"Who says that fictions only and false hair
 Become a verse? Is there in truth no beauty?
 Is all structure in a winding stair?
 May no lines pass, except they do their duty
   Not to a true, but painted chair?"
      -George Herbert, Jordan [I]

Notes on Queer Structure, Gay Presentation
& Lesbian Navigation

High Audience, Low Bandwidth

[Visitor's Survey][Main][Stoo-pid]

• If you have any problem with the presentation on this site, please, let me know. You have both my permission and my plea to mail me, berate me, call me a hypocrite and demand that some oversight, error or carelessness be fixed.
• Links which lead to pages Off this Site will be appended by "(OS)". Links which lead to pages at the site Here will be appended by nothing (I started putting an "(H)", but really why bother, duh? So if you see one could you let me know? Thanks). Linked, but unimportant, personal or overly opinionated pages will be preceded by hopefully a thumbnail gif of something goofy.
• Each page contains a "Null" or "Empty" Stoo-pid link. This is meant to be both a navigational aid and a courtesy. If for some reason I should be so sloppy or inexplicably stupid as to change the name of a file, you will not get any information other than a "File Not Found" server error. To compensate for this you will be able to hit the Stoo-pid link and be thereby taken to the site's directory where you will be able to apply your own faculty of reason to glean through my Stoo-pidity. Also, I like to hit a site's directory to quickly see what I might be missing or passing over.
• For the time being, no page will be larger than 30k. This will be a nuisance for some, but it is a necessity for too many for me too ignore. Once the vital content is entirely posted in easily accessible format, I'll make single page documents (which I use with relief whenever I can). When there is enough here to make it advisable, I'll post a stuffed (and only 'cuz I'm fair-minded - a .zip) file of the entire site for off-line viewing. If there is space and I don't break-down from Ed's kindly arm-twisting, I hope to include the Commission's Reports in downloadable rtf files.
• As planned, the site amounts to a behemoth, and despite what my friends think, I don't have all day. This is going to take a few so, please bear with me, and come by often. It may be whippety now, but it'll be an unmanageable Great Dane soon. (We have a whippet and Danes - poor Danes.) An aside, I now realize that these stupid jokes all over the net are not for the viewers benefit, but to relieve the tedium of "Web Authorship". I'm not sorry to say that it is a respite from which I will attempt to restrain myself. But there will be lapses.
• In the longer, segmented linear documents there are linked ball bars. These are, from what I've seen on the Web, the best & least obtrusive quick visual answer to, "Where am I and what have I gotten myself into?" They're handy for navigation to boot. The arrows represent back/forward that many sections. The squaring the circle or non-arrowed gif represents the current windowed page or section of the document. It can also be used for top/bottom page navigation. Users of text-only browsers and speech-based user agents should see/hear something like "-1, 0, +1, +2" with "0" representing the current window and the string signifying that you are in the second section of a larger document which is four sections in length. If you have image loading off, I set a border on the image for the document's current windowed page, so you should as well be able to orientate yourself and operate the bar by looking for the generic image which is "different'.
• The pages' background color has been chosen to aid readability. Screen white is not paper white; it blazes and makes one squint.
• There are and will be no use of images necessary for navigation or comprehension. One of the last things to be posted, if patience me its durance deals aka I can swing it, is to be an image map of the Commonwealth linked to a cgi-independent on-site database of community resources. This will have non-image based functionality, but no real utility to people outside of Massachusetts.
• The pages haven't a "cool" look to them because too many people don't get to use "cool" browsers. For instance all internet access at the Taunton Public Library here in Southeastern Massachusetts is via Lynx - yah, fun. This is remarkable because Taunton is a county seat. Actually I will hold forth on this. For those of you with dedicated ISDN lines or as we have in Raynham, MA through MediaOne - Cable Modems - gasp, you may find some of the concerns I express here unnecessary. Know that one of my favorite ftp servers was, until October 1997, run off of a Macintosh SE/30 with an 80meg hard drive. It was "upgraded" to a MacII w/ 200megs (for those of you who are merely feeble milk feed veal upon Microsoft's butcher's block, these are "obsolete" machines). I know of an ISP run off of an outright archaic Tandy. If the server side is this cobbled together, and it is, think of how much more tenuous, how tedious and slow many people's connections have to be. About three times a week, I walk by a guy using a Braille reader. People do not "have" a connection, as much as they are merely able to get or use one. It is for the real, the not rich, for the great unpampered mass of the 30 million+ people...I think I'll zip up now my zealotry's showing.
• My "Test" browsers are MacLynx and Netscape 1.1. If the use of an HTML element causes the loss or garbling of information within these browsers, the tag will not show up here.
• There will be the standard e-mail mailto: link at the end of each page. There will also be a "Form-mail Propagandhi" link to an e-mail Form. After sending the Form-mail, you will be brought back to the page from which you mailed. This "feature" is included for those of you who are on the all too common network which has disabled the browser's Preference Saving feature.
• On Privacy: The internet is unsecure, and overall, I hope it stays that way. I'll have too choke off a rant here. Anyway, the internet is unsecure. Period. As I noted above, you will be able to send me a message by using a Form. Now the cgi script is provided by the good people of Geocities. I have not seen it. I do not know what else, if anything, it does. It could build a database for geocities to sell so that it can support the "communities" it has founded (West Hollywood was amoung their first by the way), it could be taking down a "hit list" of "pre-verts" to be put up against the wall during the next right-wing revolution or it could be composing a misleading Christmas "wish list" saying, "Nah, Kris, just coal for me, but thanks anyway," and then e-mailing it to Santa Claus. I do not know and I do not care. I do not care, because "They" could be doing this at any point during connection anyway. "They" could be anybody by the bye. "The good people at geocities" are the least of your worries. Because of the proprietary rather than privacy fetish of the Law and Order, aka money/microsoft minded, you take your private life in your hands as soon as you start up the browser. This unchoked off rant (sorry) is still here undeleted because, while I don't care, you might. You might have to. To sum up: using the form-mail is just like any other e-mail except that we know that it hangs around the geocities server a little longer but then becomes just another e-mail going on, unsecure and crackable, to a long line of other servers which will be "handling" it.
• Far More Important: Clear the disc cache. If you're on a networked connection or using the family computer and you do not want people/parents/siblings/gun toting, bambi-mother-killing, bigoted, and netsurfing red-neck uncles to know (your parish priest might never know, but your sysop KNOWS ALL) you've been someplace Clearing the disc cache before you stop surfing is the easiest way to preclude this. If you've bookmarked sites, check the preferences folder, because though "Preferences are not saved" they may be saved as a temporary or back-up file. Also, disable the visited links feature before, or expire them when your done, surfing. If you have to (and you can), trash the Global History or whatever file the browser uses to keep track of visited links. But be aware these are around because they are very handy features which make it easier to go back to sites. I regularly use them to get a site address I should have book marked or lost because of a crash. One last point: The first paragraph deals with something which is simply irrelevant, the second with that which is immediate. Okay, long winded paranoia and privacy stuff is now ended.
• If you note a ridiculous redundancy at the beginning of some pages, it's just me trying to write for the silly search engines and their punishing algorithms and trying to make it all "work".
• I intend to strive for consistency in these points. Consistency is the handmaid of constancy. While constancy is something we all do expect from the world, it's something we are rarely able deliver to the world - I will lapse on these. Because I think they're important enough to talk about, lapses to these points are important enough to correct. When you find them, I'd love to hear about it. Thanks.

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Last Updated: 4 December, 1997
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