I've been led to a revelation. Web pages are just web pages, and are going to be interpreted as such. It doesn't matter if there are beautiful images on them, wonderful sounds or brilliant writing. They're just web pages. Something about the medium causes the means of presentation to consistently overshadow the content.
Other amateur web designers have told me that they're envious of my 'web design skills.' I'm convinced that the concept is not being grasped that my website is the presentational portal of 5 years of creative output. My aim is not to showcase my html coding or layout. Every piece of writing, every interactive project, every line of code, every piece of music is being offered up through the medium of the web. It's not just a web page, and making a web page 'like mine' isn't a single teachable skill. If you percieve my web pages as interesting or cool, then this is because of what I'm presenting, and not the fact that it's a webpage on the internet, written in html and uploaded to a server.
I'm afraid many people don't see the work I put into the things I present on my web pages. I'm afraid they're just seen as 'cool web pages,' things that are products of a specific medium. I'm afraid that the popular sentiment is that if you 'learn to make web pages,' then you'll automatically become endowed with the means for creating the stuff in the web page -- the content.
The contents of a page do not necessarily equal its presentation. This seems obvious, but I don't think some people are getting it. The viewer should be paying attention to the writing, the ideas, the images, and the sounds. The content. It's not a difficult concept: the web is a medium for presenting anything -- music, art, writing, games, etc -- and the object of presentation is most often unrelated to the means of presentation.
If my essays were published in a newspaper, my artwork shown in a gallery or museum, and my music played at a concert, than it wouldn't so often be glossed over with 'oh! Cool webpage...what's on TV?'
I feel like 'content' has become a buzzword, and has lost some of it's denotative meaning. This is unfortunate, because it's a crucial concept. 'content' is what the web-author is communicating to his or her audience. 'design' is the way this content is presented. And sometimes, just to keep things confusing, the design *is* the content. Or even part of the content. But learning how to code and design a page won't make your content interesting, intelligent, or important. Learning how to make web pages won't turn you into a programmer, author, musician, visual artist or businessman. It seems like a truism, but I don't think this has quite sunken in for some people.
The web's potential lies not in its own presentation, but in its fluidity. One can use the web to communicate any idea: visual, intellectual, sonic, whatever. It's a way to share your brain.
I've speculated on why the web medium so completely eclipses content, mentioning the association with the workplace, the speed of computers and its effect on human contemplation, as well as the novelty of the web -- it's only about 10 years old now. Immediately after television's inception, anything on TV was really cool.
It's extremely frustrating to see a user visit one of my art projects that I spent hours and days (or even months) making, and then glimpse at it for a few seconds. It's as if they aren't really seeing it -- they don't see the work, the concept, or anything besides a few pixels on a screen. And ultimately, that's what a web page is. I think this is the problem. Web pages don't actually exist. It's nice to have real art, art you can touch and smell and taste. Web content is permanently disconnected from our bodies -- it's completely cerebral. It's simply never going to be an oil painting you can run your hand over, feeling the silky, glossy bumps, a book you can hold and feel the dry pages against the ridges on your finger, or a guitar you can pluck and thereby come into direct body contact with the source of the sound. People want their art, their music, their creative output, to be real.
But it's still distressing to think that there are some people who don't see my online work as anything but a webpage. They don't like computers, and all they see is the computer. It's not a piece of writing, sound art or image -- it's just a computer. Just a webpage.
Maybe this will change as the internet ages.
Knowing html, unix, apache configuration, etc, won't put content on your server. I think some people still don't quite grasp the difference between content and presentation. As I mentioned, there are web pages that are focused on their own design, and are so visually interesting that they are works of art in themselves. My girlfriend makes pages like these. In these cases, the content *is* the design. In these pages, the important thing one should be paying attention to is the design, layout, and html itself. But in most cases the web page exists to present something else unrelated to web pages (unless it's a page about making web pages, and that page happens to be designed prettily enough so that part of the content is the design. See? It gets complicated).
I have a sinking feeling that a lot of people see me as being a 'good web designer,' as opposed to writer, musician and artist. There's something sterile and impotent about the web, and everything that is published on it is relegated to the banal category of 'web page.' nothing here really matters. If an article appears identically on the web, and in a newspaper, it's clear which one will be given more attention.
The web is a bankrupt medium. But it's so damned convenient. Maybe that's the problem; it's too easy, and people recognize this. Also, there are no standards -- anyone can publish their bullshit, and people often don't trust themselves and their aesthetic judgment to determine 'what's good.' in a museum, the museum-goer has been assured by the convoluted and exclusive process of exhibit-selection by the curators that what they're seeing has been deemed 'good' by the literati. The museum-goer doesn't have to make this decision on his or her own. Same goes for concerts and printed publications -- the publisher or promoter has already implemented a filtering device. But for web pages, literally anyone can publish anything. So, this places an enormous burden on the web-surfer -- he has to decide for his or herself what he likes, what he wants to see, and he thinks is 'good.' this is often too much to bear, and every web page gets reduced to the lowest common denominator because the surfer is so used to having his aesthetic decided by authority that he can no longer judge one page as being subjectively better than another. He has no idea what's good -- there's not jury, no committee, no publisher and no suitcase full of money to decide this for him.
Basically, I'm upset that I don't get enough credit, and that my superiority to the rest of humanity is not adequately demonstrated on the web. I've put my entire life into these pages for the past few years -- they're not 'just web pages.' poor me.
I watched the final episode of 'friends' last night. I think it's time for a confession, something that only a few people already know about me. I've pretty regularly watched 'friends' for several years. I took a break from regular viewing for the past few months preceding the final episode, but over the years I've spent countless hours watching 'friends,' time that will never be returned to me.
It was the second-biggest TV audience this year behind the 89.6 million viewers posted by the Feb. 1 Super Bowl telecast and the most watched non-sports program since the August 2000 finale of CBS's first "Survivor," which drew 51.7 million.
Measured another way, the highly promoted, hour-long "Friends" finale accounted for more than half of all U.S. Households watching television from 9 to 10 p.m. On Thursday
Before I am justifiably stripped of my license to critique mass culture with a superior sneer, allow me to enter a plea of 'guilty with an explanation.'
I should mention that I've previously touched on the 'friends' phenomenon and its indistinguishability from product marketing. It's easier to sell a lifestyle than it is to sell a product -- if a viewer is convinced that they want to *be* rachel, ross, monica, phoebe, joey or chandler, then selling those viewers products that are associated with those characters' lifestyle becomes a very easy thing.
The title of 'friends' could just as easily have been 'white,' 'rich,' or 'attractive.' 'friends' is a very obvious example of the hollywood phenomenon -- showing the mass of viewers an archetype of behavior, thought and appearance to which they don't currently conform, and through product association making it seem like conforming to this standard is an attainable goal.
There are a few things that are inherently desired by people, and that don't require any marketing genius for their presentation as objects to be coveted: to be attractive, witty, racial pure, healthy, etc. All of these things can be further categorized under an even bigger umbrella: acceptance. Acceptance doesn't require any ornamentation in order to sell it to people. It's what we all want: to be loved, respected, lusted after, considered, and accepted by other humans.
This is why 'friends' attracted viewers in a way other shows couldn't easily compete with. Here were six people (nevermind that they're wealthy, beautiful, fashionable, white, urban, etc -- every desirable quality imaginable) who cared for one another, who accepted one another. This is an irresistible seduction, and it sells widgets like nothing else.
If you flip from channel to channel, something becomes clear. There are human figures on every station. If you flip quickly enough, it starts to seem almost ridiculous -- just image after image of humans, doing various things, in various positions, in various numbers. But always the human form. Over and over, on every single channel. We're obsessed with ourselves, with our physical presence, with the little round head, elongated torso and two legs, about two meters high, almost completely hairless, and the dynamics of our interaction with one another. Such a strange creature. How does it stay balanced? Is it walking that way just for fun? I'm confused. Their facial muscles are always twitching and twisting around; this must mean something.
Humans are hard-wired with empathy. We see another one of our species, and we unconsciously put ourselves into that role, imagine that we are that person. This is why it's so unpleasant to watch torture or executions -- we imagine ourselves being tortured and executed. The writers and producers of 'friends' understand this.
We see these six 'friends' and we empathize with them. We come to care for them, even though they cannot care for us. We covet them and what they have. We imagine that it's us in that little box, making sex jokes, remaining lithe and slender in the face of plenitude, and accepting one another fully. 'friends' owes its success to building its characters around the things that people covet most: beauty, love, sex and wealth, all under the enormous umbrella of 'acceptance,' which is right in the title of the show. Who doesn't want 'friends'?
And then, when the viewer is most emotionally vulnerable, when s/he believes on some level that they *are* rachel, chandler or joey, because they have come to identify so closely with them -- but something's still not quite right, something unnamed is preventing the viewer from attaining chandler-hood -- then, it's time to sell the widgets. It's time to name that unnamed thing, and that thing is 'product x.' you want to be like rachel? Then get a rachel haircut! Only $99.99! For a limited time only! That's the only reason you aren't her, aren't thin, beautiful, fashionable, witty and popular! Because you don't have a rachel haircut! I bet you're just kicking yourself now, saying 'my god...it seems so obvious now. Why didn't I think of that before?' problem solved, until we want to sell you another product. Then, you aren't rachel anymore, and we'll only let you be rachel again if you buy it. Not having this product is preventing you from being one of the 'friends,' from being the 7th 'friend.' just imagine: joey, chandler, monica, ross, rachel, phoebe and steve. That'll be you, steve, just as soon as you fork over some dough.
A lifestyle is being sold on every episode of 'friends.' we are shown an impossible image of social and physical perfection that ensures that our 50 hours a week in the workplace will keep going towards buying our way into that lifestyle.
And of course I want friends. Of course I want to be attractive, rich, powerful and accepted. I want to be the object of coveting, rather than the coveter. 'friends' made an awful lot of money for its sponsors.
These observations also tie into my paper on the four motives of humans; specifically, the impulses to covet and exclude. 'friends' is a private club -- we don't just let anyone in. But, we might let you come and make sex jokes with us if you buy enough things. That's the message, lusty appeal, and dark truth behind every single episode of 'friends,' and has been for all 10 seasons. How many dollars have been spent because of 'friends'? And not just to buy things that are specifically advertised during every episode, but everything one needs to buy in order to complete the covetous fantasies presented on 'friends' -- every jennifer aniston haircut, every (i don't know) chanel shirt, louis vuitton bag, pair of perry ellis shoes, etc. It's all part of the same marketing ploy -- advertisers, writers and producers are all part of the same team, whose only goal is to siphon as much money as possible, by any means necessary, from the purses of the viewers.
And even if I don't have any money, I can still tune in, watch, and dream.
Maybe I can close this dark chapter in my life now that the final episode is over. It wasn't even very funny.
Feliz sexto de mayo!
Loud man dumb
loud dumb man
man loud dumb
man dumb loud
dumb loud man
dumb man loud
Alors, en francais. Au jour d'huis, je vais manger du nuriture, regarder la TV, et joue sur l'ordinateur. Il faut que je vais recommencer la velo, mais je suis tres...je ne sais pas le mot pour 'lazy.' mais, je suis ca. Oui oui.
Peutetre, j'aime discuter quel que choses sur la bbs du SDF. Je crois que je faisait trop du choses sur SDF, mais quel enfer. Il n'ya rien dans ma vie, alors il faut chercher les activities different. Oui?
Je pense que le fin du ma premiere blog en francais est pres. C'est un problem que je ne peus pas fait un spell-check. Mais il n'y'a pas le fin du la monde, n'est pas? Oui oui. OUI OUI OUI. Oui.
I've eliminated hash browns from my 5-item list of food staples. They smell really greasy, and I couldn't stand them anymore. That tends to inevitably happen with me, foods and the way that I like to eat them. I often fall into a pattern of eating one particular thing for a very long time, suddenly get malevolently sick of it, and never eat that thing again, or at least not for a month or two. For instance: eggs. I get excited about them, because they're an incredibly cheap source of protein and taste good, but there's a statistical inevitability that during preparation I'll eventually drop a few fragments of shell into the bowl (i prefer scrambled eggs or omelettes to other styles of egg). I'll chew away at my lovely, soft, rich, buttery, protein-rich scrambled eggs, feeling them roll along my tongue like brains, and suddenly I'll crunch on a piece of shell. This is too much to bear, and makes me never want to eat eggs again. I think it reminds me of bone and gristle in meats like chicken. However, if I'm really hungry, and the chicken drumstick is really well-cooked, I've been known to eat the entire thing, including bones and gristle. I just chew it all up indiscriminately. They have a saying: 'hunger is the best sauce.'
The one food I never seem to get tired of is rotini and sauce. This might partly be because there are a practically infinite number of sauces at the grocery store to choose from. I sprinkle cheese on top, and it's the best thing ever.
Tomorrow the excitement commences: bulk pickup day is on Friday, and my mom and I will haul about 500 pounds of pee-soaked carpet/carpet pad to the curbside for the city of gaithersburg to play with. Today, if I can muster the wherewithal, my mission is to clean up minor scraps of carpet and perhaps even try to mop some of the superficial filth from the wood floor. My mom received new instructions for care of the wood floor: 1. Prime it with a liberal application of water, non-antibacterial (pro-bacterial?) dish detergent, and vinegar. 2. Dump on the wet floor some solution containing special bacteria that eat old pee. 3. Dump on some other unspecified solution of something. 4. Wait. Hopefully, this does it. My mom received these instructions from a man who seemed reputable, and who sold us his own bacterial solutions. He also told us a sealant wasn't necessary. I'm sure all you manly men out there are just itching to say 'NO THAT WONT WORK YOU NEED SEALANT LOUD MAN DUMB,' but save your strength for the coming apocalypse. I've noticed that one of the favorite activities of Men is to impart their knowledge in aggressive ways, often in the form of 'NO YOU DID THAT WRONG IT'S TOO LATE NOW BUT YOU SHOULD HAVE DONE IT MY WAY DUMB LOUD MAN.' this form is often further specified as 'YOU PAID TOO MUCH MONEY I COULD HAVE GOT YOU A BETTER DEAL MAN LOUD DUMB.' it's hopeless. Loud dumb man.
Both men and women have problems, each in the specific set of qualities that differentiate one from the other. The book _men are from mars, women are from venus_ was actually somewhat interesting, although it could have easily been shortened to a few sentences. This is what I got out of a listening to maybe 75% of the audio version while driving to new york when I was in college. I'd borrowed the tapes from the counseling center, where I worked. I even returned them when I came back.
Men and women communicate differently. The male goal of communication tends to be information-transfer, whereas the female goal tends to be interaction for its own sake. This is well-illustrated in the scenario of communicating a problem. For instance, if a woman tells a man that her purse was stolen, the man's first instinct is to solve the problem, so he says 'buy a new bag.' or, the famous one: 'I'm cold' 'put on a sweater.' the woman wanted to hear something similar to the way she would have responded herself: 'awww, I'm sorry sweetie...that must have been awful. Were you scared?' the woman seeks interaction and sharing of emotions, whereas the man seeks to solve the problem or share factual information. A man might approach a woman with a similar complaint: 'my car wouldn't start this morning.' in overtly stating this, he's seeking a solution to the problem, as opposed to 'awww, I'm sorry sweetie...that must have been awful. Were you scared?'
Another scenario in which communicative differences are illustrated is in the volunteering of help in solving a problem. If, say, a man is having trouble unscrewing the pickle jar, and the woman snatches it away from him to run it under hot water, the man will take offense at this because in his eyes his competence has been undermined. Unless a man specifically asks for help, then attempts to solve the problem for him will be looked at as aggressive displays of competence. Picture one man trying to pound a nail into the wall, and bending it with each attempt. Another man watches, gets frustrated, and says 'OH HERE DAMMIT YOU'RE NOT DOING IT RIGHT LET ME DO IT (loud man dumb),' and proceeds to hammer the nail in himself. This is clearly an aggressive gesture of demonstrating superior competence. On the other hand, if a woman were pounding the nail into the wall, she'd likely appreciate it if someone were to solve the problem for her, even if she didn't expressly ask for help. And of course there are exceptions -- there are men who communicate interactively and women who do so factually. Perhaps it's helpful to look at these two different communication styles as being completely independent of gender, and their apparent gender correlations as being incidental. There might also be more communication styles. Taking my anti-dualism medication. Reading about quarks. Doing ok.
And then there are people like me, who are star-children; beings of light. We transcend everything, and then spit on the tops of your puny heads from our illuminated clouds.
I don't understand why this army of inner people always comes out and challenges everything I've written. It's very expedient for them -- all the aggressive human has to do is spout his bullshit at me once, and this leaves a polluted area of cognitive residua in my brain that will serve his purposes for years to come.
I think I belong in a cave, where I can interact with the dirt and pebbles, and hopefully they won't make me too mad. People just anger me; interacting with them pisses me off. I think this might be due to a boundary problem -- I'm not 100% sure where I stop and the other begins. Let me rephrase: imagining interacing with people pisses me off. Actually doing it generaly isn't a problem, even though I often get mad afterwards (similar to the 'i should have said' phenomenon).
This would help solve the problem: regular exercise, a good sleep schedule, a more ascetic diet, meditation, and martial arts training. Unfortunately I'm extremely lazy.
Here I am. I just ate dinner over at mrs. White's house -- we had stuffed pasta shells. I blog about a limited number of topics. Or maybe not.
More floor-scraping today. It turns out there are two principle areas of dog-damage, at either entrance to the kitchen. Townhouses are really rather small and boxy. From where I'm sitting here, I can conceptualize the entire floor plan of this middle level. It isn't separated into rooms and a hallway, like a 'house' house, but is instead so small that the division of one area from another into 'rooms' is pretty arbitrary, and is dependant on the imagination. I can imagine the full perimeter of the rectangle that is my house. There aren't any rooms -- it's basically a crate, with a few structures that sort of look like they might be walls. Actually, there are two rooms: the kitchen, and the dining/living area. There is also a little strip of floor from which one can access the kitchen, staircase, or dining/living area. I guess this is a hallway, even though that's pretty silly.
But the point I'm desperately trying to make here is that I can literally see all four corners of my house from where I'm sitting. One through the doorway into the kitchen, the other two behind me, and the fourth through some wood bars on the bannister. I always thought a house was supposed to be defined by a maze of rooms -- in a way, what I have here is more reminiscent of a crate. Actually, it's a very well-designed layout. I think this house was built something like 30 years ago. The carpets are that old too, and are now being replaced for the first time.
The house is all fucked up. My mom and I have been peeling back the carpet in the dining area and scraping from the wooden floor clumps of pee-soaked carpet pad, semi-disintegrated and bonded to the floor in odiferous wads. Let me see if my horrible digital camera still works.
By the way, here's what's wrong with my horrible digital camera:
But it's better than no digital camera at all.
Anyway, here are some pictures of the carpet ruin.
Above: that huge wad you see is the actual carpet and the underlying carpet pad bundled together into an unholy megastructure, which needs to be disposed of. Ordinarily, the carpet installers would throw away the old carpet, but the underlying wood floor needs some treatment which may or may not work (the wood panels are soaked in dog pee). In order for me to treat the floor with a sander, soap and water, enzyme de-stinker (?) and sealant, all of the dog-pee soaked areas have to be exposed. I don't know exactly where the dog-pee soaked areas are, and they very well may extend further than I originally thought. This would mean that I'd have to clear the wood floor in one area, treat it, move furniture back onto the treated section, peel back the carpet that was under the just-moved furniture, treat that floor, ad infinitum until all pee-soaked wood has been treated.
I'm hoping the pee doesn't extend too far, but it's really trial and error. As soon as I peel some carpet back (cutting it with an exacto-knife because that's the only tool I have; it's almost impossible), it appears that the pee-soaked area spread out further and further under the carpet, extending to reaches unknown. And what's worse is that it's often hard to tell exactly what constitutes a pee-soaked area, because I'm not sure whether questionable spots are darkened due to the wood's natural discoloration over time or pee-soaking. Smelling them doesn't work too well either, because the air is so permeated with pee vapors that discerning the pee-soaked from the non-pee-soaked is impossible.
Above: I think that's the worst area there -- where the carpet pad had literally melted into the wood due to some chemical reaction with the pee. It was violently scraped off, and what remains are those dark patches, in just about the shape you'd expect from a small dog voiding on the rug.
Above: a close up the scraped-up, semi-disintegrated bits of pee-soaked carpet pad that were bonded to the wood floor, nestling around a pair of pliers used to pull out rusty carpet pad staples. Today, I need to throw away what I can. Bulk pickup day is this Friday in bennington, so I'm going to drag the actual carpet out to the curbside then. But the carpet pad isn't so bulky that it won't fit into plastic bags. However, the garbage collectors didn't pick up most of our trash this morning, so that raises new concerns.
Above: finally, you can see all of the dining room furniture pushed intrusively into the living room. It's hard to move around, but an advantage is that the bigger of the two couches has been angled in such a way as to make TV-watching more enjoyable.
I had a few fits of rage this morning. My new theory is that they're at least in part due to my temporal lobe epilepsy. My brain damage is in the same area: the right temporal lobe. So clearly there are some strange things going on there. I feel better once I can identify the rage and name a cause. When I'm in the middle of a fit, I fantasize about how wonderful it would feel -- like scratching an itch or satiating hunger -- to turn a human being into a pile of bloody, shredded flesh with my teeth, hands and feet. My mouth even starts to water as I imagine sinking my teeth into a human face and tearing it apart. Holes in the drywall decorate all floors of the house. But I feel perfectly fine now, even though my head hurts a little bit. I'm not sure if it's seizure-triggered (involuntary firing of neurons), or thought triggered. Just now, I had a little flash when I fantasized about being in an office with a co-worker and seeing the fear in his eyes as I came at him. So it's confusing -- maybe I'm partially just a violent guy. Or, maybe certain thoughts tend to trigger seizure-like activity. Who knows. It's all a big interconnected mess in there anyway, and every discreet system effects every other one. My head still hurts.
I don't feel like doing anything.