12.31.99 >> I'm throwing a Happy New Year 2012 party tonight (we're celebrating the Mayan calendar event early), so this will be my only entry. Don't get stupid, and be wary of those who did get stupid. Good luck out there.

Okay, one other note. I just tried to get to Adam Twelve, and everything at saidgun.com has been wiped out. Ack! Hope things are backed up, Adam. :(

12.30.99 >> Oh, cool. HTML anarchy. Now I'm done for. (courtesy o' Turlyming dot com's eat'nshred via Eatonweb 'blog)

By the way, the coffee finally wore off around midnight. I crashed until 10am. Fortunately, everyone's on vacation and didn't notice my being late to work.

Prol discovers imood. Yay! (Personally, I'm feeling kinda .)

Gary Bauer is still an asshole. He called Vermont's decision to extend marriage benefits to same-sex couples "a judicial decision that attacks America's deeply held values." I'm sorry, most of the Americans I know would like to see gay couples receive the same benefits straight couples do. This must be some other America. Additionally, Republican Presidential candidate Steve Forbes said this about the ruling: "It was a flagrant example of judicial activism. I believe in traditional marriage. The court overstepped its bounds. This, if anything, is a matter for the people to decide, not judges." The judges elected by the people of Vermont, Steve? Elected so they would make decisions that represent the desires of the people that voted for them? Okay. If you get elected President, we won't let you do your job and decide anything. You can just sit there and look... um, pretty. But don't fret, we'll invite you to the meetings. (article courtesy o' Turlyming dot com)

12.29.99 >> Though the site was brought to my attention last month or so, pang-yen's journal kay.pee.y had some broken links and such. But now it's all whole. I'm also mentioning it now as I'm going to be moving up the launch of my own journal. I was originally going to have a journal section of null means null for longer, essay-type entries, but I do enough personal babbling in here that it warrants its own section. I'll combine the two somehow. My project for the new year. Or at least the next couple of weeks when I find some time.

The following has nothing to do with anything: I got about two and a half hours of sleep last night. I started falling asleep at work. To prevent this, I just drank a cup of coffee, or most of one. I also quit caffeine four months ago. I expect to shoot through the roof any minute now. Hoody hoo!

12.28.99 >> I got a copy of Kristin Hersh's Sky Motel for xmas; I like it, it's an alright album, but one song sticks out in particular for me. If I ever find myself in a band, I'll insist we cover "A Cleaner Light" (realaudio format).

AOL search update: a few more of the same came in, but one new search came up this morning: WWW.TALLI.COM. Now, um... if you already know the URL, why would you search for it? Egads, man.

12.27.99 >> Okay, a weblog written by some slightly-psychotic-sounding group of superheroes. How fucking cool is that?!? Hot damn. Watch the World Die.

The emails have stopped coming in on the GLBT weblogger survey; if you know of any more, point them over here so they can give us a holler if they wish. I think next will be the Straight Weblogger Poll, just to be fair.

I've gotta find some new links soon. I've noticed that the holy-day seasonal business has reduced me to links to other weblogs. Not that that's a bad thing, but this is supposed to be a weblog, not a metaweblog. Too much navel-gazing and I get anxious.

Speaking of other weblogs, I happened across another GLBT blogger while sifting across sites that had fallen into my referrer log. Adam Twelve is the weblog of a photographer in Boston. Since I can't find any archive links, I'm assuming he started in late November. Good stuff and tonsolinks(tm) on the sides.

With the year 2000 coming, I've been thinking of the movie Strange Days and its vision of the last days of 1999, and thought, no, we haven't gotten that chaotic yet. Then I thought, well, yes, we have, just not so wide-scale, which quickly got appended with, no, wait, Seattle.

Gary Bauer is an asshole.

Sweet!! Next year's National Freedom to Marry Day falls on my 25th birthday. Then again, it's been on 2.12 since they started two years ago, but I'm just noticing this now.

They're serious about this; there actually is a center for the study of time travel. I don't know if I'd want that to be possible. The capacity for too-much-mucking-around exists. (courtesy o' Larkfarm)

Okay, it should be no secret that AOL's search engine bites. Going through my access logs, I found what searches people were performing on AOL's search engine to find Running Tally; the percentage it matched at, and the number of queries followed here:

Apparently, it's as I feared. I do swear too much. Not that I remember ever discussing any of the above topics at any point, other than the full moon on 12.22, iwon, xmas gifts, and the gayboy webloggers. Of course, by adding this list, I've just upped my ratings for the above on AOL's search engine. Woohah.

Incidentally, Adam Twelve was only 1% behind me for both XMAS GIFT IDEAS FOR MARRIED COUPLE and TALK ABOUT FUCKING. Way to go, Adam! Keep up the good work.

Though I've stopped making new year's resolutions, I'll make one this time: I resolve to not swear so much, be it online or in conversation. It'll probably fail but what the hel--er, heck.

12.26.99 >> Happy Boxing Day!

My friend Halsted's cam site has a new feature: email notification of when her cam is turned on. Now all my voyeuristic tendencies can be delivered to me through the Internet.

Um. As of 04.27am on Monday in whatever timezone beebo.org is in (somewhere in Australia), I'm one of the most frequently linked sites by weblogs. How did that happen? Am I a closeted marketer? Freaky.

12.25.99 >> Since I've been calling today xmas in this weblog, here's my explanation of the difference between Christmas and xmas. Christmas is the Christian celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, who was a very hip prophet type guy with some major mojo. The American (and I'm sure in other countries as well) phenomenon of xmas is that part where you have to go shopping for gifts for your family and friends, and you do it out of habit. It is very commercialized, and somewhat related to but utterly unlike Christmas. Since I'm pantheistically pagan and hang out with a lot of Wiccans, I can't say that I'm predisposed to celebrating Christmas. But I'll do xmas. Yule is more my gig, and I was sick for that this year.

But what before my wandering eyes did appear but four new links in Kein; we've a live one here. It's a lovely xmas gift, so to whichever one of my cohort(s) is(are) responsible, thank you thank you! (Since one link was about doll clothes, I think I have an idea of who it was.)

Wendell's OneSwellFoop has a very flippant, irreverant, yet honest tone to it, and then I realized, whoa, his writing style is very similar to mine -- if I had a longer attention span, at least. Then I thought, why am I not linking to him? So now I am. Besides, he has me listed as 0=0 and how can I be any more pleased? It looks like some bug-eyed Japanese-style emoticon smileytype, and demonstrates that if anyone asks me what the URL to my site is, I can just make a frantic, bug-eyed face at them. What else could I want? It's exactly the marketing angle I was looking for. Thank you, Wendell!

I just got back from xmas with the family; I hate to say it but I didn't have a good time. It was my stepfather's family, and while I like them, tonight I just felt disconnected from the whole celebration. The fact that there was no rhyme nor reason to what was going on didn't help. Supposedly we were supposed to all open presents together, but it ended up as a free-for-all after dinner because we couldn't get everyone organized (i.e., no one would shut up long enough for me and a few others to try and get people back in one group). So I left relatively early, came home, hit the web, and ended up relating to the lack of control that underlied Benjy Feen's Seattle Riots Journal (courtesy o' OneSwellFoop). I felt the holiday spirit more last night, when I went to a friend's family's place for dinner. That just goes to show that more and more, your family (or at least mine) is who you choose, not who you're related to by blood. Tomorrow I get to have xmas with my dad, his girlfriend, my brother and his family, and then Tuesday night the Guy and I are having a mini-xmas. I'm hoping either or both will be more satisfying.

12.24.99 >> One gift away from being done with xmas shopping. Let's hear it for procrastination.

C'mon, Matthew, name it Rosie. Ya know ya wanna.

12.23.99 >> Funky xmas greetings over on Pete's site -- Flash 4 required.

Last night, for the first time, I tried port. I liked it.

Okay, I used to spend too much time at this site, when I gamed a lot online. Now I hardly have the time to game anywhere. I went back today and found this photo contest they ran and got a good chuckle from some of them. The things gamers will do for fame...

On the way back from lunch, I finally heard my favorite 80s xmas song: "Christmas Wrapping" by the Waitresses. Now it's the holy-day season. I am a happy boy. (This is the song I ps.ed about yesterday. Hmm, that sounds bad.)

12.22.99 >> I had forgotten that Barnes & Noble was open until midnight, which made shopping for my family that much easier and I couldn't be happier.

It's the wrong holiday season, but since I can't find anyone abusing xmas candy on the web (yet), here's some marshmallow bunnies being experimented on for science.

Right on. In the future, we could be able to say "I do" in Vermont. (courtesy o' whim & vinegar via Turlyming dot com)

I have this album. Found it in the bargain bin while working at Tower Records in college, heard of it from a Stereolab song. It's a weird experiment from a time when people weren't doing all that much experimenting. Bless you, Lucia. (courtesy o' bovine inversus)

Katie is like me at 17, but with much, much more power available to her. Bless her, too.

Geezus Kreist, Prol, ya could've just said something. ;) But bless you again and again. (ps. three days til xmas, and I haven't heard that song yet this year. It's a little eerie.)

12.21.99 >> Work today had an Alice-esque incident when a pipe burst in my boss' office, the water spreading across the hall to flood the network operations center. We got to risk electrocution while saving workstations sitting on the floor. Cheers. It wasn't as glorious as some of the shows put on by Survival Research Labs, but we get by.

I need to get the guy I'm dating (yup, it's dating now) an xmas present... but what? He already has a whole store of product, so maybe something more personal? (Oh... he apologized for not calling that one time, saying he had said he would call, though I don't remember him saying that... dating's so screwy.)

Maybe I should just start an online journal to separate the links from the personal blather. Maybe that's too easy. Maybe I'll think about it after the holy-days are over.

I may end up a marketer. Scary. Well, not a marketer, but working for marketing. Eep. So today I RTFMed on electronic press releases. Not that I expect to do any writing for the company, and if I did, I'd rather draft blurbs like this.

It's a small world. Dennis of attack force D may have been responsible for the Cheerios portal... maybe not the current incarnation, but he helped get it off the ground.

12.20.99 >> Not much to post today, as I actually spent the whole of my time at work today working. Go figure. Anyway, today's mailto: poll... Perl or PHP: which would make the better chef? Extrapolate as necessary.

12.18.99 >> You don't get much more inspired than Brad's 12 Days of Blogging. If I didn't still have this sore throat I'd be cackling like a hyena.

Okay, in keeping with all the mailto: links that have sprung up in Running Tally over the last few days, I'm going to give you even more reasons to email me over the next few days. Today's reason has a bit of back story: this guy I had a date with last Monday and I have been chatting on the phone on again off again the last few days. On each of these occasions, he's been at work, as he's there a lot... understandable, as he owns the store. Last night we even chatted twice. Tomorrow I'm going in to bring him and his employees sushi, and Monday we have a movie date. I'm going to see all sorts of this guy over the next couple of days, so last night I finished our second phone call with "if I don't talk to you tomorrow, I'll see you Sunday." He said, "We'll talk tomorrow." "We'll talk tomorrow?" I asked. "We'll talk tomorrow," he answered. "We'll talk tomorrow," I said, taking this as a hint that he might call. Now, I was already planning a big day of staying home to make sure I got over this flu, and I knew he had work, then some xmas party with his friends tonight, so I didn't actually expect him to call. He didn't. But now, for some reason, I feel disappointed. Here's your assignment, class: tell me why I'm being stupid for feeling disappointed. I have my theories (like the fact he never said the words "I'll call you tomorrow," for example), but let's hear yours. (And no, I'm not looking for abuse. I'm not beating myself up over this, I'm just fascinated that I feel this way. Aren't I clinical?) [Update: Ha! My Yahoo! horoscope for today says: "The desire to be protective of yourself surprises you. You are used to remaining available for all the chaos that comes along." Heh, no kidding!]

The Art of Noise got back together and earlier this year released The Seduction of Claude Debussy. Before I was a Stereolab nut, before I was a raving Pixies fan, before I got a chance to sink my teeth into the Sugarcubes, I dug this band above all others... kind of unusual for someone in the 6th grade, but what the hell. They were techno/ambient before anyone called a section of music by that name, and their new stuff is pretty slick.

Oh good. Jason is also homebound, sick, bored and miserable. I'm not alone. Misery loves company.

12.17.99 >> I'm home sick. Blah. Getting the cold was fun, but now that I have it, I'm cranky. The fact that I like to talk and have a sore throat preventing me from talking isn't helping matters.

We Are Everywhere... including Tom over at barbelith. We've got nearly enough of us for an infomercial! If you would like to order your GLBT weblogger, pick up the phone today and dial 1-800-GAY-BLOG. Operators are standing by. (Did I mention I was cranky? Make that "cantankerous." Is that a word? If not, it is now.)

My C++ teacher from college has a site that proves that he's not about all work and no play. Knowing this about him made class just that much more interesting.

So I went over to Dr. Koop and read up on the differences between a cold and the flu, and it looks like I probably have the flu. It all started with an achy back and a clammy feeling. It still didn't tell me how long I'm contagious, so I don't know if I'll end up giving it back to the guy I got it from on last Monday when we go out again this Monday. (Like I said, getting it was fun, but now that I have it...)

I was going to start calling this survey of weblogs "a bunch of gay guys and a bi girl", but now there's a bi boy to add to the mix. Going by the name of Red Scare, his Daily Life is a combination of a journal and a weblog... he calls it a dia-log, which is the best name I've heard yet for one of these things.