I can’t get over how dumb this is. Kemi Badenoch, a Conservative MP, is complaining that young people have “puritanical” attitudes to sexual harassment and homophobia:

Young people are becoming puritanical about sexual harassment and what constitutes a sexual advance, according to Kemi Badenoch, the new Conservative vice-chair in charge of candidate selection.

The MP, who was elected last year, cited those who think Friends, the 1990s US television series, is transphobic and homophobic as examples of such attitudes, saying “something has gone wrong somewhere”.

[She] said she thought the younger generation’s view of appropriate sexual behaviour was conservative rather than liberal.

“In the papers, they were talking about how Friends is now sort of really homophobic, transphobic and so on. That, for me, is a very, very – it’s actually a puritanical position, which I think of as conservative.

In what parallel universe was it “puritanical” to condemn homophobia and transphobia? A quick look at any conservative or puritanical society, either contemporary or historical, will find that homophobia and transphobia tend to be wholeheartedly embraced, often to the point of people being persecuted and killed over it.

But here comes this staggeringly ignorant Conservative MP with a new take: namely that these harsh, dogmatic puritans were characterised by a rigid and unwavering condemnation of homophobes, and a draconian insistence on a woman’s right to conduct her life without being pawed and objectified by drooling men. It betrays a complete lack of understanding not only of history but of the contemporary attitudes she’s set out to condemn. What a joke.

I’ve started making music again in the last couple of months.

Usually I head into the realm of soundscapes, ambient and experimental music, as it’s typically late at night when I’m doing this stuff and I’m getting into a soporific frame of mind.

But with this track I decided to revisit a niche of music which used to be, and still is, a strong passion of mine: extremely fast and futuristic electro.

My reference points for this style are, obviously, Drexciya, Dopplereffekt, Detrechno and Ultradyne, but it goes back to “Cosmic Raindance” by Cybotron, and there’s a long historical thread of DJs pitching up traditional electro records or even playing them on 45rpm. Ghetto-tech is obviously a part of this strand but while I got tired of its thematic tropes some time ago I’m still drawn to the disorienting complexity that can emerge from interesting electro tracks at these high speeds.

Geocities, founded in 1995, was a colossus of the dotcom era and an early example of a mass-market social web platform. When it eventually died off (under the care of Yahoo!, unsurprisingly) lots of people like me were snobbish about it: who cares about Geocities, this garish place where internet newbies experimented with starfield backgrounds, “under construction” gifs and animated cursors?

The sort of thing you’d expect to come across on Geocities

But while yesterday’s trends can seem like naff ephemera that should be wholly eradicated from the cultural memory banks, they often accrue historical value over the years and eventually come to enrich our understanding of an otherwise obscure period of time. So it’s good that some people work hard to preserve dying web platforms which, as aesthetically offensive as they might seem, will one day become major historical records of contemporary culture.

A couple of these people over at One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age have been going through the Geocities archives, and they recently took a look at how Geocities changed in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks towards the end of 2001

…It’s the time when Harry Potter fanfic starts to get illustrated with stills from the film, not pictures from the book; when N’Sync fandom gets more vibrant than Backstreet Boys fandom; when you see a bit more of cat web sites than one year before, but still more dog lovers are out there; when GeoCities users call Yahoo! names for suspending their sites for too much traffic.

However, these are just side notes. The most striking content from 2001 is websites that were made or modified in reaction to September 11. Up until today I looked at 97 of them, and there will be more sad, angry, devastated, patriotic, conspiracy pages appearing in the coming months.

I recommend going to the article and taking a look through the screenshots.To modern eyes, there’s a kind of poignancy in the more jingoistic fighter-jet/bald-eagle stuff, given how the response to 9/11 ultimately turned out for America. And many of the sites actually shut down after the attacks, their creators no longer sure that their fanfic and other geeky material was necessary or even appropriate in a world turned suddenly serious.