Okay, NOW I have news.
Today was the day the domain name went into effect. I’m up there for the world to see. Not that I’ve told anyone yet.
Category: anti-blog
This category contains posts I wrote under the name of “anti-blog” prior to migrating the site to WordPress. If we are all exceptionally lucky, the post you’re reading may even approximate a prototypical blog post of the early 2000s, containing several random (usually unrelated) links and maybe a sentence or two on each. At various times, I have written “anti-blog” and “blog” rationales, but fuck it—I’m going back to my roots.
I love the band Of Montreal. Not only are they great musicians, and excellent songwriters, but they [have been known to] frequent their band’s discussion board. That is truly awe-inspiring and should be a model for… everyone.
Their [former] label Kindercore is [was] really great, too. Talented bands and free shipping!
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I really have to get in the habit of doing this at least weekly.
Nothing in the way of news that’s really interesting. I went on an eBay buying spree, and plan to get away to a warm-weather location SOON!
Advertisements. I’ve been fascinated with them practically since birth. My current attitude towards advertising, one of simultaneous love and hate, is one you might expect from a liberal, somewhat anti-consumerist web designer.
Parodies of ads, if done well, I love. And publications that deconstruct and use the mechanisms of advertising for social change? Adbusters: See for yourself.
This is it—the first day of the rest of my anti-blog. The Big Launch.
The truth is that this so-called “anti-blog” is a completely designed-and-produced-by-hand weblog with a catchy name (on the order of antihero, Anti-Counter, etc.). Read the rationale behind it.
Incidentally, this blog is an Aquarius.
And I’d forgotten completely about this kind of stuff.
Okay, I think I hate Google. It’s too good.
For example: today is my first ex-girlfriend’s 25th birthday. It happened to occur to me to put her name into Google. Sure enough, there were pictures and stuff that brought back all kinds of buried memories. Uncomfortable. Worse, Google somehow got a hold of some stuff I wrote in 1996 I completely forgot about. Overall, not too shameful, but not fun, either. It’s my fault for searching, I admit, but their fault for finding too much.
A quick entry as I struggle to get this thing started. I spent a couple hours on Atom Films today. It offers independent short films and, though heavy on the bandwidth, it’s fun to watch and submit critiques—instant gratification all around! [My friend Will, a filmmaker himself, says it sucks, though, and you should go to ifilm instead. I’ve never been there though.]
I am starting a weblog. Today. As of this very moment, 3 pm on Wednesday, November 22, Year 2000. Why? I think it could be useful.
I’m unhappy this week about the almost total decline of my intellectual development. It’s up to me to do something about it, and I think starting this will help me whip my mind back into fighting shape.
I want to experience more good, contemporary design. If I’m going to claim to be a “designer,” I must pull myself out of the muck of mediocrity. Most state websites—the system in which I currently toil—strike me as the worst of the web circa 1996. For the record, I now work at the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (MN DNR). The current web site is an artifact of the previous regime. My stated goal is to redesign it by November 2001.
My hope is that, if I surround myself with excellence, or at least stuff that impresses me somehow, my ability to design will improve. Stuff that makes me say “Wow — I wish I’d done that.”
Not to mention really nice stuff that friends from college have done. Pinkey Suthers has been my favorite comic for years, and “Dr. Agonize” (clever pun!) taught me almost everything I knew about the web before I worked at HBG.