The Toronto Star, where I wrote a how-to-get-online column before, during, and after the historical moment when the Web was invented, is sinking millions into a “tablet app,” as they consistently misname it. This project, which could cost the company $9 million, involves licensing an iPad (not “tablet”) app from La Presse.

It also involves hiring an army of hacks, editors, developers, designers, and ad-floggers. But, they’ve made it clear, under no circumstances whatsoever will the Star hire me.

Now: Why would they? Apart from the fact I actually am part of the Star “family,” albeit one who only shows up at Thanksgiving and expects Tofurky and vegan gravy, and apart from the further fact that I essentially learned my craft at the feet of Sid Adilman, I am now the last developer left in Toronto with standards-compliance and accessibility knowledge. I told you already who the second-last was. I further am the only one who is an accomplished journalist and editor with 30 years’ typography knowledge.

The Star needs me because its technical infrastructure is seriously broken. [continue with: Don’t expect to be taken seriously by the ‘Toronto Star’ →]

I met Mr. SCOTT BOMS in some guise during the doomed abortive run of Webstandards.TO, the social club I formed for Toronto standardistas that finally once and for all taught me I am much too unpopular to start any club. Scott is a highly competent designer–developer, a combination that, like accessibility designers, no longer exists. He is, further, well versed in typography.

Scott and I worked like dogs to give an adequately researched presentation at another failed enterprise (this one not my own), BookCamp, in 2010. Just now I found the handout I gave to members of the audience, who later took to Twitter to shit all over me.

Scott’s wee office was just down the road from me, and I visited him a couple of times. He very compassionately listened to me and rubbed my shoulder. I remember a separate creative-luncheon kind of meet-’n’-greet held at his office that was visibly uncomfortable for everyone and – again – resulted in my character’s being assassinated the minute I left the place. (I distinctly recall Ben Lucier, even then fully weaponized, as the aggressor. He aptly describes himself on Twitter as a “hooligan” and has failed upward to New York, as natural a home for bullies as Twitter itself. And surely Ben’s true surname is Lucifer. [You can take that to the bank.])

Scott is a tiny, perfect graphic-designer type, with no gut, impeccable casual clothing, and an abundance of children. (Graphic designers, like Mormons, are outbreeding the Muslims.) A tidy masculine model comparable to that of the Mormons, who themselves are often good designers (no religion has better graphics). Scott lived one or two neighbourhoods over, and I kept not quite understanding his messages on Twitter about selling his house, then finding a rental house to live in. I was then equally baffled by a reference to San Francisco, and seemingly a moment later I realized Scott had left Toronto for Facebook.

When he did so, Toronto lost its second-last standardista and the very last accessibility‑ and standards-aware graphic designer. I didn’t blame him. While it costs a fortune to live there, even without asking I know he’s earning a fortune. Toronto is too second-rate, and too hostile to expertise, and too hostile for a designer to raise children in.

I have followed Scott onliné since he left. Apart from masterminding typography at a venture that appears to have nothing of the sort, he spends his days in a garage on the Back 40 of the Facebook compound hand-painting signs for an Honest Ed’s of the imagination.

He got out just in time.

When I tell disbelieving-antagonistic-uncongenial-hostile interlocutors that I am the last standardista standing in Toronto, I mean Scott was second-last. He is also the second-last man I knew personally who took me seriously. I’ve got one left.

Two observations by Mike Daisey about being the object of gleeful public pillorying (as found in JON·RON·SON’s book; second quotation from his blog):

• The way we construct consciousness is to tell the story of ourselves to ourselves, the story of who we believe we are. I feel that a really public shaming or humiliation is a conflict between the person trying to write his own narrative and society trying to write a different narrative for the person. One story tries to overwrite the other. And so, to survive, you have to write your own story. Or you write a third story. You react to the narrative that’s been forced upon you.

  You have to find a way to disrespect the other narrative. If you believe it, it will crush you.

• It feels like they want an apology, but it’s a lie.

  It’s a lie because they don’t want an apology. An apology is supposed to be a communion – a coming-together. For someone to make an apology someone has to be listening. They listen and you speak and there’s an exchange. That’s why we have a thing about accepting apologies….

  But they don’t want an apology. What they want is my destruction. What they want is for me to die. They will never say this because it’s too histrionic. But they never want to hear from me again for the rest of my life, and while they’re never hearing from me they have the right to use me as a cultural reference point whenever it services their ends. That’s how it would work out best for them. They would like me to never speak again. I’d never had the opportunity to be the object of hate before. The hard part isn’t the hate. It’s the object.

Walking down to the Carlton, whose showing of They Live I had managed to miss, I passed an apartment building with a well-made sign. Enamelled steel? I wondered, getting right up to it. No, just Tremclad. Then I felt the raised lettering (plastic), and walked away while wondering if the font was Thesis. No, Cæcilia, I realized instantly without looking back.

I saw the trailer for an upcoming film in which a Eurasian-American actor affects an ungodly French accent and plans a daring caper that would have him walk between towers of the World Trade Center across a thin cable. That’s just Man on Wire, I thought at once.

I put these two instances together and realized that all the knowledge and experience I accumulated over a lifetime are, like that lifetime, now worthless.

I then watched Best of Enemies, a documentary about a lost era of popular television intellectuals, both now deceased.

After being told over and over again that there were actual scandals to be exposed at Pink Triangle Press, Jesse Brown decided to let a former paid employee of Xtra write a loving farewell to the “gay and lesbian” newspaper chain that had folded six months previous. And that farewell letter was barely distinguishable from a piece that same Millennial hack, Erica Lenti, had written for RRJ in January.

Lenti made good use of Brown’s credulousness, willingness to backstab, and malign ignorance of the actual gay and lesbian press. She joined a list of other journos who recited approved bromides about all the good work Xtra did that we will all now surely miss.

To dumb Millennial hacks, Xtra is a cherished cornerstone of our diverse “LGBTQ” communities. Its most important feature was its “pink” (actually fuchsia) streetcorner newspaper box. These hacks are very concerned about the elimination of the container that held Xtra rather than Xtra itself, which I am sure they never read. (Can you imagine hetero hacks pulling out a copy of Xtra from a streetcorner newspaper box in broad daylight?)

The “pink” newspaper boxes were held up as a form of “visibility.” Fags holding hands in public is visibility; newspaper boxes are “unregulated, multi-hued hunks of metal.”

Every obituary for the printed Xtra that I read was premised on an idealized (this means false) conception of the paper. These hacks either have not actually read Xtra in recent years or are lying about it.

• Matthew Hays, an Xtra contributor who did not answer my questions, wrote in the Globe: “All it takes is for one election to provide us with politicians hostile to the idea of a rainbow flag in a public square, and we’re back to square one,” despite the Constitution and established legal precedent. “For those reasons it is imperative that we have a press for and by Canada’s evolving queer communities.” (A press. Just one. As we’ve always had.)

• Though I wasn’t quoted, my acquaintance James Dubro canvassed my opinions for an article in Now that was toothless and wilfully ignorant by any standard. “For many[, the discontinuation of the print edition] is disappointing and sad… because of the loss of visibility in the streets.” (That soon became the talking point for dumb Millennial hacks and for Craig Takeuchi in Vancouver.)

Toronto’s bien-pensant media intelligentsia want Xtra’s “pink” newspaper boxes back; what they don’t want is the task of investigating Xtra. When challenged, Lenti, via top-posted E‑mail, asked me what I would have written. Here it is. [continue with: The dumb Millennial’s guide to ‘Xtra’ →]

Brian Abrams has written a classic of the oral-history genre, this time on Kindle and about Gawker. Mr. SICHA:

There’s a huge male energy that’s a sort of muscularity that I like about Gawker. It’s brash, but it’s also really outward-looking. The thing about the straight men who work there, they don’t have any qualms about seizing any editorial territory. It’s sort of [un]real. They’ll cover anything, while the rest of us are sort of like, “I know about books.” That’s a self-limiting thing.

Further: I know the only person ever to receive an unequivocally positive recommendation after leaving Denton’s employ.

A purported “scholar” at the University of Toronto, Ms Kyle Kirkup, wrote the following lie about Stonewall at Torontoist:

On June 28, 1969, the New York Police Department… raided the Stonewall Inn, targeting queer and trans people for having the audacity to gather together…. The riot – led by trans women of colour

This is false, of course. “Trans women” are, first of all, men, and they did not exist in 1969. The attendees of the Stonewall Inn were gay men with a few lesbians and a very few cross-dressers and drag queens. It was illegal to appear in public in opposite-sex attire in 1969 in New York. It’s an established historical fact that those cross-dressers and drag queens – their own self-descriptions – were few in number (perhaps two) and did not “lead” anything. Further, the Stonewall uprising lasted several nights.

But to a queer theorist like Kirkup, and to a downtown-progressive blog like Torontoist, facts are whatever you want them to be when the topic is the most oppressed people the world has ever known – transgenders. This is at least consistent with the intrinsically dishonest worldview of transgenders and their apologists, who hold that biology does not exist, some women have dicks and some men have vaginas (“Get over it!”), and you can just decide to be a woman or man at any time, such decision overriding every right and privilege other people hold.

A series of complaints to Kirkup and Torontoist’s co-editor-in-chief, David Hains, resulted in nothing until I threatened to call them liars. I do so now, because they are. That threat prompted the sole response, from Torontoist’s de facto publisher, Ken Hunt of St. Joseph Media, who wrote (excerpted): “The editors and writer stand behind the story as written and they do not feel that a correction is necessary or appropriate.”

“In other words, they knowingly lied and you support their doing so,” I replied. “I’m sure they would disagree with that interpretation,” Hunt wrote back. “Yes, I do support them.”

To sum up, then: Kyle Kirkup lied about the historical facts about the gay and lesbian uprising at Stonewall. Torontoist’s editor and publisher backed her to the hilt, the latter implying that fact is mere “interpretation.”

Torontoist’s corrections policy is, I see now, a sham. And this city blog, on its ninth life and owned by the for-profit St. Joseph, has the audacity to ask for donations.

Who finds Gengoroh Tagame (op. cit.), in his natural state and not when writing and illustrating a G-rated novella about lovable musclebear dads, a bit much? I can barely get through his English blog.

Nonetheless, after the manner of Mishima, when viewed in translation many of Gengoroh-san’s story titles are unexpectedly poetic.

• The Afterstory of the Mountain Cottage Training Camp

• The Army of Fallen Tears

• A Boy in Hell

• Company Slave Elegy

• Dissolve

• Nº 1 with a bullet: Do You Remember the South Island POW Camp?

• The Fallen Rugby Player

• Father and Son in Hell

• The Flower Garden of Bondage

• The Flying Dutchman

• The Gamefowl in Darkness

• The House of Brutes

• In the Chest

• The Long Lonely Night

• The Midnight Business

• The Mountain Cottage Training Camp

• The Nonulcer Dyspepsia (apparently for real)

• The Protégé

• Purgatorio

• The Rasp

• Run, My Horse, Run!

• The Silent Shore

• The Silver Flower

• Slave Training Summer Camp

• The Soldier’s Brave Blood

• The Song for Defeated Samurai

• Standing Ovations

• The Unpatriotic Boy

• The Vast Snow Field

• The Winter Fisherman Lodge

• The Yakuza’s Brave Blood

• The Yoke of Shadow