i’ll have a salad, please.

Posted at 25 Jan 2:32 pm. 0 comments

Pet owner? Meat eater? Pharmaceutical drug consumer?

Watch this.

digital masks

Posted at 22 Jan 11:21 am. 1 comment

I’m attempting to bring this blog into the 21st century by updating it with plugins, a horrible task if one is indecisive. The sheer variety available is quite astounding.

One type in particular keeps catching my eye: those extolling greater connectivity. Where else can you find me? one app asks before listing some of the most popular platforms available today: Facebook, Friendster, digg, Flickr, Orkut, etc.

I’ll not kid myself – I’m tempted to jump on the bandwagon and embrace the kind of accessibility they’re dangling in front of my nose. (Basic internet marketing: the more people know who you are and how they can reach you, the better.) But a greater part of me isn’t so happy.

I am by nature a wary sort of person. I’ve struggled with this in the eleven blogs I’ve had in the past eight years – where to draw the line between being truthful and overexposing myself? In person I’m about as likely to divulge a gruesome tidbit of my sex life just for the shock value as tell you about my day, but the difference, you see, is that I know who I’m speaking to. I simply don’t like the idea of some stranger knowing more about me than I know about them.

Once upon a time I used to track through cyberspace members of online groups I subscribed to, just for fun. I learnt their real names, siblings’ names, birthdays, personal descriptions, hopes, dreams and issues. With just a bit of determination and no complex computer skills – I was about thirteen then – all this information was available. When you think about it, that’s quite unnerving.

(While time and internet privacy campaigns appear to have wised up my generation, kids growing up with the Net seem even more blase about sharing their personal details than we were. Coupled with their tendency to camwhore incessantly and speak to/add everyone who drops by their blogs/social networking apps in order to look more popular, it’s a breeding ground for disaster.)

Made even more cautious by the results of my trawlings, I lurked for years under a whole host of personas, email addresses and websites. It took five years before I would even reveal my real hair color to online friends. I never really grew out of it.

Now, facing me: the option of providing randoms a link to my Facebook, the repository of my friends, pictures, personal references to my life.

It’s a massive step. Probably not one I’ll be taking anytime soon, either, although of course with a bit of determination it’s easy enough to find out who I am.

tweet me

Posted at 19 Jan 3:39 pm. 1 comment

As a member of the yuppie-twenties still clinging desperately to my hipness and youth, I’d like to claim an affinity to Twitter the way so many of my online media-savvy friends do.

Alas, unlike an orgasm, I can’t fake it.

Twitter, I used to think in horror as I waded daily through an avalanche of 140-character tweets, is the propagation and validation of mental diarrhea.

On one end of the literary scale you have books: great masterpieces of critical thinking and solid, carefully expounded stances, which take years to write. (Some of them, anyway. Twi-shite, er, Twilight, not included.)

On the other end: Twitter, which broadcasts to the world every insignificant piece of drivel that passes through your brain at the speed your fingers can type.

What Twitter, with its speed-of-type broadcasting ability, is unequivocally good for is spreading news. Or gossip. The line between the two is naturally rather thin.

Said line grows dangerously so when posters no longer even have to take five minutes  to produce a reasonably researched blog post, hopefully reinforced by a couple of factual links and a picture. Just re-tweet it, bub.

Thankfully the main yardstick for a news tweet’s believability is a credible source: a link to a credible article.

And those, fortunately, don’t come with 140-character limits.

motifake

Posted at 16 Jan 9:09 am. 0 comments

A lot of the stuff on motifake is trashy crap, therefore but it wasn’t too hard to find something that tickled my funny bone.

Creationists? Evolutionists? Boom! Problem solved, too.

Yeah, we’ve all been there. But this one’s included just because the little guy’s misery looks so darn cute.

But how often do people really have anything relevant to say to each other anyway?

I don’t know if lobsters can feel pain, but I’m morally opposed to boiling anything alive. It seems a good general stance to take.
That said, heaven tastes like lobsters smothered in garlic butter sauce and wreathed in crustacean screams.

she

Posted at 14 Jan 8:30 pm. 0 comments

This is about choice.

http://questioningtransphobia.wordpress.com

holey crap

Posted at 08 Jan 7:37 pm. 0 comments

This is what I hate about taking a stand on a topic of argument: the position you find yourself in when you realize your defense has holes in it.

(Debates are overrated! I’m always right!)

future past

Posted at 01 Jan 6:11 pm. 0 comments

I think that the dreams and hopes we nurture in our youth become, ideally, the memories we cherish in our old age.

templater

Posted at 27 Dec 5:59 pm. 0 comments

Finding a new Wordpress template is such a pain in the arse.

Not because of lack of variety – there are thousands out there on Google.

Not because I favor only a particular look – I appreciate minimalism, adore complicated, bandwidth-intense graphics, have a soft spot for grunge.

I’m just picky. Each layout must adhere to a list of guidelines I’ve built over the years:

• Layouts should have ample space for text without the reader having to scroll down multiple times to finish a post. The two-column layout most often fits this criteria and the next, with some tweaking to expand the writable space.
• There should be space for links on the same page. Not necessarily tag clouds and calendars and the whole hoopla, but at least categories and a list of links out. The important things users might click.
• My posts contain a lot of text. Text is easier to read on a white background, even though I have a secret fetish for their black or dark counterparts. Backgrounds must therefore be white or very light.
• I have a strange dislike for Times New Roman used for headers. I think it makes things look very unprofessional, rather childish. I’m not averse to the occasional use of Arial, but strongly prefer Verdana. It’s very neat.
• I have a soft spot for user-configurable layouts. Readers can pick their preferred background image? Brilliant. Something to keep them at my page when the mundane details of my life bore them.
• I really hate it when the header graphic takes up most of my screen when I load the page. I immediately dismiss the layout from consideration. The picture is not the focus of this blog. My writing is. Attention! Attention! Attention! Me, me, me!

things I believe:

Posted at 23 Dec 7:51 pm. 0 comments

• Men exist to be taken care of, not the other way around.

Friends. Lovers. Family.

edible ties

Posted at 20 Dec 5:48 pm. 0 comments

The balls of dough need to be handled firmly, but not too aggressively or gently. I’m rolling tong yuen, mini ones. This year we’re not adding red bean or sesame filling. I achieve some semblance of uniformity without too much extra effort and with a sprinkling of pride.

A head pops in the doorframe. “Wash your hands,” I order Phil. He’s six foot three gangly, compliant inches. He takes on the small ball of pink dough. “It’s your color.” He glares at me.

I declare my white balls stormtroopers. He declares his breast cancer. We form wedge and scissor formations with our doughy soldiers. I send in a spy. Our armies encroach on each others’ territory and suffer in the arctic snows of excess flour at the top of the tin baking dish. A particularly tiny ball of breast cancer is locked in an inescapable embrace with a stormtrooper. Two stormtroopers are infected with the enemy when Phil finishes and begins helping me roll the white with pink-tinted fingers.

Apparently, I am told after we finish with help from my grandmother, only good things should be said while rolling the tong yuen balls. Acceptable topics of conversation do not include wars and cancer and how much that roll of unshaped dough resembles a fat white maggot.

He appears again when we’re boiling the tong yuen. I call him over to watch as our handiwork is dropped individually into the pot and fished out into bowls of cool water when they float. The completed products will be divided into bowls and presented on the altars, then reheated and eaten. After the ceremony, after the joss sticks have been lit, the paper offerings burnt into the delicate lacy petals of a great ash-flower, I am pleased to see our unique half-pink-half-white baby has landed entirely by coincidence in Phil’s bowl.

Our relationship has been built thus far on food. I’d tried bonding with Lizzie first over shopping, not a topic I’m terribly interested in, and drinks and music at No Black Tie, which she isn’t terribly interested in. I couldn’t think of something I might have in common with my sixteen year old half-Aussie male cousin until my grandmother urged him to eat more for the umpteenth time at dinner one night.
“Stop smiling,” he told me.
“It’s so good to have someone else be the focus for once.”
“Your turn will come again soon,” he threatened.

During dinner at a Japanese restaurant I challenge him to eat the plate of green wasabi. “Halves,” he dares me back.
We eat the wasabi plain.
His eyes water. I have difficulty swallowing.
Having a brother, as far as I am concerned, must be awesome.

Even now, with my wrists still red after half an hour, my mind isn’t changed. He came up behind me, grabbed my wrists and tried to make me take the durian on the spoon. “You touch it, you eat it,” he said, and we wrestled. A foot hooked behind his knee did nothing. Stepping on his toes of iron did more damage to me than to him. I bumped his wrist against the box and exclaimed, “You eat the whole box!” but he wasn’t having any of it. We were still in the throes of a deathmatch when his father and sister came along and voiced concern. “Don’t be so rough with your cousin, Philip.”

Rough?

Communication comes in many forms; I’m happy with this one.