Here comes the new blog, same as the old blog

For a couple of months now, Blogger has been enthusiastically informing me "your new version of Blogger is ready!", only to own up after I pressed the upgrade button that "er, actually it's not ready yet, you've got too many posts and comments and stuff... sorry... we got overexcited".

But, as Selina points out, Google have started sending men in dark suits around who "accidentally" knock ornaments on floor and suggest that bigger things might get damaged if I don't, upgrade. So I decided to give it another go.

And, by jiggery, it worked! Look, it's all new and shiny!!

Er... new back end. Front end might stay the same for the time being. I don't think I'll bother implementing the fancy-schmancy new features just yet. That new archive menu thingy looks ghastly.

Right... I'm off to assign a new ID to my Flickr account, before Yahoo break any more of my limbs.

Update - ooh look! I've got TAGS!!

Last one

I said I'd link to everyone, so completists might want to know that Penny has blogged about Transpocalypse. :-)

More angles

Isobel and Chrissy have blogged about Saturday, and Jane has written something rather nice prompted by the night. Go comment on all of them to show your appreciation, and come back here when you're done, m'kay?

Transpocalypse Liverpool

Hmmm... what to say about last weekend?

I've not got much to add to the usual comments like "it was great to see everyone", "getting everyone organised was a little fraught" and "I really wish I'd had more time to properly chat to everybody".

I did do my best to mingle, but inevitably I barely touched base with most, which is a real shame.

One of the great thing about organising a tranny even for a bunch of bloggers and friends is that you can guarantee at least a few of them will do all the writing-up for you afterwards. :-)

So, in the manner of those multi-angle things on DVDs, you can already see Saturday night's action from the point of view of Pandora, Clarissa, Valerie and Joanna.

Of course, the others don't have to blog about it, but if they do get round to it, I'll link to their posts too. :-)

Jane and Me... and Becky makes two

When it comes to being supportive about my cross-dressing, Jane makes no effort whatsoever.

Which is great.

I'd better explain.

She's supportive in the same way that the sea is salty. It just is.

It doesn't have to make any effort. It doesn't feel it's making any major sacrifices. It doesn't feel the need to join forums for salty things to discuss the endless burden of being salty with... errrrm... anchovies. It doesn't appear in magazine articles entitled "How I Learned to Live with my Secret Salty Shame". Salty is the natural way of things. Quite frankly, the sea is a bit surprised that other major bodies of water aren't salty.

Jane is equally a bit nonplussed by women who don't want anything to do with transvestites. Why some girls seem to get their knickers in a twist that some boys want to wear twistable knickers. She's blessed with enough common sense and wisdom to see that transvestism is a facet of a personality, not a defining trait.

I initially found it strange that I didn't have to endlessly explain my actions to her. Then I realised that her attitude was that while she might not totally understand why I do it, that's doesn't make it a Big Scary Thing. As long as I'm totally honest with her, and live to the fundamental ground-rules that any partner should, she trusts me implicitly.

That doesn't make her unique, I've met lots of other partners of trannies (including a few at the weekend) who are just the same. But it's still reason 3 of the 6 reasons I love her. (Before you ask - the other five a split into too many sub-categories to list here.)

That's not to say that I've got total free rein, and Jane doesn't have any opinions in the matter. She's normally pretty good at pointing out when those stripy tights don't go with that floral blouse or you might want to avoid bending down and/or being seen dead in that skirt. And that's just the sartorial matters!

Where Becky is concerned, things are working fine. As I tried to indicate with the title of the post, she's not the "third person in the relationship", she's just part of me. Who wears a skirt.

(Aside: FFS, if you're ever going to accuse me of just being a "bloke in a dress", get it right! I hardly ever wear dresses!)

It would be easy for me to rest on my laurels, happy that we've got "Transvestism in a Modern Relationship" sussed. But situations change, both gradually and in big jumps, and there are couple of big jumps coming up that we both need to factor in to the equations.

For example, when I first started going out with Jane I explained to her that cross-dressing was my "garden shed". Most men have some place to go to get away from it all, whether it's to tinker contently with a recalcitrant lawnmower, or to make exact scale models of the Titanic out of matchsticks. A place away from the complexity and vagueness of real life and real emotions. A place where most problems can be solved by WD-40.

Cross-dressing and it's related paraphernalia fulfils that purpose for me. Admittedly, I've not found too many uses for WD-40 yet, but I still use "Becky" — the dressing up, this blog, the community and social aspects — as a little walled-garden that I can escape to when the rest of the world is just too pointy.

I told this to Jane because I needed her to understand that sometimes I'd want to go off and "be Becky" on my own, and I didn't want her to worry that I wanted to do this to be unfaithful or because I didn't want her there. I don't really know why I want it, I guess it's just something that, even now, is fundamentally private to me.

Jane was cool with that, and really up to now it hasn't been much of an issue anyway. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times in the last 18 months I've been out as Becky without Jane along for the ride. Because I really wanted Jane to see what I was getting up to, and meet my friends so that they became her friends too. I've been immensely happy that she's been there enjoying herself, there's not been an outing yet that I've regretted going to with Jane. And also because I've generally found my Happy Place with Jane, maybe I don't need to dress as much as I used to anyway.

But it has highlighted some differences. I don't think Jane will argue with me if I say she's not the clubbing type. She's got a wide and varied taste in music, but not much of it the kind of stuff that turns up in the boxes of the DJs at the kind of clubs trannies frequent!

I however enjoy occasionally enjoy swinging my lack-of-pants to popular dance combos, and it's something I'd like to keep doing. Also, there's still the whole garden shed thing. In the future I don't always want to have Jane along for the ride when I go out as Bex, and Jane doesn't always want to be there. We just need to set the ground rules for what acceptable and what's not, and adjust them when necessary.

This would be in danger of being one of those horrible tranny blog posts where the writer shares their deepest thoughts with the readers of their blog, without communicating it directly to the other person involved. That's not the case here, I've talked to Jane about most if not all of this beforehand, we've already set some new rules that will come into effect should X Y and Z happen in the future. And it will be an agenda topic forever more, no doubt.

'Cos that's what you have to do. Keep talking. Even when it's working.

Mitchell and Webb are Mac and PC

...in the UK version of the Get a Mac campaign.

File that one under "Obvious in Hindsight"!

Transpocalypse Nigh!

Just 48 hours to go before possibly the biggest Liverpool-based UK tranny blogmeet of this weekend, if not the whole of January!

If you think you're coming and you've not just received the final details via email then let me know as soon as possible and I'll sort you out. :-)

Delightfully blasé attitude towards dangerous pharmaceuticals

You couldn't make it up

A new series of the excellent phone-in comedy Down the Line started last week. This time Radio 4 are making no attempt to conceal that it's a spoof phone-in show, unlike the first series which was aired with no warning or explanation, causing more than a few calls of complaint to the BBC from Enraged of Tumbridge Wells!

Actually, the reason that the Fast Show crew have given up pretending that Gary Bellamy's callers are fictional is probably that compared to many real life callers to radio phone-ins, they're no more ridiculous.

Take for example this snatch of Jeremy Vine's show that I caught at lunch time. They were debating the morality of this news story about a couple who want a posthumous child for their dead son via impregnating a woman he never met.

A caller phoned in to support them, saying:

"If I died tomorrow, I'd want my wife to take my liver, kidneys, heart, etcetera, and put them into someone else. If that's okay, why not sperm?"

Well, it's nice to be invited

I just got an automated email from Flickr that I found quite amusing, and I thought I'd share it with you.

[Flickr] You've been invited to join Jane And Simon's Wedding

Jane Goth has invited you to be a member of Jane And Simon's
Wedding.

To find out more about this group[snip]

Good-oh, I was starting to feel a little left out. ;-)

(I'm so up for a slap.)

Am I a transsexual?

One of the reasonably common misconceptions amongst the TG community is that "all transvestites are basically transsexuals who can't/won't own up to it".

Admittedly it's mainly transsexuals who hold this opinion. That doesn't make all transsexuals morons, of course. Just the ones who think that it's true.

(I think that qualifying statement will once again spare me the wrath of the entire TS community for another day.)

But transvestites and cross-dressers who have no intention of taking the TS route would be forgiven for worrying if maybe they're hiding their innermost feelings from themselves. Maybe they are fooling themselves without realising it. Maybe there's a inevitable mental process going on in the background, which one day will make you decide that you want to be a woman full time.

And, even scarier, maybe this mental process then re-writes your memories so that you think you always wanted to be a woman. After all, you often hear transsexuals say stuff like "of course, I knew deep down I wanted to be a woman, I was just afraid of admitting it to myself."

So, as an aid for those transvestites who might be worrying along these lines, I present some tips on how to spot a pre-TS TV, by which I mean someone who's actually a transsexual and is pretending to be a transvestite/cross-dresser until they're ready to own up to it.

Just read the following traits and score accordingly.

Trait 1: Growing your own hair. If your hair is bob length, and you're not in a Beatles tribute band; or if your wig's currently perched on a massed thatch that's "not quite ready to be shown off yet" because it resolutely refuses to grow back over the shiny bit at the front - score 1 point.

Trait 2: The "Blatantly Obvious Secret". If you pepper your blog/forum posts with comments such as:

• "I just wonder if I'm being honest with myself."
• "I wonder sometimes if things would have turned out differently if I'd never married."
• "I hate labels, but I guess I'd describe myself as transgendered".

and other statements that you think make you sound wonderfully unknowable and non-commital, but actually make everyone think you're fooling yourself - Score 2 points.

Trait 3: Passing. If your idea of the pinnacle of TG achievement is a dressed-down visit to Meadowhall to buy a beige jumper without being clocked as a bloke - score 2 points.

Trait 4: Knowing far too much about the process. If the first thing you think of when you hear the words "Charing Cross" isn't railway station; if you don't have problems with referring to private medical consultants as "Uncle"; or if you've run the online COGIATI test so often you know how to get the secret easter-egg "You're actually Kylie!" ending - score 1 point.

If you scored zero, then be rest assured you're not (unknowingly or otherwise) harbouring latent desires to go the transsexual route.

If you've scored one or more points, it doesn't necessarily mean you're a transsexual. But it does mean that your tranny friends who've read this (or have a grain of personal experience) probably think you are.

If you scored 6 points... stop messing about, own up to being a transsexual and put us all out of our misery!

(A "I'm only joking" wink smiley is available for this post. If you'd like one, please send a stamped addressed envelope to BECKYSWEB c/o Microsoft Plc, 1 Microsoft Way Ste 8, Redmond, WA 98052-8300)

Is it just me...

... or does that woman who does the Shipping Forecast on Radio 4 sound really smug and spiteful? There's a definite hint of malice mixed in with the clipped RP.

Take for example this sample from tonight's forecast...

VIKING NORTH UTSIRE. NORTHERLY 6 TO GALE 8, OCCASIONALLY SEVERE GALE 9 AT FIRST. ROUGH OR VERY ROUGH, OCCASIONALLY HIGH. WINTRY SHOWERS. GOOD.

It's that "good" on the end. The self-satisfied way she says it makes it sounds like she's happy that there's going to be gales in the North Sea.

FISHER GERMAN BIGHT. NASTY CHILLY WIND THAT GOES RIGHT THROUGH YOU. GOOD.

TRAFALGAR. WE WON. BEAT THE FRENCHIES. GOOD.

BAILEY ROCKALL SHANNON. HURRICANE FORCE WINDS, 50 FOOT WAVES, SCORES OF DEAD FISHERMEN FLOATING IN SEA. GOOD. I'M GLAD. SERVES 'EM RIGHT.

Really good writing

Really good writing isn't about using big words, or knowing when to use an apostrophe, or saying something interesting, or clever, or wise. Really good writing isn't about any of those things.

Really good writing is the paragraph that blind-sides you unexpectedly. The few brilliant words that shine a light on your innermost feelings. The snatch of text that immediately makes you gasp, or laugh, or cry, before your can even think why. Really good writing is machine code for the human soul.

It happened to me today, while I was thumbing through a booklet of suggested readings for wedding ceremonies. I read the passage below, and immediately had to leave the room to, er, get something out of my eye.

I know. Deeply soppy. You'll probably read it and wonder what the hell I'm on about. That's the trouble with really good writing, it's usually a personal thing! In this case it's a personal thing about how I feel about Jane. It's the last line that gets me, every time.

Don't Walk in Front of Me

Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow.

Don't walk behind me; I may not lead.

Just walk beside me, and be my friend.

Albert Camus

Worlds apart

Jane and I strike a post in Blood Elven form

I made a minor detour in London to pick up the first major expansion to World of Warcraft, "The Burning Crusade".

I really enjoy WoW. Ever since I first started playing in Beta, it's had a home on my hard drive. By taking every element of established massively multiplayer gameplay and honing them to perfection, Blizzard have created a game that really does have something for everybody.

The thing that always impresses me most is the design and variety of environments. They appear at first to be simplistic and cartoonish, but that's just the designers' way of coping with a 3D engine designed to run on only mid-spec graphics hardware. Rather than going for the hyper-real look of many of today's graphics-intense console and PC games, they've adopted a look that makes a virtue of the low polygon count to create a robust, smooth, colourful and varied environment.

Unlike other online worlds such as Second Life, the environment is virtually set in stone, with no chance for user-modification. To put it in terms of childhood toys: World of Warcraft's a pre-moulded Tracey Island play set - compared to Second Life's big box of Lego.

But your playset's this huge, and looks this beautiful, who can complain?

My new Draenei hunter visits the Exodar city-ship

On diaries and nemeses

Hiya, I'm back.

Not much to report. On Monday a parcel dropped through the door from New Jersey, which caused me a few moments puzzling over what on Earth I'd ordered from the States. Then I remembered that I hadn't, but I'd agreed to review a new book about transgendered teenagers for an American publisher.

I read the first few chapters on the train back from Taunton and so far it's rather good. So I'll hopefully finish that in the next few days and let you know what I think.

What else to talk about? Um... [rifles through the pile labelled Unanswered Questions]

Lynn Jones asks:
If there wasn't the Internet or blogging, would you keep a diary?

Almost certainly not. I don't think of my blog as a diary replacement
as such anyway. I rarely post entries about what I did that day. For
me, blogging is a social activity. A place to share my ideas and
thoughts with other people.

I've tried keeping a diary in the past, but I find it difficult to
write without an audience, and it quickly becomes tiresome.

. . .

Alex asks:
Do you have a nemesis either on the internet or in real life?

Not at the moment, although I'd like a new one. There's nothing like a
good nemesis to make life worth living. :-)

If you'd like the job, the qualifications are pretty vague, but if you post pictures of a real girl on Flickr and pretend that they're of yourself en femme, you're pretty much a shoe-in. ;-)

Twinned with Hoth Wampa

Hi everybody! As part of my jet-set lifestyle I'm away from work for a couple of days on a course. I'm down in Taunton, famous for cider and for sounding a bit like those two-legged camel things they rode at the start of The Empire Strikes Back.

So I may not answer emails and stuff. Normal service will resume on Wednesday.

Getting anal over Analytics

One of my biggest recent mistakes was installing Google Analytics traffic monitoring on this site a few weeks ago.

It's given me a ridiculous amount of useless information about my visitors to pore over for hours on end. Virtually limitless permutations of the raw logs are available just by drilling down through it's copious reports.

For example, here's the top 25 search terms used to hit my site in the last week, just from Germany.

transvestite
becky
tranny
boobs
tranny blog
"look like a girl" petticoat
tranny with long toenails
tranny basil
best tranny
sudoku
hamster
tranny for me
becoming a shemale
picture sudoku
My long Weekend DVD
short skirts
young tranny
feminization
t-girl uk
crossdressing blogs
passes for youtube
Mummy Fetish
too short skirts
k750i nazi theme
make tranny

If anyone has created a Nazi theme for their mobile phone, there just might be an untapped market there. ;-)

It's only waffer theeen

Let's get one thing clear, I'm not on a diet. Dieting in January was invented by supermarkets. I refuse to be made to feel guilty for eating too much at Christmas by the same people who were trying to flog me all the food in the first place.

I am, however, cutting down my portions. For example, I've started eating only one molecule of chocolate per sitting.

2 months in 10 seconds

In mid-November I stood beneath a tree on the bank of the Ouse, looked up and took a picture of it's gold-green canopy.

This week the Ouse burst burst it's banks, flooding the surrounding water meadows, and today Jane and I took a walk to see the results. Recognising the same tree, now bereft of leaves, I stood in nearly the same spot and took another picture.

In one way, the video below took two months to make. In another way, it took about half an hour experimenting with Morph Age morphing software.

Either way, I'm kinda proud of it. :-)



You can see the original pictures here and here.

Theo-illogical

Stegbeetle asks:
Assuming she exists, what single thing would you ask God, given the opportunity?

You made a mistake in addressing God as "she", Stegbeetle. It should be a capital S. ;-)

I'll use the more popular male pronouns in my reply though. The God I don't believe in might as well be male. :-)

But, assuming God exists, I'd ask Him why, during His seven day stint of creation, He went to so much effort to make it look like it had taken billions of years.

He'd probably come up with some baloney about it being a test of faith, and I'd be left wishing I'd phrased the question better.

The quickfire round

Emily Rose asks:
What is the ground speed of an unladen African sparrow?

I don't know. Try here. ;-)

. . .

Lara Tyg asks:
What is medical term for the back of the knee ?

That's the popliteal region, Lara. :-)

. . .

Populuxe asks:
Coke or Pepsi? Diet or full-calorie?

Diet Coke, with lime.

. . .

Strandy asks:
Asking you out on a date - fruitless?

Yes. Unless your definition of "fruitful" is being walloped by Jane. ;-)

. . .

Miss K asks:
Do you dress to the right or left?

Both sides. At the same time. (Fnarr!)

. . .

Joggerblogger asks:
Cake or death?

Cake!

Pale in comparison

Lauren Teo asks:
Choice of web browser?

Mostly Firefox 2.0 on the MacBook Pro at the moment, because it's got the most functionality and works with most web sites. Sometimes I fire up Safari to look at sites like Flickr, because believe it or not Safari actually makes the photos look nicer!

This is because Safari is the only mainstream browser that supports embedded ICC colour profiles. ICC profiles help maintain accurate colour representations across media, so a printed picture looks as close as possible to the screen version and so on. OSX and a lot of Apple applications handle ICC profiles almost transparently using software called Coloursync.

As Coloursync is all about moving between mediums (between monitors, or from screen to print, etc), you wouldn't think that this would make much difference when moving digital pictures from your desktop to the web. After all both ends of the equation are digital and effectively using the same monitor.

But with my MacBook it seems to make quite a big difference. A picture that looks rich and colourful in iPhoto or similar looks washed out when uploaded to Flickr and viewed in Firefox.

This "should-be-good-if-it-actually-worked-properly" feature is one of my few major annoyances with OSX, because you can't really turn ColorSync off. It does a great job with printing, but when it comes to working purely digitally it doesn't seem to be able to resist sticking it's oar in, and getting it wrong.

I'm by no means an expert on this, so I've scoured the web for a solution. So far nothing, apart from other people agreeing that it's the case. Any (non-patronising) suggestions gratefully received!

I seem to have strayed somewhat from the original question. :-S

Browsers: Firefox 2.0 first, Safari second, Camino when I feel like a combination of the two (but alas not the best of both worlds it could be).

On the PC side, Firefox again, occasionally Internet Explorer when I need to check what wild interpretation it has for a particular bit of CSS I've written at work!

The science of magic

One of the things I fondly remember about my childhood home was the view from my bedroom window. It looked directly north, across gently rolling Norfolk countryside. We were some way inland, but there was very little in the way of civilization beyond our house. Just fields dotted with old lime pits, the sand banks and marshes of the North Norfolk coast, and then the sea... all the way to the North Pole.

That window was my natural theatre. Summer days watching the combine harvesters perform their sedate ballet in golden fields sprayed with poppies, accompanied by a skylark singing somewhere high above. Winter evenings watching squadrons of geese blacken the sky as they returned to their night-time roosts on the coast.

At night the sky was inky black and free of light pollution, so my view of the night sky from my bedroom was perfect for stargazing (a privilege few children today have). I watched the Plough (over agricultural Norfolk it could never be a Bear, great or otherwise) as it wheeled around the pole star, and could even see and learn to recognise the fainter constellations of the northern sky, like Ursa Minor, and Draco the dragon.

One summer night we even saw the faint glow of the Northern Lights. It was that dark.

One night I was awoken by a rumble and a flash of blue-white light on the bedroom wall. A distant thunderstorm was making it's way along the coast. I watched it for a while, disappointed that it wasn't the showy fork-lighting kind of thunderstorm, when there was an almighty flash that made me flinch and blink.

A second later I saw it, rising out of a bed of clouds in the distance. A brilliant point of light, like a fallen star. It climbed slowly, throwing it's light on the suddenly beautiful cloudscape that surrounded it. After a few seconds it reached it's apogee and began to fall again, disappearing back into the clouds.

That's my story about the time I saw ball lightning. Well, at least I think it was ball lightning. I can't imagine what else it would have been. It was too high in the sky to be a flare, and was far too bright to be a plane.

Why am I blogging this? Because scientists have managed to create ball lightning in the lab, and it reminded me of my experience. One of nature's greatest mysteries is finally starting to be understood and replicated, but it doesn't make my memory of that night any less magical.

Deprincessing 101

Welcome to this introductory course on deprincessing.

Examine the picture below. The owner is a tranny who, while out to his parents, would rather not present them with blatant evidence that he occasionally cavorts in Lady's Things. Therefore all evidence of TG activity must be removed before they visit for coffee.

To graduate from Deprincessing 101, correctly identify the error that has been made.



Do you wanna know something really funny? A certain fiancée of mine (who shall remain nameless), when tested with the above problem just before my parents arrived, confidently announced that the room was completely de-princessed!

I'm just glad I planted the magazine, now that I know that my partner is tranny-blind, I can compensate accordingly. ;-)

Note to self: think up witty "only gay in village" variant for this title before publishing

Lexie asks:
Where is the Tranny night life in Kings Lynn?
[Extra question marks removed for clarity.]

Working on the presuppositions that:

1. I'm the only tranny in King's Lynn,
2. I'm sometimes in my house at night, and
3. I'm alive.

I've determined that the location of the only tranny night life in King's Lynn is...

In my house.

And no, you can't come. ;-)

. . .

Okay, enough of the flippancy. To answer the question in the spirit it was asked:

There is no tranny night life in King's Lynn.

Zilch, nada. Sorry!

I suppose you mean places where trannies regularly hang out (excuse the expression) or would be accepted. The only place I can think that might fit the bill is King's Lynn's one gay pub, "The Hob in the Well" (known to local wags as "The Knob in the Gob").

But as I've never been I can't vouch for it's TG friendliness. For all I know it's full of psychopathic tranny-hating bull dyke lumberjacks with chainsaws.

But maybe you could go and report back for us? ;-)

Paralyzed by ennui

I sit staring at a blank page, desperately trying to blog something.

I suppose I should start finalising the organisation of this.

With Christmas, New Years and the wedding plans occupying my mind, it's kind of crept up on me. :-S

I need to finalize numbers for a meal and get it all finally booked.

So...

Who's coming? Email me, even if you have already. I'll email back with my mobile number and further details as soon as I have them. :-)

Blogrollcall

Over the last couple of months I've started to read some really good tranny blogs. It's strange none of them are particularly "new", but they all seemed to come to my attention at the same time, giving me a false impression that there'd been another tranny blog-rush, like the one I was part of in early 2005.

They deserve a little more exposure, so in no particular order:

First up is CaroLINES by Carolyn Ann, an American blogger with a love for big motorbikes (which of course makes her a crossdresser).

Penny Morris from Rambling Thoughts, Furious Musings is fairly new to blogging but has already written some interesting stuff. She has an eye for art, but works in IT (which of course makes her a crossdresser).

Last but not least I'm enjoying YATGB by Lynn Jones. The acronym stands for "Yet Another T-Girl Blog", but Lynn is really selling herself short, she writes well and thoughtfully. Although she doesn't seem to work in IT or own a motorbike, so I'm not sure why she's a tranny.

(Update: she probably does work in IT. The balance of the universe is restored.) ;-)

That's it. Hope you enjoy them as much as I have.

Envérité Speaks!

I'm eating away at my 15 minutes of fame in easy-to-swallow 5-minute chunks. So what did you think of my latest stint of prime-time exposure?

Okay, for those of your who possibly weren't listening to Radio Five Live at 2AM this morning, and missed the "Pods and Blogs" show, the BBC have a convenient listen again feature.

Follow that link, and after about 3 minutes you'll hear a guy called Simon talking about "Becky T's Blog", but it is me. Honest.

[Update: The Listen Again link only worked for a week. However, Siobhan helpfully converted it to MP3 format for me.

Becky on BBC Radio Five Live's Pods and Blogs]

I always thought I had a face for radio. ;-)