The YayDir promises to actually be very useful once its independent crawler gets going. For now, however, it’s simply an alternative interface to the same data BlogTracker uses. A slightly inferior one, IMHO, not to belittle the no doubt herculean effort required to even come close — I specialize in the backhanded compliment. It does, however, update at 49 past instead of (I believe) on the hour, which can be useful in those late night bored browsing sessions. You know the ones I mean. (This, of course, has no bearing on my qualified “we’ll see.” Nope.)

Pee-Wee just can’t get a break. “Los Angeles police have raided the actor’s home and seized material after an unidentified accuser claimed Reubens was into child pornography.” However, the article closes with “Just last week, Reubens joined Justin Timberlake for an appearance in Elton John’s new video.” Well, there you go. If the accusations were true, surely Justin would have turned up missing by now.

Bruce Sterling, science fiction author and thinker of assorted thoughts, has a weblog. And the current post is about cyborg insects. <happy dance> (Addendum: Apparently, he’s had one since at least August, but it had been pretty much dead since shortly thereafter. Must’ve been during one of my blog vacations or something.)

Loserscopes: “Leo - The moment the clock gets turned back, you poor sun signs get the celestial shaft. This week, the cosmos will conspire to let you know what an intolerable asshole you are. From self-esteem deflating e-mails from old college friends bragging about their undeserved fame and fortune, to little birdies at your windowsill chirping ‘YOU SUCK!’ — this week will be a tough one. But you know what sucks the most? You deserve it.” Ha! Finally, conclusive proof that astrology is crap. It was cats. Not birdies.

November 20th, 2001, 1:00 AM, car interior, driving: a couple realizes they are probably secretly hated.

“Aren’t you glad you have your car here now? I don’t think I could have dealt with those two another second.”
“At least it’s not like they fight this way all the fucking time, or anything.”
“Ah, so you’re starting to see my objections to living there, eh?”
“Oh, come on, they’re not that bad. I know you’ve seen worse. Don’t make me name names.”
“Ha! We’d be here all night. But I don’t have to live with any of them, either. I see your point, though — do we even know any happy gay couples?”
[pauses] “Us?”
“Scary thought, huh?”
“Jeez, I don’t think I can deal with that responsibility. Obviously, we have to break up. Like, right now.”

Coming out to the people you love most can be an intensely horrifying experience, an intensely gratifying experience, something in between, or a mixture of all of the above. That said, I don’t think there are many who would want to repeat the experience of coming out to their families. Especially from the other side. I don’t think many out and proud gay people would want to actually find such classic lines as “But you can’t be gay! You’re my [foo]!” and “It’s a phase” running through their minds, and on the tips of their tongues. Who among us would want to truly, viscerally understand the shock and, yes, horror that they had visited on others? Certainly not this one.

To: you@there

From: me@here

Subject: I miss you.

That’s all. I’m not cycling into a depression or anything. I just miss you. I’m not worried about absolutely everything. I’m not panicked. I’m not paralyzed by doubt and fear. I just miss you. I’m not freaking out three steps in advance like I always do, wondering if we’ll ever have a life anything like what I’ve always planned. I just miss you. All of it isn’t forming into this epicenter of bliding pain behind my left temple. I just miss you. It isn’t like I can’t breathe sometimes. I just miss you. I don’t find myself more and more numb every morning as I wake up. I don’t think I’m dying. I don’t care more about you than anything else in the world. Of course I believe myself capable of living my life without you in it on a daily basis. I just miss you.

What a singularly weird week. Odd. Off. Strange. I could go on playing human thesaurus for the next three years, but I don’t think I could quite capture it. I’ve come to hate travel. Nothing is ever the same when you return, including yourself, and that’s not always a good thing.

Ev sez: “Now I’m going to focus on my pile of past-due to-dos.” Ahem. The question, understand, is not whether I myself am tired of manually pinging Weblogs.com (though I am), it’s whether I’ve all but stopped reading those blogs that don’t show up in my handy BlogTracker pop-up. And the answer is yes.

I ran across some old backups of the first site I ever had, on Tripod, and it’s been humbling, amusing, and interesting. Mostly all at the same time. In the excerpt below, likely the only part of these works to ever see the light of day again, you can observe how quickly it morphed from a site updates page to a proto-journal-blog-thing.

7-19-1999 Get this: tomorrow I have to go and voluntarily have a needle shoved through the protective coating that nature has provided me with, or else I won’t be allowed take classes at a college 15 miles from my house. May tribbles knaw the balls of whoever made that policy. Or ovaries, we’re equal-opportunity stupidity-haters here. Which reminds me, there is again news on the job front. Well, sort of. There is roandabout scuttlebut of a job that will not only pay $9 an hour, but reimburse me for my education… Somebody drool for me, I ran out of spit an hour ago.

7-18-1999 I have returned. Six Flags was fun. Walking-around-in-wet-socks-for-8-hours fun, but still fun. I really haven’t processed the whole experience yet, but I think maybe I should just chalk it up to vacation and move on. Not all of my life can be mined for material for a web page. I’m not on the clock all the time. Not that I get paid for this, which is a whole other barrel of ichyforms…

6-6-1999 I know, it’s been forever, I’ve probably driven most anybody who does look at this site away, and that wasn’t a whole lotta people anyway. Now let me tell you why. I was busy gettin’ that high school diploma. I am now on my way to getting my degree, getting a job, and commencing to build my evil empire! Hehehe.
Oh, how naïve I was those many, many two years ago. It’s takes so much more effort to build an evil empire than I thought.

Geocities’ FTP server randomly rejects perfectly valid files as invalid. And now Yahoo Mail’s SMPT server randomly rejects certain emails with no explanation. Not to mention that trying to use the web interface to same invariably leads to a server timeout at some point during use these days. Which, to be fair, bests Hotmail’s consistent server timeout on login. I’m beginning to suspect my (not an) ISP. How on earth could so many web services just suddenly stop working all at once? Oh, right.

Tangent: ohright.org appears to be available. Hmm… perhaps it is time for some re-branding. Once the balance sheet no longer bleeds like a stuck wild boar, of course.

Inspired by all this talk of NaNoWriMo, I decided I could at the very least write a short story, unpadded. Understand, now, that my previous forays into fiction of any kind are all long behind me for very good reasons. My method basically consists of just diving in and writing, making up characters as I go along, making up the story scene by scene. This does not work. I seem cursed to always end up with characters I like, dialogue I like, and absolutely no frickin’ plot to put them in. I set the memory of these past agonies aside, however, keeping in mind that “aiming low is the best way to succeed.” (Genius, I tell you.) And the strangest damn thing is that it seems to be working. I’ve written almost 2,000 words since Wednesday (I’m also very slow) and the thing hasn’t yet managed to derail itself. Remarkably, I seem to actually have some idea where it’s going, but not too much. Just enough.

I had forgotten just how amazingly life-affirmingly joyous a thing it is to write something longer than two over-parenthesized sentences.

Tangentially related: Participants in NaNoWriMo from the local metropolitan area: Three. In the entire state of South Carolina: Two. (And he had to move to Charleston…)

I am aware of all the good that the Salvation Army does, but given their recent antics, and of course their famous in-your-face tactics for soliciting donations, I can’t help but find the idea of Queer Dollars hilariously evil. Sure, it’s culture jamming, the protest equivalent of masturbation, but it’s fun.

In some way but not really related, here’s a rather dark and twisted but entertaining holiday tale I just happened upon.