Joanna's Diary

Sparkly

2009-07-07T19:06:00.004+01:00

Yes, after a two year hiatus I am finally getting my arse back to Sparkle.

I'll be sharing a room at The Place with Valerie. I've warned her I'm getting old these days so nothing too outrageous please! Will be going to the Angels meal on the Saturday night but apart from that I haven't really planned out the Sparkle weekend.

Really looking forward to it - it's been 2 years since I've been out with Val - far too long.

Need to get everything packed tomorrow - then I'm heading up on Thursday.... have narrowed down what I am going to wear but you can guarantee I'll end up taking 3 tonnes of clothes with me just in case.

If you're going to Sparkle - say Hi.

Thank You Ebay

2009-06-24T19:14:00.001+01:00

Thank god for Ebay. New wig, £20. Bargain!

More wigs here - Direct from Hong Kong, fantastic :)

TG Captions has a new home

2009-06-04T08:42:00.005+01:00

A quick note for fans of my TG Captions website: Please note that I have had to movethis week.

I've been having problems with Heart Internet who tell me that, despite promising unlimited hosting with unlimited bandwidth, this site is using up too much of the system resources. Unless I do something about the server load then they will take the site down. So basically it's hit it's unlimited limit.

I have tried to put into place some Wordpress caching plugins that are supposed to ease server load - but I don't think they are working. The site gets about 15,000 hits a day, so it's much busier than any of the other sites I run.

I can't afford to pay for a dedicated server - the banner ads on the side of the site only bring in a few quid a week, nowhere near what a dedicated server costs. And as the site is only a bit of fun, unless it's self-supporting I don't want to spend lots on it.

So for now I am moving the captions across to a WordPress-hosted site that hopefully will be able to cope with the load. I'm currently in the process of copying all images from my old site to there, and will eventually remove the images from the tgcaptions.co.uk site and just leave a redirect in place.

You can find the new site here: http://tgcaptions.wordpress.com/ please update your bookmarks and any links you may have to it.

All new updates will go there for now. If you follow the caption site via RSS then please update your feed settings.

20 Years Ago Today

2009-05-26T10:34:00.001+01:00

Today is the 20th anniversary of a moment that will live long in the memory of any Arsenal fan.

This was the night we went to Anfield needing to win by 2 goals, which we did with almost the last kick of the game.

This also produced one of my favourite scenes from any footballing movie - the final minutes of Fever Pitch which sums up wonderfully the emotions of a football fan :)

(And Ruth Gemmill looks fantastic in that red and white spotted frock too!)

Angles

2009-05-20T10:43:00.001+01:00

Yes I know I've taken lots of photos in this pose recently, but I've bought a monopod thing and I don't like the ones I take when I am facing straight into the lens.

Had another dressing sesh the other day, trying out a few outfits I've been buying to see if they'll be OK for Sparkle. Been favouring the more longline tops with jeans/leggins which don't emphasise my fat belly.. Quite pleased with the overal look.

And yes, still here, blogging in other places right now. Trying to revive the Angels blog as a good news feed, and started twittering to raise its profile. Also got back into making captions again - lots on my TG Captions website, and have a backlog of about 30 to publish over the next month.

Oh for F**ks Sake

2009-05-10T15:45:00.004+01:00

Look, for fucks sake. The MMR thing is one of the biggest media hoaxes out there. The research by Wakefield was seriously flawed in the first place and leapt upon by a horde of journalists and celebrity columnists without a science qualification between them. No actual studies have been published that show a link between MMR and Autism, and the evidence against a link is overwhelming. Every media outlet that discusses this always ends up trying to "balance the debate" by allowing anti-vaccine nutjobs to have their say and continue to spread this absolute rubbish.

Of course, now the media point the finger purely at Wakefield, and walk away whistling... claiming it was never anything to do with them guv, oh no honest. And the biggest bastard in all this is the Daily Mail...

So of course, one of the things we really need to do is to get our children to start thinking about how science is manipulated by the media and by parties with a cash investment in peddling alternative therapies etc. It's good common sense to doubt what these shitrags are telling us.

So this story in the Daily Mail yesterday made my blood boil when I read it (which to be honest every story in the Daily Mail does) - for the sheer arrogant cheek of it.

So - to try and show children that the whole MMR thing was complete bollocks and that people like Wakefield and the Daily Mail were bastards of the highest order - is somehow Brainwashing them? Oh for fucks sake.

I'm gobsmacked. Really i am.

To have people from JABS talking about insidious ways of shaping peoples opinions? Words fail me.

And for AQA to now withdraw the past paper because of it. Shameful. Stand up to these bastards. (And I've now seen the paper and it was only for 3 marks anyway!)

I'm hoping Ben at Bad Science will be writing about this soon, keep an eye on his blog.

And the Anti-vaccine movement is moving ahead at a scary rate in the US with that fuckwit Jenny McCarthy being signed up by Oprah. These diseases are going to come back, and people are going to die, and the blame for that falls squarely on these celebrity rent-a-quotes and the arts students that work in the media who don't have a clue about what they are doing.

Bah.....

Want to read more. Try some of these links
Why Does the Vaccine/Autism Controversy Live On?
Oprah drinks the antivax Kool Aid
Why is Oprah Winfrey promoting vaccine skeptic Jenny McCarthy?
Daily Mail Exposes Secret Government Brainwashing Plot!
Mail & MMR: who's doing the brainwashing?

The stupid.. they not only burn, they kill...

After Twitter

2009-04-06T14:45:00.004+01:00

After Twitter.. here's Flutter

Well... not really.. but it made me chuckle

Eddie Lizzard?

2009-03-03T18:15:00.003Z

From Discovery Channel:

Male Lizards Disguise as Females to Avoid Attack

Young, male lizards desperate to mate, access women and avoid attack from older
males by pretending to be one of the girls, a new study said.
According to the study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, young male Augrabies flat lizards (Platysaurus broadleyi) hide their colors so as to
imitate plain, brown females.
"In this system the adult males are extremely colorful and extremely territorial and the females are a plain brown," said co-author Scott Keogh, of the School of Biological Sciences at the Australian National University. "Young males purposefully only develop colors on their belly, so they reach sexual maturity by still looking like a female."
Imitating a female allows the juvenile lizards to mate with females, without being detected and driven away by the larger, territorial, adult males, who will chase and bite their young rivals

More

See.. for some trannies, it's all about the girls :)

Banksy

2009-02-27T15:46:00.001Z

well, ish.

A fun free site to jazz up your photos if you don't have photoshop.

http://www.befunky.com

In need of a hero?

2009-02-19T16:39:00.003Z

In need of a superhero? Here's Angels Modgirl. With her Axe of Smiting +3 gasp as she moderates threads in a single bound and herds kittens without breaking sweat.

Want to make your own? Then check out the Hero Factory. Great fun.

So Anyway...

2009-02-16T22:21:00.003Z

You may have noticed a distinct absence of blogging from me. I've noticed it too ;)

It's partly because I've run out of things to say on here. It's also due to me building up my boy online presence - it gets hard to split things between the two personae. Splitting between two flickr accounts, several blogs, forums, two facebook accounts and a twitter stream.

And while some have managed it very well, merging the two parts of me just isn't going to happen.

What has been interesting is how a few Twitter friends I have made through education are also into Second Life, and are Twittering (Tweeting) with Siobhan and Mrs Siobhan. It's just bizarre to see several threads merge like that.

I've become more and more distanced from the scene. I'm crap at ringing people to say Hello.. and obviously I'm crap at receiving calls too. I do need to get out more, but am in that awkward period where real life birthdays, events and holidays (plus work) gets in the way with the best laid plans and all that.

Add to that a general feeling of "meh" from those trannies I've followed and used to read regularly. There's a whole new wave of young british trannies, and they're leaving us behind with whole new fabulousness.

Have had a few chances to dress in the last few months though, which is good. And I've rekindled a desire to do that - although I've found myself falling back on the same few outfits... Photos on flickr in a narrow range of poses that work. Although I have found that this quickpod thing was a fantastic purchase for self portraits.

I've stopped playing Everquest 2... Got bored with just raiding... but have now got into Warhammer Online instead. I used to play the tabletop game and then the roleplay game as a teenager, and have been waiting for the online version for a long long time. Enjoying it so far, but I've been very much a casual player... only logging in at weekends etc. Trying to get the right balance between gaming and RL.

Angels is still ticking along - I spend a lot of time keeping the peace between the girls who only post when drunk and those who just want to argue about everything. Recently had an instance of sockpuppeting, which made a change. I'm assuming they were sober.

So yeah... that's about it for now. I am still here.

Better late than never

2009-02-16T16:47:00.001Z

Haven't dressed for a month or so. Haven't had a lot of chances.

I promise I will write something more substantial for this blog soon. Until then, here's a brand new photo.

Cut and Paste 2

2009-01-24T12:30:00.002Z

While on the subject of Cut and Paste trannies

This one, is yet another work of art.

Seasons Greetings

2008-12-18T09:44:00.001Z

Wishing you all a very merry Xmas and a Happy New Year

Cut and Paste

2008-12-12T16:22:00.004Z

I know I shouldn't point and laugh, but....

Is this the worst photoshopped tranny ever to appear on Flickr?

Just makes me think of this.

Actually, I hope it is photoshop, and I'm not mocking a deformity....

Stripped

2008-11-24T17:34:00.001Z

I aint dead

2008-10-30T19:00:00.003Z

Honest. I've just been throwing my energies in different directions and forgetting to write anything here.

Last night i went out for my first tranny night for what I think has been just over a year. I went up to London to see Laura Handbag and Fiona. We had a few drinks in bar in Soho, then off to a nice italian restaurant. Drank far too much wine (as usual) so feeling a little delicate today!

Was great to see both Laura and Fiona again, it's been far too long and I hope we don't leave it so long until the next time. Thanks to Laura for the bacon sarnie this morning as well.

No photos of the event :) The only photo we took all night was when two girls on the table next to us asked Laura to take their photo. Which got me thinking on a philosophical point - if a tranny goes out but no photos are taken, did the event actually happen?

Desaturated

2008-10-20T23:58:00.001+01:00

Kindness falls like rain

2008-10-15T22:54:00.002+01:00

Another chance to catch up on some dressing. Taking the night off from troll-wrangling on Angels to give my new wig a try out.

Really wish I could get this style in a red, but it's not available.

yay

2008-10-15T21:00:00.001+01:00

Hurrah. My Eddie Izzard tickets have arrived.

I know he's not been top of his game standup-wise for a few years - and Sexie wasn't his finest hour, but I couldn't turn down the chance to see him again.

Yarr

2008-09-19T07:26:00.005+01:00

Avast ye landlubbers

It be Talk Like a Pirate day today.

Yarr.

And a few more

2008-09-18T12:48:00.001+01:00

Just a couple more :)

Dressing up again

2008-09-16T11:12:00.003+01:00

They say dressing up sessions are like buses. You wait ages for one, and then a bendy one comes along. Or something like that.

Anyway, I've been enjoying a little bit more "me" time with yet another dressing up session. For ages I've wanted a really nice school uniform look, and I managed to find a cheap pinafore dress on ebay the other month. I just haven't had the chance to really try it out yet. So I did.

I also tried out some new Mac eyeshadows that I bought mail order this week. I needed some new foundation and it seemed silly not to use the chance to get some Mac eyeshadow too. I was quite pleased with the look I got with it.

Anyway, here's the photos.

And yes, another chance to try out the maid outfit. I think I'm turning into a fancy dress tranny - fixating on some of the outfits I've never had the chance to wear before. :)

Back on the Horse

2008-09-02T22:06:00.003+01:00

Like others in the trannysphere I've been in a real non-tranny mood for most of the year. I can't believe the last photos I added to my flickr stream were from Xmas. I really just haven't been bothered. There's a feeling of things moving on plus I am very unhappy with my weight which means a lot of my clothes don't fit, or don't fit very well :(

I have finally got round to my first dressing up session for a long time. But even then I needed a head start as I mentally came up with reasons why I couldnt be arsed... I've had a bit of a thing for some of those fancy dress outfits you get on ebay (like the santa and maid outfits I got for xmas) and had two really nice dresses that I'd bought ages ago and hadn't worn with the full slap and wig on.

Hopefully, this will kick me into life a little more. But I don't know.

Captions - A New Home

2008-08-03T16:51:00.004+01:00

For a while I've been thinking about moving to a blog format to host my TG captioned images. I'd like a little more audience participation, and a blog format will allow readers to post comments about the images.

So this weekend I've finally got it up and running at a new site. If you want to know more, pop over to http://www.tgcaptions.co.uk/ and take a look.

The aim is to host my favourite images from this site, and also to provide a home for any newer captions I make.

I haven't made many new images for ages, but I have been downloading a tonne of source images from various places on the net that are just ripe for captioning. Hopefully I'll produce some new material soon.

So please visit http://www.tgcaptions.co.uk/ and let me know what you think!