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FJ!!
Work News
After 7 months of working on a Vodafone property of which the last segment I worked on was released October 15th, I took a break.
I saw on a mailing list an ad from a recruiter I had been impressed by when I met her at a tech meetup thing. I sent her my CV. She submitted me for another job, which I have accepted and started.
I am now a Mobile User Experience Architect for AKQA, a digital agency. I am based in London, and working on a Nokia account for a group primarily based in Berlin. After some confusion it seems there is no immediate travel.
Contractually I am not allowed to blog, tweet, or update about AKQA and working for AKQA, so do not expect many news updates from me.
FJ!! & JPeace, ep 34: "FJ!! & JPeace... Discover Gay Sex Elves In Mainstream Gaming"
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
fj: http://gamevideos.1up.com/video/id/2703
fj: haven't seen yet, someone just tweeted this with gay sex elf in dragon age? [ed: it was darke, btw]
fj: not loading
jpeace: Oh JPeace
jpeace: my god
jpeace: Ohhhhhhhhhh wow.
jpeace: OH. MY GOD.
jpeace: BioW, i love you.
fj: you are so just teasing me
jpeace: No
jpeace: I'm not
jpeace: This is nearly groundbreaking
jpeace: Use safari
fj: what is dragon age anyway
jpeace: midtier RPG from bioware
jpeace: they specialize in big budget RPGs
jpeace: this one's getting hype for some really inventive gameplay
jpeace: nothing was mentioned about gay sex in loincloths
jpeace: with the chat tree ACTUALLY BUILT FOR THIS EVENTUALITY
fj: [ed: switched to Safari, video starts playing] wait what?
jpeace: it's not just a gender-blind system
fj: N F W!
fj: my god it is gay soft-core porn!
fj: and the elf bottoms
jpeace: This isn't exactly insanely rare, but i've never seen anything so explicit
jpeace: The shadows slopping in on a scene change = sloppy
fj: does everyone get to do this?
jpeace: No ide
jpeace: This game wasn't on my radar until release
jpeace: No, I've never seen anything so explicit that was actually ENCOURAGED
jpeace: Japanese RPGs generally have male on male content, but that's coming from the co.jp bizarroverse
jpeace: and then they get all the good stuff dropped in translation to avoid the dreaded AO rating.
jpeace: That this is coming from canada is amazing.
fj: User comment: "This is just wrong
Author: Hunterman328, 11/09/2009
Dude, I know elves have small penises, the extra cartilage in their ears takes away from penile growth during youth, but the guy could at least given him a reach around. No wonder Elves don't like humans that much. Bet the guy didn't even spit on the elf's anus to lube it up a bit, just plugged away. (Little know fact, Elf semen glows in the dark when Bilbo's Sting is nearbye.)"
jpeace: :]
fj: can you repeat a scene?
jpeace: probably not.
fj: ooh, let's have sex with the elf again?
jpeace: oh, that? maybe
jpeace: replay isn't common
fj: I am oddly aroused
fj: No wait, I know what I am
fj: I am really really touched. Teen boys get to play this, right?
fj: I mean, at that age, as a nerd, you are all about Big Sweeping Advetures Far Away
jpeace: Yes JPeace
jpeace: And no
jpeace: The target market for this game is me at best. probably skews older. 30-45
fj: and now finally we exist too
fj: and this one was really quite romantic
jpeace: Bizarrely tasteful
fj: I think it is what a closeted teen boy needs: existance outside his own plane without everything about That Thing being Problems
fj: but part of the huger tapestry of being a Hero
fj: am I making any sense to you? I expect that over the years men will understand it less and less as fewer grow up quite as isolated and closeted
jpeace: You are making complete and total sense to me.
fj: also something about being gay that is not about bars and trying to fit it in in the Big Gay Urban Lifestyle
jpeace: It's just jarring. The software industry is, i mean this sincerely, a century behind cinema in its handling of human sexuality.
jpeace: An entire fucking century.
fj: and yet this perfect moment gets put in
jpeace: This is the exception that proves nothing other than that the French have more taste than anyone else.
fj: it is indeed very Brokeback
jpeace: The culture you desire exists, now, on the internet.
jpeace: It self-organizes, seeks out the stories it wants
jpeace: And makes them by force
jpeace: There are a million shippers and ten million readers
jpeace: The internet is the nexus of all fact and fiction
jpeace: And you can reassemble it better, faster, and more satisfyingly every day.
fj: yes, but it has terrible production values. This game does not
jpeace: True.
fj: and being shown with real production values, like every other narrative held up as True, is what counts
jpeace: You're right.
fj: it is one of the reasons I never liked Gay Cinema
fj: I wish it had been about Gay Cowboys Eating Pudding. It was always about grubby teens getting beaten up. I KNOW THAT! I DO NOT NEED A MOVIE ABOUT IT!
fj: I wanted to be loved in something as big as The 5th Element because that is how BIG love felt when I was alone
jpeace: Ouch
fj: And still does.
jpeace: x2
I Have No Idea What My Brain Was trying To Tell Me Here
Dream this morning: I found myself talking to Bea Arthur, and trying hard to amuse her I shared the insane fashion tip found in Joan Crawford's "My Wonderful Life" to always buy more fabric for a blouse than you need so your tailor making the blouse can line a new suit jacket with the remnant at the same time.
Forphornax
Hair. Somewhere last year I went to one of those Mediterranean barbers and had a £7 haircut. This is a very standard thing to do here for gay boys: you get all short and sides buzzed and you are in and out in 30 mins I did this on the way to my gay gym, and when I was there I looked around between lifts and noticed the only variation in haircuts was where the length of the stubble was between a nr 2 buzz or clean shaven. Like mine.
Very soon after I was in the Netherlands with my family and we were talking about age and my sister said my hair was thinning at the crown. I knew she was exaggerating, but I did realize that if I ever wanted longer hair, I had to do it now So I didn't have my hair cut for months, and when I did have it cut it was at the local barbershop that caters mostly to black people. I figured a guy who spends days shaping "afro-caribbean" hair from dreads to relaxers, and then
a cut on top of those processes, would know how to make an unruly head have some shape He did, and Don and I now have a great relationship. I love sitting in his shop and just chat for hours with him and all the customers about everything as pretty much everyone in the neighborhood comes by. And his reputation is such that, while being a one-man shop in Kennington, people all the way from Richmond come by for consultations.
Well, I had wild romantic hair for months, many of you saw it, and then I got bored. I told Don I wanted 'expensive West End Creative Director Hair'. (Don trained and worked for years in the shops around Marble Arch, btw.) Red streaks and cut it short. It took hours because he was also doing dreads on one guy and a deep conditioner on a female client, but when I walked out, I looked like I was running Hommes Vogue UK. He never lets me leave without a full blow-out, and this time with the flat iron set so hot I could smell singeing. My hair was hanging straight and strict and posh.
It's a little wilder now that its natural curl is back, and the red has faded some. I should make a new userpic soon.
Fashion. I sometimes wander around Selfridges just for a look at what is Hot and Now. I deconstruct everyone I see, and I like a lot of the fashions here. I have already raved about the coats on women, and the men on average take just as much care. As for me, I could never justify to myself paying full retail for designer stuff, and I am not about Clothes Of The Now that much anyway. However, my styling has been getting plainer and plainer these last years. I haven't been to Yoox.com and Bluefly.com in ages, and I only occasionally go to the designer vintage shop near Marble Arch. It is really hard for me to find a piece I really want to spend money on. In my precarious financial situation, it is just not something I can justify doing, especially while I am finding that taking care of my body and layering with American Apparel makes me look outward just as interesting as I feel.
Yet I know I should, some, if I come acros those really special items. I have two Yamamoto thick grey shirt jackets that I have had for a decade now, and cannot live without. The custom shirts, of which I want more. The Watanabe travel coat with all the pockets. Last year I let a Y3 black hooded raincoat go because it was 'too expensive'. I still mourn it; it seems impossible to find a hooded raincoat that doesn't look like you felt the need to a) wear a bag b) climb the Kilimanjaro, but instead looked like a city dweller who has it together. I went back to look for it during Selfridge's famous sales. I described it to the sales guy, he recognized it immediately and told me the few they had had sold out in pretty much the first two weeks they had had them The piece was that good.
Design. There are 6 million definitions and theories of it, and the one that works for me in my work and personal life is that Design is everything you do to something -- and 'everything you do' includes how you make that something look and be and feel and work -- to make it be nice for people. Yes, 'nice', I really see no need 90% of the time to go for anything loftier. Nice in how it looks and works and is. Just getting to nice is already so elusive, often the best you get is inoffensive. In my job, part of that nice is having the way that something looks and works also communicate what that something actually is, and is for, preferably all by itself without needing external artifacts like manuals and help files. This is spectacularly difficult to do for anything remotely complex or new.
I love doing my part of it. Truly love it. I love doing it together with people who are very talented at the parts I am not. It is such fun to make everything fit together and be just nice. I have never really wanted to change the world through software. I just want everything to be nice.
Image. People tell me my online persona is so controlled. Well, one the one hand it has to be, you can get fired or not hired for what you write online these days Many an unemployed time I have considered setting this whole thing to Friends Only if not deleting it, and I still may. I also think I may be overprotective this way, but I do work in the part of the industry where your online persona is scrutinized heavily.
Mine's a bit lacking. I just do not play the social media game enough I actually do want to hold back, only dip in a toe. I look at the successful social media workers and their tweets and everything and I am always torn between "I could do this" and "It would not be authentic", whatever that means. Authenticity is an insane concept on the net, and yet everyone always looks for it, tries to glean it from what has been posted.
Language. All we got, and it is a terrible medium. I am tired of languages. I haven't had to learn a new human one in years, and I hope I never have to again. I suck at it.
The Stars Fly
I Is Learning
I am watching and following along with the Stanford Lecture series on iPhone Development on iTunes. This is the first time I have watched a cooking / DIY show where I have actually followed along real time with some of the examples. It's fun. The course explains the thinking behind the basic frameworks far better than any documentation.
And it seems someone is finally moving in downstairs.
Disaster Continues?
One of the most interesting people in the social meetup technology scene in London is into Disaster Management, trying to focus governments and companies on What If scenarios at the edge of current reality, but coming increasingly nearer as maintenance and vandalism and software get more and more complicated and laks and put off because of money issues. ("What if the grid does indeed collapse around Minneapolis in January for a month?" "Um, I guess everyone will have to live in sleeping bags in the underground mall until it is restored?")
Now, because of his gig he may be a Cassandra, but he said something really interesting Friday morning I would like some coroboration on: supposedly one of the head people in charge of TARP said that a) the fundamentals in the financial sector are as bad as when TARP started, considering the real value of assets being held b) those banks that were too big to fail used their TARP money to buy other banks to shore up their bottom line, which means they are now even too bigger to fail.
Does anyone remember seeing this in the news anywhere? Is it true?
(And thenjpeace sends me a Bloomberg article predicting a massive crash in commercial real estate values.)
FJ!! & Davy ep1: "FJ!! & Davy... Discuss Halloween and Pop Music in The UK"
cyborgdog: is halloween a big deal in the UK?
fj: getting resentfully bigger
fj: it is an import nobody likes
fj: yet here it is
fj: much like Cheryl Cole's song hitting nr 1, everyone hates it, yet is is nr 1
cyborgdog: everybody secretly loves it
fj: it's really bad
cyborgdog: autotune bad?
fj: badly boringly written bad
fj: this for the first hit solo single of a singer of one of the biggest girl groups of the now
fj: http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=GB&hl=e
cyborgdog: Well, the Brits refuse to acknowledge the crassness of their own people
fj: lazy writing, lazy production, lazy programming, nobody likes it, nr 1
fj: Halloween is like that: they kind of get it, they resent to have to celebrate it, and yet more and more parties are being held
cyborgdog: is it the kid friendly halloween with candy and pumpkins? or the dress up as a whore Halloween?
fj: this country's biggest hobby is binge drinking till puking on the street. Take a guess.
The Streets Were Made Of Fog
The Streets Were Made Of Fog
My First Week As A Free Man
So I am celebrating watching with a Celebrity Rehab Season 2 episodes. Where the lesson again seems to be that the only way to deal with crap is to go right through it. No shortcuts.
However, being in a place where it is sunny and people make my food and everyone will listen to me but still call me on my shit sounds so awesome.
The Streets Were Made Of Fog
The Streets Were Made Of Fog
The Streets Were Made Of Fog
The Streets Were Made Of Fog
BTW, the expansion I worked on went live. It is under the Social Exchange tab on http://www.betavine.net. Which means I have now worked on the whole site. CSS & HTML. No, it won't validate.
Snog
Well, 2 years after peaking in LA the Pinkberryoid "Korean Frozen Yogurt with fruit toppings in a shop with an achingly modern cool interior" trend has hit London. I managed to introduce the Most Beautiful Woman I Know to it tonight after we had had dinner and caught up. She was appalled I would even suggest it since I had already finished her dessert after my own, but she ended up eating half anyway as we walked to our tube and bus stop to go home.
And the shop was called SNOG, with all cutesy wordplay on How Would You Like Your Snog and Why Snogging Is Healthy and all. She liked it, I told her it was waterier than the original. Somewhere in the world some shop owner is thinking about calling his future FroYo palace WANK or something.
DO NOT WANT
A Priority 1, critical bug the day before Go-live. In any department, but especially front-end, my department.
With a racing heart and total panic I realized that I had no idea why this stopped working this build while it was working two days ago, while my front brain got colder and colder in demeanor to get more analytical, drilling down in the process of constructing this part of the page, finding nothing, getting the crucial HTC file served just fine when I entered the path directly, diagnosing outside of the code I am responsible for into how it was being served, until I found out the request for this file from the browser was being answered by the server with a 302, File Temporarily Moved, instead of 200 All Ok. When the page asked for the file, it wasn't getting it.
Huh. Relative request from the page fails, full path from the browser location-entry bar succeeds. Test installation on my machine agrees: putting a full path -- not optimal because of structure of the site -- in the page does load the file, putting a relative path in the page fails.
IM tech lead and server config person to inform of problem, describe problem in bug report, re-assign, tech lead and server config person are on it. They are checking a fix in now.
Perhaps I Should Stop Thinking In The Shower
Hypothesis: the level of Eating Disorders [EDs] in the US gay male population (maybe even in the general population) is undercounted because the disease is masked by the more severe results of self-medicating it with meth.
To be clear: I am not saying every meth addict has an ED, nor that meth use is an ED by itself. I am saying that I wonder whether, and if so how much, EDs in the gay male population end up being expressed not as starving or purging, but as meth use, rendering the ED component invisible, or seeming like a minor issue, because meth addiction is such a catastrophe.
Yes, I know ED is usually Erectile Dysfunction. No need to leave a comment giggling.
Diagnosis
My problem at work is that I am more Opinionated Margot Channing than "Pliable" Eve Herrington.
Forjwg
SnowLeopard I'd like to upgrade to Mac OS X Snow Leopard, but it seems like a bad idea right now since I am using this machine to make a deadline. The deadline is doing CSS implementation for an expansion to Betavine, and this expansion will be coming online for a pilot in weeks. So yes, little time to be installing something that could screw up my system and make programs I use, like Virtual Machines and eclipse, not work.
I did, however, upgrade the memory myself, sincejpeace pointed out this would be relatively cheap and easy to do, and with my needs I should really max it out. Which I now have done, after which I wiped down my machine with a furniture wipe since it was off anyway. It is now all clean and fast, and I will install Snow Leopard in a few weeks. I suspect the clean shinyness is what is making it faster.
Leopard I think that's the Mac OS X version I am now. I got this mac over a year ago for my second gig, I forget when exactly. It's an MBP, not a unibody, and I just spent a ridiculously low £40 to have memory delivered to my door so I could double it. Good god, I remember when memory, etc, get off my lawn. Considering I am running two if not three Operating Systems on this simultaneously, having 4GB of memory is not a luxury.
This is the first Mac of my own. I have been envious of people who had macintoshes since they came out, and especially since the parents of the girl I babysat when I was in High School had one. I would switch it on at night and just move the mouse and open windows, trying not to leave any traces by changing anything. Your own Mac on your own desk for you alone, it seemed and incredible thought. When I did start buying my own computers, I always wanted tiny subnotebooks to carry everywhere and have on my desk at work as my own machines, and Apple didn't make those. When I finally had to bite the bullet and buy my own workhorse as a consultant, I could finally buy a Mac. I like my Mac, but it really doesn't remind me much f that 1986 SE.
Tiger Shame they are getting extinct, and for stupid superstition medicine no less. I have always wanted to pet one, but it seems a bad idea in the wild. I wonder how they feel, if they are as soft and fluffy as cats, or bristly. When we lived in Medellin, Colombia, we would hear sometimes that some coke- or weapons-oligarch we knew from the club or whose kids went to our school got tiger cubs for his children. As a 7-year-old that sounds like a great idea. As an adult I shudder at how this could never end well, often for the humans, but always for the tigers. So stupid. I mean, yes, tigercubs are cute, but geezus, they grow, man. And what about the mother?
Panther The big black ones are the prettiest, I would say. I suspect its fur is really bristly and only fun to pet with the grain.
Jaguar My older brother used to do chores for a rich family in out tony neighborhood, and the mom drove a Jag. This was thing in our neighborhood, and yet, well, it just didn't seem all that chic. It seemed small, to me. Luxury for me was when all 6 of us could fit in the car and I, as the youngest, did not have to go in the back of the stationwagon (once, even, if I recall correctly, together with the dog, which I must have liked because I loved our dog). This went on until I was 14 or so. I actually would have more space there than with my siblings in the back seat. Now my siblings all have less children than we were, and yet they all have minivans. Yup, when we all go to my dad's you can see between two and three minivans parked outside. Spoiled brats, with their own armrests, those nieces and nephews of mine.
Am I the only one for whom the LJ syndication feeds have not updated in days?
5 Words, Fromdpolicar
Expatriate. The thing that I dislike most about it is the levels of Stupid Foreigner Tax you have to pay. Like because you have no credit history in the new country you can only get Pay As You Go phones or only secured credit cards or god, trying to get a bank account when you only have a temporary address. I couldn't, except for this one banking product HSBC had here which cost £72 per year I kid you not. Then after a year, if you have shown proof of address, which you need for the savings account, it becomes a normal account. Being an expat is expensive, with advances and extra deposits you have to pay. Because I had no references and no steady job when I landed, I had to pay my rent 6 months in advance or keep living in a hovel. Six.
The expats I meet here are mostly Brazilian, and recently a whole host of South Africans. This is the first country I have lived in in which I am truly pegged as a foreigner when I speak. Well, I was kind of pegged as a foreigner in South America too --as I mentioned before, I thought "gringo" meant "blond" for the longest time. Now I know I was not even a gringo. Like in the UK, in South America they thought I was American, over there because I was a blond child, here because of the accent. When someone mentions me being American in company, often someone else will say "He's Dutch" and then often I get an apology from the first person, I am not sure exactly for what. I suspect it is for briefly having thought less of me. They don't like USers all that much here.
Of course, I suspect that when I go back to live in NL -- it is inevitable -- I will be an expat there again. Like having to find what my Dutch social security number is, and I will have no credit history, and I will have to explain over and over that I lived in the foreign for a long time and just came back. This is already oodles of self-conscious fun when I go back for a weekend and take forever to count out my change in Euros and shopkeepers wonder what is up with this local guy not knowing the money, did he just come out of 20 years in jail?
Being an expat is often about looking stupid. It can be assaulting. And it feels like I constantly am one.
Sex. What to write that's PG-13 here... you know where to find the rest. Oh yes, people want me to start dating again. I tell them that I of course I am getting laid (hello Internet!), but I have no intention of doing the dinner and movie and setting up by friends and awkwardness thing.
Success. I want it. Last time I was in Boston,missdimple told me she knew why I liked LA and I dared her to tell me since I wasn't sure, and she was correct in saying that it was because LA has The Shiny. If you make it big that is one of the places you end up, you know. I liked the aspect of being there, but I really didn't like what it did to people chasing it, what little I saw. But I do so like shiny things. I wouldn't mind meeting anyone who lived in it.
I don't feel successful right now, which is ungrateful of me, considering I get paid, and get to work at home a lot, and the work is quite decent, and so many of my friends are, well, hurting bad. People I have come to know and love are at the brink of homelessness. These were people with careers.
I keep seeing glimpses of me going to my next level, scenarios put in reach but just not panning out. It takes hard work, showing up, and third, luck, that being in the right place at the right time while known by the right people, and that last thing is faltering. All I know about becoming successful is to show up, pay attention, do the work, and get recognized, so I do the work and pull rabbits out of hats, show up to meetings on time, pay attention, and be ready. I am ready. Am I ready? Do I recognize a good chance?
Cat. Somehow I have become the cat expert for some electronic friends. They will mention things they saw a cat do or send me a clip or a LOLcat and I tell them what is actually going on -- most of the funniest of ICHC is actually very well photographed yawns. And I explain that some cats are indeed paw-drinkers, it is not some super cute thing that only this one cat does. And how they are actually completely alien; most the time they are awake you really have no idea what is going on in that head.
This topic makes me sad; I miss having a cat. Working at home as much as I do I guess I could have one, but my life is so unstable. I don't feel like I am committed to be here for the long term, and moving a cat is hard with the distances I move. I don't really have space for a litter box here either, and seriously don't miss the smell and hassle, and like being able to take off for the weekend. Still, I'd like a little purring fluff ball with personality to snuggle with me and be loved by and love back. Owning cats for me is for their life spans, it is a commitment: you can't abandon something smaller and weaker than you you have been entrusted with and has grown to like you and you like back. Yes, I gave mine up, but that is because they went to a very good home with their co-owner. Twinkie, the remaining one, is thriving, thriving, she will be 200 yet. But when I visited last I realized she has completely forgotten me.
I want loaner kittnes like I had my last months in LA, when my neighbors cats would visit, and then go home.
Solitude. She stands in the doorway. With her black silhouette, her long cool stare and her silence, I have lost track of how many times we have met.
I used to think I was a loner, turns out I was just good at handling being alone. I like being around people much better, if they are nice people. But if not, I can handle it. Often I have conversations with other people in my head. Sometimes with you, even when you are not here.
And the landlord agreed to pay for the lock. I need to send him the receipt so he can chase it down.
Walk Through It 4
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After 7 months of working on a Vodafone property of which the last segment I worked on was released October 15th, I took a break.
I saw on a mailing list an ad from a recruiter I had been impressed by when I met her at a tech meetup thing. I sent her my CV. She submitted me for another job, which I have accepted and started.
I am now a Mobile User Experience Architect for AKQA, a digital agency. I am based in London, and working on a Nokia account for a group primarily based in Berlin. After some confusion it seems there is no immediate travel.
Contractually I am not allowed to blog, tweet, or update about AKQA and working for AKQA, so do not expect many news updates from me.
FJ!! & JPeace, ep 34: "FJ!! & JPeace... Discover Gay Sex Elves In Mainstream Gaming"
fj: http://gamevideos.1up.com/video/id/2703fj: haven't seen yet, someone just tweeted this with gay sex elf in dragon age? [ed: it was darke, btw]fj: not loadingjpeace: Oh JPeace jpeace: my godjpeace: Ohhhhhhhhhh wow.jpeace: OH. MY GOD.jpeace: BioW, i love you.fj: you are so just teasing me jpeace: Nojpeace: I'm not jpeace: This is nearly groundbreaking jpeace: Use safari fj: what is dragon age anywayjpeace: midtier RPG from bioware jpeace: they specialize in big budget RPGsjpeace: this one's getting hype for some really inventive gameplay jpeace: nothing was mentioned about gay sex in loincloths jpeace: with the chat tree ACTUALLY BUILT FOR THIS EVENTUALITY fj: [ed: switched to Safari, video starts playing] wait what? jpeace: it's not just a gender-blind systemfj: N F W!fj: my god it is gay soft-core porn! fj: and the elf bottoms jpeace: This isn't exactly insanely rare, but i've never seen anything so explicitjpeace: The shadows slopping in on a scene change = sloppy fj: does everyone get to do this?jpeace: No ide jpeace: This game wasn't on my radar until release jpeace: No, I've never seen anything so explicit that was actually ENCOURAGED jpeace: Japanese RPGs generally have male on male content, but that's coming from the co.jp bizarroverse jpeace: and then they get all the good stuff dropped in translation to avoid the dreaded AO rating. jpeace: That this is coming from canada is amazing.fj: User comment: "This is just wrongAuthor: Hunterman328, 11/09/2009
Dude, I know elves have small penises, the extra cartilage in their ears takes away from penile growth during youth, but the guy could at least given him a reach around. No wonder Elves don't like humans that much. Bet the guy didn't even spit on the elf's anus to lube it up a bit, just plugged away. (Little know fact, Elf semen glows in the dark when Bilbo's Sting is nearbye.)"
jpeace: :]fj: can you repeat a scene? jpeace: probably not. fj: ooh, let's have sex with the elf again?jpeace: oh, that? maybejpeace: replay isn't common fj: I am oddly aroused fj: No wait, I know what I amfj: I am really really touched. Teen boys get to play this, right? fj: I mean, at that age, as a nerd, you are all about Big Sweeping Advetures Far Away jpeace: Yes JPeace jpeace: And nojpeace: The target market for this game is me at best. probably skews older. 30-45 fj: and now finally we exist too fj: and this one was really quite romantic jpeace: Bizarrely tasteful fj: I think it is what a closeted teen boy needs: existance outside his own plane without everything about That Thing being Problemsfj: but part of the huger tapestry of being a Hero fj: am I making any sense to you? I expect that over the years men will understand it less and less as fewer grow up quite as isolated and closetedjpeace: You are making complete and total sense to me.fj: also something about being gay that is not about bars and trying to fit it in in the Big Gay Urban Lifestyle jpeace: It's just jarring. The software industry is, i mean this sincerely, a century behind cinema in its handling of human sexuality. jpeace: An entire fucking century.fj: and yet this perfect moment gets put in jpeace: This is the exception that proves nothing other than that the French have more taste than anyone else.fj: it is indeed very Brokebackjpeace: The culture you desire exists, now, on the internet.jpeace: It self-organizes, seeks out the stories it wants jpeace: And makes them by force jpeace: There are a million shippers and ten million readers jpeace: The internet is the nexus of all fact and fiction jpeace: And you can reassemble it better, faster, and more satisfyingly every day. fj: yes, but it has terrible production values. This game does not jpeace: True.fj: and being shown with real production values, like every other narrative held up as True, is what counts jpeace: You're right.fj: it is one of the reasons I never liked Gay Cinema fj: I wish it had been about Gay Cowboys Eating Pudding. It was always about grubby teens getting beaten up. I KNOW THAT! I DO NOT NEED A MOVIE ABOUT IT!fj: I wanted to be loved in something as big as The 5th Element because that is how BIG love felt when I was alone jpeace: Ouch fj: And still does.jpeace: x2
I Have No Idea What My Brain Was trying To Tell Me Here
Dream this morning: I found myself talking to Bea Arthur, and trying hard to amuse her I shared the insane fashion tip found in Joan Crawford's "My Wonderful Life" to always buy more fabric for a blouse than you need so your tailor making the blouse can line a new suit jacket with the remnant at the same time.
For
phornaxHair. Somewhere last year I went to one of those Mediterranean barbers and had a £7 haircut. This is a very standard thing to do here for gay boys: you get all short and sides buzzed and you are in and out in 30 mins I did this on the way to my gay gym, and when I was there I looked around between lifts and noticed the only variation in haircuts was where the length of the stubble was between a nr 2 buzz or clean shaven. Like mine.
Very soon after I was in the Netherlands with my family and we were talking about age and my sister said my hair was thinning at the crown. I knew she was exaggerating, but I did realize that if I ever wanted longer hair, I had to do it now So I didn't have my hair cut for months, and when I did have it cut it was at the local barbershop that caters mostly to black people. I figured a guy who spends days shaping "afro-caribbean" hair from dreads to relaxers, and then
a cut on top of those processes, would know how to make an unruly head have some shape He did, and Don and I now have a great relationship. I love sitting in his shop and just chat for hours with him and all the customers about everything as pretty much everyone in the neighborhood comes by. And his reputation is such that, while being a one-man shop in Kennington, people all the way from Richmond come by for consultations.Well, I had wild romantic hair for months, many of you saw it, and then I got bored. I told Don I wanted 'expensive West End Creative Director Hair'. (Don trained and worked for years in the shops around Marble Arch, btw.) Red streaks and cut it short. It took hours because he was also doing dreads on one guy and a deep conditioner on a female client, but when I walked out, I looked like I was running Hommes Vogue UK. He never lets me leave without a full blow-out, and this time with the flat iron set so hot I could smell singeing. My hair was hanging straight and strict and posh.
It's a little wilder now that its natural curl is back, and the red has faded some. I should make a new userpic soon.
Fashion. I sometimes wander around Selfridges just for a look at what is Hot and Now. I deconstruct everyone I see, and I like a lot of the fashions here. I have already raved about the coats on women, and the men on average take just as much care. As for me, I could never justify to myself paying full retail for designer stuff, and I am not about Clothes Of The Now that much anyway. However, my styling has been getting plainer and plainer these last years. I haven't been to Yoox.com and Bluefly.com in ages, and I only occasionally go to the designer vintage shop near Marble Arch. It is really hard for me to find a piece I really want to spend money on. In my precarious financial situation, it is just not something I can justify doing, especially while I am finding that taking care of my body and layering with American Apparel makes me look outward just as interesting as I feel.
Yet I know I should, some, if I come acros those really special items. I have two Yamamoto thick grey shirt jackets that I have had for a decade now, and cannot live without. The custom shirts, of which I want more. The Watanabe travel coat with all the pockets. Last year I let a Y3 black hooded raincoat go because it was 'too expensive'. I still mourn it; it seems impossible to find a hooded raincoat that doesn't look like you felt the need to a) wear a bag b) climb the Kilimanjaro, but instead looked like a city dweller who has it together. I went back to look for it during Selfridge's famous sales. I described it to the sales guy, he recognized it immediately and told me the few they had had sold out in pretty much the first two weeks they had had them The piece was that good.
Design. There are 6 million definitions and theories of it, and the one that works for me in my work and personal life is that Design is everything you do to something -- and 'everything you do' includes how you make that something look and be and feel and work -- to make it be nice for people. Yes, 'nice', I really see no need 90% of the time to go for anything loftier. Nice in how it looks and works and is. Just getting to nice is already so elusive, often the best you get is inoffensive. In my job, part of that nice is having the way that something looks and works also communicate what that something actually is, and is for, preferably all by itself without needing external artifacts like manuals and help files. This is spectacularly difficult to do for anything remotely complex or new.
I love doing my part of it. Truly love it. I love doing it together with people who are very talented at the parts I am not. It is such fun to make everything fit together and be just nice. I have never really wanted to change the world through software. I just want everything to be nice.
Image. People tell me my online persona is so controlled. Well, one the one hand it has to be, you can get fired or not hired for what you write online these days Many an unemployed time I have considered setting this whole thing to Friends Only if not deleting it, and I still may. I also think I may be overprotective this way, but I do work in the part of the industry where your online persona is scrutinized heavily.
Mine's a bit lacking. I just do not play the social media game enough I actually do want to hold back, only dip in a toe. I look at the successful social media workers and their tweets and everything and I am always torn between "I could do this" and "It would not be authentic", whatever that means. Authenticity is an insane concept on the net, and yet everyone always looks for it, tries to glean it from what has been posted.
Language. All we got, and it is a terrible medium. I am tired of languages. I haven't had to learn a new human one in years, and I hope I never have to again. I suck at it.
The Stars Fly
"The Stars Fly", London, Leica C-LUX 3, 2009
I Is Learning
Image by avh2222 via Flickr
And it seems someone is finally moving in downstairs.
Disaster Continues?
Image via Wikipedia
Now, because of his gig he may be a Cassandra, but he said something really interesting Friday morning I would like some coroboration on: supposedly one of the head people in charge of TARP said that a) the fundamentals in the financial sector are as bad as when TARP started, considering the real value of assets being held b) those banks that were too big to fail used their TARP money to buy other banks to shore up their bottom line, which means they are now even too bigger to fail.
Does anyone remember seeing this in the news anywhere? Is it true?
(And then
jpeace sends me a Bloomberg article predicting a massive crash in commercial real estate values.)FJ!! & Davy ep1: "FJ!! & Davy... Discuss Halloween and Pop Music in The UK"
cyborgdog: is halloween a big deal in the UK?fj: getting resentfully biggerfj: it is an import nobody likesfj: yet here it isfj: much like Cheryl Cole's song hitting nr 1, everyone hates it, yet is is nr 1cyborgdog: everybody secretly loves itfj: it's really badcyborgdog: autotune bad? fj: badly boringly written badfj: this for the first hit solo single of a singer of one of the biggest girl groups of the nowfj: http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=GB&hl=ecyborgdog: Well, the Brits refuse to acknowledge the crassness of their own peoplefj: lazy writing, lazy production, lazy programming, nobody likes it, nr 1fj: Halloween is like that: they kind of get it, they resent to have to celebrate it, and yet more and more parties are being heldcyborgdog: is it the kid friendly halloween with candy and pumpkins? or the dress up as a whore Halloween?fj: this country's biggest hobby is binge drinking till puking on the street. Take a guess.
The Streets Were Made Of Fog
"The Streets Were Made Of Fog", London, Leica C-LUX 3, 2009
The Streets Were Made Of Fog
"The Streets Were Made Of Fog", London, Leica C-LUX 3, 2009
My First Week As A Free Man
So I am celebrating watching with a Celebrity Rehab Season 2 episodes. Where the lesson again seems to be that the only way to deal with crap is to go right through it. No shortcuts.
However, being in a place where it is sunny and people make my food and everyone will listen to me but still call me on my shit sounds so awesome.
The Streets Were Made Of Fog
"The Streets Were Made Of Fog", Amsterdam, Nokia E71, 2009
The Streets Were Made Of Fog
"The Streets Were Made Of Fog", Amsterdam, Nokia E71, 2009
The Streets Were Made Of Fog
"The Streets Were Made Of Fog", Amsterdam, Nokia E71, 2009
The Streets Were Made Of Fog
"The Streets Were Made Of Fog", Amsterdam, Nokia E71, 2009
BTW, the expansion I worked on went live. It is under the Social Exchange tab on http://www.betavine.net. Which means I have now worked on the whole site. CSS & HTML. No, it won't validate.
Snog
Well, 2 years after peaking in LA the Pinkberryoid "Korean Frozen Yogurt with fruit toppings in a shop with an achingly modern cool interior" trend has hit London. I managed to introduce the Most Beautiful Woman I Know to it tonight after we had had dinner and caught up. She was appalled I would even suggest it since I had already finished her dessert after my own, but she ended up eating half anyway as we walked to our tube and bus stop to go home.
And the shop was called SNOG, with all cutesy wordplay on How Would You Like Your Snog and Why Snogging Is Healthy and all. She liked it, I told her it was waterier than the original. Somewhere in the world some shop owner is thinking about calling his future FroYo palace WANK or something.
DO NOT WANT
A Priority 1, critical bug the day before Go-live. In any department, but especially front-end, my department.
With a racing heart and total panic I realized that I had no idea why this stopped working this build while it was working two days ago, while my front brain got colder and colder in demeanor to get more analytical, drilling down in the process of constructing this part of the page, finding nothing, getting the crucial HTC file served just fine when I entered the path directly, diagnosing outside of the code I am responsible for into how it was being served, until I found out the request for this file from the browser was being answered by the server with a 302, File Temporarily Moved, instead of 200 All Ok. When the page asked for the file, it wasn't getting it.
Huh. Relative request from the page fails, full path from the browser location-entry bar succeeds. Test installation on my machine agrees: putting a full path -- not optimal because of structure of the site -- in the page does load the file, putting a relative path in the page fails.
IM tech lead and server config person to inform of problem, describe problem in bug report, re-assign, tech lead and server config person are on it. They are checking a fix in now.
Perhaps I Should Stop Thinking In The Shower
Hypothesis: the level of Eating Disorders [EDs] in the US gay male population (maybe even in the general population) is undercounted because the disease is masked by the more severe results of self-medicating it with meth.
To be clear: I am not saying every meth addict has an ED, nor that meth use is an ED by itself. I am saying that I wonder whether, and if so how much, EDs in the gay male population end up being expressed not as starving or purging, but as meth use, rendering the ED component invisible, or seeming like a minor issue, because meth addiction is such a catastrophe.
Yes, I know ED is usually Erectile Dysfunction. No need to leave a comment giggling.
Diagnosis
My problem at work is that I am more Opinionated Margot Channing than "Pliable" Eve Herrington.
For
jwgSnowLeopard I'd like to upgrade to Mac OS X Snow Leopard, but it seems like a bad idea right now since I am using this machine to make a deadline. The deadline is doing CSS implementation for an expansion to Betavine, and this expansion will be coming online for a pilot in weeks. So yes, little time to be installing something that could screw up my system and make programs I use, like Virtual Machines and eclipse, not work.
I did, however, upgrade the memory myself, since
jpeace pointed out this would be relatively cheap and easy to do, and with my needs I should really max it out. Which I now have done, after which I wiped down my machine with a furniture wipe since it was off anyway. It is now all clean and fast, and I will install Snow Leopard in a few weeks. I suspect the clean shinyness is what is making it faster.Leopard I think that's the Mac OS X version I am now. I got this mac over a year ago for my second gig, I forget when exactly. It's an MBP, not a unibody, and I just spent a ridiculously low £40 to have memory delivered to my door so I could double it. Good god, I remember when memory, etc, get off my lawn. Considering I am running two if not three Operating Systems on this simultaneously, having 4GB of memory is not a luxury.
This is the first Mac of my own. I have been envious of people who had macintoshes since they came out, and especially since the parents of the girl I babysat when I was in High School had one. I would switch it on at night and just move the mouse and open windows, trying not to leave any traces by changing anything. Your own Mac on your own desk for you alone, it seemed and incredible thought. When I did start buying my own computers, I always wanted tiny subnotebooks to carry everywhere and have on my desk at work as my own machines, and Apple didn't make those. When I finally had to bite the bullet and buy my own workhorse as a consultant, I could finally buy a Mac. I like my Mac, but it really doesn't remind me much f that 1986 SE.
Tiger Shame they are getting extinct, and for stupid superstition medicine no less. I have always wanted to pet one, but it seems a bad idea in the wild. I wonder how they feel, if they are as soft and fluffy as cats, or bristly. When we lived in Medellin, Colombia, we would hear sometimes that some coke- or weapons-oligarch we knew from the club or whose kids went to our school got tiger cubs for his children. As a 7-year-old that sounds like a great idea. As an adult I shudder at how this could never end well, often for the humans, but always for the tigers. So stupid. I mean, yes, tigercubs are cute, but geezus, they grow, man. And what about the mother?
Panther The big black ones are the prettiest, I would say. I suspect its fur is really bristly and only fun to pet with the grain.
Jaguar My older brother used to do chores for a rich family in out tony neighborhood, and the mom drove a Jag. This was thing in our neighborhood, and yet, well, it just didn't seem all that chic. It seemed small, to me. Luxury for me was when all 6 of us could fit in the car and I, as the youngest, did not have to go in the back of the stationwagon (once, even, if I recall correctly, together with the dog, which I must have liked because I loved our dog). This went on until I was 14 or so. I actually would have more space there than with my siblings in the back seat. Now my siblings all have less children than we were, and yet they all have minivans. Yup, when we all go to my dad's you can see between two and three minivans parked outside. Spoiled brats, with their own armrests, those nieces and nephews of mine.
Am I the only one for whom the LJ syndication feeds have not updated in days?
5 Words, From
dpolicarExpatriate. The thing that I dislike most about it is the levels of Stupid Foreigner Tax you have to pay. Like because you have no credit history in the new country you can only get Pay As You Go phones or only secured credit cards or god, trying to get a bank account when you only have a temporary address. I couldn't, except for this one banking product HSBC had here which cost £72 per year I kid you not. Then after a year, if you have shown proof of address, which you need for the savings account, it becomes a normal account. Being an expat is expensive, with advances and extra deposits you have to pay. Because I had no references and no steady job when I landed, I had to pay my rent 6 months in advance or keep living in a hovel. Six.
The expats I meet here are mostly Brazilian, and recently a whole host of South Africans. This is the first country I have lived in in which I am truly pegged as a foreigner when I speak. Well, I was kind of pegged as a foreigner in South America too --as I mentioned before, I thought "gringo" meant "blond" for the longest time. Now I know I was not even a gringo. Like in the UK, in South America they thought I was American, over there because I was a blond child, here because of the accent. When someone mentions me being American in company, often someone else will say "He's Dutch" and then often I get an apology from the first person, I am not sure exactly for what. I suspect it is for briefly having thought less of me. They don't like USers all that much here.
Of course, I suspect that when I go back to live in NL -- it is inevitable -- I will be an expat there again. Like having to find what my Dutch social security number is, and I will have no credit history, and I will have to explain over and over that I lived in the foreign for a long time and just came back. This is already oodles of self-conscious fun when I go back for a weekend and take forever to count out my change in Euros and shopkeepers wonder what is up with this local guy not knowing the money, did he just come out of 20 years in jail?
Being an expat is often about looking stupid. It can be assaulting. And it feels like I constantly am one.
Sex. What to write that's PG-13 here... you know where to find the rest. Oh yes, people want me to start dating again. I tell them that I of course I am getting laid (hello Internet!), but I have no intention of doing the dinner and movie and setting up by friends and awkwardness thing.
Success. I want it. Last time I was in Boston,
missdimple told me she knew why I liked LA and I dared her to tell me since I wasn't sure, and she was correct in saying that it was because LA has The Shiny. If you make it big that is one of the places you end up, you know. I liked the aspect of being there, but I really didn't like what it did to people chasing it, what little I saw. But I do so like shiny things. I wouldn't mind meeting anyone who lived in it.I don't feel successful right now, which is ungrateful of me, considering I get paid, and get to work at home a lot, and the work is quite decent, and so many of my friends are, well, hurting bad. People I have come to know and love are at the brink of homelessness. These were people with careers.
I keep seeing glimpses of me going to my next level, scenarios put in reach but just not panning out. It takes hard work, showing up, and third, luck, that being in the right place at the right time while known by the right people, and that last thing is faltering. All I know about becoming successful is to show up, pay attention, do the work, and get recognized, so I do the work and pull rabbits out of hats, show up to meetings on time, pay attention, and be ready. I am ready. Am I ready? Do I recognize a good chance?
Cat. Somehow I have become the cat expert for some electronic friends. They will mention things they saw a cat do or send me a clip or a LOLcat and I tell them what is actually going on -- most of the funniest of ICHC is actually very well photographed yawns. And I explain that some cats are indeed paw-drinkers, it is not some super cute thing that only this one cat does. And how they are actually completely alien; most the time they are awake you really have no idea what is going on in that head.
This topic makes me sad; I miss having a cat. Working at home as much as I do I guess I could have one, but my life is so unstable. I don't feel like I am committed to be here for the long term, and moving a cat is hard with the distances I move. I don't really have space for a litter box here either, and seriously don't miss the smell and hassle, and like being able to take off for the weekend. Still, I'd like a little purring fluff ball with personality to snuggle with me and be loved by and love back. Owning cats for me is for their life spans, it is a commitment: you can't abandon something smaller and weaker than you you have been entrusted with and has grown to like you and you like back. Yes, I gave mine up, but that is because they went to a very good home with their co-owner. Twinkie, the remaining one, is thriving, thriving, she will be 200 yet. But when I visited last I realized she has completely forgotten me.
I want loaner kittnes like I had my last months in LA, when my neighbors cats would visit, and then go home.
Solitude. She stands in the doorway. With her black silhouette, her long cool stare and her silence, I have lost track of how many times we have met.
I used to think I was a loner, turns out I was just good at handling being alone. I like being around people much better, if they are nice people. But if not, I can handle it. Often I have conversations with other people in my head. Sometimes with you, even when you are not here.
And the landlord agreed to pay for the lock. I need to send him the receipt so he can chase it down.
Walk Through It 4
"Walk Through It 4", London, Nokia E71, 2009