Lesbian Prom Followup II

Well, Fulton, Mississippi is apparently full of asshats. That's the town that canceled the prom because one of the students wanted to take her girlfriend. Well, the school then said they would have it, at a country club. Seven students showed up at this fake prom", while all the other students went to an unofficial prom somewhere else, and then posted pictures etc on Facebook. (More)

Yes, they wanted badly enough to exclude her that they rented two venues, and did all the legwork to set up a second fake prom. Not only is it asshattery, it's asshattery that took a lot of extra work and money, just to make a few people feel bad. Seriously, people? As if that's not depressing enough, reading the comment pages of some of those articles is pretty bad too. I really don't get it. But then, back in HS, I'd probably have been invited to fake parties, if I'd gone to parties.

She will, however, get to be Grand Marshall of a gay pride parade in NYC, and was invited to a national "lesbian prom" in San Francisco. And Green Day is going to be helping host a prom geared for gay couples in Tupelo, Mississippi on May 8. Which is probably one of the best steps to take.

So yes, Fulton, Mississippi? You've successfully shown the entire nation you're a town full of bigots and idiots. Congratulations. You managed to take a minor incident and turn it into the first time most of the country has heard of your town, and it's for this kind of stunt.

Play This

Digital: A Love Story is far better than it has any right to be. Go play it now.

If you want, you can read things other people have written, but there may be spoilers in those, especially ones with comments. Or mine, below

Here's the nickel summary. It's a game set "five minutes into the future of 1998" in the heady days of BBSes. You've just gotten your new computer, and it includes a modem, and the friendly local computer shop guy stuck a dialer and the number for the local BBS into it. As a bit of advice, I suggest using your online alias when it asks. Trust me. From there, you explore BBSes, learn to hack and phone phreak, fall in love, and save the world, or at least the Internet. The game is short, a couple hours at most, and well worth it. The puzzles are good at making you feel clever, even when they're objectively not too hard. And you can even get in nerd-arguments about which Star Trek captain is best.

By the time we got a computer with a modem, in all of its 14.4 glory, AOL discs were spamming mailboxes everywhere, and the net was just being "discovered". I've only ever visited BBSes a handful of times, over at a friend's house, where we played Legend of the Red Dragon and dinked around. But the feel of things is very right. Very early internet. I can't really pin down what about the game is so affecting, or why it's stuck with me so much. The soundtrack, the low-res welcome screens, everything about it made it feel right. Part of it is nostalgia, I'm sure, even if it's nostalgia for something that wasn't quite the internet I grew up on, but its ancestor. And the story will probably kick in more for anybody who's ever made those emotional contacts that can come from just letters on a screen.

So I don't know if it's the story itself that's stuck with me, or the recreation of a smaller, more secret, newer, less ad-filled days of the Internets. But whichever it was, at the end of the story, I was honestly sad, and it's kept kicking around in the back of my head in the days since I played it. And that's reason enough to recommend it.