Q-Seattle Events: Tacky Tourist Clubs

Our favorite online source for queer news, QueerDay.com has recently started sporting a new look. More on that in a moment, but whatever it looks like, QueerDay has been worth a look for a long time. It has a wonderful and light-hearted mix of real news and juicy (but accurate) gossip.

That new look though? Hmm. At first glance, I find it appealing, colorful, and easy-to-navigate. But at a second glance, I note that it needs some major tjuzing. (Another question: Can a tjuzes be major, or is it by definition minor but fabulous?) The new QueerDay opens up on some screens with an extraordinarily wide pink band over a sea of blank white space on the right side of the browser page, forcing the browser's horizontal nav bar to display. (Our guess: The css width value is set to 100% which doesn't work in this case.)

((And yes, we realize that we, too, feature a sea of blankness on the right side for many browser configurations, but at least the scroll bar doesn't encourage a user to go over there and look at it if it isn't showing at the moment.))

Even without the blank sea on the right, a user looking at this in something like the FeedDemon reader would have to readjust the window because of a wide river of blankness on the left side of the page, under those attractive feature previews. Why not remove the narrow column used for "Today's News" and put those items under the feature previews where they would benefit from a bit more breathing room? Doing that would make the page once again fit, like most RSS-reader-friendly sites do, in an 800px window.

While awaiting news of the 2005 Queen City Cruise, we might want to look to the wider scene hereabouts to find other possibilites. Of course, you could always pick up one of the weeklies, but there are now a few more possibilities in the, err... blogosphere.

A couple of blogs with multiple authors have caught our eye recently. Both Seattlest and Metroblogging Seattle are components of a larger conglomerations of city-focused blogs. Like the weeklies they emulate (and often quote), both are mostly mainstream with just enough queer spice thrown in occasionally to maintain a certain urban cred. They focus mostly on the same kinds of events and people that you're likely to read about in the calendar pages of one of those weeklies. Both have RSS feeds to help you keep up with their entries.

But both are also worth a look. This is a good moment to check Seattlest because they offer a holiday review of past features. It's also been the more active of the two in the past few weeks.

For a different view of this town, check the Seattle Wiki. Like most such things, this is a collaborative effort of several contributors. Like many other such things, it is still sorely in need of way more collaborators. But their current featured article on the Last Exit on Brooklyn certainly shows promise.

If there is someone (or two or three) out there who could offer them, say, a feature on Shelly's Leg or the Macombo or even the Brass Door, then this thing could become very interesting. (But a warning: If you do offer anything for their pages, make sure to keep a copy of your posting since some wiki-folk have a way of deleting entries that they don't agree with.)

Last week, we mentioned OutSports.com and then came upon another queer sports news/portal almost immediately. Both OutSports and GaySports.com include similar features including sections for news of local queer sports organizations (although GaySports seems to have more local contributors), photo galleries (except that the one at GaySports hasn't worked any time we've checked while the one at OutSports definitely does work). OutSports has that active message board which GaySports doesn't have.

But check out both. One or both is sure to have something you're interested in if you care about athletics or, at least, about athletes.

Your humble WebWrangler admits that he doesn't tend to read books in the category "gay gothic romance" and didn't even know that such a category exists. Apparently, it does, because we wandered upon this e-book novella during some web offroad travels:

Eclipse of the Heart: "Lan is openly gay, but a closet werewolf. A university lecturer with a history of abuse, he finds it hard to reconcile his submissive nature with his predatory tendencies."

What drew us to this page was not the description or the novella itself (although it might be entertaining for a lunch break date with a PocketPC). What has drawn us back to the page a few times is that sexy cover art by illustrator Scott Carpenter.

Whoa! This isn't the old days of romance novels with pictures of that long-haired butter guy. Makes us want to get a collection just for the cover art.

(Oh. And yes. We realize that "a lunch break date with a PocketPC" would be distressingly lame, but, hey, there are times when one wishes to avoid one's co-workers for at least a few consecutive minutes during a long day.)

Did you notice that little orange "XML" button in the left-hand column? Yeah. Probably not, eh? If you don't know what it means, then this entry won't hold much interest, but if you do know or want to find out just click on it. You'll be taken to a page that explains a bit about what it does and gives you a few options to subscribe to what is called an "Atom feed" or "RSS feed". Think of those things as email lists for the 21st century. Like email lists, a "feed" is updated regularly, but unlike an email list, it won't clog up your email inbox next to all the ads for questionable pharma products.

If you follow these things and use a "feed reader" of some sort, go ahead and subscribe to ours. We promise not to inundate you with too many entries, but once the planning is actually underway for the Cruise, you'll be able to find out quickly when new information about it is posted here.

And while you're at it, you might want to check out QueerFilter to search out other queer sites that offer feeds on a wide variety of topics and perspectives.

Those who have been on the Queen City Cruise in recent years might have met (or wanted to meet) a few of the volunteers provided by one of the event's beneficiaries, Seattle Quake Rugby Team. Of course, any conversation might go a bit better if you knew what rugby is all about. Right?

Well, here's a cool site where you can find out about that and a whole lot more that's sports related and also (even vaguely) gay-related. If you've been looking for a message board where you can talk about your favorite team's off-season moves while also mentioning that this new guy looks really hot in home whites (and if you know what that means), then this is your place. And even if you don't know what that means, this is a comfortable place to find out.

Oh. And yes. They do have photo galleries. And yes, some of the guys are half-naked (but you're really there to learn about the game, remember?).

Out there in the (slightly) wider queer world, we came upon a few tidbits while checking on a few links in our overly generous old-school links page:

Seattle Pride announces schedules

"The March begins at 11 AM on Sunday, June 26 at the corner of Broadway and Pike Street. The March will continue north on Broadway up to Volunteer Park, where the festival will take place."

Seattle Pride 2005 -- Festival Schedule

• Festival/Entertainment: June 25-26, 11am-6pm. Volunteer Park.
• 2nd Annual Gay BINGO in the Park: June 25, 6:30-8:30pm. Volunteer Park Amphitheater.
• Movie in the Park: June 25, 9-11 pm. - Volunteer Park Amphitheater. Movie To Be Determined.

Seattle Quake Rugby hosts tournament

"The Seattle Quake RFC is proud to present our biennial MAGNITUDE 15.0s the weekend of May 6-8, 2005 in Seattle, WA. The tournament is only played in off-Bingham Cup years. Formerly the West Coast Gay Rugby Tournament, the last tournament in May 2003 was a great success, sparking many friendships across teams in a small-scale event setting. This year's 15-a-side event aims to preserve those qualities of our first event."

Despite continual requests for it from Google image searchers who spot Christoper's wonderful image in their rarely-updated image indexes, I've decided to go with something else until an actual theme is chosen for the 2005 cruise. (Although a similar way-hot picture of Christoper is still used on the main Queen City Cruise page.)

These images of Christopher were originally taken for the 2000 Cruise: Poly Tickle Party.

I have, however, dusted off a different old publicity photo. The one being used now in the promo box comes from the poster for the very first cruise. That makes this picture older than many of those who will be buying tickets to this year's event. Sigh. But hey, it still works, especially when the much-changed skyline is removed as it is here.

Maybe there will even be reason to give that first Inqueerier story a reprise: "Tacky Tourists Expose Rear Admiral's Flap".

Labels: shirtless hunk

If you tried to get here anytime from about midnight Friday until just before 3pm, you wouldn't have made it.

Sorry. Our host had said there would be a 15-minute service outage last night. Instead, it turned into this marathon outage. They haven't yet explained why. They probably never will.

I would like to look for a more reliable host, but I doubt anyone else in the organization would be willing to pay the extra money. So I guess we're stuck here for at least a while longer.

4:43pm: Ah. So they did say something about it. Turns out that it was a problem completely different from what the scheduled outage was fixing.

We've added a few new scans of old pictures. Now, you can enjoy more of the Prom with other parties soon to come. Several of the pictures that have been up here for years were also rescanned. Not all of them, unfortunately, but at least there are fewer of those old heavily compressed images.

We've also made a few tweaks of the photo display system, including support (of a sort) for non-JS-enabled browsers. This isn't the best solution, but it seems to be the only thing that would work with this very cheap but very frustrating host.

The Bruce-sun that appears on the upper right of every page had long ago gotten way too old. The original was done back in the day when graphics had to be tiny enough for 24 K modems. That now seems a bit too unforgiving, so I switched over to a newer and larger version that uses much more than the previous four colors.

Under some conditions, uses might see two versions of the new sun, with a smaller one on top of the intended version. That will happen if the user's browser is being just a bit too retentive. To see the current version of the page without double suns, hold down the Ctrl key while pressing the browser refresh button (or F5).