Monday, 28th May, 2007

Cel_Sculptypaint

secondlife sculpties

Manipulate and change the RGB layers of 64*64 sculpts in realtime

/seconds. 5

art journal work

Issue five of the Art Journal what I make — I should have linked to this weeks ago I know it's not up everyone's street, but if you look at no other pieces, you HAVE to watch "Peaman". Utter genius

The A-Z of modern etiquette

etiquette funny

"Hoodies, emails, religion, MySpace... If negotiating your way through society's ever — shifting codes of conduct is getting you down, Mark Hooper plays Mr Manners"

Usurp

photo secondlife hawt

I swear, every time I go to Bare Rose, I end up buying everything

bleb.org/tv/

The week's UK television & radio in screaming-to-be-mashed-up XML — (via Jon 's comments)

Tazer

photo secondlife maid

The funny thing is, I have this outfit in RL...

Argh!

photo

I was writing a Big Thing™! A Big Thing™ that I hadn't saved! Why is it that the only time this happens is when I'm writing a Big Thing™ and haven't yet saved it.

WHY?!

Sod this, I'm going out to buy fags

A Ramble

If I was to say to you that I'd invented blogging, you'd probably think I was lying.

And you'd be right

Although, if like me you have an ability to stretch your plausibility-sticks off to infinity, in some sense I did — just not before anyone else had done it, named it, slapped a big patent on it, and declared themselves to be King of the Blogosphere.

"I'll keep a diary", I said to myself, five+ years ago. "This hand coding HTML sucks", I said, six months later. "I'll write a tool to make it easier".

Two years after that, I suddenly discovered that there were millions of other people, all doing the same thing (None of them in frocks, mind you )

But hey, enough of my fabrications. If you read Becky (and I'm sure that some people must), or Jane , you'll no doubt have spotted that the two of them came up out of their way yesterday to see me Erin. Lovely to see them both again, so it was — it's been far too long — God, about a year I think

Anyways, we talked about a fair few things, and did that time-honoured traditional conversation that all bloggers have when they meet up: a few mutual backpatting congratulations about being such a good blogger, followed by a right juicy bitch about all the other bloggers, that you'd dare not say out loud on't web

But one thing that we talked about, that popped into my head a few moments ago whilst reading something elsewhere, was how our approaches to things are very different — on a technological front, rather than a frock-wearing one

(Although we do differ on that a bit, to be honest)

Becky sees cool blogging tools (and other Google loveliness) and uses them, I see things and insist on rebuilding it myself. Dammit.

But hey, ramble ramble ramble...

On a midly entertaining dwell on Twitter a few minutes ago, I followed someone's link to their tumblr page, and was struck by how rather attractive it was.

"Hmm", I thought, "I wonder what all this is?" — having seen a few of them before, and noticed the word bandying about a bit. A quick visit to Wikipedia later, and I was getting rather excited about these things called "tumblelogs" — what Jason Kottke describes as "quick and dirty stream[s] of consciousness"

The design aspect of them appeals to me as well — quite minimal, raw text and unembellished photographs — the most popular ones seeming to be on stark white backgrounds.

"Hey," I thought. "I'd like to do something like that — short links, little snippets of text, random quotes, the odd photograph here and there, all served up on a clean, simple page, with lovely colours and ordered by date. A random stream of consciousness, sometimes worried about how it's read, sometimes not. Sometimes structured, sometimes just keyboard splurging..."

"Hold on a minute. That's what I do already"

So, basically, I invented Tumblelogs, as well as Blogs

It struck me, whilst talking to Becky and Jane, that there's perhaps a lifecycle of a blog — it starts off all excited and intentional, gets into a giddy period of harsh ranting and opinion-stating, followed by a drop in activity and interest, and — if not cared for — a slump into blogrot.

I'm quite proud that rather than the blogrot route, I've kept things going, changing into something else rather than giving up. It's a lot less focused than it used to be, and a lot less convicted about it's/my (er) convictions. We were chatting last night about how it's possibly because I/we don't keep bang up to date with what's going on in the TrannieSphere©™, that there's less of a rant-fuelled outpouring against/for trannydom — but I think it's also just that you change over time. It's hard to keep saying things over and over again, in slightly different inflections. It's hard to sustain the thirty-comments-per-day-inspiring posts of your earlier days, and I've found that I've morphed into someone who just sits mumbling out loud, hoping that people can hear, but not bothering if they can't.

(I am so going to be the old lady in the park talking to herself when I'm older, no?)

Anyway, to try and draw this to some kind of 'point', I was reading a post by Alan Levine about an hour ago — Viva La Blog — in which he mentioned the concept of blog-demise¹ at the expense of Fun! Exciting! New! Things! like Twitter, and — having posted about that before — I was going to leave a comment ... but then my brain wandered off into all the stuff that I've written above, and I figured I couldn't leave a decent enough comment, and I should write a little about it myself.

A blog, for me at least — or rahter this blog anyway — is like a home. It's where you live, relax, stretch out, define your own rules.

On other sites — Flickr, Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, Arsebook, whatever — you're expressing yourself within the boundaries of someone else's stylesheet. And not just visually — whatever you're on, you're living within the constraints of the conceptual/technological nature of whatever that site is.

On Flickr, it's a photo-sharing site. On Twitter, you only have 140 characters. On MySpace, you have to leave your aesthetic taste outside your browser before you log in.

On your blog, you can do whatever the hell you want. Even if you don't ever change the default style, even if you use completely unplugged standard software, you define the very nature of what the conversation is. Or whether it's a conversastion at all.

People — me included — often think "Oooh, I have a tranny-blog. I'd better write about trannying", or "I have a Linux blog. I'd better be dull and geeky", or something. And while, yes, there are self-induced pressures to remain relevant to a readership, it doesn't really matter if you don't stick to your mission-statement that you wrote as a first post.

For me, this blog has changed. It doesn't have an overt mission statement anymore. It's an aggregate of all the things I do in various spaces, with a little bit of old-skool scroll-down rantage every once in a while.

There are so many little web.apps that are cropping up all over the place — each with different ways of communicating ideas and pieces of work, suited to different times and devices — that I think it's becoming almost impossible to keep an aggregated hold on what someone is up to, or where they're at, or what they've discovered, or what they're wearing, or who (indeed) the are.

I did, I must confess, set up two tumblr accounts earlier — and repeated my username joy that I had with Twitter ... siobhan.tumblr.com and kisa.tumblr.com³

I don't expect anyone to read them, the same as I don't really expect anyone to read my Twitter feeds. They're just ways to make it easier to say different types of things, in different situation. Whilst in the background, Erin quietly scrapes their feeds and force-feeds the whole shebang to you poor, unsuspecting, long-sufering readers.

You people do read my source code every once in a while? No?

¹ "...if you are running your own copy of blog software on your own domain, [then?] you are God/Goddess of Your Own Data Destiny [...] your ISP may goof up on you..." — I bet he means me²

² He probably doesn't though.

³ Dear Graham Clarke, damm you sir.

I'm In Ur Stairz, Shakin Lik A Leaf

I don't understand this. I really don't. My cats, I presumed, were hard as fuck.

When she was younger, Biscuit used to bring me Magpies every morning. And Tish, well, Tish used to bring home Elk.

OK, not Elk. Bears.

OK, not bears. Large enormous mammals.

(By which, I mean "Baby Rabbits")

But regardless of my over-embellishment, I was certain that they were hard cats.

Here though, is a typical night at my house...

...

CAT-FLAP! CATF-LAP!

FOOTSTEPS UP STAIRS times FOUR (times two)

Petrified faces staring at Mum to do something

BANG BANG BANG at cat-flap

...

There is a tabby that chases my two. He chases them into my yard, in through the flap, then whacks the thing several times until the point of Human Intervention™.

Birnakky...

Eh?

Normally, I just open the back door and he runs out, but tonight I thought I'd do the decent thing and chase the bugger across the back yard, hoping to catch sight of the neighbourhood terror, and hiss in his face to put him off once and for all.

"Danger Tom Cat, transvestite who knows Cat for 'Fuck Off!' lives here"

So I chased him, into a neighbour's yard, and for a second we were face-to-face. Eyeball-to-eyeball. Paw-to-erroneously-clad-stocking. Whisker-to-beard.

...

Tiny!

He's only a kitten.

My cats are crap.

So is there anything you haven't invented / reverse engineered / integrated into your Electronic Empire™?

Well, I had this idea once, to create some kind of heavily cut-off space in which men who wanted to be 'ladies' could talk to each other, bitch about a world that "didn't understand them", and swap train numbers.

I was going to call it "Pansies" ... after myself — Martine Pansy