In which I still haven't read Dostoyevsky.
I've been a bit MIA from all forms of internet life for a while now, and I can't say that's not going to continue for a while. Certain aspects of my life have been shot to hell and things have gotten complicated without getting interesting. But now that my soul is a mirror that only reflects the darkness, I don't really feel like wallowing in my own misery on LJ. That and my computer's internet decided it didn't want to work anymore. Which is crappy because I had made all these new icons. (I've decided my icons should match my journal.)
But Sark's on Heroes now, with Veronica Mars to follow, and this alone deserves a post.
I don't think I've ever talked about Heroes, except in cryptic posts no one understands and in makingall too obvious Spider-man 3 parallels, but it is, with the cancellation of Veronica Mars, the only show I watch regularly.
But anyway, here are Alex's Completely Accurate Heroes Postulates as Proven by Science:
1. I hate Peter. I hate Peter a lot. He's stupid and his hair pisses me off. It's strange because the people I watch Heroes with share my strong hatred, but pretty much everyone else I've met loves Peter and doesn't understand why I dislike him. It isn't just that he's ridiculous powerful, because I hated him even when his power was lame. It's that he's always right. Here's this guy who basically coasts through life on his family's ill-gotten fortune flitting from job to job who can't commit because he feel's he's destined for something more. And then he is, and the whole damn world moves around him because he's special. And still, all he does is mope around and throw himself off buildings. But it doesn't matter because he has heart, even though he never inspires the same kind of joy as Hiro. He isn't as hopelessly brave as Ando or as hot as Mohinder. No. He's just always right and the show likes to remind you of this special quality he has even though he never seems anything but emo and annoying to me. If you want to make a difference in the world, take action, don't just passively blow up and mail yourself to Ireland.
2. I like Nathan. Points one and two go together, because the only time I like Peter is when he's interacting with Nathan. The way they foil each other is great-- I loved the conversation they had where Peter is insisting they drop everything and like, become super-heroes or something and Nathan's says something like, "What am I going to do, pull a cat out of a tree?" He doesn't have a very useful super power, but he does have such an opportunity to affect human lives as a senator, and we saw bits and pieces of his struggle to take down Linderman all legal-like. The contrast between the asshole who acts and the superpowerful mopey Ma-Ti is a really interesting one. It'd be more interesting if it wasn't hammered into us that Peter is Always Right Because He Follows His Heart, but you take what you can get. And Nathan's apparently gonna shave his beard soon, so.
3. Sylar is also lame. I...ugh. The only thing about Sylar that makes him dangerous is that he's so much more powerful than anyone else. (Sans, of course, Peter.) They may have hammered some backstory onto him in a weird attempt to make him sympathetic, but he still has no real motivation other than power and poses no real threat to the universe outside the special people he's trying to kill. Let's think of good super-villains and compare. Sylar doesn't have any of the over-the-top third-person charisma of Dr. Doom, not to mention a shred of Victor's brains. He doesn't pose the ideological threat or have the personal connections of Magneto. He isn't a brilliant foil like Lex Luthor, he isn't as crazy as the Joker and he's never killed Gwen Stacy. It's hard because Heroes is trying to humanize the spandex and tights routine, and super villainy is at least two thirds CAPSLOCK MONOLOGUING, but they had a serviceable knockoff of Watchman's villaino supremo in Linderman, who had the interesting healing power to boot. Hell, Nathan could've been a great villain. Sylar doesn't completely failure-- he works as the uberpowerful dude the rookies have to team up to take down-- but he's horrible as an archnemesis and I wish he weren't still alive for reasons unexplained except "its Sylar" or "no one stays dead in comic books" or "he's a SKRULL" or "Superboy punched time!" I hope he's killed off to establish credibility for the season 2 Big Bad, who has some actual gravitas.
Most of my other theorems are par for the course-- see: Hiro is awesome, Mohinder is hot, Noah Bennet is the new Jack Bristow, more Sark more more more!!
Speaking of Sark, by which I mean that filthy gaijin Tazeko Kensei as played by David Anders, besides the fact that Hiro in Japan is my favorite new plotline it bothers me that it's 1671. gamera was saying that this is a comic book homage, not videogames, not everyone is a weaboo-- so translate your damn Japanese. Which I agree with. HOWEVER, the series is keeping the American nerd tradition of WTFJAPAN alive. See: everyone in comics is a ninja, katanas are stupidly better than everything.
And, let's not forget, the fact that this flashback is in 1671 which makes no sense, considering that from about 1635 to 1853 no foreigner was allowed to enter Japan on pain of death. Which went double for Europeans, who were forbidden from trading with Japan unless they were Dutch, who were kept boxed up in their own little ghetto in Nagasaki. To say nothing of the weird implications of the Samurai/Blacksmith's Daughter romance at the height of the Tokugawa period. Unless Kensei was supposed to be some kind of peasant hero, but I think the lure of the word samurai is too much to handle.
And yes, it's Heroes, a show where sixteen year old girls cut off their toes to watch them grow back, but the schtick of the show is superheroes that are ordinary real-world folks. And like I said, American nerd culture has this weird fetish with Japan where it's treated as this mythical fairy land populated entirely by ninjas and samurai who'll just train up any white folks passing and make them UNSTOPPABLE!! instead of a flesh and blood place with a well-documented history. And I'm sure that if they were flashing back to early America, they'd get that something big happened in 1776. Or that France in 1793 was different than the France of 1745.
Honestly, I feel this could be a Legitimate and Telling Issue, and I would be looking forward to the feelings of righteous indignation it inspired within me, if only David Anders wasn't so damn entertaining. Instead, everytime he shows up I think in loud and incoherent heart shapes instead of being a respectful scholar of History and the Human Condition. Damn.
1. How long have you been designing webpages?
Since 2002, I think. Somewhere around there. I was 15/16? Sophomore year of high school.
2. What was your first website?
Starbonked.org, which migrated to "Cynical Athena" almost immediately.
3. What is your oldest existing site?
Probably Renaissance, if you can call that existing. Otherwise, Consequence.
4. What is your favorite site?
Generally whichever one I've revamped recently. Which, given my recent inactivity, is none of them. But in theory Renaissance has a special place in my heart.
5. What is your most visited site?
Libertine, by quite a bit. (Although its popularity has died down.) Not counting my main collective. But when I had a blog, it was way more popular than any of my shrines. Maybe I'm cooler that fictional characters after all.
6. When did you first get a domain name?
2002. I totally started with a domain, and then was intimidated out of it by the weird elitist domain-owning community. I decided I didn't deserve one. That was really dumb of me. But I think I've had enough domains now that I've made up for it.
7. What domains have you owned?
Starbonked.org, athenae.nu, astarael.net, asperia.net, antigone.nu, valiantknife.org. There's a trend there, but I can't seem to put my finger on it...
8. Why did you choose your domain name?
Well, there are a few reasons. I was kinda tired of the a dot n names, and I wanted something having to do with video games. But at the same time, I wanted something that had nothing to do with video games. The Valiant Knife is...not Locke's ultimate weapon persay, but it's one of his best, unique to him, and has all these neat personality-related quirks. A knife the gets stronger the more its wielder gets hurt, and it ignores defense and goes straight to the heart. That's awesome. It says so much about death and chivalry-- and that's probably why I have the most pretentious "about the domain" page in the business.
9. Do you have a "style"? How would you describe it?
I think I must, but I have a trouble pinning it down. I've done a lot of different styles over the years, I kind of go through phases. I think lately I've been doing lots of bright colors and straight lines, but it really hasn't always been that way. I've done lots and lots of blended layers, random 3d shapes and pre-Raphaelite art, grunge, Amano art, pastels, extreme simplicity, and a whole bunch else. I guess I use a lot of just-off-complimentary color schemes. And random unnecessary literary references. But style is something it's easier to see from without than within, if that makes sense. I think my visitors have a better grasp about what my style constitutes than I do.
10. What is the most important element to you when you design a layout?
For me, it's in the details. You can change so much about text placement, spacing, line-height-- all of these things make a layout seem like a cohesive whole rather than text slapped on an image. That's what makes a layout a layout, y'know?
11. What elements do you always include in your designs?
My footers are all the same, I guess. I definitely go through phases, where everything I design looks the same, but I move on from them pretty quickly.
12. What web trends do you dislike?
I like trends, and even if they become overdone in the short run, there's usually some innovation left after the trend is gone. So, uh, none that I can think of off the top of my head.
13. Have you been responsible for any trends?
I've sort of stopped paying attention, it used to happen so much. It sounds arrogant to say it, but I've kind of lost track of them. When I first started, say, asperia.net, my site was actually really different and unique, but when I stopped blogging it had almost become a genre, the sort of personal site I ran. But originality is overrated. I'd rather do something well than do something innovative.
14. What layouts are you most proud of?
Probably my favorite layout was Astarael's fiftieth. I wrote about it here. But man, I loved that layout. I wish I had never taken it down.
15. What are your current projects?
Lots, lots lots lots. A lot of the problem now is I have too many ideas. Right at this second I'm working on Black and White.
Bold is for books you've read. Underline is for books you own but haven't read. Italics for books you've started but haven't finished. Strikethrough is for books you found unreadable. And, finally, leave the ones you haven't read as they are. I am making a new category which is WANT to read, and that gets a pretty little *.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina*
Crime and Punishment*
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi
The Name of the Rose (Reading this right now...)
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov*
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin*
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha*
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch*
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys*
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist*
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492 - Present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere*
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita*
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road*
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood*
White Teeth
Treasure Island (In fairness, I was twelve.)
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers
I have this thing where I keep on saying I'm going to read these long impressive Russian books, but then I never do.
But Sark's on Heroes now, with Veronica Mars to follow, and this alone deserves a post.
I don't think I've ever talked about Heroes, except in cryptic posts no one understands and in makingall too obvious Spider-man 3 parallels, but it is, with the cancellation of Veronica Mars, the only show I watch regularly.
But anyway, here are Alex's Completely Accurate Heroes Postulates as Proven by Science:
1. I hate Peter. I hate Peter a lot. He's stupid and his hair pisses me off. It's strange because the people I watch Heroes with share my strong hatred, but pretty much everyone else I've met loves Peter and doesn't understand why I dislike him. It isn't just that he's ridiculous powerful, because I hated him even when his power was lame. It's that he's always right. Here's this guy who basically coasts through life on his family's ill-gotten fortune flitting from job to job who can't commit because he feel's he's destined for something more. And then he is, and the whole damn world moves around him because he's special. And still, all he does is mope around and throw himself off buildings. But it doesn't matter because he has heart, even though he never inspires the same kind of joy as Hiro. He isn't as hopelessly brave as Ando or as hot as Mohinder. No. He's just always right and the show likes to remind you of this special quality he has even though he never seems anything but emo and annoying to me. If you want to make a difference in the world, take action, don't just passively blow up and mail yourself to Ireland.
2. I like Nathan. Points one and two go together, because the only time I like Peter is when he's interacting with Nathan. The way they foil each other is great-- I loved the conversation they had where Peter is insisting they drop everything and like, become super-heroes or something and Nathan's says something like, "What am I going to do, pull a cat out of a tree?" He doesn't have a very useful super power, but he does have such an opportunity to affect human lives as a senator, and we saw bits and pieces of his struggle to take down Linderman all legal-like. The contrast between the asshole who acts and the superpowerful mopey Ma-Ti is a really interesting one. It'd be more interesting if it wasn't hammered into us that Peter is Always Right Because He Follows His Heart, but you take what you can get. And Nathan's apparently gonna shave his beard soon, so.
3. Sylar is also lame. I...ugh. The only thing about Sylar that makes him dangerous is that he's so much more powerful than anyone else. (Sans, of course, Peter.) They may have hammered some backstory onto him in a weird attempt to make him sympathetic, but he still has no real motivation other than power and poses no real threat to the universe outside the special people he's trying to kill. Let's think of good super-villains and compare. Sylar doesn't have any of the over-the-top third-person charisma of Dr. Doom, not to mention a shred of Victor's brains. He doesn't pose the ideological threat or have the personal connections of Magneto. He isn't a brilliant foil like Lex Luthor, he isn't as crazy as the Joker and he's never killed Gwen Stacy. It's hard because Heroes is trying to humanize the spandex and tights routine, and super villainy is at least two thirds CAPSLOCK MONOLOGUING, but they had a serviceable knockoff of Watchman's villaino supremo in Linderman, who had the interesting healing power to boot. Hell, Nathan could've been a great villain. Sylar doesn't completely failure-- he works as the uberpowerful dude the rookies have to team up to take down-- but he's horrible as an archnemesis and I wish he weren't still alive for reasons unexplained except "its Sylar" or "no one stays dead in comic books" or "he's a SKRULL" or "Superboy punched time!" I hope he's killed off to establish credibility for the season 2 Big Bad, who has some actual gravitas.
Most of my other theorems are par for the course-- see: Hiro is awesome, Mohinder is hot, Noah Bennet is the new Jack Bristow, more Sark more more more!!
Speaking of Sark, by which I mean that filthy gaijin Tazeko Kensei as played by David Anders, besides the fact that Hiro in Japan is my favorite new plotline it bothers me that it's 1671. gamera was saying that this is a comic book homage, not videogames, not everyone is a weaboo-- so translate your damn Japanese. Which I agree with. HOWEVER, the series is keeping the American nerd tradition of WTFJAPAN alive. See: everyone in comics is a ninja, katanas are stupidly better than everything.
And, let's not forget, the fact that this flashback is in 1671 which makes no sense, considering that from about 1635 to 1853 no foreigner was allowed to enter Japan on pain of death. Which went double for Europeans, who were forbidden from trading with Japan unless they were Dutch, who were kept boxed up in their own little ghetto in Nagasaki. To say nothing of the weird implications of the Samurai/Blacksmith's Daughter romance at the height of the Tokugawa period. Unless Kensei was supposed to be some kind of peasant hero, but I think the lure of the word samurai is too much to handle.
And yes, it's Heroes, a show where sixteen year old girls cut off their toes to watch them grow back, but the schtick of the show is superheroes that are ordinary real-world folks. And like I said, American nerd culture has this weird fetish with Japan where it's treated as this mythical fairy land populated entirely by ninjas and samurai who'll just train up any white folks passing and make them UNSTOPPABLE!! instead of a flesh and blood place with a well-documented history. And I'm sure that if they were flashing back to early America, they'd get that something big happened in 1776. Or that France in 1793 was different than the France of 1745.
Honestly, I feel this could be a Legitimate and Telling Issue, and I would be looking forward to the feelings of righteous indignation it inspired within me, if only David Anders wasn't so damn entertaining. Instead, everytime he shows up I think in loud and incoherent heart shapes instead of being a respectful scholar of History and the Human Condition. Damn.
1. How long have you been designing webpages?
Since 2002, I think. Somewhere around there. I was 15/16? Sophomore year of high school.
2. What was your first website?
Starbonked.org, which migrated to "Cynical Athena" almost immediately.
3. What is your oldest existing site?
Probably Renaissance, if you can call that existing. Otherwise, Consequence.
4. What is your favorite site?
Generally whichever one I've revamped recently. Which, given my recent inactivity, is none of them. But in theory Renaissance has a special place in my heart.
5. What is your most visited site?
Libertine, by quite a bit. (Although its popularity has died down.) Not counting my main collective. But when I had a blog, it was way more popular than any of my shrines. Maybe I'm cooler that fictional characters after all.
6. When did you first get a domain name?
2002. I totally started with a domain, and then was intimidated out of it by the weird elitist domain-owning community. I decided I didn't deserve one. That was really dumb of me. But I think I've had enough domains now that I've made up for it.
7. What domains have you owned?
Starbonked.org, athenae.nu, astarael.net, asperia.net, antigone.nu, valiantknife.org. There's a trend there, but I can't seem to put my finger on it...
8. Why did you choose your domain name?
Well, there are a few reasons. I was kinda tired of the a dot n names, and I wanted something having to do with video games. But at the same time, I wanted something that had nothing to do with video games. The Valiant Knife is...not Locke's ultimate weapon persay, but it's one of his best, unique to him, and has all these neat personality-related quirks. A knife the gets stronger the more its wielder gets hurt, and it ignores defense and goes straight to the heart. That's awesome. It says so much about death and chivalry-- and that's probably why I have the most pretentious "about the domain" page in the business.
9. Do you have a "style"? How would you describe it?
I think I must, but I have a trouble pinning it down. I've done a lot of different styles over the years, I kind of go through phases. I think lately I've been doing lots of bright colors and straight lines, but it really hasn't always been that way. I've done lots and lots of blended layers, random 3d shapes and pre-Raphaelite art, grunge, Amano art, pastels, extreme simplicity, and a whole bunch else. I guess I use a lot of just-off-complimentary color schemes. And random unnecessary literary references. But style is something it's easier to see from without than within, if that makes sense. I think my visitors have a better grasp about what my style constitutes than I do.
10. What is the most important element to you when you design a layout?
For me, it's in the details. You can change so much about text placement, spacing, line-height-- all of these things make a layout seem like a cohesive whole rather than text slapped on an image. That's what makes a layout a layout, y'know?
11. What elements do you always include in your designs?
My footers are all the same, I guess. I definitely go through phases, where everything I design looks the same, but I move on from them pretty quickly.
12. What web trends do you dislike?
I like trends, and even if they become overdone in the short run, there's usually some innovation left after the trend is gone. So, uh, none that I can think of off the top of my head.
13. Have you been responsible for any trends?
I've sort of stopped paying attention, it used to happen so much. It sounds arrogant to say it, but I've kind of lost track of them. When I first started, say, asperia.net, my site was actually really different and unique, but when I stopped blogging it had almost become a genre, the sort of personal site I ran. But originality is overrated. I'd rather do something well than do something innovative.
14. What layouts are you most proud of?
Probably my favorite layout was Astarael's fiftieth. I wrote about it here. But man, I loved that layout. I wish I had never taken it down.
15. What are your current projects?
Lots, lots lots lots. A lot of the problem now is I have too many ideas. Right at this second I'm working on Black and White.
Bold is for books you've read. Underline is for books you own but haven't read. Italics for books you've started but haven't finished. Strikethrough is for books you found unreadable. And, finally, leave the ones you haven't read as they are. I am making a new category which is WANT to read, and that gets a pretty little *.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina*
Crime and Punishment*
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi
The Name of the Rose (Reading this right now...)
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov*
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin*
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha*
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch*
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys*
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist*
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492 - Present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere*
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita*
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road*
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood*
White Teeth
Treasure Island (In fairness, I was twelve.)
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers
I have this thing where I keep on saying I'm going to read these long impressive Russian books, but then I never do.