Bandwagon

\’band-”wa-g&n\, n. A popular trend that attracts growing support.

Somehow it’s taken me until halfway through 2004 to actually get in on this whole “weblog” thing.

I think actually that a large part of it rests solely on the shoulders of one LiveJournal.com. I have a deep-seated hatred for that “community”. The past 3 people with whom I have lived all have had LiveJournal accounts. I hated it because it seemed as though they would use it more as a means of playing the victim, rather than actually confronting their problems. I have plenty of stories of times when a roommate would be pissed off at me for something as inane as forgetting to run the dishwasher, but rather than actually talk to me about it they would run to their computers and madly type away, letting everyone except for those involved know about what a hellish existence they must endure. And of course the “community” would come rushing into business which is not theirs in the first place, and start giving sympathy and formulating negative ideas about me, when all I did was forget to turn a knob.

It’s become a bit of an inside joke for me, now, making fun of LiveJournal. I was at a Skinny Puppy concert in Portland a few weeks ago, and as they started coming out onto the stage, I screamed “O-o-ohmigawd! I need to go post this on my LiveJournal!”

Well, at least I thought it was funny.

So I suppose that was my initial resistance to starting a weblog. That and the fact that my web design knowledge was largely obsolete, being versed as I was in non-standard table-based layouts. If there’s one thing I hate (at least in the context of web technology), it’s using tables for layout. I had a website for a music project of mine that ended up falling into obscurity simply because I hated those fucking tables. It amazes me that people will still argue with me about how tables are “the way to go”.

The idea of starting my own weblog was born from a number of factors, which all seemed to coalesce together into a whole. At first, it was a desire to do a site redesign. I’d started hearing about how CSS can be used for layout, so I started looking into resources for learning CSS. This lead me towards a large number of blogs which, to my surprise, were actually enjoyable to read, and weren’t just self-centred “oh-woe-is-me” posts. Eventually, I discovered A List Apart, and went on to buy Designing with Web Standards, and from that point on I had been trapped within the gravitational pull of web standards.

As the number of projects on which I was working started to increase (such as my electrobiomechanical music project, my comic, and the desire to put up some fun sites like a Legend of Zelda fansite—laugh if you want, but if you’re a fan of the Zelda series and you’ve seen the other sites out there, you know how desperately a good site is needed—and a Star Trek site (again, look at the woeful quality of other Star Trek sites), and numerous other things in which I am interested, the conclusion was soon reached that I can have all of these sites in a central location, and that since they’re all involving projects or interests of mine, that I should try to integrate them in some way.

And as I became a fan of good blogs like The Daily Report, Daring Fireball, A List Apart, Airbag, and Jason Santa Maria, I began to appreciate the medium beyond the crap spewed out by the various LiveJournals. So I thought, “Hey, I could do something like that as a means of threading all of these sites of mine together!” And thus was the conception of what eventually became a warm gun.

I intend to use this mostly for news, reviews, and interviews regarding technology, art, and culture. There will be a personal blog, a day in the life, which will be used more as a journal in the classic sense of the word. To put it clumsily, a warm gun will be stories about things, while a day in the life will be stories about me. Of course, I will try to be modest, but sometimes my overly-narcissistic superego gets the best of me.