I promised myself I'd be done before the end of September, and here I am. First, down to business. Reviews of The Sentinel, The Guardian vs. The Independent, The Sunday Times (you will notice this is empty, which is because vim blindly followed my bleary-eyed order to overwrite three hours of solid work with a very early revision of my next article, making me question it as my text editor of choice, I may rewrite it eventually), and a surprise extra edition are all now done. That's Phase 2 over and done with. If I do a Phase 3, it will likely be at some point in 2010. I may or may not take a look at various Sunday papers before then, but such a thing would be in the form of sporadic specials rather than this more formal experiment.
But the big thing that happened while pointlessness was down (due a snafu by the hosting company during a server fault and restoration from backups) was the revelation that I'm actually a male-to-female transsexual, who's only just got started with transition. I'm still living as male, and have been doing so for all my life up to this point. The 'event' on 9th July was me telling my parents about this (which went well) and the whole subject of it is what's been distracting me this whole time. It's only been quite recently that I got my head together enough to start writing articles for pointlessness again.
I actually planned to make the big revelation here, but fate intervened, so my big revelation was at Zophar's Message Domain instead. I've updated the FAQ to reflect this, and changed some other stuff there while I was at it. The aim of pointlessness was not to be about me but about my opinions and views though, so expect to not hear much about this (apart from possibly two articles I've been writing in private about my experiences with gender though, which will probably be published in 2010 or later, if at all).
As a result of all this, showing myself on the web now holds no fear for me. So I've ordered a webcam that should work well on Kubuntu, which has now been dispatched to me. Hopefully, Skype chats with others will be a fairly regular part of my life from now on. I also ordered a 7-port external USB hub to help with my increasingly severe shortage of USB ports, and a DVD boxset of Haibane Renmei (which is my new favourite anime series).
I am feeling somewhat better today, though my effort to keep myself on the day shift seems to be failing. Either way, I'm still going with my experiment, and today I've been looking at the Daily Express, which has brought a little bit of enjoyment back to proceedings.
Day 3 now, and I've been struggling somewhat as I seem to be ill, which has drained my motivation. Regardless, I have pushed on to write today's article, which is a comparison between the Leek Post & Times and Your Leek Paper, the two local newspapers in this town. Hopefully I'll be feeling better tomorrow.
Still going with Phase 2 of my experiment, today I revisit The Daily Telegraph, to see if there's still plenty of op-eds to tear apart. The result was somewhat surprising.
This is where we depart from Phase 1 rules though, tomorrow will be a bit different. Stay tuned.
Ah, I still have a site.
Yes, I am back, and I've now decided out of nowhere to start Phase 2 of the Great British Newspaper Experiment, Monday seeing me take a look at the Daily Mirror. The rules have changed for Phase 2, so things will be done somewhat differently this time, though I'll still be reporting in once a day every day for a week. I've also archived all news and articles (what few there were) from May, June, and July.
So, where have I been all this time? Well it is related to the 'event' that happened in June, though I'm going to have to disappoint all except one person (you know who you are) since I'm still not publicly talking about what happened. I do hope to reveal all in late 2009 or early 2010 at the latest though, I'm just not ready yet.