Ahh, so that's why I'm so skint at the moment

34-year-olds living through the most expensive year of their lives.

Becky wuz here (and here... and here...)

So Flickr have properly integrated geotagging into their service, and it seems to work quite well.

I've spent a semi-constructive hour or so going through my old pics and tagging some of them with their locations. At first I just did the ones of interesting architecture and such, but then I thought: why not the ones of me too?

After all, Becky does get about a bit (quiet down at the back).



So now you can find out just exactly where pictures like the one above were taken, if you were so moved.

One thing that annoys me a little is that they've used Yahoo's mapping service, which is a poor imitation of Google Maps. Flickr freely admit it's not as detailed as it should be, and are promising to work on it, but at the moment I'm wishing Google had bought Flickr and not Yahoo!

For pity's sake...

It's hard to sum up how much stuff like this pisses me off.

Being female, whether you've got a uterus or not, doesn't give you some God-given right to ridicule males. I think certain trannies seem to think that making piss-poor sexist jokes about men somehow makes them appear more like fully paid-up members of the female sex.

It doesn't. It makes them look facile and deluded.

Pyroclastic Flo

Is going to be my drag name, I've decided.

This might be related to me watching a thing about volcanoes on BBC2.

Their quiet big

Tranny Makeup - The Becky Way (Part One)

I get the occasional email from newbie trannies asking me how to get started with cosmetics. I normally end up firing off an email with some of the basic things I've learned. Each email ends up being pretty similar, so I thought, why not write down everything I know about makeup in one place?

So here it is, my guide to tranny makeup.

The first thing to say is that this is by no means definitive. And what works for me may not work for you at all. Everyone is different, and everyone finds their own best practices. So this is my personal guide to what works for me. That's why I called it the Becky Way. If you want a second opinion, I suggest Miss K's excellent tips. She'll tell you to do it completely differently. Neither of us is wrong.

In the beginning I used to experiment a lot, but when I find something that works, I tend to stick to it. I'm not one for trying new techniques very often, especially as normally when I'm getting ready I'm in a hurry, and experimenting leads to mistakes which leads to delays. If you're reading this and you're already good at doing your own makeup you'll probably think some of my techniques are dumb, and you're probably right. But, like I said, they work for me.

That's why everything is written from my point of view. Read each sentence as if it starts "in my opinion" or "in my experience". If you think that what I'm talking about will work for you too, then try it. Just don't blame me if it doesn't!

Attitude

The first thing that it's important to get right is how to approach makeup. We're not trying to emulate how a woman applies makeup, we're trying to emulate how a woman looks with makeup on. It's the difference between method and result. Girls don't use makeup in the same way that trannies do. Girls already tend to have feminine features, so they use makeup to enhance and add colour. Guys tend not to have feminine features, so makeup serves to modify the shape of the face, as well as enhancing and adding colour.

Horrendous generalisation: most woman haven't a clue how to do tranny makeup. Of course, they'll tell you that they've had a whole lifetime of practice, but it's practice on their own girlish faces! Their whole ethos is "less is more", and "subtle is better". This works really well on a female face, on a male face it tends to get lost in the general cragginess and blokishness. Ask a girl who's never made up a guy to do your makeup and, while the result will be expertly applied and beautifully subtle, you'll look like a geezer wearing expertly applied and beautifully subtle makeup.

Don't listen to girls, they're scary and they carry cooties. Listen to me!

My ethos is more is less: put more on than a girl would, and you'll look more like a girl.

Within reason, obviously. Put on too much slap and you'll look like a clown, or a bad drag queen.

But "drag queen" isn't necessarily anathema to trannies. Actually, a lot of what I do is based on drag queen makeup techniques. This is because drag queens tend to be doing an extreme version of what we want to achieve. Drag queens want to over-emphasize all the feminine features: high thin eyebrows, strong cheekbones, full lips, wide eyes. By taking what the best drag queens do and throttling it back a few notches, we can get results which feminize the male face enough to make it look girlish but not too "draggy".

Time and Patience

One of the most important things when working with makeup is giving yourself enough time.

A tranny once asked me how long it took me to get ready. I said "all told, about three hours".

They laughed and said that was a ridiculous amount of time, and it never took them more than 30 minutes.

I smiled and thought, "yeah, it shows".

Of course, every tranny has a different idea of how much they want to achieve, and how long they want to spend on achieving it. From a cold start, it takes me about three hours. Of course, that includes cleaning, de-fuzzing, plucking, dressing, re-dressing, wigging, bejeweling, manicuring and perfuming; as well as the actual time spent making up my face!

The important thing is that good makeup takes time. Especially when you're new at it. It's important not to feel rushed, because that's when you make mistakes which are hard to fix.

Also it's important to have patience. During the process of making up you're going to look worse before you start looking better. In my early days messing about with makeup I used to get half way through applying foundation, see my Bride-of-Frankenstien reflection in the mirror, and give up. With makeup, things never really come together until you've completely finished, don't get too disheartened half-way through.

...

Wow, a lot of writing and we've not even touched the makeup case yet! In the next installment I'll write about my essential kit, and how to prepare your face.

That is, if you're interested? :-/

Trannies like me like Meh

Uncovered at last:

BBC researcher reveals Miss K's first name to be "Meh". :-D

Do you get the feeling some researcher didn't actually do any research?

A slow news day, even by Norfolk standards

Final item on tonight's Look East:

"And a moos-flash from the farm: cows have accents!"

Saucy Minx

Don't you know who we are?

This weekend Jane finally completed her Grand Tour of my semi-regular tranny haunts. Having blown out Pink due to the weather, and on a bit of a whim, I decided to take her to the Fox and Hounds in Essex.

It's a bit of a trek from my place (in fact it's about the furthest distance you can travel in a straight line within East Anglia), so I don't make the trip as often as I'd like. Which is a shame because it's a quite nice venue. A little oasis of camp in the Essex countryside!

In fact, this was the first time I'd been in over a year. It's not changed much. They've knocked through a wall to put the pool table in it's own room, and they no longer seem to serve food (as far as I could tell), but that's about it.

There were only two other trannies there, which seemed a little unusual. Wednesday is their regular "tranny night" and the place is heaving with us, but there's usually a smattering at the weekend too. Perhaps Pink over in Cambridge was a bigger draw than I'd expected.

Jane and I had been there a while soaking up the atmosphere and enjoying people-watching when a tranny who'd arrived after us came over and said hello. She asked if we were together, and seemed suprised that Jane was accepting of me as a tranny. I explained that Jane had known about Becky before we'd even met, as we'd both got blogs.

Blank looks. Jane explained what a blog was, and how she'd got to know me a little through mine.

She then got the idea that maybe Jane fancied trannies, and it took a bit of explaining that Jane hadn't been trawling the net for trannies (she wasn't, she promises me!) it was just that she was OK with it, and found it kinda fun.

She then wanted to know how often I dressed, from my "look" she'd expected me to be full time (I'd made about my usual amount of effort). Then she asked if Jane was prepared for me to start wanting to dress "more and more"?

I explained that I was a pretty casual tranny, and since my early days of being out I'd actually dressed less and less, and in fact the last time I'd fully dressed up was Sparkle.

More blank looks, so we explained that Sparkle was a big tranny meet back in June, then incredulous looks that I'd not dressed in over a month.

It was at this point I decided I'd much rather be elsewhere. So Jane and I went dancing.

Meeting that tranny made me realise that I'm living in a bit of a bubble when it comes to where I think we are at. The we in the title doesn't refer to me and Jane (I'm not that big headed, honest), it refers to Trannies Like Me.

If you're reading this and you're a tranny, then Trannies Like Me probably includes You.

Trannies Like Me have, or seek, partners who see them as a whole. Parters who are neither repelled by trannies nor actively seek them.

Trannies Like Me know that these partners are special, but not unusual.

Trannies Like Me aren't defined by how often we dress, we're defined just by the fact that we dress, and we identify as a tranny because we dress.

Trannies Like Me are capable of wanting to look fantastic (I said "wanting", not often "managing") without wanting to go "full time".

Trannies Like Me feel a part of a wider community through the internet. We might not have blogs, we might not participate much, but we gain a wider understanding of what it means to be a tranny by seeing what other trannies are doing.

Trannies Like Me exist. Don't you know who we are?

Morph me beautiful

I've just been playing with the demo version of My Perfect Picture.

By analysing survey data on what makes a face good-looking, the software developers have developed a "beauty function" to quantify attractiveness.

Using a this function, this software can now adjust digital portraits to fit more closely to the ideal, so that they look more "attractive".

Two things interest me about this. Firstly, the generally ethics of it. Is it "cheating" to electronically change the shape of your face in a picture to make yourself look more attractive than you actually are?

Probably yes. But then again, makeup and camera angles can change the shape of a face in a similar ways, are they "cheating" too? And everyone with an ounce of savvy in digital photography knows how to fiddle with levels and touch-up tools to make themselves look better. Where do you draw the line as to what's acceptable digital manipulation and what isn't?

I'd draw the line somewhere well before morphing your face, but that's a gut feeling rather than based on any hard-and-fast criteria.

The other interesting thing is that you can set it to work to a feminine or a masculine ideal, in fact the demo version of the software only works for female faces. That's not going to stop an enterprising tranny like me from trying the obvious: a female transform on their male mug!

The results were... strange. It looked like a more female version of me, but it didn't look like me.

One of the great things when I see good pics of Becky is the feeling of seeing a girl who looks like me. Using this software on my tranny pics would probably generate a more female-looking picture, but it wouldn't look like me, and wouldn't give me the same rush.

So maybe that's where you draw the line: when you reach the point during "enhancement" that you can't see yourself in a picture anymore, then you're cheating.