Moving ...

Goodness it's been ages since I've updated this blog and I really haven't got time at the moment for a big long essay on what has been happening in my life, suffice to say that the past few months have been incredibly manic and busy but so much fun, mainly thanks to the many fantastic people in my life - thanks all!

This post is, unfortunately, rather a boring one to inform anyone that is insane enough to read this blog that it's moving (back) to the following address:

http://fionasboots.blogspot.com

The reason for the change is that it's so easy for people to use http://www.fionasboots.co.uk when they mean to refer to my photography website, which actually makes alot of sense given that I'm in the UK! So, rather than try and correct everyone it's just easier to redirect the .co.uk to the .com address :)

Right, I best get on with other stuff that needs sorting out, I promise I'll do a proper update here again soon :)

Pictures and Prints

I'm slowly getting sorted out with my pictures and websites though I have some tinkering still to do. I've added more galleries to the website and very soon I'll make this the main destination for that domain and use it more for holding medium resolution versions of my pictures.

I've also started submitting prints on DeviantART, for example this one of a Poppy, which can be purchased and shipped to the UK. For the most part I'm going to keep providing images under the Creative Commons License, but for some I'm going to retain all rights and see if anyone is willing to part with their hard-earned cash. If you really like my pictures then do consider purchasing a print, it gives me a great ego boost as well as funding my shopping needs (well wants really).

Half millennium!

I seem to have been really busy over the past few weeks and haven't really had the time or inclination to write anything so I've been a bit lax about keeping things up to date. I've got a tiny amount of time now and I just noticed that I've had 499 posts so far which makes this the 500th! That's quite alot of wittering over the past ... goodness, it's only two and a bit years!

Anyway, here's to another 500 posts of complete and utter nonesense!

Catching Up

The problem with taking lots of pictures and having a fairly busy social (and work) life that presents many opportunities to practice my photography, means that I don't seem to have much time to sit down and process the images that I've captured so that I can blog about them or even get prints!

I guess I could make things a little easier on myself by not taking pictures in RAW mode but the advantage of doing that is that it's then possible to correct for colour, contrast, or carry out other tweaks before producing the final picture, if you go straight to JPEG that's not as easy to do as you've lost alot of the information that the camera captured.

Since I have a bit of a back-log of events and pictures I'm going to blog with place-holder entries to keep everything in order and then update each entry when I've got the whole set of images done so I can refer to the location on my website or deviantART where I've uploaded the pictures!

I'm Famous ...

... well, not quite, but for the first time someone, other than my friends, has re-published a post from my blog which I'm really quite pleased about, their version actually looks better than the one hosted on blogger here!

The post in question is Empowerment Through Style and can be found here on the Directory of York website. The screen shot below shows my entry on their blog page:

Now, if only I could get my website to look half as good as that I might be on to something!

OMG, why?!

It's terrible, almost too horrible to describe, totally inexplicable, a shock, words really do fail me. I wish I had been more prepared for this, if I could have got some help, maybe even professional advice or a support group or something. I really just don't know where to start or what to do, I'm completely at a loss.

Why, oh, why, oh, why ... have I got a Twitter account!!

Yes, I have finally succumbed to the latest in social-networking time-sinks for the very flimsiest of reasons:

1. There is a work-related Twitter account I wanted to follow#
2. I didn't want anyone else to get the "fionasboots" ID!
3. Erm, no, that's it, no other reason at all!

So, you will notice that I now have short, bite-sized, drivel fed from Twitter on the front page of the blog (look to your left), which I might even manage to keep up to date! Since my account is rather devoid of followers at the moment, please head over to http://twitter.com/fionasboots (or is that @fionasboots in Twitter speak?) and add/follow/whatever me.

Opinion or Ignorance

This has been covered by several blogs already but it was something I felt was pertinent to me and worth comment. There is on a post on Misha Safranski's blog concerning this topic: Should Transsexual People Teach in Public Schools? The poster is very much against this but does not seem to have documented any specific reasons except that she feels that exposing children to these issues isn't a good idea.

There is plenty of comments against this post (including one from me) and alot of to-ing and fro-ing of opinion as well as name-calling and general questioning of research, basis, reasons, etc. In short it has all the makings of a raging debate which achieves very little. I suspect that this is the blogger's aim on the whole.

What is concerning is that there are many people who would hold such discriminatory views. The reasons for such views essentially boil down to prejudice (either for some personal reason or because of upbringing, political or, most likely, religious beliefs*) or pure ignorance, though the latter usually has to be coupled with a degree of the former.

The term 'ignorant' is usually seen as a derogatory term and I believe in the comments the blogger's response was that she had read more about it and still held her view. I would maintain that reading about something can often still leave you as ignorant as you were before, even if you are reading unbiased literature.

In some ways I wish there was a magical way to make people like this experience what it is like to be trans, even if it is just for one day, so they can realise what it is like to be so unhappy with your own gender and everything that entails such as outward appearance, body, feelings, emotions, and your whole identity. I think only then would you have the right to give an opinion.

One very common misconception, which is mentioned or implied repeatedly on the comments on this post, is that transsexual people have a choice, that it's a lifestyle thing (the same opinion is applied to anyone who is homosexual). There is no choice. You are who and what you are are, no matter how much you try to fight it or attempt to conform to some ideal set by culture, or church or ignorant people. Trans people can spend a long time in denial before realising their true self and some may even die (either naturally or much worse, by suicide) without being able to transition.

A related misconception is that transness can be 'cured'. If you take hormones to become the gender you feel you are, the opposite hormones will make you 'normal' again. It simply doesn't work like that. Taking hormones will, hopefully, help your body change such that you feel happier with it, but no pill will make you a man or a woman, that is something that is built into your idea of self. And no, that doesn't make it a mental illness either with some possible treatment. Many trans people have gone through all sorts of things in search of a 'cure' and there simply isn't one, apart from being who and what you feel in you heart/soul/mind you are. That's the only way to be truly comfortable and happy.

Tinkering

You may have noticed a bit of a change in the layout and format of my blog. Think I just needed a bit of a change and to get away from the rather overly-coloured (pink) format I had before. I hope this new layout is easier to read and looks a bit more professional and stylish (even if the content doesn't). Actually I'm not really too bothered if it doesn't, I just had a nice time fiddling with CSS and HTML tags, was nice to do something geeky AND useful!

Anyway, if anyone has any remarks/criticisms on the new look, feel free to comment.

An interesting night

It sounds quite a bland title but I mean it most sincerely and completely, I had a fantastic time last night at the launch event/party/celebration (not entirely sure what to call it) for the book Single Mother on the Verge written by Marie Roberts and based on her blog of the same name.

I should explain that I was there because my friend Kim invited me along since her and some other friends, also there that night, were friends with Marie; I did have all the history of where they'd all worked together and the whole history but it's way to complicated to go into here.

Anyway, back to last night. The event itself was fun, a few readings from the book, some extracts from other books by different authors, art, music and the inimitable compere for evening who introduced herself as Precious Cleaver, one half of the folk-singing duo The Cleaver Sisters (very entertaining she was too). I wish I could remember the names of the woman from LA who sang as well as the duo who did a few of their songs too, they were all very good.

The night was also made more enjoyable by just meeting fantastically fascinating people, like one of Kim's friends who works for the company that produced the Super Lamb Bananas that recently graced the city of Liverpool with their colourful presence. (I believe the company is called Wild in Art and they have lots of other similar art projects on the go).

The art on display last night was by Anne Earnshaw and both pieces were actually photographs though this was difficult to tell so I had to ask. One of them, not shown on her website unfortunately, was of oil on water and captured lots of different reflections, colours and shapes and was just so intriguing because at times I was convinced it was an abstract painting.

Another person I met and have a wonderful chat with was an author, Qaisra Shahraz, writing of several novels including The Holy Woman which I think I shall add to my must read list (after completing Single Mother on the Verge obviously).

Of course I did get to talk to Kim as well, who is interesting herself!

So, this is probably a bit of a name-dropping post but the aim is not to make me sound more interesting by association (it reads a bit like that, not intentional honest), but simply to promote people who I found so intriguing.

[ P.S. I desperately need a thesaurus! ]

Digital trap

I think I've tried to write this down before but I've not really been able to really find the right words until I could think up a snappier title for the post and maybe get my thoughts lined up in some order.

One the problems with having online representations of my life is that it makes it harder to express what I'm really feeling both here and in real life. A single pithy status update won't convey all the different things I'm going through. It's almost like I need many of these all at the same time to cover my feelings accurately.

I tried to put it in technical terms by saying that my brain was currently "running with a load average of at least 10" but that really only works if you know what on earth I'm talking about! *

What is also hard to convey is how difficult things are when what you have put out into the great digital world seems to be so much of your life; people begin to think that that is all there is and forget that one of the great advantages of this virtual environment is that you can hide your true self completely.

Of course this is essentially a double whammy; putting more into your virtual life not only means people believe that is all there is but you also start to find it harder to express things in reality. The digital representations become your way to trying to communicate with everyone else, to try and explain yourself from the slightly safer-feeling cyber world.

The bottom line is that what appears online is, at best, only showing a few small facets of what I am going through and while these show ups and downs they are by no means a complete picture and should not be taken as the whole.

[ * - Load average on a Linux/UNIX machine is the number of processes available to run at a given point in time (actually over a span of time, e.g. average over the last 1, 5, and 10 minutes). Usually on an unloaded machine the load average is low, often less than 1, even if there are lots of things running, most of the time they are waiting for things to happen. Even on a slightly busier machine load average may not increase much. Once you start getting into bigger numbers then the CPU is constantly going to be doing real work and having to think all the time ]

Gaining followers!

As a few people pointed out, the sudden drop in the list of people following my blog was likely down to a technical glitch with Google/Blogger as they also experienced the same sort of thing.

Now I seem to be up to 19 poor, mis-guided, souls following my inane ramblings! Wonder if I can break the 20 barrier? :D

Hmmm, yes, a slow news day as you can tell, nothing much else to report except I'm thinking more about all the things from the 70s/80s/90s that we could do with bringing back to cheer us all up during the current economic 'fun'. Definitely think we need something like Spitting Image and similar satirical programmes since the current crop of politians desperately need to be ridiculed!

Looks like other people have the same idea as well: Fame is coming back and, on the news this morning, Michael Jackson is going to be performing in London. Not a fan at all, but it's clearly got some people excited! Hmmm, wonder who else could make a come back (well attempt one), answers on a postcard :)

Where did you all go?!

I know it shouldn't matter but I do like to see my list of "followers" of my blog grow. It started with one or two and slowly passed the 10 mark and was, until yesterday sitting at 17 which I was quite pleased with!

Now it's dropped to 13! I've lost 4 people! WTF!?

Hmmm, don't think I said anything too controversial in the last few posts so no idea what is going on there!

Please come back, all is forgiven :D

Blogs everywhere!

Well, I can't believe people actually listen to what I say, it's such a shock! Lucy, who has been mentioned here several times has now, finally, got herself a blog:

Lucy's Blog

Now I should have written about the shopping trip that Lucy and I went on on Sunday but I kind of didn't get round to it ... and now I feel bad because her post was so nice (and written so well) that I wish I could come up with an equally touching entry myself.

Anyway, go and have a read of Lucy's blog, particularly after next weekend when, as she mentions, we're going out in Manchester and will probably be having alot of fun and ... erm, hold on a minute ... NO! Don't read the blog, just in case I do something silly and Lucy posts a picture of me ... OMG, even if I don't do anything silly I don't think I want any pictures of me ... I'll look terrible!

One final word on blogs; I've said before that people I know in real life read this but I just thought I'd say thanks to the friends in particular that *REALLY* pay attention and phone me up if I don't sound happy.

P.S. I'm going to try and keep this blog more up-to-date over the coming weeks and make a concerted effort to try and write shorter and more personal accounts of what is going on because I think there is going to be lots that will be happening to me physically and mentally!