Spam as Conditioning

There’s something offputting about reading text on the internet in the

absence of the inimitable cradle of ads and frivolous, non-sequitor imagery

extending a lecherous appendage for credit card information or for you to

hit a swivelling monkey with a croquet mallet or something.  The sickly

embrace of links and a banners that I’m half convinced not one soul has ever

clicked on, even once for fun when it was 3am and you thought what the hell,

I have antivirus, is so often ignored and mentally cropped out of frame that

to have no such ocular lining makes for an strange experience.

It’s grotesque how easily I feel cheapened by the lack of such gutters.

It’s as if you have a city, and there are no, well gutters, because the few

amiable people flitting through your streets leave no mess or footprint to

speak of in their comings and goings.  And you design it this way, but what

the hell?  The streets just meld into the walks, and the storefronts, and

you know there should be something there.  You can feel it, kinetically.

Something’s amiss, and now you’re sincerely thinking about messing the place

up just to restore order.

Ghastly business, this internet.

I know what’s bothering me most about this new layout – the lack of ads.  Sigh.

There’s something offputting about reading text on the internet in the absence of the inimitable cradle of ads and frivolous, non-sequitor imagery extending a lecherous appendage for credit card information or for you to hit a swivelling monkey with a croquet mallet or something.  The sickly embrace of links and a banners that I’m half convinced not one soul has ever clicked on, even once for fun when it was 3am and you thought what the hell, I have antivirus, is so often ignored and mentally cropped out of frame that to have no such ocular lining makes for an strange experience.

It’s grotesque how easily I feel cheapened by the lack of such gutters.

It’s as if you have a city, and there are no, well gutters, because the very few amiable people you have flitting through your streets leave no mess or footprint to speak of in their comings and goings.  And you design it this way, but what the hell?  The streets just meld into the walks, and the storefronts, and  you know there should be something there.  You can feel it, a kinetic tremor that leaves you unwell.

Something’s amiss, and now you’re sincerely thinking about messing the place up just to restore its dystopian order.  Ghastly business, this internet.

I have at least one goal with this new go at blogging: to cut down on the swearing for fuck’s sake.

Cough Cough

I’m quietly revamping the layout of the site in preparation for my return to regular writing.  It’s a soothing process, in large part because the old layout was servicable and largely crap, but mostly because a completely new facade helps assuage the feeling of decay and still rotting histrionics that is the odour of every long-abandoned blog.

Mostly it feels good to stretch the legs, as it were.  I’m like a sloth at present, pushing through with will and ill-informed faith in Lamarckian metamorphoses to transform myself into a nimble wordsmith once again.

See, what the hell is all that?  I just wrote this, and it’s embarassing.

I’ve devised the most pretentious Web 2.0 term it is possible to say.  The term is: bloggist.

Exeunt

How embarassing.

I’ve loved this blog dearly for the past few months, but it’s time to shut it down for the foreseeable future.  School and work have to come first, and even then the other loves of my life have to come before this little experiment.  It’s felt wonderful, and it won’t be my last push into writing and publishing, but this is it for now.

Day One

To paraphrase a line of William Butler Yeats’s: Holy balls.

My fellow fourth year students and I have got our work cut out for us, even before taking into account the terribly ambitious number of work hours I’ve signed myself up for in hopes of a fiscally sane future.  The outlook appears daunting, and the potential for me to take to the pen, so to speak, looks grim.  I am tentatively sticking to my weekday update schedule until such time as the combined force of readings and assignments makes this an impossibility.  

Even when the shit hits the proverbial windmill I will be maintaining an unflinching commitment to at least 3 updates a week.  You’re reading it here and now folks, make sure I don’t forget it.

Alms for the (Soon to Be) Poor

If you’ve been paying any heed to my tweets over the past few days, you’d have some idea of how busy life has been in the little IT office where I work.  We are overrun with Commerce students, and they are a difficult lot to support.  I try, I work to avoid stereotyping groups of people based upon single arbitrary traits, but the effort involved in this endeavour has been taxing my limits ever since the dozenth or so vapid business major sneered at me for not immediately handing over expensive electronics that don’t now and never have belonged to them.

The fact that we at the IT help desk are neither a store nor medieval serfs frustrates the entirety of these beings’ educations, as they are by all accounts trained to either throw money at a problem until it goes away or else to futz with people until they realize they’re beneath you and spontaneously develop obedience.

The sense of entitlement is like smog around here.  I am saying it is thick enough to obscure vision, folks: environmentalists will be pissed and asthmatics will die.

It’s the school year that’s to blame for this influx of walking damned commerce students, and I’d have a lot more ire for these folks if I hadn’t already used up all of my ire in the mental preparations I’ve been doing in advance of my own resumption of academia.  I’ve got some goals, and they are ambitious, and with this being the last week before the commencement of my last year of undergrad I have ample time to sit back and interpret the whole ugly vista of the coming eight months as a terror and a menace and probably the greatest set of opportunities ever in my lifetime.

I hate that last bit the most.

So I’ve been keeping tabs on every single bloody page I find offering cheaper alternatives to the campus store for textbooks, in the hopes that I can spend less than five hundred fuck-mothering dollars a semester on books I’ll have no time to ever touch again and will in all likeliness only need to read a quarter of to do well.  The more interesting possibilities include trading and renting books, and I sincerely hope I can come to some positive arrangement with one or another of these ethereal options.

The outlook does not look good, however.  The book store, in spite of its being a hellish maw filled with smaller, uglier maws, is at least reliable.  You know that it’s there, and that you can probably count on getting books in it.  It’s what it’s for.  I’ve trusted the Internet to deliver all manner of goods to my doorstep in the past, but I’m skittish when said goods will not only serve as the tools to leverage my way through the final horrifying battles of my education, but also cost hundreds of dollars even with hefty discounts.

You might sense that this is a sensitive issue with yours truly, but then again you and your wallet likely sympathize.