I’ve named my new kitten “Boomer”. Since young cats’ genitalia are kinda obscure, at first I wasn’t sure if he was a boy or a girl. Ooh. Since the Battlestar Galactica character after which I named him is, for me, a cipher for various kinds of sex/gender and human/non-human differentiation, this is only fitting. And of course, in the original series Boomer was a guy, and now she’s a woman. Or a toaster. Or something.
[ tags: battlestar-galactica, cats, gender, sex ]
You know you’re fully immersed in geek mode when you start fantasising about text editors. Honestly: code highlighting, code folding, code completion… I’m drooling.
Moving right along…
The other day I roasted an animal for the first time.
When I was growing up, a “roast dinner” was a strange, alien… exotic thing. I really had no firm idea what one was. Cool, exotic Anglo food. (This reverse fetishisation reminds me of the first time I had bangers and mash. I was six years old, living in England for a year, and over at my girlfriend’s place for dinner. We were going to have “bangers and mash”. I hadn’t been in England that long — what the fuck was “bangers and mash”? Must be cool, exotic Anglo food. After dinner, Nicola’s mum frowns and asks me if I’m okay. “I’m fine thanks, Mrs S, that was delicious,” I reply, rolling around on the floor, clutching my tummy.)
Some years later, the idea of popping a hunk of meat and some vegetables in the oven seemed like cheating. I mean, where’s the cooking? Juggling stuff quickly on top of a flaming stovetop — that’s cooking. Bah. So it’s finally taken me a couple of decades, but I’ve now found roasting a meal to be a very satisfying procedure. Maybe it’s that cooked-animal aroma, slowly permeating the apartment, when I’ve always been about searing stuff. Ahhh. And it’s still uh, exotic.
[ tags: cooking, cultural-exchange, culture, text-editors ]
When I was a teenager, my mother thought I spent too much time on the telephone — you know, talking to girls and stuff. This was over and above the hours I spent on bulletin boards online. So when she left me alone in the house, she took the phone with her.
This didn’t stop me. Actually, going up the road to use the nearest pay-phone didn’t occur to me (and obviously, this was a decade before mobile telephony become commonplace). Instead, I made a “phone”. Cutting open a couple of cables and twisting various copper wires together, I managed to connect my 1200 baud modem to our stereo system. The only microphone I had was in a standalone, portable tape recorder that had no outputs, so I pre-recorded various phrases on different tapes, to be played back by the more integrated tape deck of the stereo. Manually issuing Hayes Smartmodem “ATD” commands from my computer, I’d make calls, and when people would answer, I’d override the modem to keep the line open and frantically play and swap cassettes through the tape deck, trying to have a “conversation” with them. I remember getting through 20 seconds of one such strangely mediated conversation before the person on the other end realised they weren’t talking “directly” to me.
I had a strange childhood.
[ tags: childhood, communication, family, hacking, modem, repression, telephone ]
I’ve been watching Jason Scott’s huge and excellently nerdy BBS documentary, and besides taking me back to my own bulletin board childhood, I picked up some more subtle clues about the relationship between the pre-Web hobbyist computer networking of the 1980s and sexual cultures.
I’ve mentioned before that Tom Jennings, the creator of FidoNet — the first international electronic network for personal computers, which foreshadowed the popularity of the Internet by a decade — was an editor of Homocore, a queer anarchist punk zine of the late ’80s. And it also transpires that Wynn Wagner III, the creator of Opus (i.e. a “work”) — the Fido software’s effective successor — was a queer AIDS activist, who went on to write “Day One”, which is purportedly “the most widely-read article on HIV ever written”. Everyone from the US military to the Sandinistas used the Opus software (I’ve still got a copy somewhere in my mouldy collection of 5.25” diskettes — sigh), and Wagner made Opus operators donate to HIV research and AIDS care services. In Scott’s film, Wagner chuckles about Christian Right organisations and the Navy inadvertantly helping to raise over a $1 million for organisations like Shanti and AMFAR. (Whacky aside: Wagner is also the proprietor of the Eye of Newt magick shop, and has more recently been ordained as a priest of the Liberal Catholic Church.)
I can’t say much about the significance of these links except to note that I’m not surprised that vocal queer scenesters and actvists have played such pivotal roles in the development of various grassroots technologies and cultures of computer networking. This goes beyond the somewhat dull acknowledgement in Internet studies circles that “minority cultures” are going to “adopt” networking technologies in order to create new social connections in a majoritarian world — we’re talking about “pioneering” developments in the technology here.
[ tags: activism, AIDS, bbs, bulletin-boards, fidonet, HIV, homocore, networks, queer, sexuality, tom-jennings, wynn-wagner, zines ]
I’m always impressed when children calmly decide when stuff might be “too much” for them.
Over the holidays, I made a little horror film with some young kids. We were just getting ready for the bit where the monster rises from the depths when Thomas, the youngest (who’s three), stopped everyone and announced that “this is too scary for me.” He then affably left the room so the rest of us could continue.
This reminded me of a young Iranian communist I know. We used to watch Neon Genesis Evangelion together when he was a pre-teen, but when the later episodes of this excellent giant robot series began veering into sex-and-death territory, he simply said, “I don’t think I’m ready for this yet,” and we left it at that.
Children who are patronised don’t stand a chance.
I’m in a cafe. It’s forty-five degrees centigrade. Fuck.
