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Unserious Project 2: Update 6 – Completion

https://pgirl-gallery.neocities.org/

The website is finished. All pages are indexed and there are small display captions for each. If i were to further improve this, I would spend a lot more time on the captions and general contextual writing in each piece in order to connect to an audience rather than making an audience search for a meaning they might not necessarily understand, as my main aim was to take my subculture dataset out of a place where the implications of each piece were understood and instead try to explain to a general audience the significance of the sheer amount of extra contextless data left online to be discovered. With each image, it had an origin. Someone had to make it and put it online, and it’s in a server somewhere, and now as these pictures float around, it can open up conversations into the appeal of retro computer aesthetics, and life on the early web were graphics and assets were very different and more creativity, like silly clipart or gifs seen on Geocities were more accepted. This can be linked to the way we used to express ourselves through simple html.

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Intro to Computational Practice Project Work Unserious Project 2 Year 0

Serious Project 1: Update 6 – Completion

http://tdor-safehouse.glitch.me/

I feel my project is not fully realised due to the scale of it within my timeframe, but this is something I will very much be revisiting. What I had managed to publish on glitch was only my preface. The code for the page pertaining to my dataset will be posted below.

<!doctype html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
	
<title>tdor-safehouse</title>
<link href="stylesheet.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
</head>
 
<body background="ASSETS/bg.jpg">


<div>
 
<table width="550" height="70" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" class="headtable">
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <td><h1 class="header">&nbsp;Resources</h1></td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table>
</div>	
<div class="emptytable">
	 <table>
    <tbody>
      <tr>
        <td class="space">&nbsp;</td>
      </tr>
    </tbody>
  </table>
</div>
	<div>
	<table width="auto" height="auto" class="texttable">
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <td>
        <h2> Masterposts </h2>
          
<a href="window.location.href='https://www.tumblr.com/transstudiesarchive/168139537672/transgender-resources-masterpost';"> Transgender Resource Masterpost by Bryn Thomas</a> <br><br>
         
<a href="window.location.href='https://transgenderteensurvivalguide.com/post/164540851980/thegrangersapprentice-all-things-pertaining-to';">Massive Self Care Masterpost</a> <br><br>
        
<a href="window.location.href='https://transgenderteensurvivalguide.com/post/144842314245/dysphoria-tips-masterpost';"> Dysphoria Tips Masterpost</a> <br><br>
          
<a href="window.location.href='https://realtransfacts.tumblr.com/post/180287510823/gender-questioning-masterpost';"> Gender Questioning Masterpost</a> <br><br>
          
<a href="window.location.href='https://nonbinaryresource.tumblr.com/post/190387009652/being-trans-without-dysphoria-masterpost';"> Being Trans Without Dysphoria Masterpost</a> <br><br>
          
<a href="window.location.href='https://howtotrans.com/tag/masterpost/';"> How To Trans</a> <br><br>
          
<a href="window.location.href='https://medium.com/@hhunkin3/debunking-transmedicalism-a-masterpost-5c63c367f8b8';"> Debunking Transmedicalism Masterpost</a> <br><br>
          
<a href="window.location.href='https://realtransfacts.tumblr.com/post/179351610973/top-surgery-masterpost';"> Top Surgery Masterpost</a> <br><br>

<a href="window.location.href='https://nekosabina.tumblr.com/post/126280798271/the-librarians-gender-masterpost/amp';"> The Librarian's Gender Masterpost</a> <br><br>
          
<a href="window.location.href='';"> A Transgender Person’s Guide to Parents Masterpost </a> <br><br>
          
		<h2> Mental Health </h2>
		  <p>Trans Lifeline: 877-565-8860

GLBT National Hotline: 888-843-4564 <br><br>

National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs: 212-714-1141(English and Spanish) <br><br>

GLBT National Youth Talkline: 800-246-7743 <br><br>

DeHQ: LGBTQ Helpline for South Asians: 908-367-3374 <br><br>

<a href="window.location.href='https://www.lgbthealth.org.uk/';">LGBT Health and Wellbeing Scotland (counselling waitlist may be full, keep an eye out)</a>

<a href="window.location.href='https://pgirl-gallery.neocities.org/paintings/cyber.html';">The Gender Centre Resources and Downloads</a> <br><br>

<a href="window.location.href='https://pgirl-gallery.neocities.org/paintings/cyber.html';">The Gender Spectrum Guide to Trans Mental Health </a> <br><br>
                   
<a href="window.location.href='https://pgirl-gallery.neocities.org/paintings/cyber.html';"> Self Care and Additional Resources </a> <br><br>
            
<h2>Campaigning Tools</h2>
          
<a href="window.location.href='http://publicinterest.org.uk/FramingEqualityToolkit.pdf';">Framing Equality Toolkit</a><br><br>
          
<a href="window.location.href='https://www.climatechangecommunication.org/debunking-handbook-2020/';">The Debunking Toolkit</a><br><br>
        
<a href="window.location.href='https://glaad.org/tdor/';">GLAAD - TDoR</a><br><br>
          
<a href="window.location.href='https://glaad.org/tdor/https://tdor.translivesmatter.info/';">TDoR Database by Anna-Jayne Metcalfe</a><br><br>
		
<a href="window.location.href='https://campaignbootcamp.org/';">Campaign Bootcamp</a><br><br>
          
<a href="window.location.href='https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201919/cmselect/cmwomeq/96/96.pdf';">Enforcing the Equality Act: the law and the role of the Equality and Human Rights Commission: Government and Equality and Human Rights Commission Responses to the Committee’s Tenth Report of Session 2017–19</a><br><br>          
		</p>
		
		</td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table></div>
	

</body>
</html>

Upon reflection, I realise my concept can be expanded in many ways as there is so much more data of other scenarios within my theme. If i had to revisit this project and take it even further, I would not only make use of converging datasets but I would create my own separate features of the website that make it significantly more unique and more worth visiting than it is already – for example writng my own resources instead of using lists of other people’s creations or bringing more art to it than the text included. The original use was a double sided campaigning tool and art piece which wasn’t what I fully achieved in my opinion as that’s a concept that would need significantly more time and research to make properly. Overall, I still find it mostly useful to have all of this information in one place on my computer even if it didn’t make it to a live website.

Categories
Intro to Computational Practice Year 0

Week 11 – Computers, Arts and Activism

My projects required a lot of data gathering and archiving and in the case for project 1, this is data that could not have been gotten from anywhere else, and can only really exist online. I believe the implications my website show a bigger problem offline in the form of transgender people not having access to societal resources and offline support so people like myself and other must make databases of information because there simply isn’t currently a body that cares enough about us to do it for us. We must create and share and document things for ourselves and build websites by our individual programming skills, and looking through my own masterpost dataset shows how homemade every single website is. They are not computationally complex. The code is simply the paper of which the means of survival is contained inside.

Categories
Intro to Computational Practice Year 0

Week 8 – Living & Performing In The Network

Connecting an existing network

I choose to combine 2 datasets in my TDOR website project; My survival datasets and the rememerance dataset. This will be seen in my website by being a converging reference point for both.

Categories
Intro to Computational Practice Project Work Serious Project 1 Year 0

Serious Project 2: Update 5 – Building and Design Choices

The home page of my website uses a stock image of warm, well lit bricks behind off white lined paper that I scanned myself. This was chosen specifically to be comforting and warm. The other pages look like this as well.

I built 2 pages simply using html and css within dreamweaver (as i did not have time to make a webpage making use of the tdor database data.) I only really had time to use my own masterpost datasets.

That being said, when i put it onto glitch.com, my assets broke and I really couldn’t figure out how to correct them in time for submission so I left it to its bare functionality.

Here’s some of my code:

<!doctype html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
	
<title>tdor-safehouse</title>
<link href="stylesheet.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
</head>
 
<body background="../project 1 serious/ASSETS/bg.jpg">


<div>
 
<table width="230" height="70" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" class="headtable">
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <td><h1 class="header">&nbsp;SAFEHOUSE</h1></td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table>
</div>	
<div class="emptytable">
	 <table>
    <tbody>
      <tr>
        <td class="space">&nbsp;</td>
      </tr>
    </tbody>
  </table>
	</div>
	<div>
	<table height="250.2" class="texttable">
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <td><p></p>
        <p class="mainpara">&nbsp;It is 2023. We are young, and transgender. We live a range of lives – ones that are hushed and hidden away; ones where we play in the streets at night; ones where an endless trail of beautiful art and music flows behind our footsteps; ones with difficult conversations, quasi-understanding and ones where we sit with our surroundings, thinking, ‘It could be worse.’ We are young and transgender, and we shake with the euphoria after washing from the shores of deprivation as we learn ourselves as young people barely budding in the adult world; secret lives and adjustments. It’s easy to understand why transgender people were considered near divine being in our faraway past. We are different, we are born to have high insight, we see the first division – Man, and woman. Male bathrooms, female bathrooms. Clothes. Roles.<br> <br>Looking up ‘transgender genocide’ yields calculated results in which transgender voices are trampled by blunt articles insisting it doesn’t exist, it’s not an issue, we die at the same rate as everyone else. If we are killed in the streets, it’s not because we are trans, and yet simultaneously it is our fault for being an anomaly. Somehow, we are the ‘scapegoat’ for issues within our society. Does it sound familiar to you? <br><br>
        My aim for this website was one of a shield to contrast the sword of transgender violence databases. As the numbers tick up, let us honour our victims and honour ourselves. This is a safe space to It was never supposed to be like this. We fight every day. So, while we fight like hell, every single day, how do we cope? How can we care for ourselves? Trans people and youth deserve rest, healing, treatment. Love. Healthcare.  As the numbers tick up, let us honour our victims and honour ourselves. Let this space be a place of hospitality and self-care, a quiet, featureless webpage for reflection. Take a breather. This is my database of transgender&nbsp; care and survival.</p></td>
    
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table></div>
    <div align="center">
	<button class="button" onclick=""> I want to see resources </button>
    <button class="button" onclick=""> Victims 2023 </button>
</div>
</body>
</html>
Categories
Intro to Computational Practice Project Work Unserious Project 2 Year 0

Unserious Project 2: Update 5 – Display Captions and Code

Coding the website was a nightmare due to the clunkiness of Neocites – even if it’s on purpose.

I started the index page using the pre-requisite message.

When finishing the website, I will change the captioning message to a longer, more thoughtful text.

Importantly, every single image I chose had context that I could talk about in display captions. However, I realise that i’m running out of time in the project to write detailed display captions about every image. To combat this, I will try and write at least a short sentence for every picture, and develop a handful of captions if i feel it is more relevant to a data themed project. The captions are to present my paintings to a general wider audience and explain the context within them even if they are highly personal to my online experience.

To make the navigation, I used invisible tables and Windows XP boxes from my CSS package that made it much easier.

look how easy! however <a href> does not work and the correct way to actually use the buttons is to put ‘onclick=””‘ in the img properties.

However, something that i found long and gruelling was making 14 individual webpages for each painting and indexing every page within the website. It’s stressful and time consuming.

It took a lot of adjusting. In the website’s current state, lots of pictures appear too large and I do not want an audience to have to scroll to see the full image. Each individual page will need to be tested. I’m honestly worrying if i will have them finished at all.

My display captions do not have the desired effect but they do have some insight. I will try to make up for the lack of content in the display captions by adding to the preface paragraph.

Categories
Intro to Computational Practice Project Work Unserious Project 2 Year 0

Unserious Project 2: Update 4 – Neocities

I had to refresh myself on html and css, so I pirated Dreamweaver and made a Nicki Minaj themed website.

Time to create my website with Neocities. Neocities is a recreation of Geocities, which was a service that let users create websites for free in the early 90s. At one point Geocities was almost one of the most browsed sites on the early internet and became a creative sandbox where users mainly made use of simple HTML.

Websites on Geocities looked like this.

I feel geocities is also relevant as a possible origin source for some of the graphics seen in images in the data set – but this is still incredibly ambiguous.

Functionally, I really hated Neocities IDE – or lack thereof. It is an online text editor with no preview options, so I was crossreferencing a lot with Dreamweaver while I coded this website. I’m assuming they are trying to stay as faithful to older methods. I did the majority of my code in dreamweaver.

To begin, I decided to look for a CSS library in the style of Windows XP or 98. This is to save time on my part in constructing a stylesheet, but also to imitate the Joel G website and other neocities websites. I feel it is fitting.

I found this library to use for a windows XP stylesheet.

Categories
Intro to Computational Practice Project Work Serious Project 1 Year 0

Serious Project 1: Update 4 – Text

In the same vein of ‘Get Well Soon’ I decided to write my own gentle, encouraging political text as a preface, and include things like mental health and trans survival resources on the front page. Aside from that, the text was heavily inspired by Anna-Jayne Metcalfe’s blog posts documenting her experiences compiling the data for the tdor database and the ‘Ode to a Grayson Perry Urn’ poem by Tim Turnbull.

‘It Is 2023. We are young, and transgender. We live a range of lives – ones that are hushed and hidden away; ones where we play in the streets at night; ones where an endless trail of beautiful art and music flows behind our footsteps; ones with difficult conversations, quasi-understanding and ones where we sit with our surroundings, thinking, ‘It could be worse.’ We are young and transgender, and we shake with the euphoria after washing from the shores of deprivation as we learn ourselves as young people barely budding in the adult world; secret lives and adjustments. It’s easy to understand why transgender people were considered near divine being in our faraway past. We are different, we are born to have high insight, we see the first division – Man, and woman. Male bathrooms, female bathrooms. Clothes. Roles.

Looking up ‘transgender genocide’ yields calculated results in which transgender voices are trampled by blunt articles insisting it doesn’t exist, it’s not an issue, we die at the same rate as everyone else. If we are killed in the streets, it’s not because we are trans, and yet simultaneously it is our fault for being an anomaly. Somehow, we are the ‘scapegoat’ for issues within our society. Does it sound familiar to you?

My aim for this website was one of a shield to contrast the sword of transgender violence databases. As the numbers tick up, let us honour our victims and honour ourselves. This is a safe space to

It was never supposed to be like this. We fight every day. So, while we fight like hell, every single day, how do we cope? How can we care for ourselves?

Trans people and youth deserve rest, healing, treatment. Love. Healthcare. My aim for this website was one of a shield to contrast the sword of transgender violence databases. As the numbers tick up, let us honour our victims and honour ourselves. Let this space be a place of hospitality and self-care, as we much care for each other and ourselves if we need to keep fighting every day.

This is my database of transgender care and survival.’

Categories
Intro to Computational Practice Year 0

Week 7 – Virtual Lives – Simulations and Simulacra

1. Write one text paragraph reflecting on the theme of this lecture in relation to your chosen project. Here are some reflection points:

how do notions of the ‘virtual’ may stretch and open new possibilities in your projects?

I believe the concept of the virtual only truly affects my own dataset project. The virtual gives me presentation options for my paintings – Virtual galleries can take many forms including 2D and 3D spaces. I simply chose for my virtual to be the old virtual, the original usage of the word referring to clunky older websites.
Real data feeds our virtual life from the algorithms that surround us that track everything we do, and advertise to us based on our digital selves, our paper trail.

Monologue

To present my project, I would talk about the importance of the TDoR database offline and how important it is that digital archving, in its multitudes and copyability is an integral tool in preserving the memory of real people in an opressed group offline that may have had no one to protect them. We are always told that when something is put online, it’s there forever, and it becomes advantageous in this case as we become more and more opressed as a minority.

Categories
Intro to Computational Practice Project Work Unserious Project 2 Year 0

Unserious Project 2: Update 3 – Paintings

I traced, painted and scanned my entire collection after sorting them into their categories.

Below is a timelapse of one of my paintings.

I’ll upload my scans here.

UNDERSKETCHES
PAINTINGS

Acrylic paint was chosen to imitate the style of RateMySetup and to invoke a feeling within the viewer of a window to the past – like a renaissance painting, I want an audience to be able to see my website and feel how it felt for us to grow up in a tiny online subculture hoarding data, and the wonder and curiorsity we had associated with the origins of thousands of mysterious images with no explainable origins. The way we communicated with eachother using pictures like that, the wierd and surreal media we enjoyed, and liminal photographs associated with the feeling of childhood isolation. An audience’s look into the short life of people that lived invisibly.