Calendars

I decided I don't like Upcoming as a shared calendar organiser, a great idea but too fiddly to use and too focused on events by location rather than events by "areas of interest".

But I am liking Google Calendar, so far. If you're using it, or thinking of using it, and you're the kind of person who likes to keep track of tranny events in the UK, you might like to click on this.

If you're the kind of person who arranges tranny events and stuff, let me know of any events you want adding. At some point I'll get round to writing something that ties into the API and does clever things.

Probably. :-)

Oh the power!

Look! I made someone do something!

Here.

It's very good too. :-)

Barbie in Derby

Kind of trips off the tongue doesn't it? Got a long weekend coming up, Jane and I are visiting friends on Friday night, and on Saturday we're off to Sophie's for her birthday BBQ bash. Some blogging may ensue, if not I'll see you on the other side!

Scalpel... suction... spanner...

Overheard in the office:

“It’s hardly rocket surgery!”

I have this cartoon in my mind of a couple of surgeons working on a prostate missile. The kind of thing Plutos the Bubbleman knocks out. (Hint. Hint.) ;-)

The Tinkerbell Syndrome

I watched a programme on BBC3 yesterday evening called "The Trouble with Gay Men". In it, Simon Fanshawe discussed what he saw as the problems with being gay in Britain today.

Programmes like this always interest me. The gay scene in the UK overlaps the tranny scene more than some trannies would like to accept, and the gay mentality overlaps the tranny mentality more than some trannies would like to admit.

Simon Fanshawe is gay, and he grew up fighting for the rights that gay men now almost take for granted. Today in Britain, gay men enjoy almost identical rights to straight people . Gay culture, Simon argues, should now "grow out" of it's adolescent penchant for sex and drugs and adopt a more adult and responsible attitude.

I'm not steeped in gay culture, but from what I've seen of it, and from parallels I can draw with the tranny culture, this isn't going to happen. Why? Because part of the appeal of being in these cultures is the ability it gives you to not to act your age or be responsible. A lot of trannies (myself included I admit) dress in clothes that aren't always appropriate to our ages. Because in some ways enjoying transvestism is as much about denying your adulthood as it is about denying your masculinity. That's why, I think, trannies sometimes describe it as a "release"; they are (temporarily) abdicating the responsibilities of their age as well as their gender.

If many gays are suffering from the Peter Pan syndrome, then many trannies are suffering from something similar. We're just not as keen on wearing green.

There'll always be the gay guys who want to settle down in steady monogamous relationships and be "grown up", but there'll always be gay men who just want to sleep around with as many guys as they can and do a lot of drugs. Equally there'll always be trannies who dress to their age and who's idea of a good night is watching EastEnders en-femme, and other trannies who dress up like teenagers (or younger) and frolic about like there's no tomorrow.

Simon used that horrible argument that gays who perpetuate the image of homosexual men as camp, carefree, vain sexual deviants are ruining it for the "good" sensible gays like him. This smells very much like the protests I sometimes hear from trannies who get their knickers in a twist about anyone or anything that doesn't present "a positive image of transgenderism". Whatever that is.

If you want to be seen as part of a culture, but you don't like the parts that don't fit your morals or standards, then you should work to make your part of the culture more visible, rather than deriding or denying what the others are doing. There's no point in me pretending, for example, that a lot of trannies aren't just hairy panty-wearing freaks. They are, God love 'em.

But then there's me too. I'm not. And neither are a lot of my friends. If you want to be part of a culture, you have to put up with the other people in it. It's their culture too.

Extreme to the Max!

A while back Joanna (inspired by extreme ironing) had the idea to set up a Flickr Group for pictures of cross-dressing in extreme environments, which she called (with her typical wit and imagination) Extreme Crossdressing.

Cue some rather lacklustre attempts to rise to the challenge by me, Karol and a few others. Then Siobhan decided to go trampolining in a wedding dress.

Then it went a bit quiet, and standards dropped. The last one I was really impressed with was this. (Woah dudette! Standing in a lake! EXTREME!)

And then Gillian comes along today and raises the bar.

Very very high.

Now, you see, your average tranny-in-the-street can't compete with that. That's just overkill. A normal person would give up and say she's "won" the competition. But not me, I decided to bring out the big guns.

I've had this picture in my collection for a few years now (rougly 14 billion) but I didn't think it was good enough quality to present. But Gillian needs bringing down a peg or two.

So behold, Becky cross-dresses in the most extreme environment ever, about five trillionths of a second after the big bang:



Yeah, I know, you don't need to tell me... I should have used a fill-in flash.

Look, I was in a hurry, okay? It was a one-take deal!

Snake

Slight change of pace.

Jane and I went for a walk around King's Lynn's docks today, and I took some pictures that I'm particularly pleased with.

Audience

You see, it's all about audience. When I write to this blog, I'm writing almost subconsciously with an audience in mind. It affects the way I write, and what I write about. When I first started blogging my mental audience was, basically, my close friends. Then over time I started to modify that audience. I realised I'd got a sizeable non-UK readership, so I try when I remember not to use too many British colloquialisms. Meeting Jane had another effect, with her in the audience I'm less happy blogging about my personal feelings. Not because I don't want her to know them, just that I think she deserves to hear them first. Strangely, I've become more private now I have someone to share my private life with.

But, usually I write as if I'm talking to friends. My mental audience for my website is made up of:

• people I know


• people I don't know but are cool with the tranny thing


• and people I don't know who aren't cool with the tranny thing, which is fine because I don't care what they think.

The other day I was told by my boss that he'd been told by his boss that my site had been discovered within my organisation. I wasn't in trouble, per-se, my boss just wanted to warn me off from blogging too explicitly about my workplace.

I'm very grateful for that warning, and it's forced me to re-think things a bit. For one thing it made me decide to tell a close work colleague about all this (the post from a couple of days ago). For another I realise now that I was being very blasé about what I blogged about.

It was inevitable that this site got found by one or more people within my organisation at some time. Back when I started this site, nearly 4 years ago, I was surprised if I got 3 hits from Google a day. Now I'm getting 3 Google hits a minute. One of them was eventually bound to be someone who knew me.

So now there's a new section of the audience that I have in my mind: people I know, but that might not cool with the tranny thing. I don't know how big that section is, depending on the gossip mill at my organisation it could be anything from 4 to 400 people. They might all be cool with it, I dunno. Hope they are.

I'm going to try to stop it affecting the way I blog and the things I blog about (apart from avoiding blogging about my organisation in explicit terms). At the moment, though, it's hard. Even this blog entry was difficult to put together.

I know, I'll do what public speakers do when intimidated by their audience...

I'm now imagining you all naked.

Torchwood!

Is it the new Bad Wolf? :)

(Thought I'd get in first with that bit of Doctor-Who-Related obscurity.) :-D

Er... hi...

So, I think I have at least one new reader tonight. Someone who's known Simon for quite a few years but only just today found out about "all this".

Hi, thanks for taking it so well, but I knew you would, really. You're the most open-minded Daily Mail reader I know. ;-)

Take a look around. Have a good laugh... I'm not worried about being laughed at because basically, it is funny. If I found out something like this, I'd laugh too. :-)

I'm kind of hoping you're laughing between periods of jaw-dropping amazement!

Oh, and if you have any questions, just ask!

The pursuit of cool

When I started up this blog, I made one pledge to myself:

Do no harm.

Then I realised that doctors had taken first dibs on that pledge, so I came up with another one:

Be original.

Which fitted me better, and had the added advantage of leaving me open to do as much harm as I jolly well liked.

But of course I didn't really actually go so far as to think up a pledge and write it down. It was just there in the back of my mind, what I thought made a good blog and what didn't. Over the time I've imposed on myself a few rough-and-ready rules such as:

• It's not a how-to-write-a-blog site: Don't blog about blogging(oops)


• It's not a link aggregator: Don't just post links to other people's work


• It's just not a place for posting personality quiz results: "I'm the Franco-Prussian War! Find out which German War of Unification you are by clicking here!"


• It's not a diary. I don't want to write about what happened every hour of every day of my life, and I'm pretty sure most people don't want to read it.


• It's not pretty and it's not clever: I'm not a programmer, so the code will be functional rather than whizz-bang, and I'm not a designer, so it's never gonna be a Thing of Beauty.

I am, sometimes, handy with words and I think I can craft something funny when the muse comes to me. So that is what I decided to do, play to my strengths.

Hopefully it works. Rather than falling between the two stools of "aesthetically pleasing" and "technically clever", I made a third stool. A stool for putting the stuff I do on. It's my stool and I like it a lot, thank you.

You see, I realised a some time ago that I'm not cool.

Being a transvestite isn't cool, it might be interesting, sometimes exciting, and it's edging towards socially acceptable. But it's not "cool". If it was then more cool people would do it (or, at least, own up to doing it), but to a fairly great extent they don't.

Neither is having a blog (popular or not) cool. It stopped being even remotely cool sometime around the time Boris Johnson got one.

Being funny isn't cool. Comedians aren't cool. A lot of them became comedians because they weren't cool. Uncoolness is almost a prerequisite.

Being good at programming isn't cool. Even if you write AJAX code on a Mac made out of lemon-scented Buckminsterfullerine. Sorry, it just isn't.

So, the pursuit of coolness through dressing up in ladies clothes, and blogging about it in a funny way with the occasional bit of hamster-related programming thrown in for good measure... is basically pointless.

Coolness is elusive, and it is nice to achieve, but it comes to you, you can't go to it.

What's the point of this post? I don't know. It almost certainly falls foul of at least one of my rules.

It's just something I wanted to say.

The World According to SurfControl

I am no longer Adult!

According to SurfControl's test-a-site:

www.beckysweb.co.uk is in our list
and categorized as Entertainment

In other words: if you're stuck behind a SurfControl content filter at work that blocks "adult" stuff, you can now visit my site!

All thanks to some aggressive campaigning by me.

Well, I filled in a form online.

But I did it aggressively.

Would be nice if someone could independently confirm this. If you're on my site and you couldn't get here before, comment! :-)