December 22th, 2007
heart beating still
Sorry about the... pause. You can stop holding your breath now.
No real content yet, however: I just wanted to make it known that this blog is not completely dead.
Well, it is, to be honest. But what I really wanted to say was that something's coming up — something to, let's say, fill the void.
Imagine a Child. The Idea is a Child, but at this point, it is still like a mere embryo in the mother's womb: small, fragile, slimy, suspiciously deformed, slightly disgusting, but at the same time subtly hinting at what the final product will look like, while not developed enough still to bear any distinct features which one might call "details." The length of the gestation period is known by no man and, as always, around the corner there also looms the dark possibility that bears the terrible name of Miscarriage.
Due to these dangers, among others, then, I shall make no empty promises on tracking the incubation of this mysteriously intriguing Child here. If and when the Child is born and reached a age mature enough that we can with certainly say that it will survive, you shall know.
Until then.
March 3rd, 2007
the redundancy dilemma
The problem I've always had with keeping a weblog is the fact that it seems such a futile enterprise. I mean, everything has been said already anyway, so what's the damn point? Rephrasing things that to most of us are axiomatic seems just sanctimonious and, well, like putting oneself in a position where one is mediating some clandestine knowledge to those of lesser lore.
I'm sure that there's a nice single-word expression for that last thing in English, I just can't figure it out right now.
Anyway, it's not like the blogger has to be some mystic guru who nobly descends from their ivory tower to dispense words of wisdom so that people could experience some sort of intellectual enlightenment and thus become a whole new person, after all.
The above logic is rendered moot, of course, by the fact that this is not what blogging is all about. In fact, it is utterly ludicrous that I'm even suggesting that. Blogging, or almost any activity of marking coherent words on paper for that matter, is rarely about introducing a completely new, revolutionary idea or concept.
What it is about is simply about expressing what you feel about certain matter, without giving a fuck about the fact you are in all probability merely rephrasing what someone else has already said or, alternatively, restating the obvious.
“That shit don't matter,” as Jules Winnfield would put it.
What matters is that it is you who's doing the saying and not someone else. Your readers will ascribe value to your contribution accordingly.
What's more, even if you did want to bring something ground-breaking or seminal to the table, it wouldn't really be a matter of coming up with an idea that's completely novel, either, but rather dressing an old idea in new robes, saying something self-evident better or with more grace than anyone before you; or, to quote A. Pope (just to lamely illustrate that my studies have not been wholly in vain, yes):
True wit is Nature to advantage dressed,
What oft was thought, but never so well expressed
The irony, of course, lies in the fact that by making this post I am, inevitably and consciously, saying something many people before me have already said and what everyone already knows.
I don't care.
Consider it a sort of a rite I had to go through to before writing more new words about old things.
February 25th, 2007
the allurement of the markup
Designing websites is hard work. It consumes a lot of time. Once it manages to grasp you, pull you into its clutches, draw you into its unfathomable depths, it becomes so difficult to lift your ass off your seat even to eat or piss that you start hoping that someone could put you on intravenous drip and magically transform your computer chair into a toilet seat. I like it, though, because it is so much like solving puzzles. As I suppose most “coding” is—I wouldn't know.
Solving puzzles. I mean, something just doesn't work, and you have to figure out why the hell not. You lean forward, closer to the monitor, and, somehow, begin to feel a peculiar sort of pleasant frustration—frustration at the fact that something's not working, and pleasure of having just been faced with a new conundrum, like Holmes at the crime scene, one which only you bring into dénouement.
It's not always because of the stupidity of the language itself, either--you make one idiotic fuck-up and boom, your site looks like it had been made on crack; or you spend 15 minutes looking for the mistake in the code, only to notice after 5 minutes of furiously hitting refresh, confounded, that you've edited the wrong damn file.
Oh well.