Blogging apps: Behind the scenes at Lunamania

≡ Category: Gear and tech, Semi-daily thoughts | ≅ Leave a Comment

A little weekend geekery for Ye Faithful Reader and Persons Recently Returned from Abroad and Wondering What to Do with Their Blog…
Before the non-bloggers stop reading, these are mostly “micro-blogging” or social-networking related apps so consider it relevant if you Secretly Want to Have a Personal Blog, But Can’t Handle the Pressure of Living Up to the Awesomeness of Lunamania So Would Settle For Sharing Shorter, Less Intrusive Bits of Information. ok, I’ll stop with the trite caps. All applications are Free. I lied about the trite caps.

Twitter: Notice the “random updates” sidebar on the right hand column of Lunamania? For those in the know, those updates are “Tweets” –posts of 140 words or less. I can send them via cell phone or through twitter’s website. I’ve also set it up so my tweets appear as status updates on Facebook. Cuz sometimes you just have to let the world know what you ate for lunch. You can sign up and have a page to call your own and “follow” people to receive text messages of their Tweets. No other application will allow you to keep tabs on Darth Vader, Barack Obama and Stephen Colbert. There’s a bit of php script here that you drop into your template and it fetches the latest x number of tweets. This is also how the “tunes” section is run on this blog–more on that later.

Firefox/Foxytunes: The open source browser that brought us tabbed browsing also brings us the Foxytunes plug-in. This allows you to control iTunes from your browser. Yum. If that’s not Web 2.0 enough for you, with this add-on, you can selectively share what you’re listening to through Twitter. One click updates the djtoro channel. If you subscribe to that channel, you can get regular updates via text message of what I’m listening to. One word for you…stalker. You can check out how it works here. If you have a group of musical friends, it could be a neat way to share what you’re listening to.
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Lawrence King and my lame high school self…

≡ Category: Rants, Semi-daily thoughts | ≅ 2 Comments

“He was freaking the guys out…” so is now dead. Lawrence King was shot twice in the head for acting “like a girl” and professing his attraction to other boys. The fragile masculinity and sexual identity of the kid who shot Lawrence means he faces the possibility of a lifetime in California’s unforgiving prison system.

Really, what the fuck is up with that?

It’s always about me here so…school based homo-hate always makes me reflect on my own high school experiences. Fortunately–or not, I didn’t fully own my queerness until college. Then again, maybe I did know back then, but didn’t have the language or imagination to come out. Either way, it’s a blessing really because unlike many a queer kids, I was able to feel at home in my high school. I was a jock, elected to student council, played in the band and even had a social life. I went to an international school in Tokyo which meant bonding over a shared language, growing up in a megapolis and well–just fun and games.

This also meant an elite New England college experience was a bigger adjustment than realizing I Liked Girls. My identity being so closely tied to that Tokyo-intaaah experience is probably why I spent so many of my immediate post-coming out years worrying about how my friends from Back in the Day would judge my queerness. I’m grateful that my anxieties were largely unwarranted and regret the lost years in between. Perhaps it’s revisionist history, but I’ve come to believe that if I had come out in high school, my friends would have figured out a way to support me…or at the very least not shoot me in the head while hanging at the gazebo of Nogawa-koen or during a nomikai at Tsubo-hachi.

Then again, maybe that unsubstantiated faith reflects my desperate desire to believe that I would have stood up for the fruity, makao-no-okama kids in our class. Sadly, I can’t say I would have. Actually, I know for a fact that I didn’t. And that’s why Lawrence King, Matthew Shepard and the countless nameless queer kids will haunt me forever.
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Hello Fish

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