Yeah, it's always bugged me how a lot of youth (LGBT or othwerwise) look up to some of the worst people. The rise of reality television has only made things worse.

Once I'm more established in my career as a scientist, I'm planning on looking for an LGBT mentoring program. At the very least, if I can get just a few of these people to look into a career in science and engineering as opposed to pursuing a career in 'being famous', I will consider my time well-spent.

Good Call. Fleet needs to make sure there are no shortages that hinder other projects. For now I think this is a good thing to do.

Grats to everyone who's recently hit 50! :woohoo:

It's a more systematic problem then just the LGBT community. What bugs me is tonight in America 17 million( more then twice the population of New York, NY) children went to bed hungry, let's all cry about Beyonce possibly lip-Syncing the National Anthem or what Justin Bieber is doing. We need to get our priorities straight.

A sad day indeed. I liked logging into chat rooms elsewhere to talk... although I haven't logged into the site in almost three years...

It worries me too how many glbt youth look to models, porn stars, and other outwardly identifying professionals. It feels like more and more like the next generation of glbt is more worried about how others see them than how they feel about themselves and are searching for an external means of validation.

There are so many tremendous role models out there now. (Many more than when I was a teen in high school.) I wish more of our youth would look and see what a great impact they could have as doctors, scientist, engineers, lawyers and politicians.

I've seen a few glbt not-for-profits that don't looked on the up and up. Many don't release how much of their funding goes to the actual causes and I believe are really business profiting off of the marriage equality fever.

Seems like a good plan, if the lack of provisions was caused by a bottleneck project i am all for letting us build up some more provisions and then seeing how things work out with it open to the floor again.

Starting on Friday, January 25th, we’ll be reinstating the Gatekeeper Method previously used to access the Fleet Stores. This will affect Stonewall Fleet and Deep Space Stonewall, but not House of Nagh reD.

For those of you that are new to Stonewall Fleet, the Gatekeeper Method is where access to the Fleet Store is restricted only to the Requisitioning rank. For a Member to purchase from the store, they must contact a gatekeeper, either a Fleet Captain or an Admiral for a temporary promotion to the Requisitioning rank. After their purchase is completed, they are demoted back to Member. The purpose of this is to limit purchases from the Fleet Stores and provide more fair access to everyone in the Fleet.

Since we opened the restrictions on the Fleet Stores, we have seen a large demand for Engineering Personal Provisions and for the last couple weeks we have had difficulty keeping up with demand. This has in large part been due to the upgrading of the Industrial Fabricator in Stonewall Fleet. During the upgrade, we are unable to queue regular requisition project and our only mean of replenishing provisions is through a Basic Provisions project that requires 200,000 Dilithium. Suffice it to say, it takes some time to fill that project.

Now that the upgrade has completed, we have access to the new higher ranked requisitioning project and will be aiming to get our stockpiles back up. Our current goal is to reach 100 provisions and then rescind the Gatekeeper Method again. We ask that you all focus on Provision Personal Fleet Equipment From Engineering IV whenever possible.

When we first gave Members the permission to purchase from Fleet Stores, it was with the concession that if provisions dropped below 25 we would reinstate the Gatekeeper Method. We were lax to do it this time since we were only lacking one provision, but with levels not restoring we decided to. Now that we have, we’d like to hear from the membership-at-large and ask their opinion on how we should further proceed.

Should we continue removing and implementing the Gatekeeper Method as provisions allow? Would you prefer a different mechanism to manage provisions?

Glad you like it! Tell your friends! :D

I love my new sig.
:)

Well aside from the shady stuff where else can I buy some of that underwear for the bf and I?? =P

I had no idea Andrew Christian had such a reputation but I guess if you run your company like a porn production house you get used to shadiness and vapid vulgarity. But I will admit that the aforementioned eye candy is quite a mitigating factor.
As for that kid he's either a well payed spokesperson, naively unaware of his organizations dubious status or working a really good PR angle which will help boost him toward the goal of being the "Gay Oprah."
I don't frequent WeHo too much but a good-sized chunk of the social scene (specifically in the bars and clubs) don't really seem to get how much activism went in to creating that community which has one of the highest overall property values in Los Angeles County.

A friend on facebook posted this "article" about an Andrew Christian model that the author refers as a "role model". For those who don't know, Andrew Christian is an underwear label based in West Hollywood. Their design and advertisement is essentially soft-core porn and only marketable to gay men. Most professionals I know who have had dealings with them have nothing positive to say except to point out the pretty (but utterly unapproachable) eye-candy.

The company mentioned, Full Frontal Freedom, has no record of existence according to the IRS, with no clear use of its donations. I worked for them shortly for web design and they were utterly unprofessional. This aside, the idea that anyone -even in this sham of an article- would refer to this guy as a role model is short sided and dangerous.

So many wonderful examples of people that are doing great things; either directly as advocates or by example by being open, educated, productive individuals. So far this kid's career has consisted of him taking nearly-naked pictures. [strike]Andrew Christian models are notorious in LA for a lifestyle that is entirely meaningless and physically dangerous. The worst personification of West Hollywood one could picture.[/strike]

Edit: Andrew Christian, its models, and business practices have garnered concern from other businesses and advocacy groups in LA. Personal dealings with a couple of their models who have issues with honesty about their health status have also caused problems among mutual friends; generally fitting into trends of increasing HIV infection rates among young gay men in West Hollywwod as reported by AHF-they are not exclusively a problem.

I do believe that there are those that, in spite of work necessities like this, could rise above and use the money gained to pay for an education and such. In general though the ratio of success is extremely low. We already live in a sex-obsessed lifestyle and do give a bit of a pass to those we find attractive without any other evaluation. I just don't want to see young men trying to embrace the gay community in THIS way. So to those who are curious, read the article and even look up Full Frontal. I warn you though to think critically about what it is and not take it at face value. I.E. don't fall for the eye-candy.

One of the models featured has a pretty monstrous reputation in Southern California already, I'd hate to think that anyone would look at this as a proper role model of any kind.

http://revolutionarygaymagazine.tumblr.com/post/41282807563/americas-next-top-role-model-who-colby-melvin-really

Yea the air bundles with the cruise lines suck pretty bad - Its bets to domply go online to your favorite resource, you will find much better rates. As for Wi-Fi costs it depends on the amount of time you want to purchase. I suggest getting minute bundles as that is the more cost effective option versus paying by the per minute use.

Is WiFi expensive on cruises? I also tried looking on the Royal Caribbean site and couldn't find an options for discounting airfare if you bundle.

In 2001, 2002, I would play the game of popping random adjectives and nouns into Google followed by .com--purple.com, annoying.com, teddybear.com, you get the idea. One day I got up the courage--and I was shaking like a leaf--to enter gay.com. Understand I was in the school computer labs, I was still in ex-gay therapy, and I was terrified someone I knew would see me. Also understand that I had absolutely no idea what I would get when I typed gay.com.

After hits and misses, I found a bit of a home for myself in the Christian and Intellectual rooms. Some of those guys gave me the courage to make the first most tentative steps to come out. Fast-forward just a few years and the environment was absolutely nothing like that. (A couple of years ago, in a bout of severe depression and loneliness, I entered my local room just to have someone to talk to, and was run out with claims that I was a mean, arrogant person and that I was lying about being from Minneapolis.) But had it not been what it was when it was, over a decade ago, it's possible that my life would have gone far, far worse.

LOL I used to volunteer for PNO at prides up and down Ca. I'm sorry to see gay.com make this decision as I used to really enjoy the chat rooms and speaking with people from areas other then my own. I hate being location bracketed, I don't use gay.com or grindr to hookup I really just want to chit chat with people.

I remember the days when Planetout was the go to place, then it was Gay.com. In my area gay.com died here just after they changed the layout of the chat rooms, no one was happy. Looks like another mistake in a string of mistakes for them. I'm sad gay. is I met my boyfriend.

First I'll say that my passion is technology and all that that entails. Of course things change, sometimes drastically at the blink of an eye. However, a particular site has made a recent change that has left me disqusted for lack of a better term.

This morning when I attempted to log onto the lifestyle website of gay.com through a program called Morar Chat, it wouldn't connect. So, I navigated to the site www.gay.com only to find that the site has been completely changed. In this change, they have completely removed the chat rooms. It now appears that the site is trying to compete with other services that focus on location-based "whatever". They don't realize that others have been doing it longer and probably do it better.

I started using the site many years ago mostly to chat with people. I realize that non-location based chat rooms are kin to ancient, dusty tombs. But, I was able to meet wonderful people through those chat rooms. Often, I've chatted with people from all over the world that shared similar interests and it's actually where I met my fiancee.

I completely understand that that environment had many issues, not the least of which being legal. However, certain changes could have been made to curtail the majority of that. Those rooms provided a forum for various parts of the GLBT community. They provided a safe environment for those of our kind to communicate with others.

Perhaps I'm a relic. Perhaps I just want to cling to a highly outdated era where the Internet provided ways to connect with people that went much deeper than a random one night encounter. Perhaps I'm in the wrong field altogether.

/rantoff

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