July 2002

I hate that I can’t watch first season episodes of The Simpsons on TV anymore without wanting to switch to the DVD commentary track and hearing tales of how bad the animation was. All the same, I’m glad my local rerun carrier has cycled back to older episodes. Maybe I’ll see my favorite again soon…

When I think about what I really like as far as the web, technology, etc. go, I realize that I’m more excited by information and data (and sometimes by neat little automation tricks) than by actual design. I like organizing things, categorizing them, finding new ways to search, sort, and reassemble them…

That’s not to say that I don’t like presenting them in a pleasing way; that excites me too, and I think I have at least a slight grasp of good deign principles. But as a rule, I get more of a techno-boner about Filemaker and even Excel (imagine, a Microsloth program which actually works well…) than about, say, Illustrator (whose Bezier curves I have neither the will nor the stamina to decipher…). It’s really cool, though, to find a way to make dry data look good AND be functional…

I’ve been known to sit in front of my computer all night working on a new Filemaker database (you should see the “supermarkets” directory on my G4) to which I’ll eventually refer, at most, about once or twice a month. I’ll spend hours on some pointless little CGI script which may give me a day’s worth of amusement once it goes live. I’ll sometimes spend a day or two trying to make Dreamweaver’s back end do something it doesn’t think it can do (with inconsistent success, alas). This is what gives me a sense of accomplishment…

But it’s as much about the actual data involved as it is about the nuts and bolts. I couldn’t get so excited if the subject were, say, the flora and fauna of Central Iowa. Technology for technology’s sake (and data for data’s sake) does not excite me; technology which has some useful purpose in my life does. I don’t want to understand every aspect of how a database program works, but I do want to understand enough that I can make it do exactly what I want and have the result look exactly as I want it to…

I’m not sure if this makes me right-brained, left-brained, or some strange centrist hybrid. Would that my life and my apartment were as neat and organized and attractively arranged as my miscellaneous sources of information…

Now to try, once again, to solve the dilemma of turning those thousands of dirty pictures into some sort of super database so that I can immediately find that shot of some dark-haired guy getting fucked on a barstool while wearing nothing but his Adidas and a baseball cap…

It’ll keep my hands busy until tomorrow, when I have someone to occupy them…

The monitor situation has been rectified (and all the discards have been safely shipped to Fresno for dumping), I spent a quite wonderful long weekend with Mark, and Blue Apron Blues disappeared over the weekend. Two positives, one negative…

Or two negatives and one positive if I figure in the two hundred bucks I didn’t really need to be spending right now…

More later…

Found a link to this article somewhere today, and as I finished reading it, I couldn’t help but think, “What are they whining about? Isn’t this a good thing?”

I don’t mean to sound insensitive to small business owners or anything. But, taking the somewhat altruistic claims of “gay bookstore” owners and the like at face value, you’d think they’d be tickled pink to find that society has evolved to the point where mainstream retailers take homosexuals seriously and no longer wish to avoid their custom. Hasn’t general acceptance, after all, been one of the main goals of most gay rights movements?

Or does that only extend to non-profit groups?

It’s no secret that I have some significant issues with the idea of “gay marketing”. Most of these revolve around the idea that it’s a fairly stupid strategy, given that there’s no homogenous group to market to. Homosexuality is not synonymous with homogebneity; as a group, we are no more likely to share one set of common values and priorities than are heterosexuals.

Thus, marketing tends (in the case of bookstores) to be aimed more at a specific subset of homosexuals who like to read mostly books about other homosexuals. It’s a valid niche category and all, albeit a rather boring one. And certain urban bookstores have made a small profit serving it for years. To a one, they all pushed the idea that “we have books you can’t find anywhere else”.

Well, now you can find them somewhere else. Now, people in Des Moines don’t have to dive into big city ghettos nor pay for shipping to get the information they want or need. One bookstore manager says, “But now gays take this all for granted, a byproduct of assimilation.” So he finds ghettoization and isolation preferable? Once again, I thought the idea was to create a world where one can take these things for granted.

Notice that I’m not talking about the sad decline of neighborhood independent bookstores here. The stores mentioned in this article are complaining about the loss of patronage from tourists and other oustide residents. I might be inclined to be more symapthetic if their arguments were framed in terms of neighbohood politics rather than merely a reaction to the fact that they don’t know how to evolve and compete in today’s marketplace. Then again, I also might not.

It seems the bookstore owners are more concerned about losing business than about promoting that “big gay ideal”. They’d apparently prefer that people were forced to work just a little bit harder in order to be sufficiently (and deservingly) homosexual. In other words, they want their customers to confine themselves to nice, paternalistic little overpriced ghettoes and shop only in their stores.

Methinks these “community-oriented” bookstore owners are a touch more capitalistic than they care to admit. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but to pretend that there’s some greater issue involved by attempting an annoying form of guilt-based marketing is a very bad thing. Niche retailers who are willing to do the work have found new life with online sales and by catering to new markets. Those who aren;t have whined themselves to death.

Gay bookstores are not non-profit organizations. They are businesses. Successful businesses are not successful because they maintain their customer base through pleas for charity. They’re successful because they know their market and innovate in response. I do not owe a business owner a living because he was “first”. I’ll glady contribute to it, however, if he does his job well and provides a service I want in a superior or convenient manner.