So we have come to this: twenty-twelve. That year.

In which the world is supposed to end (as pictured yesterday), the Mayan myth getting some traction here because the future seem pretty bleak in this old and impoverished southern European economy, a feeling opposite to the innocent optimism of the previous apocalypse, during the Y2K Belle Époque. The consensus here is there’s not much to look forward to in 2012, except for inflation, unemployement, crappy digitally-televised Olympics (the analogue TV blackout is due in a couple of weeks), emigration, government and citizens alike being dicks, a slightly higher rate of civil unrest, a slightly lower rate of meals to be had in restaurants, bond market bondage being equated with ‘freedom’: serious problems in the First World, in which percentage points, rather than orders of magnitude, mean the End.

Of course, none of this will go as planned, not even the Euro or Mayan apocalypses (apocalypsii?). So there’s no reason to bother making lists of resolutions or go about planning stuff (suggestion: listen to this). 2011 taught us that: it was the strangest year on record. I won’t even go and repeat last year’s mediocre excercise of reviewing a full 365 days as if they were a record album or a movie to be digested. But if I did, I’d rate 2011 with five stars. Despite having spent the summer in bad health, despite the precarity of my work and the freelancing troubles, despite the illnesses of close relatives and the troubles of close friends, despite the melancholy in the morning and the inadequate relationships and the heartbreaks. Despite the laziness, the many productive hours wasted on crappy computer games, the fear of being sincere in doomed romances, and all the times I didn’t even try. Because I’ll remember little of this as being 2011. What I’ll remember is the sublime, unscripted weirdness. Consider the evening of April 6th, a date I find easy to recall as it is my birthday, as a scale model for all of 2011:

While having dinner with friends in a restaurant downtown, there’s this sudden announcement the IMF is bailing out Portugal. People’s smartphones are produced out of their pockets (we had, and still have, smartphones, get it?), 3G internet used to summon the mobile webpages of newspapers, fact-checking — yes, Portugal is getting ‘help’ from the IMF (in the form of a big loan the economy — meaning us, the working people — won’t be able to pay). The girl I was seeing at the time had to wake up very early the next day and had to leave the restaurant soon after the meal was over (another crazy detail — I was seeing someone at the time), so I left the restaurant for a few minutes to walk her to her car, and as I came back to rejoin my friends I already sensed this palpable but yet-understated hysteria, as if a carnival would start to unfold later that evening. It was a very hot evening — about thirty degrees Celsius, in April! — and, as our party left the restaurant after a couple of drinks and went for further drinks in bars nearby, we all had this shared feeling of “let’s spend all our money today because we’ll all be poor tomorrow”, the drunken circularity of which you have to admire. Walking in the streets, our party wasn’t the only party not minding the sidewalks. It was a Wednesday. Later that night, I met a friend in an equaly advanced state of drunkeness at a club, and I spent a good deal of time listening to his awesome narration of the most disgusting and gory parts in A Serbian Film.

Just consider for a little while the following impressions, all co-existing in space, time and mind: a oral history of Serbian extreme gore, the IMF bailout, the heat (when I took a taxi home at about 5am, I was still in t-shirt, carrying my jacket as a twisted knot in my arm), the binge drinking. And the awareness that the Belle Époque was finally truly over, that job precarity (eg. my not having a contract despite working at the same place for seven years now) was not the past, the present, but the future as well, and that we might as well live that present evening — listening to fragmented accounts, voices like random radio chatter, of what the Finance Minister had said, if the PM had been contradicted & etecetera — and ask for a shot of Bushmills if one could still pay for it.

That day was hyperreal. Anyway, the next day it became pretty obvious things wouldn’t go as expected, either for better or for worse. People’s ways of life didn’t come to a sudden stop as the hot sun rose that morning. There are still dinners in restaurants (fewer — or far fewer) to be had, extravagant gadgets and other toys are still bought and sold, some people lost their jobs while others got raises. I have close friends who were forced to go back to their parents’, while others moved into a bigger apartments with their partners and their kids went to kindergarten. But still, the overall feeling of 2011 is indeed depressive, that injustice and overall stupidity were on the rise in this country. The expectation for 2012 is that the austerity forced from Above will do no good, and may in fact force good people into doing things they are not supposed to in a healthy society: leave the country or fight the power(s).

Then again, consider that week in November: I had been well down in the dumps, counting evey day until that Tuesday when I’d get my first paycheck of the school year. The day before, I was penniless and attending a meeting concerning a play I was going to make video for. As I search my backpack’s pockets for a scrap of paper in which to write a quick note, a 50 euro bill comes out. I had stashed it there for safety before the summer and had completely forgotten about it. I called a close friend and invited her for dinner that night. On me. I had had to share that good fortune, and taste a bit of luxury after weeks on a tight budget. The very next day, as some kind of karmic reward, my paycheck has a significant raise — which I had actually expected last year (as finishing my Master’s degree had brought me to a new carreer position), but after getting no pay increase then I became cynical about it and didn’t expect it in the current ‘austerity’ climate. Feeling pleased about myself (even if you think I’m a shallow person for letting pecuniary rewards influence my self-esteem, the truth is, they did), I invited a girl I had met a few days before to go out with me the next weekend, and she replied she’d be delighted. We started dating but things didn’t last, and we parted ways after a couple of weeks. But despite that, if I could just capture the feeling of hope, the knowing things were going to be all right and that we’d get through these troubled times, the expectant happiness, all the optimism I felt during that week in a bottle, I would take a sip of it every day.

Despite it being 2011. Despite the IMF, the troikas, the precariousness, the expensive rents, the price hikes. Despite the Arab Spring going bad. Despite the populist Eurocrats, despite the US Republicans, despite our new Prime-Minister, the old Prime-Minister, and the people who vote in hate of a candidate. Despite Islamic terrorism, despite right-wing terrorism, and the jornalists and politicians who blame both on immigrants. Despite Obama being a letdown, despite Merkel and Sarkozy. Despite the easily offended and the eagerly offended. Despite censorship. Despite the thieves, despite the police, despite the politicians who blame everything on authority and the politicians who blame eveything on the poor. Despite earthquakes, despite floods, despite the heat and the freezing cold. Despite oil, coal and gas, despite nuclear power, despite the villages flooded by dams and the birds killed by wind farms, despite solar power and the exotic materials, toxic chemicals and the energy wasted in building batteries and panels. Despite the infinitely regressive ecologists who will never be satisfied. Despite anxiety, despite fear, despite suspictions. Despite fashion, despite technolust, despite gluttony. Despite the hypocrites and despite those who are bad at simple math:

When you feel you are worth something, this all goes away. This is something all leaders and managers must know; this is something all lovers and friends must know.

For 2012, I expect the unexpected: the truly unexpected.

Ten years ago I started a weblog in this space (I mean in here, Tumblrites). That’s a century in Internet years; three and a half weeks if you actually account for my actual writing and lack of enthusiasm. Anyway, this weblog is perhaps my most compreensive (and embarrassing) record of life in the past ten years, mostly in the form of short-lived and now-incompreensible Internet memes (again, I mean this blog, not its content management system, a billion Tumblr years old).

So. It’s actually quite tempting to just pull the plug on the whole thing and call it a nice round decade summed up in 1583 lazy blog posts (one every 2.3 days — not that bad in retrospect). Perhaps I could start investing the freed time promoting my career on LinkedIn or the Behance Network. However, I know I’d actually waste my time sharing short-lived Internet memes on Facebook. So why bother closing?

I’ll come up with a new version of this weblog instead; at least I’ll keep a SQL database of my wasted time. I’m actually working on it, but I’m late. As always.

Almost eighteen hours into 2011, I think it’s time to finally time to look back at the last 365 days. I’m going to steal Daily Meh’s idea and rate 2010. With stars, as if it was a movie. Which it felt like, in some (not so good) ways.

The good things about living through 2010:
- Had all basic needs fulfilled: food on the table, clothes, decent housing and hot water. Plus some money for drinks and entretainments.
- Found myself surrounded by a group of friends who where kind and treated me right. No personal dramas.
- I did finish my Master’s Degree with a pretty good thesis.
- Felt pretty eager to learn most of the time: took up computer programming with renewed interest (I previously though I was pretty finished with that); while being engaged in co-directing a performing arts (another new thing).
- Enjoyed a proper holiday for the first time in years.

The bad thing I endured through 2010:
- Anxiety made its ugly appearance, with a few terrifying psychosomatic episodes.
- A persistent acute feeling of inadequacy, with consequences.
- While I don’t feel at liberty to write about the specifics, something happened that put the brakes on my post-Master expectations. I wish for once I could build something nice without anyone immediately pissing on it.
- Creative bankruptcy: I didn’t shoot a single video besides the camera/editor-for-hire stuff, didn’t write anything either (besides the thesis, that is). But still, 2010 was a good learning year, so I’ll consider this phenomenon as part of a brain tide cycle.
- A bad crop in arts and entertainment. I can’t name much in the way of outstanding movies, or plays, or music or books. I’m sure there were, but fell under the radar.

2010: (two out of five). A pretty mediocre year, then.

Ah, web typography. When I did my first website back in 1997, things were pretty much limited to a choice between Arial and Times New Roman. Then Microsoft introduced Verdana and a couple of others, and people found out they could get away with really small font sizes. Georgia was lovely but not for everyone, and Trebuchet… well it just replaced Arial in my mind. The fact remains, for the last twelve years designers had less than a dozen sure choices for web type, fonts readily available in both Windows PCs and Macs. Windows Vista introduced a few pretty good fonts (such as the Candara that used to be this blog’s first choice), and that had designers writing ridiculously large CSS font stacks in order to maintain a small amount of control. Some did go all the way and wrote scripts that replaced HTML text with Flash movies which had some font embedded, but that’s a pretty crude solution to a problem that should be easier to solve.

It took ten years but finally most browsers support font embedding. Internet Explorer is a nuisance, as always, because despite being the first browser to support embedding (since I first started making websites, in fact!), it does so through some peculiar font format which is incompatible with everything else. Anyway, I finally jumped right into the @font-face bandwagon. You should be reading this text in CartoGothic (Font Squirrel also has a pretty friendly tool to help with the CSS and the conversion to IE format); and the headlines should be set in Jos Buivenga’s Delicious. If you are using one of the latest browsers, that is. Enjoy!

Update: screw that, using CartoGothic brings too much of a lag on page load. So it’s back to Trebuchet. But I’m keeping the titles set in Delicious.

If you look at the location bar on your browser, you’ll probably notice that this blog’s address now is www.eduardomorais.com/blog/. Every asseptic.org location is now redirected to the www.eduardomorais.com domain, now featuring a new homepage as I moved my filmmaking website, which previously inhabited that address, to a folder under that domain. Don’t hesitate to comment if something’s not looking as smooth as it should be.

This might be the most useless tweak I ever committed to If Then Else, but comments will now show up inline in the blog pages. Facebook-like, if you really want to call it that.

Of course this is something that can be described as Quixotic, as people rarely comment on blogs anymore. It’s a lot more interesting to engage in dialogue with people you actually know (or should) via social networks than disagreeing with strangers who are wrong on the internet; and people read blogs via RSS anyway.

Two other tweaks might be important signs of the times, though:

1. I removed the blogroll. It was hard to maintain and I think whatever’s good is linked via the via segment at the end of posts. I might someday code some ‘autoblogroll’ that fetches the recent via links, or that grabs my RSS subscriptions. But no ‘roll for now.

2. I bumped the ‘Greatest Hits’ box to the top of the sidebar. Because I think this blog is becoming a (valuable, at least for me) archive, and good or in some way important posts should be highlighted.

As anyone wiling to examine the source HTML of this weblog would know, my webdesign techniques are what people in 1999 would call the cutting edge. For instance, I still use a couple of table tags, because I can’t see where’s the cardinal sin in that, besides being a lot easier to make grids and to center stuff in tables. This is not what you call design correctness in this decade, but who cares — it’s my site and I design it as I please — just for Lynx even, were I in a retro-cyberpunk mood.

Anyway, since I started my master’s degree in multimedia, I’ve felt an increasing curiosity about new webdesign tricks, and I’ve spent some of my free time catching to the stuff I missed due to my cinematic adventures of the last eight years, therefore trying to relearn some Javascript in the time I would be playing Sudoku.

So here’s a neat trick for this weblog: I built from scratch some keyboard navigation! The left and right arrow keys skip through posts, Page Up and Page Down skip through dates. Tested successfully in Firefox, Chrome/Safari, and IE8! Enjoy.