For comparison, here’s a screenshot of my real Geocities-hosted homepage, made in late 1997. The downside to years of data-loss paranoia and redundant backups is that I keep all kinds of embarrassing stuff, readily available for me to share with you readers whenever I find myself on a Cory Archangel-esque aesthetic appreciation of crap. (Which is perhaps the Internet equivalent of my not-totally-ironic conversations on the merits and demerits of individual episodes in the Rocky series.)
Anyway, since it’s been years since I last looked at this, I have a few questions for my 18-year old self: What the hell is that typeface in the title and background? And how could you even include that handheld-scanned ID photo? And is that darker background color purple or blue? At 32, I can’t tell them apart.
For the record I’m pleased no Comic Sans was found anywhere on that page. And surprisingly enough, no hitcounters!
The Geocities-izer will theme any website like a Geocities-hosted crapfest, which is why I found it appropriate to present the above image of my GC-ized website as a 16-color GIF. I think the transformation lacks a centered text layout, as well as a few animated buttons and Java hitcounters. But the garish colors: perfect.
There’s a recurrent theme in my inbox as another semester is near the end. (And yes, I do use that wooden desk Gmail theme. Let a man keep his kitschy customizations.)
“I have been intending to write this essay for months. Why am I finally doing it? Because I finally found some uncommitted time? Wrong. I have papers to grade, a grant proposal to review, drafts of dissertations to read.”
— John Perry’s How to Procrastinate and Still Get Things Done looks like a good article on the ‘active procrastination’ I wrote about yesterday. True to form, I’ll read it later.
Agreed. I try hard to circunvent this sad fact of life by wanting to do things that can still be considered productive — something I call ‘active procrastination’. Sadly, I’m often unsuccessful.
I guess I’m going through a deliberately defective images phase. Here, have some Notendo.
“Whenever people are certain they understand our peculiar situation here on this planet, it is because they have accepted a religious Faith or a secular Ideology (Ideologies are the modern form of Faiths) and just stopped thinking.”
— Robert Anton Wilson. (via Boing Boing)

Enda O’Donoghue’s Reflection (oil on canvas, 2010). Can we call this ‘compressionism’? (via new-aesthetic)
Here’s a new sad pasttime of mine, The Gallery of Dead Projects. It will contain posters for all the films I never did, either because I couldn’t find a way to fund and/or shoot them, or because they were only temporary musings and I never even bothered to commit anything to paper. This first one definitely refers to the latter type of project — at some point, I guess I wanted to make a film like Dune, but good and set in this solar system. Don’t we all?
But then again, perhaps this movie does indeed exist, as a blockbuster in the same parallel universe where a James O. Incandenza does his arthouse movies (hence the ‘Interlace’ Infinite Jest reference). I’d like that.












