Between the hours of 1:30am and 3:30am last night, I attended FUSE, the Vancouver Art Gallery's new attempt to draw in more people and introduce art to a wider audience. And while I obviously can't speak for everyone there, for my part I have the following review: Bad Idea.

For some reason, I had it in my mind that the event would be an "adult" affair. I had images of nicely dressed people wandering through the gallery at all hours listening to music, drinking wine and having a civil good time. Call me an ignorant old fart if you like -- after last night, I couldn't blame you.

Instead, what I found was a horde of drunk 20somethings getting hammered before they even showed up, puking outside and running around the halls of the building. Horrible, screechy digital music blasting from the inner chamber throughout the building and a few kids in cosplay garb hopped up on LSD attacking their "mortal enemies" from anime-land.

It would seem that I'm continuously forgetting where I live.

One highlight of the evening came just as I walked in: I bumped into k-dot, a girl I know from way back in my high school choir. Of course, she couldn't even remember my name, but I suppose that's alright since she's simply more memorable than I am :-) Anyway, it was nice to see a familiar face in that zoo.

So yeah, FUSE was not cool -- at least for me. And in my book, I honestly think that it takes a way from the dignity of the place. Just once, I'd like to see nightlife in Vancouver happen without public drunkenness, but perhaps I'm asking too much.

I read the following posts in Savage Love tonight and just wanted to share. If you haven't already read them, I suggest you do so. Savage's response to the first letter is beautiful and the second letter made me teary:

I'm in my final year of high school and I decided to come out as a lesbian – a very foolish move as I live in a small town that's not exactly brimming with tolerant people. But I know there are other closeted people at my school and I figured if none of us ever take the first step, it won't ever get any better around here.

But the response from my peers was worse than I expected. It's nothing too terrible, no physical violence, and in the beginning I could cope. But it's been a while now and I guess I need some advice. It just isn't getting better and I'm getting tired of it.

I have to park two streets away so people don't write shit on my car, someone's hacked my user account and deleted important coursework, I'm either told I'm dressing like a dyke or trying to be a girl depending on what I choose to wear on any given day. I'm avoiding classes that I don't have friends in because even if nothing is said (though it often is), the atmosphere is horrible. And none of this is that big a deal compared to what others have to go through, I know, but I'm sort of at the end of my tether.

Reporting it to staff is useless because they just tell me there isn't any proof and do fuck all. I've got some teachers looking out for me, but they can't really do anything either. I have some supportive friends, thank God, but it's all just becoming a bit too much, and I need some advice on how to cope through the last few months until I can get out of this shithole town.

Here's what you need to do, TALI: look in the mirror every morning and tell yourself that is the nadir, the bottom, the worst it's ever going to get. Once you get out of your high school and out of your shithole hometown and get your ass off to college – to a big state school or private secular university – you won't be the only out queer any more. Hell, you'll be surrounded by out fags and dykes and bisexuals. I can't promise you that you'll never encounter a bigot again, of course, or that all the fags and dykes you meet over the course of your life will be good people. But you will never again feel as vulnerable or persecuted or alone as you do right now.

And while you're talking to yourself in the mornings, TALI, tell yourself this, too: "Fuck my school, fuck my classmates, and fuck this town." The shits conspiring to make you miserable, TALI, are unlikely to have lives anywhere near as interesting as the one on which you're about to embark. Your classmates are making you miserable now because they know, deep down in their little black hearts, that their lives are going to be duller than day-old douche water compared to yours. Their lives aren't going to be dull because they're straight, TALI, but because the value they place on conformity – that's the reason they feel they have a right to abuse you now – is a prison they've constructed around themselves.

Right now they're making you feel like an outcast, TALI, and the malice stings. But what exactly are they casting you out of? Your high school? Their asshole cliques? That shit town? You haven't been cast out, TALI; you've been liberated. Freed. Sprung.

If only every kid in high school could hear that.

Four months ago, my mom walked in on me messing around with my boyfriend in our garage. I'm also a boy, age 15, and I hadn't gotten around to coming out to my parents yet. I felt bad that my mom had to find out by seeing what she saw. I stayed in my room crying until my father came home. They called me down to the kitchen and told me they loved me and that they were very, very sorry if they had ever done or said anything that made me feel like I couldn't be open with them about who I am.

My boyfriend is 17. He came out to his parents at Christmas, and our parents met for the first time last night. We don't have a question. We just wanted to thank you and thank all the other gay people who came out back when it was much tougher to do so. Our parents wouldn't have reacted the way they did if it weren't for all you guys that already came out.

We're Out Now

Thanks for the sweet note, WON. It's too bad that all teenagers, gay and straight, don't have parents as loving and supportive as yours.

Joss Whedon's take on so-called "honour killings". Please read. Everyone should read this.

Those of you who know Noreen probably know that she's been working tirelessly on a special project with UBC in an effort to expand the curriculum to include Asian Canadian History. To that end, she's working with both SFU and UBC on a project called Asian Canadians Reframed and she needs our help. Below you'll find information about a survey they're conducting about the public impressions/ideas about Asians and it takes a total of 3 minutes to fill out.

Please note that everyone is eligible to fill this out. White people, Toronto people, rich people, poor people, whatever, they need everything for a balanced look at the issue, so please do what you can.

"Asian Canadians Reframed" is an art project comprised of students from SFU and UBC. We are conducting a survey on common perceptions of Asian people in Canada and from the data that we collect, we intend to produce a photo exhibition showcasing the responses. The survey is an online one and should take no longer than 3 minutes if not less.

Please help our project grow by filing out our online survey! Tell your friends and family about us, spread the word, fill out the survey several times! We’d love to hear all that you have to say and we’ll do our best to showcase them all!

Thanks for your help.

I heard a story on CBC radio today and thought that I would share.

Way back in the 60s, when it was still illegal to sell condoms and pregnant teens were ejected from school as a matter of course, a fifteen year-old girl met a nineteen year-old boy, had sex, and conceived a child.

Her father was outraged and insisted that the couple marry immediately, and the school banished her from the classroom without a second thought. But despite all of this mess, one of her teachers, at that time a young man in his early twenties, went the extra mile and came to her house after school to tutor her and help her finish her classes.

The young couple are still married and have been for over forty years. The teacher remains a family friend.

Here's to all the teachers who go that extra mile to make things right.

CBC confirmed it this afternoon. All around the world, it's as though every rational person is breathing lighter. The bigoted, racist, antagonist is dead, and as one person I spoke to today asked: "so where do you think he ended up?"

Can I have a Halleluiah?

I had this thought today on my way home and I thought I would share it, if only to be able to say later: "I saw this coming years ago" :-) The following may sound technical for the non-geek, I'll explain myself better if you ask questions, but if you're bothered by geek-speak, you probably just want to skip this post.

One of the big problems with online communities is the load on a centralised server. The wider your user base grows, the greater the load on your servers. This issue leads to the second problem: corporate control and need to use advertising as a revenue stream to support the server load.

Now with most sites, this in an unavoidable problem. After all, sites like imdb.com are largely a repository of information in a centralised location for access by all. However, with community-oriented portals like MySpace and Facebook, the content is largely member-generated and hosted in one place either out of tradition or because the user base lacks the capacity to host that information locally.

But as hardware gets cheaper and wireless access more prevalent, we're going to start seeing a lot more in the way of mobile computing. The inevitable result then is that we'll be able to host our own information on our own machines and provide (or not provide) that information to the public through an open protocol.

So, for example, under this system, you would go to a central site (for the sake of argument, we'll use Facebook) and search for "Daniel Quinn". The site will have a basic record that these n people match your search criteria and that their information services can be found at their respective addresses. You could then issue a friend request to that user which would be managed only between you and I and the servers we're running on our personal devices.

Once a relationship is established, it exists only on my device and yours -- the key being the host site doesn't store this information, doesn't need to collate and back it up, or handle the bandwidth requests for other users wondering who my friends are. All relationship information, images, shared notes, etc. etc. would be managed by the devices operated by the user you're querying.

This sort of thing is a while off I would think. Frankly though, I think the real limiters would be the writing of an open and scalable protocol to handle a network like this, and the fact that most computer users are idiots who would have no idea how to configure their own server. A system like this, however inevitable, will have to depend on really slick software that does the majority of the work for you, and a solid, open framework upon which to base each application.

Ok, I'm done. Rant over. Wait for the "I told you so" in about 10years.

This video restored my faith in humanity.

Thanks to Pavel for the link.

Aileen just introduced me to one of the eeriest things I've ever seen: In the united states, parents can take their kids to a special mall that's explicitly designed for their dolls.

Read that sentence over again and let it sink in: america is so rich that it spends its wealth on catering to the desires of plastic playthings.

At American Girl Place you can:

• Give your doll a $20 haircut
• Have Brunch with your doll
• See a show with your doll
• Get your face on the cover of a magazine with your doll

Did I mention that you can go on a full-blown shopping trip with fake-money to outfit your plastic companion for the low-low price of only $280USD? Has the world gone mad?

In a day and age when finding fresh water is a toss up in most of the developing world, the united states scares the hell out of me.

The UK, for fear of hordes of terrorists trying to destroy it's great democracy from within has been pushing for these new ultra-safe, super-protected passports to be the norm. Unfortunately for the group that designed them though, they're neither safe, nor protected:

Using a simple gadget built from parts bought on the Internet, it took the Mail less than four hours to copy the details from one passport.

More details on The Daily Mail.