That being said, wouldn’t you say it would be a fairly harebrained idea for a company to release a concept video about its future products that have (1) no relevance to its current situation or products and (2) are free from any physical, technological, ergonomic and economic actualities? Products that are probably 20 years down the line, when the technology hopefully catches up with these futuristic delusions. Imagine your relatively successful neighbor telling you he’s going to rule the world one day, literally, the entire world. You might be nice enough to humor his fanatical notions but you’ll only believe it once it actually happens, but only before you laugh your lungs out once you walk back to your house and close the front door after cleverly stifling it the entire time he was talking. I’ve been laughing about this since someone forwarded me the link.

These are the kind of ‘Nowhere Man’ showcases that Microsoft has been known for putting out. Previously with Surface, which thankfully, has made a somewhat fractional penetration into the real world we live in but still miles from the wonderful reality that Microsoft wanted to paint into our minds through the video.

Microsoft is lacking focus now, more than the usual amount, and it knows that maybe we realize that. So to put back that sense of customer faith that it thinks it has lost recently, it goes and makes an idealistic video about the world of the future that it hopes will look like. Microsoft and idealism? That’s a joke in itself.

In the video, its pretty clear they have put money and energy into this. Money and energy that they could have otherwise spent on making better products for the present. You know, the kind of things we could actually buy use without having to wait a few more decades.

But lets face facts. This isn’t Microsoft’s vision but rather the vision of their engineers and the designers that were paired with them at the media company they employed. This is the future they envision, though not necessarily feasible, but definitely desirable. I imagine after a few weeks of filming, animating, editing and palling around with the media and animation people, the engineers took back the final reel and presented it to the Microsoft board for approval. Their consensus was that “wow it looks good” then green lit it. The mentality that the better it looks, the more we can distract our customers into thinking the new and amazing products are just over the next hill. Guess what, they’re not. Customers are smart and they’ve already seen sci-fi visions of the far future. Say that again – Far Future. Let me just add that I have very big doubts about my fridge running MS Office.

Need further evidence that a futuristic concept video is a sign of a company that lacks a clear vision, leadership and focus? RIM just recently released their own flavour of it – now there’s a company that’s definitely booming right now.

People talk about Steve Jobs and Apple having a reality distortion field? Please.
If any company spends as much effort as Microsoft and RIM has in producing these future vision videos and, yet down the road doesn’t deliver these things, they’d better be prepared to look monumentally stupid(er).

Update: I would have embedded the RIM/Blackberry Future Vision video in this entry too if not for the fact that RIM has taken it down from YouTube and pretty much every other video site I can think of. That’s the smell of confidence all right, but is arguably the smarter to save themselves from being the butt of many internet jokes. I’ve heard on the grapevine the video that I originally watched (4 times) was leaked. A very low priority leak, I suppose. I smell more confidence.

This is a review that I’m not surprised took me this long to write/finish. Not because I was meticulously placing the words or deciding which angle to attack it from, but because I quite liked it (the film) and didn’t think my writing about it would mushroom into something worthwhile. I am probably, therefore, a lousy reviewer in that respect.

The cinemas in Malaysia cannot be counted on to show anything but movies with explosions or mushy romance – sometimes the two overlap. With that in mind, I had to find a way to watch it outside of ‘traditional means’. There seems to be many ways to achieve that end here in Malaysia.

For the sake of this review, let’s assume that it was playing at my local theatre and that watching it would only mean around 10 bucks out of my wallet and a 10 minute drive. I still wouldn’t have gone. For good reasons. Largely because of the fear that I’d be subjecting myself to an experience that would leave me in an incompatible emotional state with sitting in a public auditorium with strange people within earshot of my restrained squeaking. So I bravely decided that in my room, on my Macbook Pro would be a better venue for my inevitable unmanly display.

I had no clue of what to expect outside of the positive reviews its garnered and seeing Top Gear plug it at least twice¹. But a movie about an F1 driver? Seriously, no way I could miss out on this.

I was pretty tired during my first viewing and I can’t remember why I ignored the logic to just put it off until the next day. In my half-dazed state only my eyes and a few other basic brain functions remained, allowing me to be as easily impressed with Senna as would my ten year old self. There was much glorious engine noise sprinkled in parts with narrative voices to make sense of the amazing footage but I was just burying my face into my bed pillow until they’d shut up, allowing the interviews with Senna or Prost or some actual race action resumed. I was awake enough to absorb the story and the tragedy, the thrill and the joy until the credits rolled. And yes, I did cry.

Yeah yeah..

“Tomorrow. One more time.” was the last thing I probably mumbled before I my face slammed back into my matress, leaving all the lights and the laptop as they were.

When I emerged and could finally gather enough coherence to make sense of last night’s final hours, the first couple of paragraphs about this film saw first light. They weren’t very good. So I watched it again that evening, still not finding a meaningful opinion but happy to solely enjoy the spectacle.

In most parts, Senna is a great piece of filmmaking, the result of real effort – the kind that I find hard grasp for myself. Within the genre of a documentary and if viewed dispassionately (which I only managed the 3rd time watching it), it can be hard to fault. The passion for the subject matter comes across immediately. Asif Kapadia, the director, and his team clearly holds Ayrton Senna, his family, his career, his spirit, in very high regard. Ayrton Senna de Silva was, and still is, my hero and I’m glad the man at the helm of this film shares this admiration.

You can pick faults at everything and despite my wanting to leave it alone and rave about it to everyone around me, there were a couple of things that made me squint in confusion. For a start, the title is a little ambiguous. It should be called Senna: The F1 Era. The title Senna implies that it is a reflection of his entire life. And as a reflection of his entire life, I think Senna falls short. I don’t completely agree that it deserves all the universal praise it has been awarded. And I say that as someone who wells up with pride and disbelief that a film about a dead racing driver from nearly two decades ago managed to cause such a huge stir when it was released at the start of association football season. Just as a great race in any motorsport is the residual of all the effort hammered out in the days and weeks leading up to it, so too a great driver and a great man is the legacy of previous struggles. In during the film, we get a few key glances at Ayrton’s go-karting days in the late 70s, but confusingly without peeks into his subsequent tribulations in Formula Ford and the fierce competition between Martin Brundle in Formula 3.

Journalistic corroboration is delivered through two people I’ve never heard of before who do a decent job to fill the narration roles. Experts, they are, but I just needed a higher degree of vindication from the people who went head-to-head with Senna, people from his life rather than outsiders looking in. There’s no Nigel Mansell, no Neslon Piquet, no Gerhard Berger, no Rubens Barichello to lend their surely amazing first-hand accounts. But the move to leave most of the scenes un-narrated, whether deliberately or not, was genius. The film is notable for its absence of talking heads to provide commentary for a noisy and chaotic grand prix atmosphere, where some would argue it needs it most. There’s so many scenes in this film that don’t need words, Ayrton’s expression imparts more than any expert commentary could ever hope to.

So its not an intimate look at his life before F1 but instead focuses more on his many epic moments during F1. Fine. Great. But to find out by the end that the 93’ Donnington race opening lap was swept over is just incomprehensible.²

Secondly, the on-board footage during the Monaco GP didn’t sync to rhythm of the lap. It really annoys me when these instances of over-dubbing creates a rift between the sounds and the behavior of man/machine. Why they didn’t just leave the damn filmstrip alone baffles me.

This disconnect is aggravating enough when you’re watching a regular DVD but when you’ve got Ayrton Senna, a 1200bhp turbo V8 and a manual gearchange to look forward to hearing, its just unbearable.

Nearing the end of the film, and we all know how it ends at Imola in 1994, it became evident that many of Ayrton’s friends, family, former rivals and colleagues chose to exclude themselves from this production. A crying shame, honestly – and I hope they can finally see how beautiful and moving this film is, both on small and big screens, to understand how their insight and support could have added the final golden piece to this powerful tribute. The weekend of the climactic San Marino race began and the complete absence of nothing but ambient sounds adds a heavy poignancy for the events I knew were about to unfold, which became even more muted when Roland Ratzenberger had a fatal accident during qualifying. Only the simple narrative of images, tools clanking, wailing sirens, nervous hands, darting eyes and facial expression; the roar of a monstrous V10 exploding against Imola’s concrete walls.

The climax of Ayrton’s crash and the aftermath, that final 20 minutes of induced stillness are the film’s crowning glory. I teared up again.

1. Actually Clarkson’s Ayrton Senna tribute is well worth a watch
2. Over the course of the first lap, in the rain, Senna muscled past 5 cars to gain first place while driving a struggling McLaren MP4/8

 

The night Steve Jobs passed away I was having dinner with some friends. I can’t overstate the impact he’s had on the way we all live our lives, even in some small way. I raised my glass of coke, everyone at my table did the same “To Steve!”, we said in unison. The two tables to our sides raised their glasses, one by one, with a knowing nod. Cheers.

There’s no shortage of things to read about Steve Jobs’ death; about its abruptness, about the aftermath, about the future of Apple, about him and about his legacy. And there’s nothing I could probably add or say better or more factually than them.

Steve was sick, we all knew that, but I didn’t care for the opinion that he was not long for this world. People would show me some new picture that their friend had forwarded them from some other friend showing a gaunt and impossibly frail Steve, at which point I’d quickly dismiss that as a photo doctored by some fat slob with too much free time and too big a bladder to keep his ass planted on that long-suffering desk chair of his through the long nights he must have endured to make that picture look as real as it could. Crazy optimist was a label that, now more than ever, you could have badged me as.

Before it happened, the death of Steve Jobs to me was, like in his own words “a useful but purely intellectual concept”. All the things in my head concerning Apple at the time revolved around being right in predicting the iPhone 4S (gadget lust) launch. More accurately, I was busy plotting how I was going to shove my rightness into the faces of the friends and acquaintances morons that were so obnoxiously sure that an iPhone 5 would be launched instead of a 4S to precede it. Yeah, fuck you too, but I was right.

But then I woke up on Thursday morning. 8.50am.

It sort of irritates me that a text message can be enough of a jolt to yank me out of sleep, but my head happened to be on the edge of the bed by the end table where my phone was. It plainly said “Dude, Steve Jobs is dead.” and it was from one of my ex Apple colleagues who I wouldn’t put down as someone who’d pull a prank, especially about this and at this time of day. I fell back into bed and let out a few sighs because I couldn’t think of much else to do or say (to myself).

I was sad and I was confused; got out of bed, tripped on the sheets that were still wrapped around my leg and opened Apple.com – there it was. No escaping it now. It might seem difficult for you to get a handle on the why. I mean, sure I never met the guy and these emotions seem more warranted for somebody I actually knew closely. In a way I did know him closely, he just didn’t know me.

Ever since I could use a computer I’ve always coveted Macs, and as I learned more about them an admiration grew for the man who championed them: The innovator, the tyrant, the visionary. To a 13 year old boy living in Alor Star, a town in northern Malaysia, a Mac was almost god-like to behold – especially in contrast to my beige-ugly-as-fuck slow ass PC at the time¹ . I’d surround myself with info about the Mac, about Apple and about Steve. The TV at home was almost always stuck on TechTV whenever I was around, with the remote “missing”. I was hooked. If you follow technology, I’m sure Apple’s renaissance² and meteoric rise back to power (and then some) must have been impressive to say the least. It was utterly and unblinkingly awe-inspiring for me.

I doubt that there’s any publicly available footage of Apple and of Steve that I haven’t seen, and seen many times. And I’ve read more stuff that I can care to mention – books, magazines, blogs. I grew up with and around him and the values he held close are the same values I have always wished for myself. And what better mentor to have at such a young age.

Knowing how Steve is, he’d probably not want people like me feeling grief over his death. He’d want us all to move on, to follow our hearts and to follow it forward. He had a great life and he wouldn’t want to keep us from living own greats lives by dwelling on this.

And he’s right, again.

It still amazes me how well I tied everything off and how the subtly irony flies past the brows of most of us. Here I am typing this entry about him on a Macbook Pro. I first heard of his death on an iPhone. He cryptically said “That day has come” in his resignation letter and neatly put his successor into place at Apple and he eloquently spoke of life and death during his speech at Stanford University in 2005(→), a year after he underwent surgery to remove a cancerous tumor on his pancreas. You just couldn’t make his story up for a movie. I feel lucky to have lived in a time when the appreciation for this man and his contributions are at its peak. He really did change the world.

“Stay hungry, stay foolish”

So it goes. Thank you, Steve.

1. I once hacked that same PC to run Mac OS X 10.3 Panther
2. After the shithole they were in

Deconstruct just a few pieces and its plain to see how it went so wrong for a company that once dominated the smartphone market, technologically.
A company that is still using a decade-old OS platform, a company with 2 CEOs and too many¹ COOs, a company that, in contrast to Apple and Google, almost completely missed out on the app revolution.

But lets look on the brighter side, they’ve still got a pretty decent user base, most of whom are the sort who couldn’t be bothered about what else is out there much less the blunders RIM is making that the only way they’d abandon their precious berries is if it exploded in their hands. Good for them (RIM). They’re still profitable, for a start. Secondly they’re still able to produce some really nice hardware – in the manner of the Bold 9900. Thirdly, even with their incrementally updated and crummily outdated technology² they still sold around about 10 million smartphones. That’s nothing to sneeze at, go ask Nokia. The Palm Pre and its cousins had crummy hardware (thanks a lot HP, no really) paired to brilliant software (webOS). The situation is a complete 180 in RIM’s case with BB OS. I heard somewhere that the first batch of phones running QNX, their next-gen OS, won’t include BES support. Like I said, madness.

1. Oops I can’t remember, but its more than it should have
2. I say technology, but what I really mean is the OS

I’ve bought an iPhone, a 3GS (Black, 32gb), recently¹ to replace my Blackberry Bold 9000. I’ll explain why I resisted buying a 4 in a future entry replete with the pressurized festered frustrations that led up to my inevitable switch. And maybe even a short-ish review on my 3GS.

I’m loving it so far. My god, the apps! I have 113! In the days of my Blackberry, having more than 5 was a stretch because my Bold only had an entirely useless 128mb of device memory² . But yeah, I hang on to my teddy at night to cope with the loss of BBM. But there’s iMessage in iOS 5! OMG!

Sometimes I stoke my iPhone so lovingly that the friction makes my palms sweat slightly, which is ironic since that would mean I’d have to look under my nose to find that microfiber cloth that I stole claimed from work and stoke it some more. Ahem..

Once I’ve managed calm my OCD tendencies I can really appreciate the thought that went into this damn thing. Quite a lot, it must be said. A quality I found sorely lacking on the BB side of things, especially the OS. Did I mention iOS 5? OMG OMG OMG.

1. Recently being a while back. Sunday, September 4th, 2011
2. For the sake of clarity, it had 1gb of onboard memory but only 128mb could be allocated for apps. WTF?! And no matter how big a microSD card you buy, you could only store media

First of all, this is overdue. Thanks in no small part to my flat out laziness but I’d also like to lay blame to the piles and piles of articles and blurbs, both online and in print, that I’ve skimmed through when Steve Jobs announced his resignation. The general vibe I got was that people were panicky. Scratch that, maybe that’s too dramatic – maybe anxious. Or nervous? Wusses.

It took several flips around the internet to confirm the authenticity of it all. I resisted an eye roll every time I saw a headline sporting the word “shocking” to describe the then-minutes old announcement. To someone keeping even a modicum of attention to the power-shifts at Apple, this is not out of the blue. Its not even unanticipated. We could all see the smoke signals.

But it is a shock.
The kind of shock that wakes you up in the morning when your alarm clock goes off, although you knew it would.

But despite that its most shocking to the people who involve themselves in Apple’s stock price. But why? I mean sort of get it; its the cut-the-head-off-the-snake circumstance. The body wiggles around for a bit and dies. The body in this case being the rest of Apple. With Apple being arguably (one of) the most important player in the tech industry, I can understand why overweight men with bluetooth earpieces who wear the kind of shoes that have to be constantly shined start to get all sweaty under the collar. Steve’s retirement is the single most worrying prospect to the mind of the Apple stock holder. I’m not going to bother explaining why that is.

The fact is he’s not retiring. He is just stepping down as CEO, whose day-to-day tasks were already passed along to Tim Cook anyway. He will continue to still be very much involved with Apple because he is the Chairman of the Board of Directors. And I think nobody within Apple would have it any other way. An Apple without Steve Jobs entirely will come one day, but not yet. Its happened before in the late 80s early 90s and Apple almost went under so its not a stretch to imagine that they’ll want to put off something like that from happening again.

The reality that Apple will have to face eventually is of Steve Jobs leaving the industry altogether, for whatever reason. Apple in the tech industry is the player every other player wants to be and no matter what definition of ‘the best’ you use, nobody can touch the envy that those other guys have for it. Steve and Apple inspired their peers and that could well be the single greatest driving force that spurred the tech industry to where it is now.

The thing to grasp here is that Apple from this point on will be the exact same Apple you remember from yesterday, a week ago and the last few months. Tim Cook wasn’t named “CEO” until the 24th of August, when Steve officially stepped down, but he has been the chief executive there since Jobs began his third medical leave back in January, and who knows how long before that. So far as I can tell, the only difference in Steve’s role henceforth is in title only. With his battle with whatever that ails him, he’s not the CEO he once was. There must be a good reason why Steve chose Tim Cook as his successor.

One of my favorite Steve Jobs quotes came from an Apple internal video about marketing which went something like “Marketing is about values, and we’ll have very little time to show our customer what we’re really about”. And to me Apple’s values are the core assets that cannot be copied or stolen or traded: of simplicity and elegance, directness and humility, truth and beauty. Take a step back and you can almost see that the same attributes that define Apple’s products also apply to Apple itself, as an entity. A question like “how should this computer/phone/music player work?” is given the same care and restless thought as the equally important question of “how should such a company operate?”

All the Macs, iPods, iPhones and iPads in the world fall away in the scope of Steve Jobs’s greatest creation: Apple itself.

“They have lots of people, lots of servers, they have Android, they have Google Docs, they just bought Motorola. Most people would say ‘we’re the users, and the product is advertising’,” he (Don Norman) said. “But in fact the advertisers are the users and you are the product.”#

I have to say my perception of Google over the last couple of months has taken quite a solid bashing.The tip of the thread was the whole Google/Android patent fiasco.

All you need to know is that Google is being a contemptible little bitch.

To quote John Gruber: The truth has an anti-Google bias.

I’ll write up something full-blown about this (and boy is there a lot of material) once I get enough downtime.

They’re not dead, fine, but there are an awful lot less of them in contrast to, say, 5 years ago.

While driving back from work the other day after I settled the money-end of this site’s hosting service (I’d recommend concentrating on the road, though); I had a brainwave.

Twitter.

More than just blogs on its hit list, comments probably got snuffed out too – magnitudes more than blogs. I remember back in the day when even a half-baked entry could garner comments from far and wide. People would link to each others’ entries and a community grew out of like-minds congealing between them and their writing, rather than in-between 140-character wisecracks.

The days have long arrived where if I or anybody should write that they’re having a can of soda and burped on Facebook, it’ll get way more replies than if I (or anybody) wrote a meticulously curated entry or found a super-rare interview with Steve Jobs discussing the iPad concept in the 90s and put those on my blog….What’s a boy to do?

Evolve and overcome of course.

I love Twitter. I love its simplicity. I love its honestly. I love hearing about odd things people exaggerate to make their lives sound unbelievably interesting. Let’s face it, nobody is always spending their money on the latest gadget or always planning next week’s vacation or just casually making a sex video. But outside of people I know retweeting those ridiculous things and me reading them, I’m sorry, but finding things to laugh at just for the sake of it seems like a waste of life.

The high-order bit to me is in the communities that spring up in the wake of these quips, just like in blog comments, where people actively discuss things come to a worthwhile conclusion, or an exciting argument along the way. How about working tweets into comments? – since they are time-stamped and searchable, you have a comment system already in use by millions, albeit off-site. Like using @jimkem with a hash-tag #4321 matching the entry title or unique keyword. Seems like a dynamite pond of potential.

It isn’t hard to imagine pulling in replies through a twitter search, caching and offloading them as a traditional linear, or maybe even threaded comment list.

Its a fascinating idea but there’s probably annoyances abound, explaining why this seemingly obvious idea hasn’t found much traction, at least according to the stuff I read. I’m no programmer or web dev and my brain will probably lock up at the thought of how to implement all this into a viable idiot-proof solution to the blog comment system.

There’s sure to be downsides and probably a few upsides too, none of which I’ve covered yet. Searches on Twitter can’t go all the way back to the first tweet ever typed. Having a googolplex of tweets to sift through for trends, keywords and mentions, and to do it accurately, is nigh-on impossible. Also, not everyone is a fan of Twitter, I can live with that, but then there’s the 140-character limit, which by no means is conducive to a heated conversation. Then again, unlimited  typing space apparently isn’t either, so…

I needed a place to vent my ‘fascination burnout’. Coupled with the annoying desire to write about anything and the fact that, all said, I’ve counted 16 different websites and blogs that I have authored over the years; most of them while I was between 13-17 when I had too much free time and even more hormones. They didn’t amount to much, which was fine, but they did manage to etch into my thick head that I had a love for writing. A love for opinion, for argument, for presentation, for communication, for language, for Truth.

I can’t list down all the things that I will spew over these virtual pages. Who knows what I’ll be into a few years from now. But as it stands it’ll be mostly about things that occupy my mind the most these days. Things like life – and its many absurdities, tech, cars, movies, games…stuff like that. The spectrum of subject will hopefully grow soon for the better. Its not the most substantial nor the most sophisticated of lists but those are at the top of my head. I’ll do what I can to avoid falling to the content trap of the degenerate rednecked or the vapidly superficial (I’m thinking…the Kardashians. None of that. Shoot me first. Scratch that, shoot them).

Anyhoo, back to the comments being closed – without much pomp and circumstance, I’d just like to clear the air and bluntly say that I’d like this site to be mine and mine alone. Selfishness is a virtue – and in the world of the website where one person pays for the hosting – they, meaning I, get supreme ruling. You can cry now if you’d like.

Seriously though, this site does mean a lot to me and I’d like there to be as little separation between the content and its reader as possible. Or at least this site has upon it the weight of my ambition and the sum of which could be a place that I can be proud of. And be proud of the content. Well duh! I realize that this site, as it is, has a readership bordering on the high negatives, but I’d much rather get this issue out of my crosshairs now than later. Later being when there are a few comments that I’d have to unhappily erase. The long of the short of it is that I bloody hate comments.

Comments, at least on popular websites, aren’t conversations. They’re cacophonous shouting matches. Coherence and a trackable conversation flow goes out the window when some shirtless yahoo from Whocaresville, Wyoming chooses to poke someone’s opinion with stick just to prove a point nobody asked him about simply because he’s got nothing better to do – I mean, I’m guessing.

The identifier for my site, I hope, would be that it is an efficient and effective soapbox because its the anti-noise. My goal is for not a single wasted word to appear anywhere on any page of the site.

To be honest, for a long time the look and focus of this site was totally different. I designed a magazine style layout for it, with a triumphant java slider to display the most recent entries. The asides were pushed to its own corner complete with a scrollbar. There was a busy footer with Flickr and Twitter feeds and a list of social media links that I named ‘Stalk’. (Hey, I thought it was funny). I was patting myself on the back after the month I took to get it to a point where I was satisfied. Thing was, it soon slowly came upon me that what I actually wanted was a site that was a complete antithesis of what I’d just spent the better part of 3 weeks working on (1 week planning, 3 weeks coding), with the carpal tunnel and back pains to show for it – talk about convenience. After another month or so of boiling down what was necessary I decided on this. The no frills approach: I write about stuff, you read it, no interruptions. Which ironically was harder to put together than the busier layout. The way these modern CMSs are built, they assume you want more of everything and its more of a challenge to get stuff out. The under-the-hood stuff is pretty kickass, I must say. Just try searching for something. Go on.

The response system is still there, and is just as obvious as it was 50 years ago. Of course Twitter has changed the rules slightly regarding privacy and the off-context remark, especially if you consider what anybody writes as a potential “response”. But the gist of it is: You write on your site; I write on mine.

We’ll go from there,

Its a lovely sunny day in Kuala Lumpur, I just had some lunch and already the shower I took about an hour ago is no match for this kind of humidity. I promised I’d kick myself in the shins unless I got some content writing done for this site today, so here it goes:

I’ve blogged before, many times, on a number of sites that I’ve either invested time in or experimented on. That being said, it was fragmented, and after delving through some hardcopy entries from way back when, it didn’t take a lot to notice my writing chops were (or maybe still are) left wanting. Blogging – I’ve never fancied the term. I’d live with it and accept it as the way things were spoken but there would be a slight cringe when I heard the word mentioned to me in conversation, the kind of cringe you don’t exhibit outwardly but can imagine yourself in a face-twisting expression for a second in your mind’s eye.

Its a good thing, then, that that term has died off, mostly- probably only used by your Dad’s buddies when trying to remember what hobby he told them you had when you were 14; and because they wouldn’t know what else to call them. This isn’t a blog. Although, if you dig shallow enough, you could make quite a strong case about why this is a blog. And you’re right: the blueprint reads exactly like a blog *cringe*. But honestly nobody (nobody being me) wants to call them that. So don’t, especially for this…site. Please?

Update: The reason I’ve got a bit of a downer on the word ‘blog’ is because over the years my eyes, ears and spirit have been forced to endure the punishment of gaudy, bling’d up girly blogs (sorry, lack of a better term). Usually in bright retina-boiling pink, with the requisite annoying emo or snappy pop song in the background that plays instantly and can never…never…ever be shut off. And all they ever post about is either how emotionally fucked they are or a picture of what they ate for lunch or dinner or breakfast (which probably went stale by the time they put the damn camera away). I won’t be surprised if they took a picture of their shit, to analyze the shape, color and texture of that lump of excrement compared to the lump from yesterday’s lunch. And if there was ever a picture of themselves or a member of their pack, they’d be sporting that slightly tilted peace-sign next to the most horrific of plastic smiles.

Ahem…sorry. It had to be said. There’s obviously a nerve nearby…
The first post, yay!