August 2007 Archives

I went ahead and installed Movable Type 4. The lovely Carla bailed me out in a dark moment, so it should be at least functional. I'll be going through the usual fixing of the feeds and reorganization of the sidebars and it looks like I may have jacked up my archive mapping, but... oh well. You don't care. And I don't think I care that much, either. So I guess now would be a good time to play with that since I've already committed to breaking all my permalinks.

*shrug*

Just so you know.

After I read that Andy was going to be liveblogging the Democratic Candidates' LGBT Issues Debate, Missy and I decided to go to Pi and watch it. The bar was pretty full, though not totally uncomfortably packed. Good to see. They streamed the feed from Logo's website and had it up on the big screen. We found a spot in the back of the room and, aside from this queeny personal space invader, we were able to see just fine. The crowd got restless and it was a little hard to hear towards the end.

I guess I didn't read up very well on the format. "Debate" implies that all the participants are standing around together, are asked the same questions, and have the opportunity to respond directly to each other. Instead each candidate had 15 minutes onstage by themselves. Ultimately I liked that format better. The panelists' questions were tailored to the candidates, while still giving each one time to give their stump speech (and time to stumble over themselves).

I was pleasantly surprised to see j. brotherlove live-Twittering as well. It actually helped to follow along and crystallize the whole thing, because with the noise in the room I couldn't always hear. And we had to leave early to go to a Fringe show. His thoughts and Andy's thoughts are pretty similar to my own. Kucinich is the shit, but is way too far to the left to ever get elected. Bill Richardson was meh. Mike Gravel is an old white guy. Barack Obama was mostly good, but not perfect. Hillary Clinton was the most polished and played the best politician. John Edwards didn't quite make his message clear and needs more practice.

Andy's got more blog reaction at Minnesota Monitor. Malinda Lo covered it at AfterEllen. DiversityInc asks Which Democrat offended LGBT voters? Who won the debate?

I was leaning towards the former until the rest of the guests joined in. Of course I knew enough to know what should be coming next. (via Leah Jones)

I'm frankly a little overdosed on this whole thing. Not like I've been on the scene, but it's exhausting to spend a lot of your day on the internet and in front of the tv and next to the radio, constantly taking in information on a tragedy like this.

I've shifted from the news (aside from MPR) to following the blog reaction to it. Metroblogging has gotten quite a bit of attention. Julio Ojeda-Zapata, the tech writer for the Pioneer Press has covered it (pasted after the jump, since that link will break in about a week). I fielded a Twitter from Jon Gordon and ended up in today's episode of Future Tense.

Missy and I have talked about the strangeness of the personal gain that comes from an event like this. Because something really terrible happened to set this all in motion. I can't occupy the "reporting" and "reflecting" spaces in my brain at the same time. What I've been doing for Metroblogging is just trying to compile info. I'll editorialize and grieve later. At the risk of sounding self-important, Metroblogging served as a good conduit of information for people at a time when people wanted to know what was going on. I'm glad we could do that.

For as much as I've driven on and under that bridge and seen all the pictures, it occurs to me that I'm having a hard time really appreciating the scale of this. What does a highway really look like laying in the middle of a river? I'll wait until the recovery effort is complete before I go over there.

I've now driven into downtown twice since this happened. Both times I looked at the Minneapolis skyline and felt intensely relieved that it was all still there.

In the mean time, there's an art fair and a Fringe Festival going on. And I'm going to Iowa for the first time ever (meh) for my co-workers' wedding. Not sure on the mechanism of this connection, but I'm feeling really in love with this place lately. Part of it's due to the awesomeness of my personal life (relative to the previous 29 years), but I'm also feeling very connected to Minneapolis right now.

I'm okay. Here's the story at MPR. Keeping tabs at Metroblogging.