Um, no. Not even a little bit. I have no reason to believe that solely recruiting white males would help me commercially at all, and Tze Ming was always popular anyway.

But like I say, everyone seems to have a different take on what I should do. Shea is sneering at the idea of gender and ethnic balance on his blog (actually, he seems to be sneering at me in general, but whatever) while other people think I’m not doing enough of it.

And Merc, perhaps you should just get over it. I have never “restricted” the opinion of anyone who blogs on Public Address and in one particular case my refusal to do so actually cost me a lot of personal grief. I’ve tried to be polite to you but you’ve been quite unpleasant and I’m tired of it.

Anyway, I’ll try and think of something to say here at some point, but I’ve written posts to three different blogs and I’m buggered. Today’s now officially a write-off for paying work, so I’m out with the kids.

but yeah, i’m only interested in contributing to something i like to see grow.

Exclamation mark indeed. My point would be this: if PAS had been established already in late 2004, and Russell decided to fill the gap vacated by Chad Taylor/Debra Daley, he would have looked to the System to provide those voices, and likely would have ended up with – as you put it, a vocal white boy(!) instead of Yellow Peril – because I, and many people like me, and a huge chunk of my community readership would never have bothered poking our heads up on that forum. As it is, he found me through a piece of elite, paper-based prose I wrote which, ironically, included the sentence: “I’m tired of talking to white people.” A lot easier to find white-boy talent? Depends where you look, depends on what structures make things easiest for you. As it was, back then, Russell looked outside the square screen and found someone, me, who did not exactly drag down the hit rate. Rather the reverse in fact. That is the danger of communities, intrinsically tied into their strengths; they make you think the centre of everything is a natural, rather than arbitrary place, and that all voices of worth will come from that centre. Well, I came from the outside, and to the outside I have duly returned. Perhaps it was inevitable (“so be it” indeed…), but I like to think not.