Amazing! In this Day And Age, it is still possible to come up with an expression whose proper name can't be easily located using the internet.
I remember in the pre-google days where the Internet was a marginal and sometimes deceptive information-gathering resource, where finding stuff required actual skill and practice. Want the track listing for an album by some non-cutting edge band? Brace yourself for the trip through a dozen shitty (often wildly inaccurate) Geocities fanpages. Need to find a reasonably good and large image of men storming Normandy? Better get a spare oxygen tank, cause you're going deep into the net.
But now it's all so simple: Wikipedia. Google. Dictionary.com. Rinse, repeat. Finding stuff is about as hard as typing its name or simply typing out the question you've got.
.. or so I thought. I have spent over twenty minutes trying to locate the name of the chain that can be used to connect an earring to a nose ring. I have nothing. Wikipedia gives me nothing. BMEZine brings nothing to the table. Google drops simple prepositions, so a "chain for nose to ear" search becomes a "chain nose ear" search (which incidentally, I've also been trying - to no avail). I can barely even find mentions of the existence of this thing, though I am sure I've seen in half a dozen non-obscure films.
I think I'm actually going to have to go ask someone in person at a piercing shop what it's called.
Friday, March 30, 2007
Sunday, March 18, 2007
Not Asimovian Levels of Output
So this blog has not received the sort of effort that I really intended to invest in it. Considering that I am unemployed at the moment and should have all the time in the world to write, this does not bode well for future blogging efforts.
A step back to my most successful period of online chronicling:
When I was in my first year of university, I started a webpage purportedly to provide real-time updates on a computer game that I was building. The game didn't survive a month of development, but the webpage did. I was very lonely and I had a great deal of angst that served as fine fuel for creative output.
This was back in the heady days of 2000, before The Day Everything Changed, and also before the word "blog" existed. In the space before the mainstreaming of blogs (a process that, in my mind, is inextricably linked to Iraq and the crimes of the Bush administration), there was a hodgepodge of website classifications that denoted much of what has now fallen under the expansive umbrella of Blogger/Typepad. The thing perhaps most similar to blogs, and arguably their direct antecedent, was the E/N ("everything/nothing") site - an online space onto which content creators would toss whatever struck their fancy, and opine on it. Something like the op-ed section of a badly run high school newspaper. Some of these were totally awesome (SA, Seanbaby) and others were vaguely disguised conduits for pornographic link-farming (stileproject)
(as a total sidenote: Holy Shit. Stileproject is still online.)
Anyhow, I somehow found the time and the ideas to update my little E/N site at least once a week, and towards its height, almost every day. My last post there was That was right around six years ago. Compare with my journal-keeping efforts since:
(my somewhat secretive) Livejournal account: last post Jan 2006, but last regular post July 2002
Baker's & my community blog: 6 posts in total, ending July 2005
My second, less-secretive livejournal account: 8 posts total, ending March 2006
etc etc
So it is fair to say that I have somewhere along the way shed the bug that compelled me to log and opine as such a regular rate in my earlier years. That noted, I believe that writing has a therapeutic, historical, and skills-developing value, and so with this blog I aim to overcome my natural hesitance to journal-keeping.
The three things (and you will learn with me that most things can be captured in short, numerated lists) I expect to write most about are:
1. My social life
2. Recipes
3. What I perceive to be my intellectual and emotional growth
And if things go according to plan, I'll be able to look back on these writings in the future and catch the trends that weren't visible from up-close, thereby making #3 a two-fer.
A step back to my most successful period of online chronicling:
When I was in my first year of university, I started a webpage purportedly to provide real-time updates on a computer game that I was building. The game didn't survive a month of development, but the webpage did. I was very lonely and I had a great deal of angst that served as fine fuel for creative output.
This was back in the heady days of 2000, before The Day Everything Changed, and also before the word "blog" existed. In the space before the mainstreaming of blogs (a process that, in my mind, is inextricably linked to Iraq and the crimes of the Bush administration), there was a hodgepodge of website classifications that denoted much of what has now fallen under the expansive umbrella of Blogger/Typepad. The thing perhaps most similar to blogs, and arguably their direct antecedent, was the E/N ("everything/nothing") site - an online space onto which content creators would toss whatever struck their fancy, and opine on it. Something like the op-ed section of a badly run high school newspaper. Some of these were totally awesome (SA, Seanbaby) and others were vaguely disguised conduits for pornographic link-farming (stileproject)
(as a total sidenote: Holy Shit. Stileproject is still online.)
Anyhow, I somehow found the time and the ideas to update my little E/N site at least once a week, and towards its height, almost every day. My last post there was That was right around six years ago. Compare with my journal-keeping efforts since:
(my somewhat secretive) Livejournal account: last post Jan 2006, but last regular post July 2002
Baker's & my community blog: 6 posts in total, ending July 2005
My second, less-secretive livejournal account: 8 posts total, ending March 2006
etc etc
So it is fair to say that I have somewhere along the way shed the bug that compelled me to log and opine as such a regular rate in my earlier years. That noted, I believe that writing has a therapeutic, historical, and skills-developing value, and so with this blog I aim to overcome my natural hesitance to journal-keeping.
The three things (and you will learn with me that most things can be captured in short, numerated lists) I expect to write most about are:
1. My social life
2. Recipes
3. What I perceive to be my intellectual and emotional growth
And if things go according to plan, I'll be able to look back on these writings in the future and catch the trends that weren't visible from up-close, thereby making #3 a two-fer.
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