Thomas A. Peters writes a report on a project to evaluate downloadable talking books.

The goal of the trial was to enable talking-books centers, libraries for the blind and physically handicapped, other libraries who serve primarily persons who are print-impaired, and individuals who are print-impaired to test and evaluate the accessibility and general usability of this digital-audio-book system.

“184 print-impaired” persons used the service. Most of them liked the actual audiobooks, though they noted that those digital files were severely unusable for anyone accustomed to real talking books, since they lacked bookmarks and other navigation features. (Mainstream audiobooks for sighted people are not the same as talking books.) They also pretty much could not transfer the files to portable players, including players intended for accessible formats like DAISY.

That wasn’t the problem. The problem was that the Web site was inaccessible, as was the playback software, which people couldn’t get to work with the digital-rights management (DRM) that was always assumed to be necessary.

The idea that any organization would conduct at test of accessibility of a product or service with an inaccessible Web site is outrageous. How incompetent can you get? But that’s just what they did. [continue with: How not to test an accessible audiobook service →]

The gay Web designers are no more likely to be any good at their jobs than the gay print designers, and are more likely to be entirely invisible and unknown. What passes for a name brand in this demimonde is red-haired invert Patric(k) King (q.v.), who is in tight with the homosexualist cabal of Nick Denton. (So is Su, the bf unit with the extravagantly abbreviated name.) [continue with: Fisking Patric(k) King →]

Man, that’s bright.

Ages ago, Musto did a one-liner:

Pronounce this name. [HOLDS UP SIGN READING “WOLFGANG JOOP”]

Now try it with this:

A trailer sitting in a parking lot surrounded by piled-up boxes that sells leftover skin-tight underwear and tank tops for fags… which presumably some of them have already tried on.

Note the usage of laser-printed single pages as building blocks for the signage, and the superspecial lower-case w.

Mother. Of. God.

I only barely read gay “blogs” (short for “Web logs,” a kind of online diary or journal), and only when I am bored out of my mind. It is another thing we do badly, you know. Likewise, I do not have a “blogroll” (short for “Web log roll,” a list of blogs [short for “Web logs”] that one reads or endorses), mostly because your sites simply bore me. (That might explain why I read them when I am bored. And adorable Tom Coates denies writing a journal or diary anyway!)

I am, however, hot-hot-hot for ugly/beautiful olive-skinned Italian Rocco Forgione and his ugly/beautiful strawberry-blond bf unit Corey. I mean, could there be there a hotter combination? (I suppose possibly. My Italian limerent object has brown eyes and red hair. Best of both worlds, shurely.)

Corey has a typical gay job (in public relations) and likes comic books or some such thing, which I can overlook given that he’s so very strapping, also de facto straightedge. (I have a harder time reconciling the name of his “blog” [short for “Web log”], OpieBlue. The use of “blue” to refer to describe items that are red – black-and-blue rare steak, the orange aircraft flown by Virgin Blue – isn’t verbal sleight-of-hand, it’s a psychology experiment.)

I revel in the excoriation and scabrousness of sexy, allegedly-rich, openly-Italian Rocco, who never met a twit he didn’t photograph and lampoon. Since he meets them in public, save for that one time at the sauna, they are fair game. They’re the ones who went to the bar dressed like that! What did they expect? If I can write about what happens to me when I go out (e.g., Tales of the Toolbox, Steamworks), and Rick Bébout can write an entire memoir about life at the Bar, so can Rocco.

Far from being racist, that lumbering, hirsute Rocco is merely staying true to his sexual orientation, which is guys with “light-brown, blond or red hair.” Fair enough. If we aren’t sexist because we don’t like wymmynz, then we also aren’t racist because we do not fancy Asians, blacks, Indics, whites, or any other group. (Hi, Christian!) We are merely being true to ourselves.

I suppose Rocco hates nonwhites the way Itchy hates cats. Cartoon violence does not require little pictures. You can also do it in writing. Or Rocco can, at least.

Anyway, Rocco, who plausibly claims to be out on straight rugby teams and to have played “college” football, also takes the piss out of himself half the time, complete with unflattering photographs and his own parody “blog” (short for “Web log”). He’s not just deprecating, he’s self-deprecating. And have you ever listened to the gay accents of his friends, as heard in the home videos he posts? Half his sisters sound like hairdressers.

I do have a couple of questions, though. If he’s supposed to be an X5-driving rich Gino (gender-conformable synonym for “Guido” [disparaging term for Italians]) who just moved in with his ginger boyfriend, what are they doing with bedsheets for curtains? (As further seen in home videos.) And what happens when the bubble bursts?

I’ve got a whole Greatest Hits package here, but you can just read the archives yourself. You’ll shit yourself laughing, unless you’re the ethically questionable Joe·My·God (q.v.), about whom Rocco wrote (link added):

I refuse to write about my pathetic, lame, tired-ass friends and our gross sex stories à la some losers. I just want to be like Oh, My God, Joe, Give It Up. You are so fucking ugly and pathetic, you make me spit up in my mouth every time someone mentions you.

And if we wanted an elder statesman of gay “blogs” (short for “Web logs”), one who might pilot us through uncharted waters, it wouldn’t be Joe Jervis, Rocco, Corey, or me. There’s a reason it’s called self-publishing: You write what you want, and nobody else has to read it.

I totes defo want a night on the town with Rocco and his stocky ginger boyfriend.

I visited the Steamworks on one of the two weekly amateur nights. While seated in the south wing of the larger hot tub, I asked the other ginger/Gayrab duo in town, “What’s a nice married couple like you doing in a place like this?”

The giant Gayrab remained silent and impassive. All the squat, ruddy ginger could come up with was a shrug.

A stirring defense of legal wedlock if ever I saw one. Whose “open relationship” is not a fraud?

An execrable novel by Carla Sinclair, Signal to Noise, begins as a roman à clef about Wired, which she camouflages verbally, but in no other way, as Signal:

At Signal there are two echelons, and as Jim sees it, the two don’t mix very well. Those in his own echelon, which include the publishers and top editors, have cocktail parties and go to private business retreats and meet the digital world’s movers and shakers, while the rest of Signal’s crew… go to raves and smoke a lot of dope and read zines.

This may explain Wired’s inexplicable habit, in its early years, of Photoshopping away the disgusting corpulence of American cable-TV moguls, planting their bald, porcine heads on muscular action-figure bodies, and plastering the ensuing brownnose/encomium on the cover of the magazine.

Anyway, of course there are castes in the digital demimonde. Let’s make a list.

1. Standardistas who make Web sites and every other developer in the world, who publish documents that Internet Explorer for Windows can read.
2. AOL and everyone else. (AOLers are afraid of the real Internet, whose users look with untrammelled scoron on AOLers.)
3. LiveJournal (the bobbysoxer’s blogging service, also the recipient of untrammelled scorn) vs. TypePad (the administrative assistant’s) vs. Movable Type (the Windows system administrator’s) vs. WordPress (the standardista’s) vs. every other platform (the eccentric’s).

I’m a standardista who uses WordPress and who thinks AOL and LiveJournal are a flat-out joke. While I don’t smoke dope or read zines, neither do I drink cocktails, take weekends at Aspen, or know anyone named Negroponte.

So, I mean, fuck you all.