Happy Birthday, Mirrorboy!

Well, I may be a couple of hours late...but I'll blame timezones :-) Anyways, we all love our patriarch the wonderful, love-able Mirrorboy. Its pretty amazing to think a just a year ago, this whole community didn't exist! I have met some wonderful people, and learned so much about other people and cultures. It has been awesome.

So I was trying to think of something I could do to celebrate the first year anniversary of Mirrorboy and his blog. First, I thought to send one of my favorite male strippers to his house in bumble-fuck, Australia

... but then I thought, no. His mom probably wouldn't like that (actually this is a rare circumstance where moms and gay sons can agree!).

So I ditched that idea, and decided to do something geeky. I whipped together a simple powershell script to gather some interesting info about Mirrorboy's blog. Blogger has a few APIs that you can use to get info. So what have we learned about Mirrorboy's blog (as of 09/18 at 1:12AM GMT-5):

• Mirrorboy has written 271 blog posts!
• There have been 3,930 comments total!
• All of the blog posts together have 125,247 words!
• All of the blog posts together have 733,991 characters!
• The average number of words per post is 499.06!
• The longest comment was 10,494 characters by Mr McCabbage on Eh. (It's epic, go check it out. I didn't read it, because I don't have three packed lunches and 36 hours to spare)

What I was the most interested in was to see who had the most comments >:-) (All anonymous comments are being counted as if they were from one username). Here are the top fifty commentors on all of Mirrorboys posts. This table includes their rank, name, total # of comments, average # of characters per comment, and the first date they ever submitted a comment. Note that this is NOT the blog's published date, but the time when the comment was submitted.

Rank	Username	# of Comments	Avg Characters / Comment	First Comment Submitted
1	naturgesetz	220	72.0	10/06/08
2	Anonymous	206	93.8	10/02/08
3	Mirrorboy	181	38.2	9/27/08
4	Seth	167	95.5	9/30/08
5	Planetx_123	166	87.8	10/29/08
6	Aek	159	48.2	12/17/08
7	cvn70	152	67.0	12/28/08
8	AJCon89	126	71.7	10/21/08
9	James	113	30.8	10/30/08
10	Mr. HCI	106	96.0	10/27/08
11	Jeremy	97	28.6	1/22/09
12	Peter	96	40.9	12/07/08
13	Kevin Wilson	82	61.1	11/25/08
14	Jake Annonymous	73	27.2	9/27/08
15	Col	72	57.4	10/27/08
16	xthecouragex	71	103.4	11/25/08
17	Steevo	70	106.9	10/02/08
18	Landyn	59	75.8	10/02/08
19	Tombi04	57	46.8	1/03/09
20	Deadwing	48	43.6	3/03/09
21	Poisoned Happiness	45	51.3	11/19/08
21	victor	45	83.0	10/04/08
22	Doomed But Cheerful!	40	91.3	10/22/08
23	J	38	66.1	11/19/08
24	torchy!	37	84.0	1/04/09
25	Mr McCabbage	36	185.3	3/22/09
26	Aahsazyl	35	20.0	12/31/08
27	Benji	34	24.7	5/22/09
28	goleftatthefork	32	25.9	4/01/09
29	Micky	31	50.8	3/30/09
29	Rhythym Changes	31	64.5	4/20/09
30	PoisonedHappiness	29	31.1	3/06/09
30	JC	29	52.6	10/01/08
31	Doug	28	65.3	10/27/08
32	WkBoy714	27	42.4	7/07/09
33	Tyler	26	24.8	4/09/09
34	Spastic Fantastic	24	39.7	4/24/09
34	Lach	24	32.0	9/29/08
35	~kiwi	22	33.5	2/27/09
35	Daily Dan	22	17.3	3/06/09
35	Tom	22	47.6	10/29/08
36	Ethan	20	54.9	7/24/09
37	Highwayman	19	30.6	4/08/09
37	Randy	19	104.3	3/02/09
37	Zee	19	99.1	11/09/08
38	pinstripe	18	23.3	12/19/08
38	Baz	18	91.3	4/01/09
38	Ryan	18	64.2	12/25/08
39	Tim	17	38.7	11/06/08
39	Jason Carwin	17	60.8	7/10/09

Congrats Naturgesetz! And grrr.... I lost to Seth by ONE! *shakes fist* I also collected a histogram of all the words in the each of the blog posts, because I thought maybe that would be interesting. The unfortunate part is that this also includes any html that one puts in there. My 'word' splitting is very simple, so html is all included. Sure, there are ways around this, but this was a 'simple' script :-) So here are the top 25 most used words with their use counts:

Rank	Word	Count
1	blogspot	874
2	style	834
3	blogger	562
4	color	556
5	about	541
6	height	523
7	width	522
8	_q08i_4aq	428
9	people	378
10	there	360
11	really	332
12	mirrorboysblog	312
13	class	303
14	would	292
15	tracker	272
16	googleusercontent	271
16	https	271
16	footer	271
17	387878206502427000	270
18	think	259
19	because	252
20	school	248
20	strong	248
21	border	236
21	cursor	236
22	things	227
23	400px	211
24	s1600	193
25	other	191

See...not as interesting as maybe expected.

Anyways- I hope you enjoyed our little journey into the blog-world mecca blog of Mirrorboy. Until your next birthday-- may your year be filled *cuddles*, *snuggle hugs*, and *pounce hugs*! I love ya buddy, and I'm so glad you are here and have had such a positive impact on everyone!

Much Love,
Steve

P.S. if anyone wants the script hit me up on MSN or my email.

P.P.S I notice that Jake Anon's first comment is 2008-09-27 00:29:00 GMT+10:00 (or at least that's what Blogger reports). Lach's first comment shows is 2008-09-29 14:31:00 GMT+10:00... a mystery?

Memphis Gay Film Fest - Day 1

Ok ok... so technically it's the Memphis Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, but who likes lesbians?? I skip all of their movies, because I don't want to see their girly parts. Creepy.

I went ahead and bought the festival pass. I'm sure I could've gotten in free since I work for the home office of the theatre chain, but I didn't ask the marketing woman, and am fine giving the money to the gay and lesbian community center-- they need it!



First, I saw "Mississippi Queen"- a documentary about a lesbian woman returning home to her parents, who started an ex-gay ministry. Any regular readers probably know my feelings about religion in general. I found myself twitching in horror, and really holding back the screams of frustration. The film interviewed many ex-gay ministries, including Memphis' own: Love in Action. I found it interesting that everyone they interviewed had failed. Each had 'slipped up' at one point or another, and had to return to the ministry. They all seemed to concede that going through ex-gay 'treatment' won't stop you from having same-sex attraction, but will instead teach you how to cope with it and how to grow your relationship with god (vomit). I was curious, as I always am, at understanding these 'ministers' relationships with god. It's clear that they genuinely believe what they preach, but listening to them talk is like watching a psychopath: I just can't identify with that reality. The documentary concluded with the documentarian and her parents just concluding that they won't see eye-to-eye on her sexuality, but that that won't stop them from having a relationship. I found this strangely satisfying.

Second, I saw "Make the Yuletide Gay". To my delight, this film starred Adamo Ruggiero of Degrassi fame. I became a Degrassi fan when Adamo's character, Marco, entered the scene and the 'gay' plot line started. I also thought Marco was super cute. Apparently, Adamo 'came out' in real life about a year ago! I find it especially interesting, because in some Degrassi behind-the-scenes interview a while ago, I remember them asking Adamo if he was gay in real life and he said 'no'...which crushed me. :-)



The movie was a comedy about a gay couple, Olaf and Nathan, in their senior year at university. Both are going home to their parents for the holidays. Nathan (Adamo) decides to surprise his boyfriend Olaf by showing up unannounced! However, Olaf failed to mention that he was still very much in the closet at home. Hilarity ensues.



This movie was 'fun', and Adamo was adorable--I want a boyfriend like him. However, this was not a 'good' movie. There were many times where the writing was contrived, the characters made no sense, and the acting was a little poor in spots. It was very typical of a 'gay' movie--ala Trick, Broken Hearts Club, etc-- but being gay, you have to watch them, and you just expect them to be campy and kind of crappy. So I would watch this if you want to chuckle and stare at how cute Adamo Ruggiero is... but just don't let your expectations get too high :-)

Tonight, I am checking out "Ready? Ok!", which is a comedy about a 10 year old boy who just happens to love dresses and cheer-leading. Oh, and it's got the guy who plays Ben Linus from LOST, so that's cool.

Much Love,
Steve

So much in a week

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Personal Responsibility

This is sort of a political / ideological post...so brace yourself.

Welfare is a highly disputed topic in America. Most middle class people resent the fact that people in poverty can't make money, and they do not want to 'fund their laziness'. Adding fuel to the fire, people in poverty have a high probability of using drugs, drinking, and having unplanned pregnancy.

My roommate read me a post where someone wanted to add urine testing to qualify for welfare money. His logic was that he had to pass a urine test to make the money for them, so they should have to pass a urine test to get welfare money. Sounds good, right? So his argument is that people should exercise some personal responsibility, and an abrupt discontinuation in funds is an acceptable solution to reducing how much welfare money is handed out.

There are some really interesting connotations throughout the whole problem of welfare: middle class people emphasizing personal responsibility seem to believe that their success is the product of their actions, and that people in poverty have failed and made bad decisions to get them where they are. I don't believe that we should 'personalize' it like that. I think that by doing so is self-serving, and really misses the point. Certainly there are hereditary traits that can prove useful in the workforce, but in high school, college, etc. the environment in which one grows up is probably the most important indicator of success. Thus, if we were to swap 'Middle Class Joe' with 'Poor Urban Anthony' early in their life, would they end up in different places? Is there something intrinsically 'better' in Joe that allows him to make 'good choices'...? I think not. With regards to socio-economic status, I think we are overwhelmingly the product of the environment we grew up in. So when Joe looks down with resentment at people in poverty, he is confusing 'personal responsibility' with cultural disadvantages.

It seems a bit naive to try to fix welfare by just discontinuing funds to drug users. I don't think anyone would be surprised to find 60-70% drug use among people in poverty (again a product of that subculture). So when this poster suggested this, I would like to respond with: "ok, but what about the rest?". You see, if you just discontinue funds, you have made an abrupt change to the economics of the situation. I wonder what 60-70% of people will do now that they have no income. Obviously, the optimistic (read as naive) answer would be that they get jobs. This seems unlikely to me, since their culture has not encouraged that in the past. I think we would see crime increase, and then the middle class would incredulously complain about crime growing...jeez just more bad choices, eh?

The point is that such a suggestion, as tempting as it is to say, is incomplete. Instead you could say: "Only give out money after a drug test, and shoot everyone that fails." Now that would be a solution. However, I don't think 'killing' off millions of Americans would really fly. We have to be a little smarter than just allowing our base human emotions suggest silly 'solutions'. The same is true of abortion in my opinion. Regardless of religious beliefs, it is naive to suggest that we can just 'stop' aborting millions of babies a year. You cannot expect people to suddenly 'have' personal responsibility--it has to be organically cultivated.

Instead we have to introduce social change subtly. The situation IS changeable, but we have to remember that people are involved...not robots. And people don't respond well to aggressive, overbearing, repressive regulation. We must be more intelligent. The real problem is NOT personal responsibility, and to suggest that is naive. The real problem is changing the CULTURE to encourage 'better choices'. The 'poverty culture' that is found in many urban areas (especially in memphis), doesn't encourage education and hard work. We have to address that problem-- NOT just tell people to make better choices.

It wasn't hard for me to make good choices growing up. My parents both had college educations, we had plenty of money, and all of my friends were from similar circumstances. However, had I grown up from parents that may or may not have finished high school with friends in the same situation, I may not have made the decision to go to college. If I were an arrogant person, it would be easy for me to draw the conclusion that I am just 'better' than them, because I made good choices to go to college. However, this is wrong, and serves no purpose other than my own 'emotional masturbation'.

(crickets...) Yea I don't blame you; I barely wanted to read it again. But I feel better, and I guess that's part of the point of a blog...so much success!

Love Much,
Steve