Quicunque

It always astonishes me when I read in an Amazon review that a reader disliked, or abandoned reading, or didn’t bother picking up a book because of its gay characters. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a book dismissed so conclusively on the sole basis that it has heterosexual characters. If I were to dismiss all books where the characters didn’t subscribe to my particular sexual preferences, there would be very many hundreds of dearly loved novels, from the classics to casual light reading and of every genre, that I would be the poorer for never having read.

It’s never been implied or assumed that only straight readers can, or should, enjoy a novel that contains straight characters – and quite rightly - so why it assumed that only gays should read books with gay characters? If I can cope with your straight sex scenes – with all the graphic detail that seems both alien and rather icky to me – without declaring it makes me want to vomit or throw the book aside in disgust as if it were a used sanitary rag, why do you have to be so squeamish about what floats other boats?

Gay romantic fiction written predominantly by and for straight women is of course a particular case all of its own and none of the usual rules apply to it. It’s particularly significant, and not at all surprising, that the vast majority of the Amazon reviewers who were icked out by gay characters were male.

Some reactions to a previous blog post I wrote, in which I expressed a nostalgia for my early ventures on the internet, when I found it a much more creatively exciting and socially rewarding experience than I do now, made me start to think about how some of the changes I see on the internet actually just mirror what's happening out in the real world.

The Place Survey was commissioned by the Department of Communities and Local Government to find out how people feel in today's society. The results, which were made available in late June this year, unsurprisingly suggested that community spirit is rapidly dying out in our fleshspace society. People spoke of a lack of respect and care for each other, citing that neighbours “go their own way, rather than doing things together and trying to help each other”. They spoke of a lack of positive leadership, with authorities not seeking public views on community issues. The results suggest society sees itself as becoming increasingly isolated and powerless.

That's quite a scary and serious conclusion, and using it as a comparison for the way one's experience of the internet, which is after all just a form of mass media, has changed is perhaps ridiculously shallow and trivialising. But the consequences of a culture that accepts that individual self-interest takes priority over the social is mirrored in both. Both fleshspace and many cyberspace communities are largely controlled or dominated by self-interested cliques more concerned with personal goals. In promoting our own interests, it feels like we've all forgotten how to play nicely with each other.

There's also the "McDonaldization" of society and the homogenisation of mass culture to cater to the lowest common, and consumerist, denominator. We're losing cultural and national identity and diversity as we increasingly conform to common global standards - just like the world's microcosm, the internet is getting blander and more visually standardised.

It's perhaps too late to prevent the death of community spirit in our societies or halt the global cookie-cutter, but at least one can still switch off the computer and go take up another hobby!

"I'm against a homogenized society, because I want the cream to rise." ~ Robert Frost, US poet (1874 - 1963)

I had to smile when I saw this article earlier today about an internet junkie detox centre. You see, once, I would have hotly denied there was such a thing as internet addiction, even while sweating and jonesing about my laptop not booting up. But I'm finding a good deal less addictive about the interwebs thing than I did for the first three or four years I was online, when I ate, lived, breathed and slept internet and definitely had withdrawal symptoms when dragged away from the keyboard to go on holiday or anything else that disrupted my... uh... "life".

Okay, but I never got into gaming. Back in the mid-90s when I got online I was still a cool Café Culture dude who thought that kind of thing was just too geeky. Besides, on the couple of occasions I tried Sonic the Hedgehog on my mate's Sega Mega Drive I was totally crap with a Capital Uncoordinated C. I don't think I ever got beyond Level 2. I never bothered after that - just not cut out to be a gamer.

My first passion was Usenet newsgroups. I can't even remember which groups I was on now, apart from the Anne Rice one, where I discovered the meaning of 'flame war' and 'trolling'. But it was someone I met on that newsgroup who encouraged me to try my hand at building a personal website, and led me by the hand to Geocities (BourbonStreet, of course). The rest thereafter is history.

I'm one of those who remembers the days when Corel Paint Shop Pro was just Jasc Paint Shop and was shareware. When everyone made tasteless but idiosyncratic and experimental personal websites on Geocities and Tripod. When we still thought the internet was for information and personal expression rather than making quick money through marketing scams. When we were proud of being called 'geeks' by the non-internet-using majority, and people online still freely and generously gave you advise and their software for free (I am still grateful to the stranger who emailed me out of the blue to explain to me that the graphic text on my amateurish site would look better if 'aliased' and proceeded to explain exactly how to do that). It was a weird kind of camaraderie, like being a member of an underground club. Yeah, I do get nostalgic for those days. In the same kind of way a driver of a modern car might get nostalgic for a Morris Minor - the internet I experienced then was clunky and limited compared to today's standards, but it had character and individuality.

Actually, I believe its the lack of individuality that's turned me off the internet nowdays. Since the wholesale adoption of the modern Web 2.0 style, design has become standardised and safe. Everything looks like a Wordpress blog. Much of it is indeed based on Wordpress or similar blog/wiki/CMS templates. When simplicity first started coming back into style, it was a refreshing change from the then-prevailing "everything including the kitchen sink" approach, but now every web "design" company is churning out portfolios of identical-looking clones and it's just boring. Boring, unimaginative and uninspiring. Don't get me wrong here - I like Web 2.0's information sharing, user-centered capability as much as anyone else. I just hate the visual uniformity and soulless sterility of Web 2.0 sites. But who knows - maybe one day we will be laughing over text boxes with rounded corners like we do now over animated blood-dribbling dividers.

I've always been a fan of the hand-made, home-made, unique one-off rather than slick mass-production. Maybe that's why I find myself cured of my internet addiction. It's still a wonderful and treasured medium to communicate with dear friends far, far away that I am never likely to meet in fleshspace, and I know I've come to rely on the convenience of having so much (mis)information so easily available, but the internet itself is no longer my life. I quit the addiction about the same time I quit smoking - now there's a coincidence!

This is of course, the former Royal Bank of Scotland boss Sir Fred Goodwin, aka "Fred the Shred". Goodwin was responsible for RBS bank during the time it made a £24.1 billion pre-tax loss, the biggest in UK corporate history. He led a disastrous strategy of corporate acquisitions which led to the bank's downfall and necessitated a bail-out funded by taxpayers. He was rewarded for this appallingly reckless bad management and record corporate losses with an early retirement package of £693,000 ($933,000) a year.

A decent man would have voluntarily given up this pension, or at least part of it. But not Fred the Shred! Despite public anger and mounting political pressure, Fred has stuck two fingers up at the Treasury and his critics - he has announced his intention of keeping all his entitlement to himself and fuck the taxpayer who's funding this cushy £693,000-a-year retirement.

Meantime, RBS staff face further job cuts and the taxpayer is not only keeping Fred in high style but is also being opened up to unprecedented liabilities by having to further prop up the RBS with insurance for £325 billion of "toxic" assets.

But "I'm all right Fred" will be hunkydory and sitting in gold-plated clover. Unless maybe the government actually follows through on its threat to take legal action against him to recoup some of the money. I won't be holding my breath. For that to happen it would have to be proved Freddo was negligent, and although it's patently obvious he was, legally proving it is likely to be bloody tough.

So if you ever wondered how you could retire on £693,000 a year at the age of 50, here's your answer - it's easy! All you have to do is bring one of the world's largest banking companies to the brink of collapse, then not give a fuck about such twattish notions as "doing the right thing".

Just goes to prove that failing spectacularly can pay better than winning.

If you tell people enough times how fantastic you are, some of them might even get to believe you. But then you have the problem of whether you live up to your own hype or not. In my experience, most self-hypers don't.

Take my lastest bugbear for example. A woman I now have to liase with for a company's website. She thinks she's the hottest thing since Planet X went supernova, and she swanks around telling everyone so. She was actually given this task recently, after two of her colleagues in her last department demanded her immediate removal from their sphere on pain of death (her's, I presume). Sadly, as we are hired by her employers, we can't demand the same, but MY boss can't bring himself to deal with her any longer and fobs her off onto me. And as anyone who's witnessed my reaction to other people like this can assure you, I am NOT a good person to deal with brash attention-seekers either *chuckles*.

First day back at work this morning after the holidays, her supervisor let slip he'd excluded Ms Me from attending an overseas conference with him in Japan because he couldn't face her yapping on about herself for a 12-hour flight *chuckles* Was it so very mean of me to snigger? Oh I'm a bad, bad bitch, but only human.

Sadly, the downside is, it means she's going to be around to bug me instead *sighs*. I'm due a face-to-face meeting with her later this month - something tells me that's going to be interesting.

One thing I really, really hate is some overbearing and patronising mini-autocrat with an over-inflated ego and superior attitude, presuming to try and "organise" me as if I were some moronic child or mindless sheep *takes a deep breath*. Yep, bossy wide-mouthed people who think they know what's best for everyone just get my fur standing straight up like a bogbrush, and after that it doesn't matter what they're trying to organise me to do - I'm already feeling negative and will dig my heels in like a sullen mule. My partner says I'm just perverse and contrary *smiles sweetly*.

Well, I feel like I'm surrounded by these people lately, both at work and at play. At work, I'm paid to bite my tongue and put up with it, and the bastards are a safe enough distance away that I can't poke their eyes out with a pointy stick. And at play? Well, I was brought up too nicely for this world, so I still bite my tongue as much as I can *spits out the blood*. I wish I had the micro-cojones to take up embroidery instead though....

The more I see of self-appointed spokespeople expounding about a certain site they don't actually have a fucking clue about, the more I have to laugh ironically.

You see -- this site they don't normally deign to participate in isn't, as they imply, simply an inferior version of their prefered but temporarily unavailable option. It's a living place with its own particular flavour and 'culture', and its own regular and loyal community who love and appreciate it. Contrary to what these 'experts' preach, they would be doing it no favours by invading and trying to imposing their own cliques and conceptions on it.

In fairness, I have no doubt that many of the recent visitors see nothing patronising or hypocritical about using this ordinarily maligned community as a make-do refuge in their time of deprivation - after all, most of them make no pretense otherwise. But I'd like to think that maybe one or two of these tourists will arrive without force-fed preconceptions, without the need to compare our community with another, with an enquiring and open mind and a preparedness to participate instead of preach.

If they do, they may well be pleasantly surprised by what they find. And one or two such people would be so much more valuable than an influx of refugees who just want to rebuild in their own likeness.