Posts in category "Random"

The most private thing I'm willing to admit here: A Social Experiment

A social exper­i­ment to get peo­ple to open up about them­selves, because it’s our lit­tle idio­syn­crasies that make us unique. Maybe peo­ple will learn that they’re not alone in their inti­mate ways as well. In the process, it’s also a way for me to open up more, as I seem to be too care­ful about watch­ing what I say here in recent years, and not writ­ing with the same hon­esty that used to char­ac­ter­ize my entries.

For every per­son who adds a com­ment with the most pri­vate thing they’re will­ing to admit here, between now and Sunday night, I will (try) to add a pri­vate detail about myself. Include a name instead of remain­ing anony­mous1, be as hon­est and open as pos­si­ble, and only one “thing” per per­son please. I don’t have that many secrets. Or do I?

I’ll start every­one off with a bonus one:

I hate mak­ing my bed. I get it messy (I do a lot of toss­ing and turn­ing) in anoth­er 16 hours, so I don’t see the point of mak­ing it. I clean my house in gen­er­al when peo­ple are com­ing over because I want them to be com­fort­able, but the bed is a dif­fer­ent sto­ry. The only rea­son why I make it is because I feel self-con­scious about it, not because I care if it makes my guests feel more com­fort­able. This makes me feel like a pho­ny.

  1. Without some sort of iden­ti­ty to bind a detail to, there’s no point to the exper­i­ment. [↩]

Arjmand

Close up

Thumbnail: Laughing
Thumbnail: Scratching Dolly
Thumbnail: Looking back
Thumbnail: Side
Thumbnail: Straight on

Photographing peo­ple with dark­er skin is a lit­tle dif­fer­ent than cap­tur­ing those with fair­er skin. You don’t wor­ry so much about the colour tones dur­ing shoot as after, when you’re post-pro­cess­ing the pho­tos.

I also find that, in gen­er­al, girls are nat­ur­al posers. They’ll change posi­tions on their own ini­tia­tive and play with the cam­era, which is very dif­fer­ent from guys, who will just stand there until you give them some sort of direc­tion. Each has their own advan­tages, as I can feed off the cre­ativ­i­ty of a mod­el who wants to try dif­fer­ent things, but also work well with those who will be pos­ing dolls for me.

The Only Way To Listen To Music

The only way to lis­ten to music is with your heart in your throat and your head­phones on, sit­ting on a curb in the shade, telling your­self you’ll be fine as long as you get the voice out of your head and the smell out of your sens­es, killing your top rat­ed, won­der­ing if you can call some­one, any­one out there, to dis­tract your­self, but no, you’ll han­dle it on your own, because you’re strong enough, you’ve been through the worst of it already, and this is just anoth­er thing, won­der­ing why it’s only in sit­u­a­tions like this that the beats pound your chest like a sledge­ham­mer and the voic­es sing out aching­ly in place of your dumb silence.

Surreptitiously Published

Japanese design book

It start­ed with this tweet by Jay Hori. I was all like, “What? What blog design book?”.

Jay told me the name, so I found a copy of “クリエーターのための3行レシピ ブログデザイン” through HMV Japan, and they shipped it to me.

SimpleBits

I flipped through the book and noticed that some of my web design idols were in there, like Dan Cederholm of SimpleBits and Shaun Inman1. I won­der if Dan or Shaun know they’re in this book. That’s right, I’m on a first name basis with them. We hang.

equivocality page

When I got to recipe 57 (they label all their design tricks as “recipes”), I saw a pic­ture of my web­site. My expe­ri­ences with ther­a­py were on the front page, along with me say­ing “Sometimes I come out feel­ing like a mon­ster, like some hor­ri­ble, fucked-up per­son.” I guess they don’t use English copy edi­tors, and my curse-filled words may give English speak­ing Japanese peo­ple the impres­sion that Canadians are psy­cho­log­i­cal mon­sters.

But aside from my own words, I real­ized it was the only thing I could under­stand. I had to ask some­one who could read Japanese. Someone who just came back from stud­ies there, and was­n’t allow to speak or write English for a month. Maggie. She sent me this:

Your site is being used to explain “Navigation through sim­plis­tic icons”. Or like, sim­ple, low-key, uncom­pli­cat­ed. The right side intro­duces WordPress and Moveable Type and talks about their uses of tem­plates and tem­plate cus­tomiza­tion, then intro­duces your site as doing some­thing (can’t under­stand the word) with the back­ground in con­trast to how you use simple/clean icons as your nav­i­ga­tion.

On the left page, under the screen­shot of your site it says “Displaying nav­i­ga­tion through min­i­mum design. Designated using CSS, the min­i­mum use of files is excel­lent.” Bad trans­la­tion. The way you use your files (I’m guess­ing this refers to the actu­al num­ber of pages and stuff on your site) is also quite min­i­mum and that is nice.

Cool.

Comment code

And with the code for my com­ment bub­ble right in front of me, I had to won­der about the legal impli­ca­tions. It prob­a­bly was­n’t legal for them to pub­lish my source code, which is why they did­n’t con­tact any of the own­ers of the web­sites to tell them that they were pub­lished. I hear the copy­right laws are noto­ri­ous­ly lax in Japan.

  1. Regarding his use of the old flash head­er that was a wave, inspired by ani­me. Shaun and I were also fea­tured in the Perishable Press min­i­mal­ism in web design series. [↩]