The other day I caught myself thinking: my partner is the greatest contributor to my happiness. It is not only because I am a recipient of her generous love, but what is more subtle is that I got to gradually know myself better through her. People around us act as mirrors, and the intimacy of a romantic partnership makes our partners one of the most effective mirrors. It is deeply uncomfortable to see my own warts and flaw so closely and clearly, yet through her eyes I also got to know the better parts of my self I was never capable of knowing on my own. I know for a fact that I would be much less of a person if she didn’t appear in my life.
Imagine if I gave all of that up because I was worried about people’s judgement of my queerness and my queer relationship. To be clear, I was never actually worried. I am making the point that this is how absurd it is to exchange our lifetime’s potential inner richness for societal conventional approval. It should not even exist as a tenable equation. But this is what some people demand of us when they deny our right to be queer, and the right to be in a legal relationship with our partners. Sadly this is also what some people believe they have to give up because they cannot bear societal rejection. More tragically, queer people in some environments are still being persecuted or bullied.
I have never struggled with my queerness. Even as a young child I just could not see the logic of it being wrong. I can be socially anxious about anything and everything, and my low self-esteem permeates into almost every single area of my life, but I have never once believed that I was less of a person because of my sexuality. I cannot explain why.
My relationship towards my sexuality is positive. I am an example that not every queer journey is fraught with shame or struggle. This is not to dismiss other people’s struggles but to correct the misperception and projection that there is always shame involved. I have never felt like I wished I can be straight, and have always perceived queer love as a beautiful thing. Not everyone thinks their non-heteronormative sexuality as something to hide. There are many parts of myself I cannot accept, but my queerness is not something I had to accept because it was not something up for acceptance to begin with. It felt so fundamental, and right. I know I am one of the lucky ones.
Right now in Singapore we cannot legally get married but no one gives a shit if we hold hands in public. I don’t think this for granted, and I know not everyone can be safe with their true identity. This is why I believe it is important to celebrate Pride. I acknowledge that this space that I have now did not come easy: there were plenty of people who bravely stood up before me, and there are many who have lost their lives for this. I acknowledge that even if I have no qualms about being queer myself, that does not translate to actual physical safety to be who I am if I was in the wrong time and place. For many, the world is still very unsafe.
I post photos of us regularly. As of now, in the 9+ years I have been posting them no one has left hate comments or threatened to kill me. I consider myself very lucky. Maybe some people may think I am attention seeking or something but nobody bats an eyelid when heteronormative couples post photos of themselves and their kids. I partially do it because of my continuous awareness of impermanence, but partially I also believe that representation matters. I come from a time when it wasn’t that typical to see lgbtq+ couples out in the wild, when seeing a photo of a lgbtq+ couple felt like striking lottery. Again, I don’t want to take this for granted. The media still sometimes portray queer people negatively when there are tons of us just leading lives like any other human being.
For a long while now I have stopped thinking of my queerness as this separate, different thing. It is just not in my consciousness. So I have to admit that writing this is not something I would write normally, since I tend to write on stuff that has been sticky in my mind. I am writing this with deliberate intention because I don’t believe that the universe bends towards justice. Justice must be a conscious human decision, made again and again. As we can see in some areas of the world, the tremendous progress we’ve made in the past few decades is actually backsliding again. It is a continuous struggle for our humanity.
I just wish the world is such that I don’t have to write such a long essay to express my pride towards my queerness but unfortunately so much this world is still stuck in illogical thinking. I am conditioned to see the word pride as something uncomfortable, but one of the definitions of pride says, “your feelings of your own worth and respect for yourself” – I just want to reemphasise that I am proud to be queer and to be my self, in a world that seems perversely bent on making us shrink our selves. I cannot help but feel deep pity for human being sometimes, because so many of us seem to need to crush other people’s souls in order to feel better about themselves. Are they proud of themselves? That they have led lives depriving other people of the right to be and the right to love? Every one of us who have stood tall against this crushing tide of forced conformity deserves to pat ourselves on the back and call our selves proud.
I still hope to be able to marry my partner in my home country some day. Before meeting her I have always thought of marriage as unrealistic: how can a person vow to love someone else for the rest of their lives? But now I know. I don’t have to vow to love her for the rest of my life, because any alternate reality is unthinkable. There is something more powerful than love. It is the melding that occurs when two people spend a long time together. She is just part of me now.
When I was younger, the legal aspects of marriage were also meaningless. But now that I am middle-aged I see the value of being legally bound. To my abstract mind, celebrating pride publicly like this is my tiny contribution to the march towards marriage equality. Our voice matters, and this voice to express oneself: my beliefs, wishes, values – this voice is hard fought for. Even in this modern day and age, the privilege of expressing oneself is not afforded to everybody.
I hope people who are able to have a voice will cherish it. Do not take it lightly in such precarious times. That is why even till today, every opportunity to write or post a photo feels precious to me.
With this, I hope everyone on the lgbtq+ spectrum gets to celebrate Pride in their own way, that we continue to honour those that came before us, and that we will continue the march forward so those who come after will also have opportunities to celebrate love.
People talk about "regime change" as if the only regime that could change is the one in Iran.#
Note to linkblog readers: I just flipped a switch and am now using WordLand to do the linkblog. Today's links are good, but the ones from prior days were mainly test posts. They will scroll off in a few days, and it'll be as it always has been. Still diggin. #
One more thing about the linkblog, it no longer cross-posts to social media sites. I want to see if I miss having the links there. It also won't have the limits. Maybe it'll be better if my accounts are a bit more quiet. Also the RSS feed is in a new location, I want to wait a bit to make sure it works before publicizing the URL. #
I'm keynoting the WordCamp Canada conference in October in Ottawa. It's the first conference I've attended since before the pandemic. #
The timing is ideal, and the location is significant. As an American, I don't want to try to attract people from around the world to a meeting in my country. Right now, I wouldn't come here if I didn't live here. #
I'm also not happy with the tech industry of the US. I'd like a fresh start, a return to our roots, with the assumption that the people control their destiny and the role of developers is to give them to the tools to try out new ideas. #
With WordLand I've created a product for writers, filling a need that's been there since the beginning of the web, using the practices in writing tools we learned in the 80s. It doesn't have the artificial limits imposed by Twitter et al. I think they're senseless. So we're going to blow that door wide open. No character limits. Simple styling. Links. Editable. #
And it's also a product for developers. There's no lock-in anywhere in this stack. So you can make a different style of editor. Or play with new ways to view timelines.#
I wanted to take discourse in a different direction too. A good design for the social web shouldn't require intense moderation. The reward for spammers is practically nil. Also, it'll be good for small groups in a way that Twitter et al never have been. #
So far I haven't invented any new formats. We're building on what works now. WordPress is a remarkably deep product, so deep it could be used as operating system. and that's exactly how I've chosen to view it and it works incredibly well. Some of what we're building on is based on work I did with Joseph Scott of Automattic in 2009, believe it or not.#
And as a bonus we get a great bridge into ActivityPub, from the great work Automattic is doing in bridging WordPress to ActivityPub. Think about it and you'll see how connections in and out of WordPress can facilitate a lot of interop, not just via RSS, but any format that comes along that people want to use. #
Imagine that WordLand is the editor of a twitter-like system built around RSS. It saves your writing to WordPress, where it is published on a website and via RSS. You don't have to use WordLand or WordPress, because RSS is an open format. Any editor that generates RSS is part of the network. Designed to be simple. #
All that's missing is a timeline viewer, and that's what I'm working on now. It's coming together pretty nicely, imho. Not an easy project, though on the surface it looks like it should be. Also there's nothing proprietary about my timeline viewer. There could be a thousand of them. Anyone who has written an RSS feed reader will have all the low-level bits they need. #
Hoping to have all the connections working by the end of the summer. #
Once done, it will be the completion of the vision for RSS as the foundation of the open social web, the place that all the open formats agree on, so we can get on with interop and say goodbye to lock-in. It can be done, I'm almost 100 percent sure of that now. Still have a little ways to go. As they say -- still diggin!#
Some of the problems Trump has created are fixable. They are painful for many people, and clearly so morally wrong, illegal, or just plain dumb that they will have to be reversed, with time. And then there are the disastrous, long-term mistakes like bombing Iran that we’ll be stuck with for decades.
I’ve updated the Micro.blog photo challenge page with the final list of words. Thanks everyone for the suggestions! I think I’ve got at least one or two from everyone who sent ideas in.
In hindsight, June was an incredibly busy month for me to do this, but I’m so happy to see people’s photos. 📷
Over the last few months I’ve been having a conversation with someone about why, exactly, “London is over/a bleak woke dystopia” has become the big talking point on the right. For many, London in their imaginary is some kind of end-times mash-up of: Blade Runner, stabbings, TikTok teens in ramen restaurants and roads blocked permanently by Just Stop Oil.
A view that when interrogated I think, tells us far more about life outside the capital than about the city itself.
First, The biggest burst of dislocation I have felt about the decline of this country wast not on a night bus through central, but back home in Thanet.
With it’s seaside towns full of boarded shops, chain coffee shops and disappearing bus routes.
Over Easter a family friend, retired, muttered over a mug tea that the town had tipped into violence; no police, no manners.
Later, walking in the Old Town, two cars locked bumpers. Drivers were out, shouting, slapping bonnets; passers by spilling out and joining in. The next day through a restaurant window, I watched a BMW cut off a young couple crossing the road. One pedestrian shouted, and the driver hit the brakes and got out, forehead to forehead with a guy shouting “you want some?”
A lorry-driver, stuck, ended up getting out and playing referee until the driver moved on.
My parents say these flare-ups are now routine. Maybe the pandemic fried everyone’s fuse. There’s anomie in the air.
Right now, at home, there’s a dispersal order in place after a brawl in the same street. Thrown bottles, and smashed windows. Yet flip on the news and this sort of mayhem is always somewhere else; a stabbing in Hackney followed by a clip of Sadiq Khan looking concerned. An age based dispersal curfew aimed at young people is almost unimaginable in London, but they have been normal outside the M25 for decades.
If life already feels precarious on your own high street, then London must seem ten times worse.
“London is Over” is a narrative fault-line.
English culture has never quite trusted the capital. Blame Hogarth; blame the Victorian penny dreadfuls; blame Dickens if you like. The metropolis plays the villain because stories need a face; and London, unlike a declining business park in Essex, is a ready-made psychic landmark. Add in its diverse population and the scene is set. A convenient Other to shoulder the nations anxieties.
Yes, London has some grim statistics; but so do Glasgow, Manchester, Nottingham. Yet overall, crime is down.
Older boomers, more rural with patchier broadband absorb a loop of London violence on TV. Whilst younger users in the city watch something else online.
Auntie May in the village watches the BBC at 6pm and scrolls Facebook between her soaps: and the algorithm serves her the same knife-attack clip twice.
Back in the 70s, Gerbner called this mean-world syndrome: the more TV you swallow, the nastier the world looks. In Britain 2025, the mean world is in our pockets with us all the time. The villains are migrants, eco-warriors, gender-neutral baristas. But strip those urban images away and the anxiety out in the shires, beyond the screen has nowhere obvious to land.
Projection does useful work. If your GP’s down to one doctor, the last bank replaced by a Costa, and there’s an hour’s wait for an ambulance, it’s neater to insist that things must be worse in London.
So a loop forms: rural unease fuels anti-city talk; national media pumps London footage; Facebook pages ad YouTubers monetise the churn. The capital’s imperfections—and its migrants—become catch-all explanations.
Strangers sell stories. And London has a big cast. Racial characters are handed an old script: once it was the gin-soaked mother; today it’s second-gen teens with Caribbean or Somali roots. Same scaffold; same role.
London isn’t paradise; it’s expensive, noisy, and very unequal. But the portrayal of the capital collapsing under the weight of rainbow flags, vegan burgers is theatre.
Meanwhile the real rot nibbles away in places where buses stop at 8pm and the mobile signal dies on the high street.
Politicians also know this. And “Take back our streets” polls well with the over-55s, but the problem is, they only ever visit the shopping centre out of town.
If we insist on villains, let us at least try to choose systemic ones; under-funded services, hollowed out local economies, first past the post in local government. Blaming London (or the people who give it its colour) is as empty as shouting at the sea.
It fills airtime, gets clicks, but changes nothing on the ground.
I’m not sure what to do about it, I have no advice. But I do know that if you start looking around at your own high street, instead of across at the city’s dark and ominous skyline, the fear will fade. Because the real work, as ever, lies at home.
