13 September 2008
Also...
Blue checked shirt was really cute and was clearly looking over quite a bit. Shame I didn't take a picture actually. Probably would have looked a bit pervy though.
Sometimes, I just get so annoyed
Like, REALLY annoyed. For no particular reason, but I feel like I'm a thread at breaking point. I'm sure all the vodka probably isn't that helpful though...
12 September 2008
Cheap gay Facebook
I joined a group on Facebook a while ago, set up by some company that was setting up a new social networking site for gay men and was looking for site testers. So I thought OK, that might be interesting, and I put my name down.
It took a while for them to reach the stage where they were ready to start letting people join and test the site, but eventually on Monday they sent a message out saying everyone should now sign up and start letting them know what they think.
Oh. My. God. It was SO rubbish! For a start, it was called Cockbook. That's just crass, predictable, and I'm sure that lots of people might not want to have loads of cockbook.com URLs appearing in their internet history at work.
So, name: crap.
Then there was the 'Create your profile' bit. They'd basically just taken all of the fields you fill in on Gaydar and used those, right down to the type of guy you are (twink, bear, etc.), the type of guy you like, and even the 'Rather not say' option for any of the more delicate questions like manhood size. Oh yes, and the form didn't work particularly well either.
Content: crap.
And then there was the design... How can I describe it? Oh yes: imagine Facebook. Now imagine if you asked a retarded eight year old to draw a picture of Facebook using blue crayons. That's what it looked like. It was almost exactly the same as Facebook (old Facebook anyway, the new design was probably a bit hard for the retarded eight year old to render with crayons), right down to the shade of blue used, the bar at the top, and the Account and Privacy links down at the bottom. I'll be surprised if they don't get sued for infringement of copyright!
Design: crap. Possibly the worst design I've ever seen on a 'professionally made' website.
Oo oo, and I almost forgot the best bit. To start with your account is 'Not verified'. When you click on why, it says that in order to stop people using profile photos that aren't actually of themselves (sadly this does happen on Gaydar, when people are too ugly to use their own pictures) they have set up a system of checking. In order to get your account 'verified', they want you to write on a piece of paper a FIFTEEN CHARACTER random verification code they give you, hold it up, photograph yourself holding it and looking like a complete knobhead for going to all this trouble, and then email it to them. Only then will they believe you actually are the person in the photo. What a completely ridiculous thing to expect people to do! That was the last straw for me.
Usability: crap.
So I clicked off of it, went back on Facebook, and left a scathing message on the group wall about how pathetic the site is.
And now they've deleted my message, because clearly when they asked for feedback they only wanted people to say nice things! Losers...
It took a while for them to reach the stage where they were ready to start letting people join and test the site, but eventually on Monday they sent a message out saying everyone should now sign up and start letting them know what they think.
Oh. My. God. It was SO rubbish! For a start, it was called Cockbook. That's just crass, predictable, and I'm sure that lots of people might not want to have loads of cockbook.com URLs appearing in their internet history at work.
So, name: crap.
Then there was the 'Create your profile' bit. They'd basically just taken all of the fields you fill in on Gaydar and used those, right down to the type of guy you are (twink, bear, etc.), the type of guy you like, and even the 'Rather not say' option for any of the more delicate questions like manhood size. Oh yes, and the form didn't work particularly well either.
Content: crap.
And then there was the design... How can I describe it? Oh yes: imagine Facebook. Now imagine if you asked a retarded eight year old to draw a picture of Facebook using blue crayons. That's what it looked like. It was almost exactly the same as Facebook (old Facebook anyway, the new design was probably a bit hard for the retarded eight year old to render with crayons), right down to the shade of blue used, the bar at the top, and the Account and Privacy links down at the bottom. I'll be surprised if they don't get sued for infringement of copyright!
Design: crap. Possibly the worst design I've ever seen on a 'professionally made' website.
Oo oo, and I almost forgot the best bit. To start with your account is 'Not verified'. When you click on why, it says that in order to stop people using profile photos that aren't actually of themselves (sadly this does happen on Gaydar, when people are too ugly to use their own pictures) they have set up a system of checking. In order to get your account 'verified', they want you to write on a piece of paper a FIFTEEN CHARACTER random verification code they give you, hold it up, photograph yourself holding it and looking like a complete knobhead for going to all this trouble, and then email it to them. Only then will they believe you actually are the person in the photo. What a completely ridiculous thing to expect people to do! That was the last straw for me.
Usability: crap.
So I clicked off of it, went back on Facebook, and left a scathing message on the group wall about how pathetic the site is.
And now they've deleted my message, because clearly when they asked for feedback they only wanted people to say nice things! Losers...
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Blogging
I'm enjoying blogging at the moment, I seem to have had a few things that I want to write about. I've also found some other people's blogs that have been fun to read, and I quite like that (after much MUCH stress and it not working properly) I can now send little blog posts straight from my phone. That means I'll be able to write little bits over the weekend, rather than having to save up things and then remember to do them when I'm at work. I do, of course, have internet access at home, but I've hardly ever written on my blog from there. Why would I want to when I can do it in work time?
Lots of people don't write as much as me in their blog posts though, I'm wondering if I go on a bit. Often they seem to write just a few sentences, but perhaps more frequently than I post. Does that make me verbose and boring?? Hmm, we'll see. If I post more often I'll write less, so maybe I'll try doing that.
Lots of people don't write as much as me in their blog posts though, I'm wondering if I go on a bit. Often they seem to write just a few sentences, but perhaps more frequently than I post. Does that make me verbose and boring?? Hmm, we'll see. If I post more often I'll write less, so maybe I'll try doing that.
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11 September 2008
I always miss EVERYTHING!
It's so frustrating that I always manage to miss every gig and performance that I would want to attend, simply because I either don't hear about them until afterwards or by the time I do hear about them they're sold out. It's happened twice in the last month or so, and having signed up for various email updates from venues and performers doesn't seem to have helped at all!
First, I love Lisa Loeb and would say she's probably my favourite musician. Chris and I saw her perform in London a couple of years ago, and really enjoyed it and said we'd definitely see her again if we could (she doesn't perform in England all that often). And then off we gaily flew (boom boom) to America, spent four days in New York and then went on to San Francisco, and THEN I got an email saying she happened to have performed in New York during those very four days. Damn it! I would have definitely gone if I'd known! I'm on her email list specifically FOR such information and I still didn't get it/read it in time to go!
And then yesterday Chris was listening to some songs by Jay Brannan on MySpace and saying how good they were. Jay Brannan is a rather cute singer/songwriter who lives in New York and who was in the film Shortbus, which is where we know him from. So I started clicking around on his MySpace profile, and found to my horror that he performed at the Brighton Komedia on 27 August! For FUCK'S sake!! I'm ON the 'What's on at the Komedia' email list and there's never ANYTHING I want to see on the list, so I've stopped reading it particularly closely, and I managed to miss that as well! And it's not like he's a massive star or anything, especially not over here, so he probably won't be back in England for ages.
Soooo frustrating, email updates are just useless because you never end up reading them.
First, I love Lisa Loeb and would say she's probably my favourite musician. Chris and I saw her perform in London a couple of years ago, and really enjoyed it and said we'd definitely see her again if we could (she doesn't perform in England all that often). And then off we gaily flew (boom boom) to America, spent four days in New York and then went on to San Francisco, and THEN I got an email saying she happened to have performed in New York during those very four days. Damn it! I would have definitely gone if I'd known! I'm on her email list specifically FOR such information and I still didn't get it/read it in time to go!
And then yesterday Chris was listening to some songs by Jay Brannan on MySpace and saying how good they were. Jay Brannan is a rather cute singer/songwriter who lives in New York and who was in the film Shortbus, which is where we know him from. So I started clicking around on his MySpace profile, and found to my horror that he performed at the Brighton Komedia on 27 August! For FUCK'S sake!! I'm ON the 'What's on at the Komedia' email list and there's never ANYTHING I want to see on the list, so I've stopped reading it particularly closely, and I managed to miss that as well! And it's not like he's a massive star or anything, especially not over here, so he probably won't be back in England for ages.
Soooo frustrating, email updates are just useless because you never end up reading them.
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10 September 2008
Testing mobile blogging
Apparently I should now be able to blog straight from my phone to here. Wonder if it will work, and how much of a fortune it'll cost...
09 September 2008
I declare three days of mourning
I am officially in mourning for Dynamite Boogaloo, which was pronounced dead early on Thursday morning. Yes, after 16 years of entertaining the Brighton masses with hotpants, massive hooters and horrible party games, Boogaloo Stu has finally taken it round the back of the barn and shot it in the neck.
I'm actually really sad, as Boogaloo has been a part of my life in Brighton ever since I moved down here in 1999. I must have been hundreds of times in the last nine years, and was ever so slowly building up to maybe one day participating in the cabaret. I'm not really sure what finished it off in the end either. It had a lot of venue changes during the last year, and its numbers had certainly been dropping off. I think every year Boogaloo used to recruit a new batch of fairly loyal student attendees who would go most weeks, but then it failed to do so this year and the numbers dropped and dropped. To be fair, I've been going less often myself, but I was still managing maybe once a month.
It was never really the same after it moved from the Joint to Above Audio, although it picked up a lot once it moved downstairs to Audio proper. But then it moved to Candy Bar, and then suddenly moved again to the Arc, and the venue was just too large and not very well laid-out for it. I thought they might wait to see how well it did once the students arrived again in October, but apparently not.
Dynamite Boogaloo on a Thursday is survived by its younger, fatter sibling: Super Dynamite Boogaloo, once a month on a Saturday at the Komedia. So it's not ALL bad, I'll still get to see Boogaloo Stu blatently falsifying the cabaret outcome so his favoured person wins, and Dolly Rocket tottering around with talcum powder all round her gob as Amy Winearse. But I'll no longer have my weekly "shall we shan't we" dilemma on a Thursday evening, and my Friday hangovers will be no more.
On a slightly more cheery note, we tried Popstarz at the Ghetto again last Friday. We went a couple of weeks ago, and were APPALLED by the poor quality of the music and left in a huff. But we magnanimously decided to give it another go last week (well, some other people were going, so we said oh alright) and it was really good! Much better than before, as this time the DJ actually put some good music on that people wanted to dance to, instead of ignoring the fact that his dancefloor had remained empty for the last two hours.
So I suppose we might exchange our Thursday nights out for Fridays, and my productivity at work on a Friday will probably increase by at least 32%. I should probably ask for a pay rise in that case...
I'm actually really sad, as Boogaloo has been a part of my life in Brighton ever since I moved down here in 1999. I must have been hundreds of times in the last nine years, and was ever so slowly building up to maybe one day participating in the cabaret. I'm not really sure what finished it off in the end either. It had a lot of venue changes during the last year, and its numbers had certainly been dropping off. I think every year Boogaloo used to recruit a new batch of fairly loyal student attendees who would go most weeks, but then it failed to do so this year and the numbers dropped and dropped. To be fair, I've been going less often myself, but I was still managing maybe once a month.
It was never really the same after it moved from the Joint to Above Audio, although it picked up a lot once it moved downstairs to Audio proper. But then it moved to Candy Bar, and then suddenly moved again to the Arc, and the venue was just too large and not very well laid-out for it. I thought they might wait to see how well it did once the students arrived again in October, but apparently not.
Dynamite Boogaloo on a Thursday is survived by its younger, fatter sibling: Super Dynamite Boogaloo, once a month on a Saturday at the Komedia. So it's not ALL bad, I'll still get to see Boogaloo Stu blatently falsifying the cabaret outcome so his favoured person wins, and Dolly Rocket tottering around with talcum powder all round her gob as Amy Winearse. But I'll no longer have my weekly "shall we shan't we" dilemma on a Thursday evening, and my Friday hangovers will be no more.
On a slightly more cheery note, we tried Popstarz at the Ghetto again last Friday. We went a couple of weeks ago, and were APPALLED by the poor quality of the music and left in a huff. But we magnanimously decided to give it another go last week (well, some other people were going, so we said oh alright) and it was really good! Much better than before, as this time the DJ actually put some good music on that people wanted to dance to, instead of ignoring the fact that his dancefloor had remained empty for the last two hours.
So I suppose we might exchange our Thursday nights out for Fridays, and my productivity at work on a Friday will probably increase by at least 32%. I should probably ask for a pay rise in that case...
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