Eccentric Flower:199902/three random thoughts
From Eccentric Flower
«February 1999 «Eccentric Flower
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twenty-three february three random thoughts My Estonian correspondent got me thinking about why I want to be female. You know, in ten-plus years no one's ever asked me why. People have always either rejected it or accepted it without comment. And, you know what? I'm not sure I can put the reasons why into words. I've been hearing from a number of people with gender issues in my mailbox recently. I don't know if this place is getting a reputation or if I'm just lucky, but I am always happy to hear about these things and compare notes. The whole subject fascinates me. Could you tell? My current speculation is whether or not Stephen Page of Barenaked Ladies has some TG fantasies. On Stunt there's an extended reference to being the opposite sex - "I'll Be That Girl" - (and a minor joke in "Alcohol" about just trying on the clothes), and of course BNL wrote one of the greatest songs about gender pigeonholes ever, "What a Good Boy," on their amazing album Gordon. - - - Dorothy quotes Lucy as making disparaging car-engine noises about Webring. Well, no fooling. Webring long since grew beyond its traffic and maintenance capacity. That's why I wrote Ringleader. I don't know how well it would do for high-traffic rings - hasn't been tested - but I don't see any collision points in the code. "Collision point" in this case means something, some file or data, that only one user can use at a time - so that if a second user asks for it at the same time, you have to make sure you send them an error message or otherwise prevent them from getting it until the first person's done with it. This is something you learn about - painfully - when you write even a simple program that more than one user might hit at a time. Mouth organ's message board has a lockout message on the off chance that two people might press Submit at the exact same moment. I don't know that anyone's ever gotten it - the odds are against it, since the bottleneck lasts less than a second - but if you have a system that gets a lot of traffic every day, the odds change dramatically. Anyway, without collision points, the only issue is whether the server can handle the traffic of running a web ring. Every time you go from one Thinking Aloud site to the next, [old domain name] gets a hit. Fortunately Thinking Aloud doesn't get enough traffic to bump up my web bill substantially. I should probably add something to Ringleader to make it slightly easier to add/delete users (right now you have to edit a text file on the server) and promote it a little more. But frankly, I don't care. On the other hand, if you're really tired of dealing with Webring, talk to me. - - - Spoke a little with Ysabel about crushes yesterday. I get crushes all the time. I don't regard them as detrimental, unless they interfere with other aspects of my life. If I have conversations with you, and you're reasonably intelligent, witty, and charming, the odds are good that I'll get a crush on you. If it lasts - if the blush doesn't wear off - I'll probably be in love with you. There's only one person I want to spend my life in close proximity to - but that doesn't affect my falling in love with people. If that seems excessive, I should also point out that I don't meet people or even talk to people readily, in the real world. You might say I have an all-or-nothing kind of brain that way. If it's someone I want to be around, then it's someone I could love. If I couldn't love them, then I don't want to be around them. Maybe I'm using the words differently. I don't know. I don't tell people when I'm in love with them anymore. It gets misinterpreted too often. Postscript: Three minutes after sending this postcard, I was poking around the bnl.org site some more, and I found "Having a Baby," which has never been released on an album. The Steven Page TG Evidence File grows by leaps and bounds .... © columbine |
