• Gay Afghanistan: Homoeroticism Among Kabul’s Warriors
  Afghan men talking, joking, and skating along the edges of gay life: a brave American writer flies into Afghanistan to ask some questions about a taboo subject. [via kg4yef]
  (tags: queer)
• Metro DC Challenge to Sprawl Campaign
  Poorly planned development is threatening our environment and quality of life in the Washington area. Suburban sprawl is increasing traffic, sapping local resources, and destroying open space. [via shawn in dc]
  (tags: dcarea mass.transit)
• Coalition Against Trafficking in Women
  NGO promotion women’s human rights by working internationally to combat sexual exploitation in all its forms.
  (tags: women)

• How to Hypnotize A Man
  Simple but cute; not safe for work. [via eros blog]
  (tags: funny sex)
• qPodder
  An affirming online community for queer-identified podcasts, their publishers, audiences, and anyone else interested in this cutting edge medium. [via ongline]
  (tags: podcasting queer)

Thanks to perigee I now have my very own wiki, so I can keep all my factual writing in one place. He set up a copy of MediaWiki on his site for me, and I have spent the entire day engrossed in it. The achievement I am most proud of is figuring out how to make template infoboxes, but I’ve been doing a bunch of other stuff too. I have put my Wikipedia contributions in - that was easy, of course, because it was going from MediaWiki to MediaWiki. I’m now working on my Everything2 writeups, though, and that is going to take a lot longer. I have several hundred articles there, and I put a few of them up with complete links (most of the hardlinks are getting sent to WikiPedia articles) and graphics and everything. I then figured out that doing that would make the port process very slow and so I’m now just grabbing each writeup and dumping it into my Wiki straight. I drop it in Notepad first, replace all the [ with [[ and the <em> with ” and so forth, and then I save it with a category of “Wikify.” It’s fun so far, believe it or not. By the way, I have turned off anonymous editing and new user signups for my wiki, because I’m the only one I want messing with it - at least for now.

I suspect the hardcore geeking I’ve been doing for the past month or so has been an attempt to escape some of the harder thoughts I’ve had floating around in my head. I’m looking forward to getting my new games soon, too.

• Stop Relay Abuse
  Since it began in 2002, Internet Relay has been overwhelmed with calls from overseas criminal gangs using the service to scam U.S. businesses and individuals.
  (tags: deaf technology)
• wiki:compare [DokuWiki]
  Table comparison of multiple wiki tools.
  (tags: wiki)
• TikiWiki Documentation
  Help resource for TikiWiki.
  (tags: wiki)
• A fatwa for transsexuals
  Surprisingly, Iran is the world leader in sexual reassignment surgery. From Salon.com - requires Day Pass.
  (tags: queer)
• The fluidity of gender
  Somewhat confusing OregonLive.com article about a teenager who is apparently FTM…if I’m reading this right. The article mixes up pronouns early on and that’s throwing me off. [via queer day]
  (tags: queer)
• The power of Wi-Fi
  It’s free, ubiquitous and magnetic all over the western US… [via techdirt]
  (tags: wifi)
• HRC Corner Store
  Rainbows and yellow/blue equality symbols abound. [via faggoty ass faggot]
  (tags: queer stuff.to.buy)

It occurs to me that there are some people I haven’t heard from in a while who probably don’t realize I’m still thinking about them often and wondering how they’re doing.

preppyperv	aleja	Halsted
gwenzilla	Gilmore	boiswillbebois
oh_chris	zille	Richard
DustyWolfe	Becky	dayzeeedogg

…they are but a few of the friends I miss.

pegsioux found this absolutely wonderful website called Stuff On My Cat. She initially linked to a cat named (surprise) Peggy Sue who was photographed balancing a tall candle on her back, so I figured this was the kitty version of Oolong. But then I went to the front page of the site, and I was amazed at what I saw.

• Beanie is the world’s most patient cat. Ever.
• The look on Holly’s face is just adorable.
• Mr. Beans would like you to give him some milk.
• And Janis is just…wow.

There are lots more, actually - go look at the site!

• Nostalgia Central
  Reminiscing about the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Hypercolor!
  (tags: history fun)
• Zachariah Dutton Genealogy Web
  An online chronicle of the family of Zachariah Dutton, a Maryland Revolutionary patriot who migrated to North Carolina, whose descendants spread throughout the Carolinas, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, and Oklahoma, and who now cover the globe.
  (tags: history)
• RFC 3092
  Metasyntactic variables are my friends! [via kiki]
  (tags: language oldtech)
• Meet ‘Women’s Auxiliary of NAMBLA’
  About Butterfly Kisses. The URL in the intro does work but only through Archive.org.
  (tags: queer fringe)
• Google Ride Finder
  Live taxi and shuttle locations in fourteen major U.S. cities. Still in the Labs. [via google weblog]
  (tags: travel)
• FriendlyCode
  WordPress plugin for proper code highlighting (of cpp, css, diff, dtd, javascript, mysql, perl, php, python, ruby, sql, and xml). [via weblogtoolscollection]
  (tags: wordpress coding)
• FeedLounge
  Web-based feed reader. Still in alpha. [via weblogtoolscollection]
  (tags: rss)
• GoogleX
  Unofficial OSX-style interface to various Google services. [via pcworld]
  (tags: gmail internet)
• Cryptome
  Secret government reports, conspiracies, security, etc. [via pcworld]
  (tags: random)
• SharpMail
  Anonymous e-mailing, SMS, and telephone numbers (UK only). [via pcworld]
  (tags: internet)
• SwapThing
  Oh my god - could this really be a replacement for my beloved, long-gone SwitcHouse? Signup is free; swaps are a buck. [via pcworld]
  (tags: onlineculture)
• RemindMe
  Free e-mailed reminders (with ads) or pay software with popups. [via pcworld]
  (tags: tools)
• Ships and Cruises
  News and information on ships, lines, terminals, barges, historical ships, and specialty cruises. Cruise tools as well.
  (tags: cruising)

After using net2ftp on its own website for quite some time, I finally installed it on my own site. There was no need to, really - I’m perfectly happy piping my stuff through net2ftp.com - but I decided to go ahead with it so I can learn a bit more about how it works. It’s really a killer app for me, because I am not supposed to install my own FTP client at work, and I can’t access the Cpanel file manager from work either. So I’ve been using net2ftp’s editor heavily, and I have gotten so used to it that I’m even using net2ftp from home!

It appears to work just fine on my own site, perhaps a bit slower than at net2ftp.com but not terribly so…not more than I can handle, anyway. I only just discovered the Java upload feature while uploading my own copy of net2ftp - it makes uploading many directories and files much easier than the file-by-file method I’d been using. By installing it on my own server I also got rid of the Google ads that are around net2ftp.com as you use the service; this is a minor benefit but it’s still nice. It does feel a bit odd to be using something on my own server to upload to my own server though!

Did I mention I love net2ftp? (And for the time being I am not sharing where I installed it.)

• Widget Gallery
  For Konfabulator, which is for XP and OSX, and is now free. Not sure I need the mosquito conditions widget, but systemDashboard? Oh hell yeah. [via perigee]
  (tags: software tools)
• XX Boys
  Visual presentation of trans FTM attitude, sex appeal, arrogance, pride, body…(I translated that from French.) [via aidan_boi_x]
  (tags: queer)
• The Lappyvator
  A laptop holder for the bedridden. [via kalephunk]
  (tags: technology)
• Subversive Cross-Stitch
  Kits for making naughty samplers. (This link is safe for work unless the f-word in cross-stitch is bad for your work.) [via kalephunk]
  (tags: crafts fun)
• Buck Angel
  I think he just might be right - he probably IS the only FTM transman on the web with his own porn site. Totally NSFW. [via kalephunk]
  (tags: sex queer)
• Technosexuality
  Technosexuality refers to the sexual interest in machines, robots, androids, gynoids and other sexual devices not really occurring in real life. And sometimes, ones that actually exist. [via kalephunk]
  (tags: sex fringe)
• Coded By Hand!
  Very simply, “Coded by Hand” means that I did not use a program like Adobe PageMill, or Netscape’s Composer, or even Macromedia’s totally cool Dreamweaver to create my web pages. [via demented kisses]
  (tags: design)
• Made With Notepad Campaign
  This campaign exists to support people who use Notepad, or other similar text-editors, to design and create their own web pages. [via demented kisses]
  (tags: design)
• Walter Koenig’s Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame
  He is the only remaining member of the original cast without a star.
  (tags: startrek)

My dear friends: polls hate me. All polls hate me. The two remotely hosted solutions I tried didn’t work, and I tried two of the options offered by my host through Fantastico but they didn’t do what I wanted either. And so I have given up the poll option, and I respectfully request that you go leave a comment on the original entry with your choice for what computer game I should get. Even if you already voted - successfully or unsuccessfully - in a poll, please comment and let me know what your vote was for.