Proper blogging tomorrow when I'm not absolutely knackered. Today I have purchased a kettle, and tomorrow I will be buying a washing machine. I am a so the mid-20s professional. (sob)

Click for full-size.

It's a beautiful summer's day.
Hundreds of thousands are starving to death.
The song I like is playing in my ears.
Someone who doesn't deserve it has cancer.
He's still here.
She is not.

How do you reconcile these things? Do you laugh, or cry? How can you be happy when so many terrible things are always going on? Should you feel guilty for laughing and having a good time, when you know that someone you care about is miserable, and you can't do anything about it? These are questions that have often occurred to me, and are currently being driven home yet again.

I say no. Guilt would be the wrong reaction. You can't go through life miserable all the time, and there will always be problems in the world and in the lives of your friends and loved ones. They wouldn't want you to be miserable all the time. If you can do something to help, then by all means do so. But if you can't, then that doesn't mean you should do nothing.

You should laugh, if you want to. You should enjoy your health, your freedom, the company of your friends. And you should do it all the more because the ability to do so is a privilege that not everyone has. Laugh for them, because they can't right now. Savour your health, and hope that they can rejoin you soon. Live life harder, in memory of those you've lost.

Laugh if you want to, because you can.

Party: 1
House: 0

Thanks to everyone who came, and the unexpected (to me, at least) housewarming presents, including the fabulous sodastream machine from Milly, which we have been playing with all afternoon! Mmm, home-made cola!

Totally unrelatedly, via Dom, following on the success of Bugs Bunny Extreme, I bring you the latest in totally hip-to-the-kids merchandise:

I'm being quite remiss about blogging recently, kidlets. At least I've returned to updating the scratchpad, right? Amuse yourselves with it. Other things going on... oh, we get a new washing machine tomorrow! This is exciting to people who've not washed any clothing in 3 weeks, let me tell you. Our last one melted while I was on holiday; apparently that 200-decibel metallic shrieking it made during the spin cycle was not just normal operating noise; who knew?

Oh, and I've gone and uploaded a silly number of photos to Flickr; mostly restricted to family, but you can see some highlights of the vacation snaps without needing to log in.

Now, while I am far from being a defender of chavs, this "zero tolerance" policy, like all other such policies, is a ridiculous abdication of judgement on behalf of the security staff. This rule is aimed at excluding antisocial teenagers who intimidate shoppers, bully staff, and damage property. However, it will also affect chemotherapy patients who wear them to hide bald heads, American tourists who wear them as an entirely nonaggressive fashion statement, and people who are just wearing a hoodie because they get cold ears.

The security staff should be given discretion to decide who can and cannot enter the complex, and if their judgement cannot be trusted then we should find people who can, not place our faith in an excessively broad blanket policy.

I recommend Randy Cassingham's site on the damage being done by zero-tolerance policies in the US and elsewhere.

In no particular order.

• iPod-as-jukebox: at home, on holiday, and now at work
• new washing machine. Mmm, Persil.
• dinner
• cuddles
• flatmates being DJs
• flatmates, in general
• plays at the National Theatre
• specifically, plays that are based on horror B-movies and are endlessly self-referential, pretentious and navel-gazing (as a blogger, I can appreciate all three of these qualities, and in fact could cite particular entries as being all three at once)
• tea
• sleep

Sno is the creator of OUTeverywhere, a community website of which I am a heavy user. It has recently undergone a disastrous interface overhaul.

I'm a web developer, and a long-standing member of OUT. I say this so to make it clear that I at least have some idea what I'm talking about, both on the notion of OUT as a community and OUT as a piece of software.

The old OUT had problems, both social and technical. Frames aren't very accessible to the blind. To standards-compliance anal-retentives, it was a nightmare: font tags and frames are both out of fashion on the web these days. Socially, the board were full of whinging fuckwits. I will address all of this issues.

Firstly: FUCK standards-compliance, and as a web developer, I do not say this lightly! Cutting out useful features just so that you can boast that your site is pure XHTML/CSS is exactly the opposite of what standards are, at heart, supposed to achieve: greater usability for all. Instead, you're getting reduced usability for all -- the lowest common denominator. What the old OUT interface had, in spades, was *usability*. That is, after all, why so many people used it.

Frames, much maligned as they are, were *perfect* for OUT's purposes: they kept navigational elements on screen at all time, giving the site a very anchored feel, more like using a specialized "OUT browser" than reading a web page.

Saying that you can't do this and that because browsers won't let you is a cop out. *CSS* won't let you do these things. *Browsers* have let you do this since 1995, which is when you designed the original interface and built all the features we are now crying out for. Just because you can't do it the new, cool way doesn't mean you should stop doing it.

The old interface was "cluttered". But that's another way of saying "information rich". Nobody accuses BBC news front page of being "cluttered", because it has the difficult job of fitting an awful lot of news into a very small space. OUT fits an awful lot of stuff -- boards, polls, profile visits, contacts, incoming messages, and full navigation -- into a small space too. The new interface has hundreds of pixels of white space wasted at the top and sides of every page, making reading and navigating a million times clunkier than the former interface.

A split forum interface that showed topics on one side and threads in the other -- like a newsreader -- was *innovative*. Just because nobody else seems to have done it since doesn't mean it was a bad idea.

A little bar that refreshed status widgets? Genius! Pervasive by not intrusive status notification, years ahead of its time. The rest of the web still hasn't caught up to that. And now it's gone.

Frames are also very bandwidth-efficient. Even on a slow connection, reading messages was speedy and browsing multiple profiles was easy. the new interface now wastes bandwidth in addition to space by re-sending the navigational elements on every single page. Another step backwards.

Socially, the boards feel slighted. I don't that was an intentional move on your part. You are aware, as is everyone else, that while only 1% of the site users are active board members, they are also the same 100% who organize the events, respond to support threads, and in general provide the sense of community that your market research told you the members of OUT valued so much.

Sno, the old OUT interface was a wonderful achievement in software engineering, full of innovation and thoughtful design, the result of years of tweaking. The new interface, even if you spent 6 months designing it, could never match the value of years of evolutionary development. If it was a nightmare behind the scenes, then reengineering was needed. But even if you rebuild the back end from the ground up, you need to KEEP THE INTERFACE, because it WASN'T BROKEN. It need evolution, not revolution.

I love OUT. I use it all the time. A disturbingly high percentage of all my friends are either from OUT in the first place or are on OUT now. I don't want to leave OUT, and I *really* don't want to have to clone it. But if I have to, I will, because this new interface is just wrong.

Please, bring the old interface back and try again.

You may or may not have heard of the concept of "happy slaps, a craze of dubious authenticity apparently sweeping the nation. It involves teenagers -- unruly, out-of-control, antisocial, densensitized to violence by video games, insert your pet theory here -- who assault a random stranger with a slap, capture it on their video phone, and then distribute the video (warning: link contains ads not safe for work) via their phones, to gain the respect and adulation of their peers.

Apart from jokes about this being a use I'm sure 3 didn't think of when they touted video messaging, this is a pretty horrible idea. Luckily, it's also a self-correcting one, as I discovered when walking home from work the other day and came across a gang of four kids with video phones, slapping themselves in the face and laughing.

Because, you see, actually slapping a total stranger is a serious risk -- they could retaliate, and if they caught you, assault is a serious crime. So the easy and risk-free way is to stage an assault with your friends, and video that.

So if the net result of this craze is that a bunch of idiotic kids are beating the crap out of themselves in an effort to be cool, I'm all for it. Darwin will take care of this.

So, who wants to see Revenge of the Sith with me? The reviews are generally good so far. I'm seeing it at least once (my company is going), but I reckon this will be the kind you want to see more than once. Get in touch.

Oh dear, I'm blogging about blogging. I'm sorry, I don't do it too often, I know it sends you blind.

I was motivated by the BBC's recent launch of a regular blog-watching feature in their generally excellent magazine. This follows the Guardian's wholesale plunge into blogging, with five separate blogs as well as a limited-run election blog.

I could turn this into a little gloat, and it's hard not to: there has been no shortage of journalists willing to claim blogs as harmful and to loudly proclaim that blogs aren't journalism. But now the journalists are covering bloggers, and becoming bloggers themselves. A victory for the blogosphere? Not really. What's actually finally sunk in -- to both journalists and bloggers -- is that they are the same.

This doesn't mean blogging is journalism, nor does it mean journalism is blogging. I still believe that journalism is material of a higher quality: it is investigative, it is thoroughly researched, it is in-depth, and it is rigorously factual. It is also carefully written, and even more carefully edited, because it is published only once, and can't be changed afterwards. Blogging is at the opposite end of the spectrum on nearly all of these: fast and loose, frequently inaccurate and even libellous*, it is written and then changed over and over, by direct editing or by contextualizing in the form of comments and links from other blogs. Blogs are nearly always commentary, and very seldom researched. Journalism and blogging are very different things, but journalists and bloggers are the same: they are writers, and everything they write is somewhere between blogging and journalism.

It means that people who are paid to be journalists do not always write material of sufficient quality for it to be called journalism, while non-professionals** writing in weblogs sometimes do. Some weblogs are so consistently excellent that their writers should be considered journalists, but even I will admit they are in the minority. All weblogs have done is lower barriers to publishing to the point that excellent writers without access to a printing press can get their work recognized, and that bad journalists have been robbed of the undeserved respect they got simply because their writing was being published. Being published is no longer special.

This is a good thing, and for high-profile news organizations like the Guardian and the BBC to cherry-pick the best of the blogs and give them wider exposure is an excellent move, both for them and for the bloggers whose work is thus recognized. Blogging is never going to end big media outlets, but it is going to provide them with some much-needed competition in a world of increasingly monolithic media ownership.

And of course it's worth pointing out that the fact that most blogging is not of sufficient quality to be called journalism should not be held up as some kind of evidence that blogs are not good writing. Belle Du Jour is excellent writing -- it got a book deal, which means it's at least as good as all that other crap that got published on dead trees -- but it's not the work of an aspiring journalist, except in the sense of "one who keeps a journal". Some blogs are simply diaries, some are entertainment, some are jokes and increasingly some are a new method of maintaining social circles. We're not all trying to be journalists, so yelling "blogs aren't journalism!" is going to be met with a thoroughly bemused "duh" by a significant portion of the blogosphere.

Blogs are just writing, and like all other writing, most of it is crap with the occasional gem. The important thing is not what you write, but that you write at all. Eventually you'll write something excellent, even if it is just by the law of averages.

* Which is why blogs should be considered, in legal terms, "speech", not "publishing", and hence not subject to libel laws.

** Not the same as "amateurs".

I was baking brownies Tuesday, and Wednesday night I was ill, hence I'm not at work today and hence I didn't blog those days. Sorry.

I get ill too often. London is either a cesspit of germs, I'm a sickly weakling, or both. I won't, however, be going to the gym, so the paramedic can take it easy. Beechams' tabs, anyone?

Oh, and a very nice young man donated £30 to Gay Geeks last night, paying for a big chunk of that site's hosting fees (since I moved to the cheaper host). Nice to know people appreciate the site.

This has been on our fridge since it was delivered to us as a housewarming present from certain people. As a result, members of our household find themselves randomly shouting "HALLO!" and "FROM WINDSOR" in very bad fake plummy accents from time to time.

If it turns out, in ten years time, that the Yazoo brand of milk drinks is carcinogenic or causes alzheimer's or is in any way bad for you, I am completely screwed.

Mmmm, banana flavour.

Catching the skillfully-thrown baton from M (and blogging during my lunch hour, so I need to wrap this up in 15 minutes or less).

The last film I saw at the cinema:
The Jacket. Pretty good. Well acted, not too cheesy, fairly predictable ending. Keira Knightley is much sexier as a chain-smoking alcoholic than as a bustier-clad pirate's consort.

Last film I watched otherwise:
Summer Storm. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that can go wrong in a movie about a mainly-straight, possibly-gay German rowing team camping on the same lake as a completely-gay German rowing team. Go see.

Films I’m looking forward to seeing: Batman Begins; Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; Fantastic Four; Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire; The Chronicles of Narnia; The Island; Zathura; War of the Worlds; A Scanner Darkly; Stealth. What can I say? I'm addicted to Apple Trailers.

Total number of films I own:
Uh... define "own". I possess copies of hundreds of films, but I think I have paid for about 20.

Five films that mean something to me...

1. And The Band Played On was very formative for me, being the first time I ever saw a gay person portrayed and recognized them as such. It did immeasurable good, I think, that the portrayal was done by Ian McKellan, and not by some lisping stereotype.
2. Hackers was, I retroactively discovered, the inspiration for most of my life from ages 16-21.
3. Beautiful Thing, flawed though it is, and a cliche in a list from a gay man in the UK, was nevertheless hugely moving to me the first time I saw it. It gave me hope that being gay could be happy and wonderful.
4. The Matrix made me really, really annoyed that the world is all there is, and determined to ensure that it is not.
5. Gattaca helped to instill very firmly in me some principles about freedom, destiny and determination.

Honourable mentions...
The Abyss, 2001, X-Men 1&2, Donnie Darko, Kill Bill, Garden State. I really didn't watch movies before I came to the UK...

Passing the baton...
Dan definitely needs to give this a go, and Dom deserves some payback for all the ones he's sent me.

There will be no spoilers until at least next week, but for the moment: it was good. Very good. It starts slow, then proceeds to some serious ass-whupping. Go see it.

I'm blogging a lot to catch up with recent slackness. Here's an extra meme, from Dom as per usual:

	Cheer Bear You're the Care Bear cheerleader! Your spunky personality and optimisim lifts everyone's spirit. Though you want everyone to be happy, you stand your ground on issues you feel strongly about and this can bring disunity among your friends. Despite this, you are a true believer in working together.
Take the Which Care Bear Are You? Quiz!

I've been too busy recently. I'm putting a hold on new social engagements for a while, to allow my brain to catch up...

Update: I have discovered that, despite my best efforts, I am in fact already booked up with social engagements every single day of the coming week:

• Monday - Dinner with friend
• Tuesday - Cooking with friend
• Wednesday - Movie with friends
• Thursday - Housemates' first full night as DJs of Miss Shapes. Come one, come all!
• Friday - Er, Popstarz, because I wanted to go Friday and was ill. Technically, I could put this off until anytime, but with the first five days already booked, what would be the point, really?
• Saturday - Barbecue at boyfriend-of-friend-of-friend.

I didn't really plan this week, it just sort of happened. So next week, I am planning to do nothing. So to be clear: from May 30th - June 5th, I intend to pursue no social engagements. If you're planning something, please don't invite me. Thank you.

So, on Sunday I decided to give up caffeine for a few months. This is mainly to give my body a break -- I've been steadily upping my dosage since I moved to Boltblue, and it's become unsustainable: on Saturday I drank 2 litres of Coke, had 3 cups of tea and was still terribly sleepy. I also think it's making me ill in other ways. So work today, which would have been a bad day at the best of times, was hell because I was also going through a caffeine withdrawl headache which is, finally, fading.

Tomorrow will be better...

I cooked the aforementioned chicken dish this evening, my first cooking unsupervised by M in quite some time. Housemate T needed to intervene a few times (for instance to point out that you don't cook all of a leek, you cut off the top part) but in general it proceeded without disaster and was even quite good. I should have seasoned it a bit more, but I have not -- so far -- died.

I can do this cooking thing. It's only taken two years of weekly practising. I should try and graduate to cooking twice a week, I feel.

Is blogging what I cooked for dinner as bad as blogging my lunch? If so, I apologize.

Tonight is housemates' T&J's first nights as DJs at the fabulous Miss-Shapes. I will be going along for great music and morale support. Come one, come all!

It was also my boss' last day, after he resigned a month ago. As such, I will be briefly bossless. This may or may not have something to do with my decision to go clubbing on a Thursday...

Nicking this style from M:
Listening to: Jem, Finally Woken, on the recommendation of the ever-present Dom.
Reading: Neal Stephenson, The System of the World. Excellently woven historical fiction, currently featuring Isaac Newton and Princess Caroline of Hanover. Nothing makes history come alive like reading about who she used to sleep with on the side.
Drinking: Strawberry Yazoo. I'm a hopeless addict.

Last night I had a non-sex dream.

I almost never have sex dreams, so this was by no means surprising. But this was not merely a dream in which I didn't have sex. In a very typically me way, this dream was about me almost having sex, but repeatedly failing. I was horny, there was a willing and available partner*, we were alone in the house, and... I couldn't find a condom. So I didn't have a dream about sex, I just had a dream about running around the house naked, looking for a condom.

Obviously, this makes no sense. Safe sex? In a dream? Dream sex is the one type of sex which is 100%, totally safe, in every possible way. But I didn't realise it was a dream. To add insult to injury, halfway through the dream, when my partner changed into somebody else**, and I realised it was a dream, the aggravation of realising that I'd just wasted all that time looking for a condom when I could have been having guilt-free sex woke me up. Aaaargh!

This is what a lifetime of scary HIV awareness campaigns have done to me. I can't even have unsafe sex in my fantasies.

* No, I won't tell you who it was, but I definitely shouldn't have been having sex with them.

** Won't tell you who this was either, but I couldn't possibly have sex with them, as they're straight.

My period of enforced antisociality starts today. See you all after the 5th of June! I intend to geek out quite severely, possibly losing sight in what it means to be human (again).

Also, I will put up new curtains.