, and I'm glad you brought it up. What I do have to concede is that at least two of the 'personas' I'm going on about are essentially self-made — underneath all the labels and assumed names, I'm just the one person.

I suppose though, that the notion of 'segregation' I'm referring to basically involves 'coming out' — on several different levels.

Firstly, it's about me deciding which particular groups of people I feel it's important to be open and honest about being a transvestite — and why. If you take my involvement with Second Life as an example, then it's about me going against the traditional 'gender play' aspects and challenging the cliched comedy of the usual "Hey dude, that AV you're shagging is a guy". You know, it's a running joke that in MMPORGs pretty-much more than half the 'women' you meet are actually male.

So what I'm trying to do is turn that convention on its head. When you click on my profile, or follow a link from my Flickr page, there's no pretension pretending¹.

Having said that, of course, there are a good handful of people who are equally — if not more so — open about what gender/sex they are in Real Life. But (if you indugle me for a moment) what I'm trying to do is take it a step further. Instead of "Yes, my AV is a girl, but I'm not a tranny", I'm saying "Yes, my AV is a girl and yes I'm a tranny".

(Which reminds me a lot of the "Yes I'm a tranny, but I'm not gay" thing — but let's not go there today...)

...

I think, just trying to re-establish a point here, I'm talking specifically in terms of this weblog.

I'm very proud of how I've pushed what was originally just your everyday run-of-the-mill tranny website — with a few pictures and some games — into a text-based behemoth that stretches outside of its traditional 'ghetto' and engages with the world at large.

But I'm very aware that for quite some time now, I've been becoming a lot more insular — disengaging myself from that external discussion, resting on laurels, and relying too much on a pre-established 'reputation' rather than going 'out there' like I used to.

I think that maybe a lot of the reasons I've become a little 'disillusioned' with my output, is because the emphasis I've been placing on 'integration' has resulted in me losing the plot somewhat.

Lemme try and clarify that...

If this weblog has any sense of intent, it's that the general day-to-day activities and thought processes of a thirty-four-year-old transvestite aren't just about dresses and shoes and makeup — it's that it is possible to be a trannie and be taken seriously by the world at large.

It's about challenging that lazy humour that exists — where in order to prop up a lame idea or joke, you just have to throw in a "bloke in a dress" and everyone will laugh.

It's about pulling random unsuspecting passers-by into the flow of conversation, and challenging the immediate knee-jerk reaction of "OMG it's a tranny".

I've tried to turn my intitial fears and paranoia about shoving the word "crossdressing" into the browser chrome of random strangers, into an actual cause célèbre — one in which I'm proud of what I am, and what I've done, rather than wanting to hide it behind multiple accounts in whichever Web App I'm engaging with.

And on the whole, I think I've done rather well. It's just that, well, the actual format of this thing doesn't lend itself very well to what I'm trying to do...

This is a conversation. In my mind, it's a real-time web-based representation of me, and whatever appears on it is whatever happens to be going through my mind — or the minds of the people who read and join in — at any given moment. I like to think of the little horizontal-rule at the bottom of the most recent page — just above the comment form — as being "NOW()".

(Does that make sense? Or should I not rely on SQL humour to make a point?)

Every once in a while, someone will suggest that I change the format of it — like making it so you can comment on a particular section, rather than just one a day as a whole — but I find that this way works for me. It means that I can just throw stuff here, in the hope that somewhere in the whole smörgåsbord² of text, moving image and photography, some sense of "me" emerges — and that along the way, we make some serious (and some not-so-serious) points about transvestism/transgenderism.

Yeah?

Can me stubborn if you like, but this is my format, and I'm sticking to it . But the reason I say it "doesn't work", is that I've become very much aware recently that I'm juggling several different and distinct groups of audiences all at once.

There are (natch) transvestites, there are transsexuals, there are tranniefanciers ... but there are also people coming from random Google searches, people following a link from a comment I've left, people coming in from my photostream interested in abstract photography or cats or macs, people who've followed a link from a Second Life blog or my profile, education people who've looked me up after a post on SLED, people who've spotted a link from me in their stats, people looking for advice on how to pronounce "Siobhan", people called "Siobhan" wonder who in the hell this tranny is who sits at the top of a Google search for their name...

...people from my institution who've just found out that the guy with the ponytail has a penchant for dresses, people who've known me for years but not known about this, people wondering what I've got to say about "mac-media-centre-part-one-hardware"...

And every time I write something, I'm increasingly feeling that I'm leaving a large chunk of those people scratching their heads wondering what the hell all this is about.

Two examples: (1) I see a lot of people coming in from AngryBeth, and every time that URL pops up in my logs, I can't help but think "Damm. There's nothing on today's page about Second Life". (2) I see a (helluva) lot of people coming in from Vicki Rene (still), and every time that URL pops up in my logs, I can't help but think "Damm, there's no pictures on today's page of me in my underwear".

...

The problem I'm having (apart from the obvious "I'm rambling" one ), is that this thing is too big. There's too much stuff.

If you're a Second Life person, imagine this analogy...

You've just TPed into a busy club, and all around you there are avatars chatting away. They seem to be engrossed in conversation, and you're finding it hard to get any real sense of what it is they're talking about. You could stick around and try to catch the thread and join in, you could just sit down on a chair and observe from a distance, but it's much easier to TP back out of there to wherever you were to find a much more comfortable space.

To some extents, what I'm trying to do here is 'force' some kind of mash-up between different communities. I'm trying to (perhaps "artificially") mux several disparate groups of people together, with the intention of hopefully there being something New and Cool that comes out of it.

But the problem — in my mind — is that the very nature of this weblog means that any new visitor invariably gets thrown in "at the deep end". There's no 'intro', no 'start', no 'way in'. It's like clicking on a link and finding yourself plopped straight into a chatroom, without having read the guidelines.

...

I'm always pleased when I see "GET /about/ HTTP/1.1" pop up in my logwatching, because it's kinda the only thing I've got that equates to those "guidelines". And I've been thinking recently that despite being very chuffed with the format of this blog — how I've stripped out a lot of the crud so that the sense of 'the conversation' takes precedence, and how that if you find yourself dropped in the middle of it it kinda makes some form of 'conceptual' sense — I do need to find some way of 'easing' people into it.

So that if you come here from a list of UK transvestites, or another trannyblog, expecting to see photographs or read TV-based rants and you find, instead, a bunch of photographs of the inside of a Cinquecento's engine — or if you come here from some Second Life-related site, expecting to see snapshots and gossip from the metaverse and you find yourself confronted by photographs of a bloke in a dress — then there's at least some form of explanation.

Whether that's in the form of just some permanent text at the top of the page, or a more 'obvious' link, or even (and this is what I'm tending towards at the moment) some kind of cookie-based way of spotting first-time visitors and only showing the 'explanation' then — I'm not sure.

But I think that really, that's the main thing I'm worried about . If you know that sometimes Siobhan (or Kisa) doesn't always stick to the one subject, then that's OK.

...

What prompted all of this, was the thought that I ran the risk of pissing off my existing readership by constantly veering of the 'official' subject and posting too many things about Second Life.

But, I guess, as long as everyone knows that that's what I do sometimes, then that's OK...

¹ I am, of coure, incredibly pretentious...

² Oh yeah — check me out with my html entities...

Or, More Succinctly

You can't please all of the people, all of the time. But as long as you warn them first, then you can sleep easy at night¹.

I should have just written that, and saved myself two hours of typing

¹ Unless all you eat the day before is cheese, and you end up having weird dreams about sims and swimming pools. I lay in bed for fifteen minutes this morning after waking up, not quite sure who I was, or what was going on. Normally, I'm down the stairs immediately to force coffee down my neck and replenish my nicotine levels.

Another Weekend, Another Opportunity Down The Plughole

Damm. I really wanted to go to Transmission tonight, seeing as Kat is across from Australia (among other reasons). If you're going, will you do me a favour and give her a hug from me?

Ta.

14.01.2001

This didn't end up in any of the pieces, but I used it a lot in live work.

Method

1. Take all the pornography on your computer

2. Open each one up in PhotoShop

3. Trace Contour

4. Crop to 384x288 pixels

5. Save

6. Import all new files into AfterEffects, glow, and wiggle the time-remapping.

7. Apply a film effect

8. Chuckle

...

Sorry Last night I was trawling through obscure parts of Erin's hard disk, and came across some really old stuff that I'd written as part of my MA documents.

Coincidentally, I'd just finished uploading almost all of the films from that period to my external server as MPEG4s. So (and apologies if some of you have seen some of these before) I thought I'd shove links to each of them here

You can also see them at eyefood.Munck in Second Life

         

         

    

(I haven't embedded the MPEGs on the page for a change. The pictures are links to them)

It would appear that my Markdown implementation isn't quite up to scratch

/me fixes

It's not even midday yet, so neither can I

I think I may have cracked it

Now that I'd be interested in reading...

Yes, you must

Make.text

Bookmarklet to convert HTML to Markdown. Joy! — [via Daring Fireball (natch)] Previously, I've been using Aaron Swartz's site...

It's a bit like anyone who's tried to start watching a soap

You know, that was exactly one of the analogies going through my head earlier

It's your blog, write about what you like

Well yes — but at the same time I can't ignore that if I want people who've not come here before to feel at ease and engage with what's going on, then I have to offer something in the way of an explanation of what it's all about.

Which is why I just wrote a cunning cookie-based thing, which only first-timers see¹

@Claudia — actually, I've been thinking about doing something with tags recently, probably seperating them off into a database (although I'd dearly love to have them contained within the metadata — or Spotlight comments — of the files themselves). I'm not sure entirely how I'm going to implement them (and fuck me it'll be a job to go back and tag everything), but I've sorta got an idea...

¹ Actually, I say "first-timers", but anyone who hasn't saved their details with me will see it — albeit only once

Want!

Seriously, I'd wear that to the shops — the middle one, I mean

Ah, you should have asked — I would have posted a link to the page I tested it on

Marvel in the gloriousness of my "pinching UI elements from OSX" traditions...

Discarded Film

photo

no description

A long time ago, I found this bit of film on the floor of our studio. I have no idea where it came from, but I fell in love with it instantly.

I took it to my other work, slapped it in the scanner, and made some huge-res scans of it.

Just thought I'd share

Whatever Happened To Plain Chocolate Hobnobs?

It's nearly 6pm, and I'm sitting downstairs having just come back from the shops, armed with a packet of Milk Chocolate Hobnobs¹. Not my first choice, obviously, being that I'm a bit fan of Plain Chocolate Hobnobs — but it appears that's all I can get these days.

I've been noticing a lot recently, that no matter which shop I go into, and no matter how prolific the placement of the light-blue-packeted milk-chocolate-counterparts of my favourite biscuit, there's never any of the more scrumptious red packets to be seen.

It's been confusing me I love Plain Chocolate Hobnobs, and I'd really fancy some right now.

So, being a denizen of this new-fangled intarweb, I asked Mr Google about plain chocolate hobnobs ... and ...

According to http://www.nicecupofteaandasitdown.com/²...

So amazingly the biscuit which you voted into first place as your loyal favourite in our poll in which over two and half thousand of you took part as has been de-listed (they don't make them anymore)

This is an utter outrage

Something must be done...

¹ Yep, that's what I'm having for tea tonight. And people still ask me how come I have such a skinny waist...

² Who's site I can't find a perma-link on to that article. *pah*

Doctor Who DVD Covers

Beautiful printable covers for those of us who set our PVRs to record the whole series — and those who we promised to send copies to. [via Miss K (natch)]