It's not what you know...

...it's who you know. Never is this more true than when running a tranny website.

Actually it might be more true when running for President of the United States, but I digress...

One of my bestest friends, as you may know, is Jessica. As well as being impossibly tall and pioneering a new tranny fashion look which I've decided to call Bow Ho', she's also a red-hot web programmer. This is how a lot of the big ideas on my website come to fruition...

Me: Wouldn't it be cool if [idea]?
Jessica: Yeah that would be cool. You can do that with [programming technique].
Me: Great! I can learn that!

(Me goes away.)

A little while later...

Me: It's too hard. (Pout.)
Jess: Do you want some help?
Me: Please. (Puppy-dog look.)
Jess: What part can't you do?
Me: Er... all of it. (Really pathetic puppy dog look.)
Jess: (Sigh.) Do you want me to do it for you?
Me: NO! I can handle it!
Jess: Really?
Me: No. (Sob.) Can you do it for me? I can do the graphic bits... and make helpful suggestions.

Later still...

Jess: I've done it! I got really into it and it now also does [extra technical bits].
Me: Great! Wouldn't it be cool if it did [even more technical bits.]
Jess: Yes but...
Me: DO IT! DO IT NOW! How much am I paying you?
Jess: Nothing!
Me: That's not the point! Do you want the puppy to die?? (Brandishes a puppy and places her hands around it's tiny neck.)
Jess: No! Please don't hurt the puppy!! I'll do it! I'll do it!

Er, the stuff about the puppy. That didn't happen. Honest.

Anyway, our latest joint venture came about when I decided I wanted to make my Flickr feed on the blog fit a bit better with the style of the rest of the site. I knew that technically it was feasible to take the XML feed from Flickr and squirt it into a application which would re-shape the pictures into anything you wanted. I just didn't understand the nitty gritty. Enter Jessica with her l33t web skilz and the result:

A little pile of pictures that updates automatically when I stick a picture on Flickr. Neat!

But that's not the really cool bit. Take a look at my new home page. See the pile of small pictures behind the main one? They're nearly ALL fed from Flickr. In particular a Flickr group called beckysweb. What's more... anyone can post a picture to that Flickr group, and a little while later it will turn up as part of my home page graphic. The picture will live on the home page until enough other pictures are added to replace it. Jessica wrote the Flickr feed application in such a way that it will work with any base graphic and any feed, which gave me the idea to do the collage on my home page.

I'm probably setting myself up for a fall here, but I thought that was awesomely great! My home page is now a dynamic collage, that anyone can add to. And it's all thanks to me and Jessica feeding off each others ideas. Thanks Jess!

So, who's going to be the first to try and put something rude on my home page?

Tarting Up

My website has undergone a bit of a face lift over the weekend. What started as a little job turned into a semi-major overhaul.

I'm like that sometimes, getting one thing to work and look good makes something else look wrong in comparison and prompts me to do just one more thing before I got to bed. Which last night resulted with me finally crawling into bed at 5.00 am.

So anyway, now I've got a new home page on my site (which you might not have seen if you came straight to this article). The old one was looking a bit tired, and it was difficult to know what to put there. It tended to repeat information that was available elsewhere on the site, so I've streamlined the whole thing right down and made it a simple hub for the rest of the content. There's also something very special about the graphic on that page, but I'm saving that for it's own blog entry, cos I think it's just so cool!

I've also re-done the navigation bar to make it slightly smaller and inject a bit more colour into each page. I realised that the "buttons" were supposed to look like white-framed photos, but you don't get photos that long and thin. So they now sport a "torn edge" look that I'm quite pleased with. It fits with the "knowingly haphazard" design that this site has had from day one.

The only annoyance is that they do a really nice deblur/reblur effect in Internet Explorer using cross-fades, but I can't find a good way of making it work in other browsers. So if you're viewing this in anything other than IE6 (I don't blame you) you're probably just getting the abrupt-switch version of the navigation bar. It's worth loading in IE6 just to see it do it's thing! :)

I wanted to stop these pages looking too much like "every other blog", so the Flickr badge has gone to be replaced with a little stack of pictures taken from my Flickr photostream.

Every page should also now fit within a 800 x 600 browser window, but I may have missed some. The blog was just a bit too wide before, which was bugging me.

Wow, what a dry posting. Sorry about that! It's just that I've been plugging away at this for a while now, and while it might not be the most technically proficient web-site in the world, I'm pleased with it!

Xtreme Transvestism

Trust Siobhan! When Joanna set up the Extreme Crossdressing group on Flickr, it must have set the wheels turning in her mind.

I wondered why she was taking a wedding dress to the wilds of Scotland!

Bravo hon! You knocked it out of the park!:)

I dare say she'll write up the full story on her blog before long.

Handouts and nibbles available at the end

I walked into the office today with a snazzy new tablet PC cradled in my arm. A colleague in the room said "you look like Moses coming down from the mountain."

This then developed into a free-ranging conversation about what would have happened if Moses had been given a tablet PC with the commmandments on it. It would have been a lot fancier with better fonts and visual aids. Then we realised God would have made a PowerPoint slideshow!

A bored lunchtime-and-a-bit later:

The Ten Commandments - The Powerpoint Version (you need to own Powerpoint to open this.)

Or alternatively, the much less whizzy Web-based Version.

The T*Meme

Aren't memes fascinating? I've been interested in them ever since I read Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene, in which he originally introduced the idea. The concept was expanded on by other people, including Susan Blackmore in her book The Meme Machine.

The word "meme" is often bandied around on the Internet as shorthand for "a good idea that a lot of people pass on or copy", but the actual concept of a meme is a lot more complex than that.

Here Comes the Science Part

Some of this is from memory, and I'm little more than an armchair scientist, so bear with me if I'm not 100% accurate in all things. But I think my understanding is good enough to make the points I want to later on. Yes this IS tranny-related, eventually!

A gene is a set of instructions coded in DNA that causes a living thing to act in a certain way or have certain characteristics. There might be genes that alter the colour of your skin or your ability to run fast.

"Successful" genes are ones that make it more likely for the creature that's carrying them to survive. For example, a gene in a frog that made it's skin the same green as the trees that it lived in from would make it less likely to be seen and be eaten. Frogs that don't get eaten are more likely to have baby frogs, which are likely to carry the gene for green skin. So the gene for "green-ness" spreads.

The important point that Dawkins made about genes is they're not inherently "good" or "bad". They don't care what effect they have on their host or other creatures, they just do their thing and if that happens to make them more likely to survive in the environment they're placed, they become more prevalent. Because of this Dawkins called genes "selfish" because they, unthinkingly, only look out for number one.

Many viruses contain genes that are very bad for the individual virus. For example, the common cold virus makes you sneeze, and when you sneeze it sends countless cold germs to their doom in the open air. But some of them land in fertile breeding grounds in other humans. From the point of view of the individual virus that dies in the open air, the "making people sneeze" gene is "bad". From the point of view of the gene, making people sneeze is "good" because it makes the gene spread.

Genes are made up of collections of molecules in DNA, they're spread by the replication of DNA. They work because DNA is fantastically complex, but able to replicate itself almost precisely. Dawkins wondered if there was anything else that behaved genetically. He hit on the concept of ideas being like genes. Brains are fantastically complex, but we're able to very accurately transfer information from one brain to another via communication such as talking, or running websites, or whatever. Human minds are the environment for these ideas, and they influence the way that we behave in subtle ways. He called these ideas "memes".

Like genes, memes don't have to be "good" for their host or for human-kind in general, they just have to be good at multiplying. Successful memes thrive inside human minds, and are good at copying themselves by "making" their host communicate the idea to other minds.

Organised religion is one kind of meme. Part of the idea of most religions is to make sure as many other people as possible believe in the same thing. From a meme point of view, the Bible in the hotel room cabinet is a egg waiting to hatch in the mind of anyone who happens to read it.

A Tranny Meme?

As far as I'm aware, there's no evidence for a genetic cause of transvestism, which got me to wondering if maybe there was a memetic cause.

I can't remember when the idea of "dressing up like a girl" first came to me, but I remember it was quite appealing. At some fundamental level in my psyche it "worked".

On television and in the media (and later on the Internet) I saw other men who were doing it and showing the world how much fun it was, which served to reinforce it in my own mind.

I'm not saying that everyone exposed to transvestism will take it up. I think that the environment in which the meme arrives (the mind) has to be one where it's able to flourish (perhaps due to the action of other memes or genes). But when the idea does take hold in a new host, it does seem to act very memetically. It strives to spread.

Most trannies feel an urge to get "out of the closet" and be seen. Some are desperate to go under the radar and pass as a girl, but I'd suggest that a lot of transvestites aren't interested in passing, they're interested in being seen as a boy that looks very much like a girl. Perhaps this is the t*meme releasing it's "payload", getting other people to see a tranny and think "that's a good idea, I might try that".

Many trannies, once they're out, feel the urge to spread the word. They tell friends, write to magazines, and run web sites like this one. Just by writing this blog I'm possibly helping to seed the idea of transvestism being "a good idea" in hundreds of minds.

The tranny meme is moderately successful, thriving in the minds of a certain group of men. It will never take over the world, but like most memes it doesn't need to, as long as it doesn't die out. Also like other memes, it's not necessarily "beneficial" to it's host. I often wonder, for all fun that my transvestism has brought me, whether I wouldn't have been better off without it.

But if you're to believe the die-hard memeticists out there, we're a slave to our memes and can no more control them than a frog can stop being green. So I'll just have to make the most of having the t*meme, and enjoy myself along the way!

Fairy

Jessica did a bit of photoshop work on her own picture. Love it!

Pining for Ireland

I'm on a bit of a flickr kick at the moment and decided to upload a few of my older pics to the site.

I've just been going though some I took during a holiday to southern Ireland and it's made me really want to go back soon!

You'll have to imagine the "Sailing By" music

And now the Tranny Summary issued by Becky for the weekend of Friday July 22nd 2005.

BECKY
THIRTIES. EAST BUT HEADED WEST VISITING SOPHIE. FRIDAY NIGHT WATCHING TV. NATTERING. ANTI-CLIMACTIC. BBQ SATURDAY, CHANCE OF DRESSING HIGH RISING TO CERTAINTY BY MID-AFTERNOON. CLUBBING LATE EVENING. MODERATE OR GOOD.

JESSICA
23 OR 6. TALL. FROM NORTHWEST BUT VEERING MIDLANDS VISITING SOPHIE ON FRIDAY. SATURDAY DRESSING AS PINK BARBIE DOLL. VISIBILITY VERY HIGH. GOOD.

SOPHIE
30, RISING. STOCKED UP ON VODKA EXPECTING TRANNIES CONVERGING LATE EVENING. SOBERNESS DETERIORATING BECOMING VERY INCOHERANT BY EARLY HOURS. GOOD.

SHANNON MINI-SOPHIE KAROL AND MANY OTHER MAINLAND TRANNIES
CONVERGING ON BIG GAY OUT IN LONDON ON SATURDAY. CAMPNESS. MUDDY HEELS. GOOD.

THE GENERAL SITUATION AT 09:00 MONDAY MORNING
MANY TRANNIES DISPERSING ACROSS THE COUNTRY AND LOSING THEIR IDENTITIES.

That ends the Tranny Summary for the weekend of Friday July 22nd 2005.

(Hope all the BBC Radio 4 listeners enjoyed that.)

Look into my eyes...

For some reason I really love my expression in this picture. It's kind of confident yet enigmatic, with a "knowing smile".

Cottingley

...geddit?

Trannies

There are a lot more new pics on my Flickr Photostream.

Sophie, Jessica and Me

Jessica was trying out a fantastic outfit she's planning to wear for Manchester Pride.

Feeling Cute

Becky with Disco Ball

I went to Sophie's at the weekend, and had plenty of time to faff about with a camera before a barbeque on the Saturday evening. Here are some of my fave pics.

Don't forget the crackers, Gromit

Good old Google have done it again: Google Moon

It's amazingly detailed. Make sure you zoom right in!

Retro-posting #1 - "TV confusion"

I didn't have a blog until recently, and a lot of my early exploits never got recorded. So I've decided to do an occasional retro-reminiscence just for the sake of nostalgia.

It's not because my life is particularly dull at the moment and I've got nothing else to write about, okay??

Anyway...

About 3 years ago (god is it that long?) I'd been out dressed with the help of The Boudoir and really enjoyed it, but realised that for the sake of my own self-esteem (and bank balance) I wanted to buy my own makeup.

Of course, I already had lots of makeup. But, basically, it was mostly shit. I was so scared of shopping for girly stuff in places like Boots that I used to buy those crappy pre-filled "cosmetic cases" from Argos! The kind that come with 15 shades of blue eyeshadow. Cringe.

So I needed some proper makeup and I needed some "basics", a good foundation and powder and other "starter kit" cosmetics paraphenalia. I'd decided to get the stuff I'd seen Jodie at the Boudoir using, and the place I'd heard was ideal for that was Charles Fox off Covent Garden in London. I was down in London for the day, so I decided to pay them a visit.

I was still really nervous about shopping for tranny stuff, but I mustered up my courage and went into the shop and up to a pretty female assistant. I'd decided to make no bones about why I was there...

"Hi, I'm a TV and I need a good foundation," I mumbled semi-confidently.

The woman looked mildly surprised but completely unphased.

"Right," she said. "You'll want something a bit stronger than a regular foundation. Have you heard of these Kryolan sticks?"

I smiled. This was going well. She wasn't being funny about me being a transvestite at all! She was cool with transvestites! She probably gets trannies in here every five minutes! My confidence skyrocketed.

"Yes, that's the stuff I need! What shade?"

"That's the tricky thing. What looks good in here or in daylight might not look good under the strong lights..."

"Er, the strong lights?"

"Yes... you said you were on TV?"

"No... a TV. I'm a transvestite."

"Ohhhhh! I see, sorry! Er, sorry that I misunderstood I mean... not that you're a TV... anyway... um... right..."

My fragile confidence shattered in that instant.

It all went okay though. I got the stuff I needed and she was probably nearly as embarrassed as me. Ah, happy memories! *grimace*

Riding the rides at Pride

Joanna's set up a Flickr group for pictures of "exteme crossdressing". That's not cross-dressing in an extreme fashion, but being cross-dressed in an extreme location.

I thought it was a fun idea so I just uploaded this pic to help kick it off.

That was taken at last year's Manchester Pride, which was a great day out. Plans are afoot to go back this year too!

Sophie Get Your Gun

Sophie went to a fancy dress party last weekend as a "saloon girl". I think this picture is what Eddie Izzard was thinking of when he called himself an "Action Transvestite"!

Blog geekery - ignore if you're not interested

Does anyone reading this use an XML/RSS aggregator to organise the blogs they read? Do you subscribe to any "MSN Spaces" blogs? I'm trying to and having real problems. They say that they have an RSS feed, but I've tried various tools to subscribe to those feeds (including Bloglines and Firefox) with little success. Occasionally Firefox will suddenly "see" the RSS feed for an MSN Spaces page and populate the auto-bookmark, but only after I've visited the site. It's almost as if MSN only create the feed if you're authenticated on the site with good old Microsoft Passport. If that's the case, it defeats the entire point of having a feed!

I really like Bloglines as a feed aggregator, but if this keeps up maybe there's a better one out there. I've given up trying to persuade Kat to stop using MSN spaces!

Voices

I've just gotten round to reading something that Karol wrote in her diary a few days ago that really resonated with me. It's strange I've had, almost word-for-word, exactly the same thoughts and experiences recently. Even down to a guy saying "you've got balls doing what you're doing".

Just recently I've been getting two conflicting voices in my head. One says...

"What the hell do you think you're doing going out dressed like this? You're running away from reality. I thought you wanted to find someone? You're never going to meet a girl if you look like this, they're not looking for trannies. And you're not gay, so why the hell are you in a gay club?"

The other voice says:

"Yeah but... this is part of who I am. I can't just put this away forever. I need any future partner to see this part of me first. Not just tell them about it, think that they're okay with it, and then watch the slow creeping death of the relationship as they slowly realise they're not happy with it. Somewhere out there is someone who wants to have fun with this with me. Not just tolerate this part of me. And that person will also see that if Becky's just one aspect of a kind, funny, intelligent man who's saved up a big ball of love and is ready to give it to someone."

Wow.

I just let that second voice speak out loud... and it had a lot more to say.

Hesitating whether to publish this...

...what the hell. [click]

Blog Generator - the backlash

The Blog Generator has generated a lot of feedback, a lot of it along the lines of...

Rachel Williams:
Random my arse! :)

Siobhan Curran:
If I didn't know you better, I'd swear you were rigging this!

I'm wounded! As if I would ever do something as underhanded as program it to look for certain names/I.P.s and present a customised response! (Truth is I was too lazy!) ;-)

Karol Cross:
Very spooky, first attempt gave me "The obsessive diary of a cynical t-girl babe"
Dont know about the babe bit, but the rests pretty accurate! :)

Yeah, right Karol! Should it have added "falsely modest"? ;-)

Carla:
Good fun though - looking forward to the "auto blogger".

Hmm, that was meant as a joke, but I've got some ideas!

Current planned work:

• 2005 - Finish Blog-Generator AI.
• 2007 - Blog Generator becomes self-aware.
• 2008 - Blog Generator declares war on humankind. World War 3.
• 1972 - The human resistance reprogram Blog Generator and sent it back in time to stop me ever being born.

Gravatar gone...

Earlier today I was looking at technorati and happened to notice that one of the top searches was for "gravatar". It surprised me a bit, I didn't think that gravatars were that big news, but I moved on.

I forgot all about it until a few minutes ago when I was visiting Siobhan's blog and noticed that my little gravatar picture was corrupted or missing. So I went to www.gravatar.com and that appears have gone!

Non-plussed, I went on to Google to see if there was any news on it's demise... and then remembered that top search on Technorati. Now the significance is very clear!

I wonder what's happened.

Random thoughts

Problem: You want to start your own blog, but you don't know what you're going to call it or even what it's going to be about.

Solution: My brand-new Blog Generator.

Disclaimer: I had too much time on my hands. Again. So I decided that as so many people used the word "random" in their blog decriptions I'd make the whole process of describing a blog random. During the day the idea balooned into that monstrosity. It's kind of fun, and sometimes spookily accurate!

You had to be there...

You know when you say something so witty that you wish more people were around to hear it? That's one of the beauties of having a blog... instant audience for showing off!

Conversation with my boss this morning:

K: (Reading some news story.) They're posting police outside mosques now, apparently idiots have been stoning them.

Me: (After a few seconds of frenzied brain activity.) They should just put railings up.

K: Why?

Me: Because... a railinged mosque gathers no stones.

Not bad for an on-the-spot witticism, I thought.

Well, K laughed anyway. Yeah, we have so much fun here, it's like working in a comedy club (on the admin side).

Almost-ideas #2 - Miscellatranny

I was having a clear-out of the dead files in my web-space the other day and came across a project I'd completely forgotten about:

Bex's Unoriginal Miscellatranny

I really enjoyed Schott's Original Miscellany, and this was meant to be a pastiche featuring trivia that might be useful to trannies.

The trouble was, I ran out of trivia that might be useful to trannies.

I dunno, it might be worth resurrecting... what do you think?

I am a genuis genius!

I've just thought of a way to catch all the terrorists in the world, at a stroke! It's simple!

Get the CIA or whoever to send a HUGE spam out to every email address on the planet, that looks like this:

From: Al Qaeda HQ
To: All Splinter Groups

Hello! I'm writing to let you know due to a recent hiccup with our computer system, we've lost all our records on our worldwide factions, splinter groups and terrorist cells. D'oh!

If you could take a few minutes visiting the site below and re-registering your group, we'd be most grateful. Please ensure you give full details of your exact location, the size of your armaments cache, and the hours when you're likely to all be in and sound asleep.

www.not-the-cia-honest.gov/ALQAEDA/re-register.htm

Apologies for the inconvenience, as you can guess we've all pretty much got egg on our faces here at the moment!

Hugs,

The Al Qaeda I.T. Team

Almost-ideas #1 - Tshirtmania

I have lots of ideas for content for this site, usually when I'm completely incapable of acting on them. I promise myself that I'll remember them, but I invariably don't.

I should carry around one of those voice recorder thingies and occasionally shout into it things like "IDEA: Tranny Olympics. Events... 100 metre faffing about..."

But I don't do that. For one very good reason: I don't want to look like a twat.

And the ideas that I do manage to commit to digital paper often tend to run out of steam before they get going, and languish in Development Purgatory™*.

A few days ago I had an idea. There are phrases that only a tranny would recognise, and then only some trannies. I'm not even sure how widespread this kind of tranny is. Perhaps you can help, take a look at the phrases below.

• Physically Forced or Blackmailed
  
• Deals, Bets or Dares
  
• Caught With Consequences
  
• Wedding Dress or Married
  
• Chemical or Drug Induced Change
  

If that generated a spark of recognition, you're the kind of tranny who's read, and probably enjoyed, that most specialist of genres: transgendered fiction. What's more, you've almost certainly visited the tranny fiction equivalent of the British Library, Fictionmania.

Tranny fiction is a strange beast. Full of evil maiden aunts who seem to delight in turning nephews into neices, and magical devices that turn hard-nosed businessmen into simpering bimbos. Most of it, to be honest, is utter crap. But certain people, it seems particularly closeted transvestites, love this stuff. Before I decided to stop thinking about girly stuff and start doing girly stuff I used to visit Fictionmania regularly.

Once I started dress-up myself (by the age of 30 it was becoming increasingly apparent than none of my aunts were going to do it for me) I lost the urge to read tranny fiction. I can't really explain the way that it works in a tranny brain. It works something like this:

Trannies grow up knowing it's "wrong" for a boy to want to look like a girl, but the idea is intrinsically appealing to us, often also in a sexually arousing way. Boys aren't allowed to dress as girls, so we create situations in our mind where the act of being dressed girly is taken out of our hands, into the hands of the aforementioned "evil aunt" for example. We're no longer to blame for being dressed en-femme, so we can enjoy the idea of femininity being imposed over masculinity without the guilt of knowing that we did this to ourselves. Tranny fiction provides characters that the closeted tranny can identify with, characters that are boys turned into girls due to events beyond their control.

I often say that I didn't start dressing and going out en-femme because I'd become more of a tranny. It did it because I'd become less of a coward. My levels of "tranny-ness", aside from natural fluctuations, have remained constant. My levels of "giving-a-shit-what-people-think-of-me-ness", dipped over the years until they reached a point where there was no reason for me not to go out. As shown in the graph below...



Once I'd given myself "permission" to dress, I didn't need the fantasy of someone else doing it for me. So the appeal of Fictionmania and it's ilk faded. That seems to be common among a lot of my tranny friends.

Oh yeah... I was talking about my idea!

So, anyway, I was talking to Sophie and Jess on holiday and for some reason tranny fiction came up, and we realised we all recognised the phrases Fictionmania uses to categorise it's stories. We were joking at how some of us used to enjoy the "Magical Transformation" stories, whereas others preferred the "Deals, Bets or Dares" stories. It got me thinking that many online trannies would probably recognise these phrases, and, with a bit of lateral thinking, it could be a way for one tranny to declare himself to another without raising the suspicions of other non-trannies.

So I came up with this, and then the idea ran out of steam.

Still, got a long blog entry out of it, eh?

* "Putting Things in Capitals and Trademaking Them"™™ Siobhan Curran - Used Under Licence

Signs

I went to the loft last Saturday. I think I might have been wearing a sign over my head saying "Lone Transvestite. Do not approach or engage in conversation."

It was an okay night, but I didn't really interact with anyone except for a couple of people I'd seen there before. Occasionally I saw people talking about me from the other side of the room, and left feeling a bit of a freak, which is a feeling I've not had in a long time.

But I was determined not to let it get me down, the Loft is a great place, and is the nearest I've got nearby to fun, accepting and mixed venue. So last night I went back.

...

The rest of this message was gonna be an up-beat description of last night, and how it had been completely different from the week before.

But literally while I was writing this something happened that's just put a
completely different light on it.

I seemed to be wearing a sign saying "Party Tranny, come talk to me!" I talked to a lot of cool people, had a great night. I was even given a number scribbled on a scrap of paper and told "call me!".

I texted the number today. Just got a really nasty message back. I guess someone's idea of a joke was to give their friend's number to the weirdo tranny. Hilarious.

Still feeling like a freak. Except now I'm feeling like a stupid freak. Ho hum.

Oooh, look what I got!

A rather heavy parcel dropped into my e-mailbox today...

My UK Angels Gold Award for "Best TG Personal Site (UK) 2005"!

It's so shiny! It's going to take pride of place on my virtual mantelpeice, once I get round to editing the code for my site.

Thanks once again to everyone who voted for me!

London

I've spent the day watching the news develop from London. This isn't the place to discuss my thoughts on it, other than obviously they are with the victims and their families and friends.

Shady Dealing

Recently I've started noticing some really odd referrers in my web logs. It appeared to be people visiting my site after being referred from all kinds of gambling sites, but when I visited the sites in question I couldn't find any links to mine.

I guessed it was some kind of spam, fraudelently reporting the referring site of a visitor in order to generate traffic to the referrer, but I couldn't work out the reasoning behind it. The only person who was seeing the referring site was me!

Then in struck me, a lot of blogs now have an auto-generated link to their most frequent referrers. The gambling sites have obviously got wise to this and are generating spam visits to those sites in order to get on those lists. Like most spam, it's probably completely indiscriminate and they're hitting my blog even though it will never generate a return visit.

It's annoying though, it means that i'm having to wade though spam on my web logs too now!

You know you're a tranny when...

... you go though your pile of dirty laundry to see what load you can make, and end up doing a "pinks wash". :-/

Crashing Success

I can just see the NASA meeting...

Head NASA Dude: What are we gonna do? We keep spending billions of tax dollars on spaceships that keep crashing. We need a big success story or people are gonna get antsy. We need to play to our strengths... what are we good at?

Second NASA Dude: Er... making spaceships crash?

Head NASA Dude: Brilliant! So we'll deliberately crash a spacecraft into something! That can't go wrong.

Third NASA Dude: Okay. Er... what do you want us to hit sir? There's not much up there we haven't already crashed into.

Head NASA Dude: How 'bout a comet? There's loads of them critters up there, right?

Second NASA Dude: Yeah, sir. Quite a few... and I guess it would make a big bang...

Head NASA Dude: Americans love big bangs! We'll film it all from another spacecraft! It'll be like a movie! We'll give the whole mission a big Hollywood name! Let's brainstorm mission names that sound like movies!

Third NASA Dude: Well, er, there was that film Deep Impact...

Head NASA Dude: "The Deep Impact Mission"! I love it! I'm tired of brainstorming, let's go for lunch!

My face - a critique

I went out last night as Becky, on my own to the Loft nightclub in Norwich. Before I left I took a few pics of myself, including this one with makeup but sans wig.

I always enjoy putting on makeup, not only because it's what helps create the illusion of "Becky", but also the very process of "doing my face" can give me a frisson of that elusive feeling of femininity that trannies seek.

I also own loads of cosmetics. I like buying it, I like the smells and the colours. The exotic names and over-blown descriptions. I like shopping for makeup in the same way other girls might love shopping for shoes.

Except that, it's not a girl thing really, it's very much a boy thing. I collect makeup. I horde cosmetics paraphernalia. The two-stage mascaras and the automatic tweezers and the make-up mirrors with built-in lights. Although they're all ostensibly feminine items, it's a still very masculine trait. No different from my dad's shed-full of tools and gadgets for DIY and gardening. Some may never get used, but they're all the best you can buy. My dad has a Swiss Army knife which is as wide as it is long, with every tool you could possibly imagine. There's some tools on that knife he's never going to use. There's some nail varnishes in my case I'm never going to open.

I used to only experiment with makeup when I at home and there wasn't an urgent need to get ready, but now I'm confident enough to play around a bit even if I need to be out the door in two hours. I normally do give myself a full two hours to go from boy to girl. I could probably do it in half an hour, if pressed, but as I said earlier the act of getting ready is part of the evening for me. "Becky" time starts the moment the tweezer plucks an eyebrow hair.

Also, that time in front of the mirror is when I'm looking the best I'll look all evening. The foundation is free from a sheen of sweat, and my look is neither hidden by dim club lighting or washed out by harsh flash photography. The high-point of many an evening is when I put on the wig, take a critical look at myself in the mirror and realise... I look gooood!

Sometimes everything falls into place, the eyeliner goes on straight and my hand doesn't involuntary spasm the moment I hold a mascara brush to my eye. Other times, for no reason I've been able to figure, it just feels wrong no matter what I do. I sit in front of the mirror at the end of it all and see a man wearing makeup and a wig.

Trannies are their own worst critics. This is partly, I think, due to the fact is we've seen the man behind the makeup every day of our lives in the mirror. We know every inch of his face. Whereas a stranger might see a girl's face that looks a bit masculine, we see a man we know very well, who just happens wearing makeup.

Last night was between the two. I thought I looked pretty good, but there were several things I didn't like. Some are unavoidable without cosmetic surgery, others to do with my less-than-perfect skills with makeup. In Flickr I've annotated a load of notes to the full-sized version of the picture above, to try and give you some idea of the thoughts that went through my head as I stared vainly into my Revlon makeup mirror last night.

Can't wait!

Well it's nearly here!

A huge gathering, the biggest of it's kind ever. Lots of free shows and events all under one banner. A chance to see some big names with even bigger egos. Okay, so some people have complained that there are better ways to raise awareness of the issues, and the organizers have taken a few knocks for not being inclusive enough, but it's all being done with the best intentions and few can doubt that at the end it's going to be a fantastic spectacle and a great day out. People will go just to say "I was there!"

Oh wait... that was last weekend. What's happening this weekend?

*grins*