Derry, Northern Ireland

Derry, Northern Ireland
A book I'm working on is set in this town.

Tuesday, July 6, 2010

I hate YouTube

The bastards vanished my account. Completely. My profile no longer exists. I've lost links to videos and archival footage shot during the Troubles, including a great documentary about the "Battle of the Bogside" and the immediate aftermath. And those bastards won't give me any way to contact them and ask what the hell's going on, and their FAQs are of no use whatsoever. The only way I can get back onto YouTube, it seems, is to open an account with a Google e-dress and start all over.

I flat-out fucking refuse. I will not be subject to the idiot whims of people who say you can do one thing then try to force you to do something else. If they won't let me on there with one of my established e-dresses, the hell with 'em. I have no reason to go back, now. I'll track those videos down some other way.

It seems many of the sites are doing that now. I happened onto this site based in Denmark and its opening post helped me deal with some exploding self-doubt about POS --

http://rottenindenmark.vox.com/library/posts/page/1/

But the only way to be allowed to post a "thank you" in the comments section is to join the VOX site. No other way. I tried and it bumped my comment, so I joined up. And then YouTube pulled its shit on me and suddenly I'm sorry I did it. I was so eager to share with the man who posted the article, I didn't think about the fact that these motherfuckers now have info on me that isn't all that important but was mine...and now it's shared...and they can do whatever they fucking want, include dump me if they feel like it.

Of course, this feeds into my paranoia about homophobia. For a while, Blogger was dumping all its gay sites. Didn't matter if there was nudity on them or how innocuous they were, if it was gay it got blocked until enough people began screaming about it. Same thing happened on Amazon, just over a year ago -- gay books were being blocked on their site and they didn't back down till people began screaming...four months after it began. And about 10 years ago, Canada began using anti-pornography laws to block the import of any gay book with sex in it, no matter how gently it's portrayed (no straight book was unless it was extremely graphic), so books like "The Front Runner" and "The Persian Boy" get held back while trash like "Poor Little Bitch Girl" get let in (it's a Jackie Collins "novel"), and they don't care if people scream; their Supreme Court said it's okay. Wonder how long it'll be before that happens here?

The hell with it. Tonight's a reading night for POS. I've got tons of stuff to go through, but I'll leave with a final note from that blog --

"When you're on the second-to-last chapter of your 898-page deconstructivist masterpiece, how do you not think 'Is it really worth all of this?'" And I'm thinking, "Y'know, I got no answer -- not even a clue -- but at least now I see the only decision is to keep on or admit that you've wasted years for nothing...and I ain't ready to do that, yet...not on Brendan's book."

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