Mekana

Remember those days?

Internet | August 5, 2010

You know the ones. The days of topsites, cliques, fanlistings, and blend challenges. Of image maps and iframes. Of plugboards and dollmakers. Of vexels and pixel text. When trendy hyphenated site names like “radio-romance” and “rainbow-kisses” abounded. When every site featured a section of stolen email forwards masquerading as original visitor content. When a blog or personal site wasn’t complete without an extensive tutorial section on how to print screen, save pictures, make scanlines, and customize scrollbars.

Everyone needs a good trip down the annals of archive.org once in a while, and these past few days have been mine. I figured I needed a bit of downtime, since I now have four jobs (two paid, two unpaid volunteer/intern positions) as of yesterday. Maybe all this archive-stalking represents my longing to return to those bygone days when building a poorly done website cemented your status as the coolest genius ever, playing tag was still appropriate, responsibility entailed doing an hour of homework, and “working” was a fabulous word that only existed in grown-up land. In any case, my time spent in the throes of sentimentality led me to make the following lists:

Things that wouldn’t fly today, especially not all on the same website:

• Layouts smooshed against the left side of the monitor with one-inch wide content columns and 9px Tahoma text (or 10px if you just want your visitors to go almost but not completely blind)
• Layouts featuring half-naked celebrities and brush splatters that only sometimes conceal the half-nakedness
• Navigation like this: [ x x x x x x x ] or this: [x] [x] [x] or this: x; x; x; — so unique!
• Pixel stretching and transparency to create columns — ugliest thing ever
• “About” pages titled “Profile” and “Basics” with all the same meaningless info — “Name: Meg. Age: 13. Location: In your pants. Buy Me Presents: September 21. Eye Color: Shit brown. Hair Color: Psychedelic pink. Shoe Size: 7. Likes: Cell phones. The color pink. Dislikes: Getting hurt. AIM Screenname: xoxoimxcoolzyo.”
• “Random Facts” pages with details like “I hate liars and cheaters” because obviously that makes you different from everyone else — I don’t know about you, but liars and cheaters are my favorite people!
• A long list of favorites, because everyone cares that you like Fridays, The Notebook, Fall Out Boy, Diet Dr. Pepper, and Desperate Housewives
• “__ years young” — can you say most annoying way to describe your age ever?
• “I’m worth $2,167,000 according to humanforsale.com!” — Is that for slavery, prostitution, or both? Okay, that was kind of insensitive.
• Splash pages — “Stuck in frames? Set yourself free!” “Requirements: Cookies. A kind heart. No sticky fingers!” “Pop or Drop?” “Click on the image above, or click ~here~ to enter.” “Add to favoritez / Set as homepage”
• “I ♥ all my sisters and affiliates! ♥ Amy ♥ Bob ♥ Jill ♥ Jane ♥ Lorreen” plastered across said splash page
• Decorative site titles: “:+: ____M.E.K.A.N.A._:+: (v2)”
• Decorative site titles that are supposed to make you look sexy and mature as a preteen: “// UrBaN-sLuT; {dot} ORG(asm) // —”
• Excessive usage of smileys and “lol” in blog posts about your new flavor of toothpaste and how your crush won’t talk to you
• A million different skins because you can’t be bothered to make one decent layout, because quantity trumps quality
• Changing the cursor to crosshair or help upon hovering on a link — or, even better, making cursors disappear entirely
• Going on hiatus every other week — grand opening #1, 2, 3, … , 4802
• Buddy-icon makers that crash browsers and install spyware as a bonus gift
• Webcam popups and portals — wow, that staticky-looking box in your sidebar transforms into a slutty picture! Lovely!
• Ugly blends that are more or less collages of floating heads
• Stupid personalized comment text: “c13mments” “K13ssez” “Sm20ches”
• No-right-click scripts — I came across one of these for the first time in years on a blog the other day and just about died
• Visitor counters that are really hit counters that you probably spend hours refreshing
• Abusing semicolons — oh wait, that still happens, and it’s still annoying
• Telling your visitors you won’t be updating because you’ll be at your great-aunt’s house
• Telling your visitors you’ve updated your blinkies page with one extra blinkie
• Flashing “new!” blinkies beside every new piece of crappy content
• Iframes 300000000px in height
• Wak’s Ask & Answer script
• Popup layouts
• Popup anything

Things that I maybe-kinda-sorta-but-don’t-tell-anyone miss:

• Anything on the above list that’s more funny than painful
• Really intricate layouts with amazing graphics and lots of places to click — I’m easily amused
• Well-done blends and vexels — they were pretty, okay?
• Pixel text and pixels — they were cute, okay?

What did I leave out? Any good sites I should plug into the Wayback Machine?

Sunday soupçons

Internet, TV & Movies | August 1, 2010

I’m planning to start this new series of posts. They won’t happen often, but when they do, they will encompass all my rejected blog topics all the bloggity goodness that just can’t stand on its own, but once you put a bunch of bloggity goodnesses together, they make a decent post — strength in numbers at its finest.

The titles of these posts will be: Sunday Soupçons, Monday Morsels, Tuesday Tidbits, Wednesday Whittlings, Thursday Thpoonfuls, Friday Fragments, and Saturday Sprinklings. Yes, I develop a lisp on Thursdays because I can’t find an appropriate word that actually starts with the th- sound. Yes, I am having way too much fun with this. Yes, I am delighted that most of these titles relate to food. And yes, I will probably forget all about this system after this post. But it works for now.

First of all, Facebook can’t spell.

Secondly, captchas like urethrae. Here’s another one. And another.

And lastly: Date Night = FUNNIEST MOVIE EVER.

I have NEVER heard that much laughter in a movie theater. More importantly, I have NEVER laughed that hard or that much watching a movie. If you know me, you’ll know that I think most movies are about as exciting as canned refried beans.

But not Date Night. It will light up your day like a sparkly sparkler. (Woo, look at the reference I worked in!) Your stummy will hurt SO GOODLY by the movie’s sad end (no, the ending itself isn’t sad, but the fact that the movie ends most definitely is). You’ll develop ab muscles from reacting to all the hilarity.

Best parts:
- “And will you, for the love of God, put on a fucking shirt?!”
- “I’m going to go home now and look at my vagina with a hand mirror.”
- The cab driver’s face. ‘Nuff said.

But none of this is funny when I write it down. If you haven’t seen this move, your life is woefully incomplete, and you should remedy that now.

Now. NOW.

I mean, my life is still incomplete, but that’s because I’m not Tina Fey.

Balance

Thoughts | July 31, 2010

I’ve always held that life relies on a delicate balance. Between work and play, altruism and egoism, caring and prying. Between caring too much and not caring, giving in to superficiality and looking slovenly, pursuing perfection and settling for good enough.

In fact, I used to write that exact sentence — “life relies on a delicate balance” — in my English essays in high school because I, for some reason, thought it made me seem all profound if I could connect everything to life and remaining in the perfect center of the seesaws and situations life presents us. In actuality, balance is such a cliché. But then again, most clichés are true. Wait, but isn’t it a cliché that most clichés are true? Apparently Steven Fry said, “It is a cliché that most clichés are true, but then, like most clichés, that cliché is untrue.” Am I just one big cliché? Is anything I just wrote true?

Cliché status and the truth in clichés aside, I still believe that balance is good and that we should actively try to achieve it. Take the classic s-triangle that all college students deal with. School, sleep, and social life make up the three angles. The goal is to make sure your triangle doesn’t come out too lopsided. Now, a lot of people will say that you can only pick two of the s’s. I think you can have all three, but there’s another equation that comes into play: balancing between actually caring about the s-triangle and wasting time on things like Facebook. Most people pick the latter some of the time when they really want the former, and that just throws everything off.

Balance. It’s important. But this guy begs to differ. He thinks that we live in constant leaning and achieve balance only in retrospect. Am I right, or is he, or are we both?

Well, what is balance, anyway? It doesn’t mean that you have pick exactly equal amounts of anything. That’s not possible. First of all, how do we measure those amounts? In hours? Does anyone actually keep track of the exact hours they spend on work and play, or school, sleep, and socializing? I don’t think so. What about the balance between things like altruism and egoism? Is it possible to count how many hours you spend being selfless and how many you spend being self-loving? No. And obviously if you can’t measure the two sides of a balance, you can’t make them even. If that’s what Carlos means, then he’s right; we’re always leaning, and the only reason hindsight equalizes everything is because leans blur together and cancel out other leans.

I think that balance is subjective, that we all have our own scales. You might have a gold one, I might have a silver one, and that person you don’t like might have a rusty one or one that’s covered in tacky rhinestones. We all just have to pick the amounts of life aspects that balance out our own scales. If you’re a student, it means sketching the s-triangle that you think looks best, not drawing a perfectly equilateral one. Or it might mean drawing a triangle that’s equilateral only when you put on the goggles that your unique life has given you.

And if you look at your balance or your triangle and it’s not the way you want it to be, then you’re doing yourself an injustice. You either need to adjust your expectations, or you need to try harder at achieving balance. When your expectations are too high, disappointment takes over. When you don’t try hard enough, mediocrity wins.