by Matt | Feb 19, 2002 | Imported Entry
I would like to also comment on a more personal trend. My uncreativity in the past 3 months or so. I haven’t written a stitch of poetry, taken photos for outside of class, or done anything remotely interesting computer graphics wise. This happened Sophmore year of college as well. For a few months I couldn’t think of anything interesting to do and it drove me nuts. I think I just need a little kick in the ass to get my creative juices flowing again. Some sort of catalyst. Like a new camera to take pictures with, a new poetry class to write for, a new web project to keep me busy. I don’t know. I just feel uncreative today and maybe I’m translating that into “I’m uncreative a lot.” Or maybe I’m hungry… yes, that’s it… lunch. What a brilliant and creative idea… it’s nearly lunch time.
Oh, and before I forget. I lost my watch. I can’t find it anywhere. It’s a silver(ish) Kenneth Cole watch. Retro looking, rectangle in shape with a dark red leather band. If anyone comes across it, let me know.
Later.
by Matt | Feb 19, 2002 | Imported Entry
Another day, another blog. Which, if you really think about it, is a weird phenomenon. The whole “blog”, “weblog”, “journal” trend if you will is definatly something odd. Most of you know I’ve been writing in this journal almost as long as I’ve had my cable modem, which is a good deal of my time here at SCAD. In that time (lets say in the past year) this journal thing has launched so far beyond “popular” that nearly everyone has one. The “blog” has replaced the “self-centered homepage”. You know the kind I’m talking about… “this is me, this is my dog, I enjoy cookies”. Now, I’m the first to admit that I’m certainly not original in having one, nor was I one of the “first” to have one, but I am glad I do. It gives me an opportunity to vent a little and I like that. But why does everyone else have one? I was curious. Luckily, my answers can be found, linked together, on one page. That page is the main Blogger.com homepage. Usually I don’t go there. I have a program called BlogBuddy so I can update, change and post my entries from my desktop. But, I had to change an internal journal setting so I took a look. What I found was kind of creepy.
There’s the usually reasons for a journal: I wanted to vent, I wanted to tell the world something, I wanted to report on things, I wanted to stay in touch with family, that sort of thing. Then there was something else. At least 4 very buisness oriented reports saying how profitable blogs can be, how they’re “where the real action is”, how they can “make the web work for you” by marketing yourself. The sickest thing I saw, and I’m sure it’s innocent (it just seems like a bad idea to me) is The Peer-to-Peer Review Project. This actually made me feel ill. It’s a site where “reviews” get to comment on your personal life in a movie critic type way. They’re not commenting on your life persay, but your writting ability, your “emotional content”, your “style” of writting, things like that. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to have posted about having a really shitty day and have someone tell me it wasn’t “convincing.” What the fuck is that about?
We’re all skating a really thin line. A line between trend/marketing device/personal expresion. Our personal expression has become popular, and that’s a good thing. More power to the people is always a good thing. You guys know I’m all about personal expression. But when will the day come when we get blog related spam in our email instead of regular spam. Something like “express you ideas in a brand new journal” instead of the usual “increase traffic to your site” crap. I don’t know. We’ve certainly pasted the point of no return. Kids in jr-high have their own domain names for heaven’s sake. They have journals and they can use them to talk about their lives. Didn’t it use to be just “us nerds” who did that shit in high-school? Apparently its trendy now.
I hope, I really do, that all this won’t back fire. That in another year we won’t have marketing based blogs. That things like Blogger and Live Journal won’t be completely pay services. That individuals won’t sell out and place banner ads all over their journals in order to make an easy buck from the marketing. I hope, I really do.
With that I’ll leave you with a few links. These are what the professionals are saying about our “hobby.”
Wired.com News brief
Weblogs Make the Web Work for You – Buisness 2.0
Far East Economic Review – Where the party is.
PC Mag – The Blog Phenomenon
Fortune Small Buisness
That is all.
by Matt | Feb 18, 2002 | Imported Entry
Fuck. Fuck the traffic. Fuck SCAD parking. Fuck them all. I even got up early today. I was downtown by 8:10 and drove through SCAD parking lots until 9:05 looking for a fucking parking space. I eventually gave up and parked in the city parking garage and it’ll cost me $6 when I leave. What the fuck? Why do I pay $25 for a parking sticker if I won’t have a parking space. Both this city and this school have serious parking issues. They even “redesigned” the Pulaski parking lot for be less useful. Serious. That parking lot was badly designed to begin with. So much so that there were two “sides” with spaces to people to park in but students kept parking down the middle. So, they “redesigned” it and instead of moving spaces so that you couldn’t block people in, the ADDED a lane down the middle. Now people can block people in on purpose. Arg. I suppose I should be paying attention in class now… Later.
by Matt | Feb 17, 2002 | Imported Entry
Chris is correct. There are still some changes to come here at LI.net. For the rest of the semester I’ll be working on little things here and there. The link back to the homepage will be added, the homepage itself will be redone (not the site, just index.html), I’ll eventually encorporate Flash into the design (which will mean a Flash and non-Flash version) and I’m still thinking about tweaking the text… though I’m not decided on that one quite yet. So that’s the skinny on the site, as for me, I’m doing pretty good.
Dinner last night was very good. The drinks were a little on the pricey side but thats ok. Afterwards we headed out southside to see I Am Sam, the new movie with Sean Penn. It was ok, sorta. The product placement alone was enough to make someone gag. Then there were the story elements that started and didn’t go anywhere, then the cinematography was just horrible. Anyway, the story was ok, at points, but the rest was just to much to allow it to be “good”. That, or it was the people on either end of the isle that made it unbearable. On one end were 3 older women who thought everything was “sweet” or “touching” and wouldn’t shut up about it. On the other end, some slutty girl was more or less trying to give her boyfriend head. It was very unpleasent. So, the movie was alright (at point) and I’d give it around a 5.5 out of 10, but having to put up with people from Savannah brings it down to around a 3.5. I would suggest finding something else to watch for you $7.50 and more importantly, don’t go to a movie in Savannah.
Lauren and I actually had a discussion about the social dynamic in Savannah last night as we left the theater. I won’t get into it, but sufice it to say that I’ve never seen people who are more rude and inconsiderate then the people that live around here. Sure, there are annoying people elsewhere in the world… and you’ve probably sat infront of them in a movie or two, but nothing parallels the extensiveness of the rude behavior I’ve seen in this city. People talking on cell phones, people having full blown conversations with each other, people letting their child scream through the entire movie, all of it, it sickens me. I’m not going to go any further with this one because I’ll just piss myself off even more and I don’t feel like spoiling what has been a wonderful afternoon.
So, here I am, relaxing at the pad, playin’ a little SimGolf (which by the way is frigging addicting) and thinking up ideas for a new flash intro thing. I wish I could do something like 2advanced.com, but then again I’m sure he’s been at it for quite some time. Oh well.
Later.
by Matt | Feb 16, 2002 | Imported Entry
See… this is what I mean about being “bad about updating”. Oh well. There are fairly good reasons however. At the top of that list would probably be Valentines day. Not that its a bad thing by any stretch, just that it occupied my time on Thursday. Anyway.
Thursday actually went quite well. Lauren and I accidentialy ran into each other in the mall. We were both picking up last minute things for each other. It was actually kinda funny. I was standing in the Hallmark looking for a nice card and someone walks up and pokes me on the shoulder. I usually don’t get poked on the shoulder by random strangers so it made me jump. I turned around and there was Lauren. I was caught. I had been the slacker boyfriend and hadn’t looked for a card before the actual day. I asked what she was doing at the mall and she said she was looking for something for me, which made me feel like less of a “slacker boyfriend”. So, we walked around the mall for a bit and then parted ways so that we could buy our respective items. Lauren headed home to prepare my “surprise dinner” and I headed home to take a shower and relax a bit. The dinner was absolutely fantastic. She made me roast with potatos and carrots and gravy to smother everything, all topped off with biscuits. It was great. As a college student, you don’t have many opportunities to “eat well” or to have ol’ fashion home cookin’ and this was certainly a very welcome surprise.
Friday wasn’t to bad either. Around 2:00 I had an appointment with the Career Planning and Placement office. They were pretty nice and gave me a whole pile of places to start looking for jobs this summer. Not employers directly, but resources and places to make contacts. Unfortunatly the admitted that they don’t remember the last time that a commercial photo agency actually came to town to look for students. (that’s something that happens more often with other majors… employers come to town to look for talent) Which, I guess I’m ok with, it just means that I have to find a job on my own. I guess the main draw back to being a photography major at SCAD would be that it’s 99% fine art photography oriented. Which, don’t get me wrong, I love doing. But there’s no money in fine art. Well, for one in a million there is, but there’s no solid guarentee of income, no insurance, no company to back your work. Sure, every once in a while a fine art photographer does the “gallery cirucut”, raises a few eyebrows and makes some serious bank. That doesn’t mean that the other 4 million photographers don’t get shafted that year. It’s just kind of interesting to me that the school is training 500 students (the size of the photo dept) to be photographers with almost no regard for any commercial aspect of the buisness. Luckily that’s changing. My professor in Studio class has been pushing hard for new studio/commerical classes and new studio equipment. Hopefully, I’ll get to use some of it before I leave.
So, that leaves us with today. Saturday… which is LAUREN’S BIRTHDAY!!!! HAPPY BIRTHDAY SWEETHEART!
*insert singing here*
Tonight I’ve made reservations at a piano bar downtown. According to everyone I talk to it seems to be nice. I guess we’ll find out. I didn’t make any plans for afterwards because I didn’t know how long we’d be staying there. I also figured that we’d be dressed up quite a bit so it would really make sense to go someplace afterwards and be really overdressed. Although it seems like just dinner is kind of an incomplete evening. I don’t know. I’m never any good at planning evenings. Maybe I’ll think of something for us to do afterwards, wardrobe be damned.
Later.
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