(Remarks on the occasion of the 20th Anniversary of ACT UP given at the NYC Gay Community Center on March 13th, 2007 with Rodger McFarlane, Eric Sawyer, Jim Eigo, Peter Staley, Troy Masters, Mark Harrington, David Webster, Jeremy Waldron, and Hannah Arendt contributing.)
We Are Not Crumbs;
We Must Not Accept Crumbs
By Larry Kramer
One day AIDS came along. It happened fast. Almost every man I was friendly with died. Eric still talks about his first boyfriend, 180 pounds, 28 years old, former college athlete, who became a 119 pound bag of bones covered in purple splotches in months. Many of us will always have memories like this that we can never escape.
Out of this came ACT UP. We grew to have chapters and affinity groups and spin-offs and affiliations all over the world. Hundreds of men and women once met weekly in New York City alone. Every single treatment against HIV is out there because of activists who forced these drugs out of the system, out of the labs, out of the pharmaceutical companies, out of the government, into the world. It is an achievement unlike any other in the history of the world. All gay men and women must let ourselves feel colossally proud of such an achievement. Hundreds of millions of people will be healthier because of us. Would that they could be grateful to us for saving their lives.
8
Mar 07
Compiz Fusion Skydomes 4096×1024
UPDATE: If you use the Avant Window Navigator, I have just posted 9 AWN Themes. Also see 9 GRUB Splash Images here on Queer Visions.
My frequent trips to the Ubuntu forums often bring me in contact with posts about the visual wonder that is the Beryl composite window manager (now known as Compiz Fusion). I decided to take the plunge and see if my experience lived up to all the hype. In short, it has. I now find working with a regular desktop window manager limiting. Though I love the Gnome desktop environment, 3D desktops are so freeing it’s difficult to go back to anything less.
See for yourself!
(hat tip: BastionPL)
Installing XGL + Beryl on Ubuntu Edgy Eft with an ATI card is relatively easy once you get the fglrx video driver working properly (that can be the tricky part). By the way, I use Trevino’s Beryl SVN repository. However, when I tried to enable the ANIMATED SKYDOME feature in Beryl-Manager under Desktop / Desktop Cube / Skydome, I had trouble. Browsing the Beryl forums led me to the realization that I needed to use a PNG image with a specific resolution ratio. I’m still at a loss as to the specifics beyond that but I have found a formula which works for me on my laptop with a screen resolution of 1280×800. The formula: a PNG image at a resolution of 4096×1024. That’s it.
Continue reading →