simolinic

betterbooktitles:

Mark Z. Danielewski: House of Leaves

Better Blog Title: “Most Things Are Easier To Ignore Or Marginalize If I Simplify My Thinking Into Casual Strata And Use Demeaning Language To Obscure The Fact That I Can’t Be Bothered To Think Any Harder About Anything Than Is Allowed Within The Momentary Gaps In My Rigorous Schedule Of Tumble-Logging Condescendingly About Real Efforts Other People Have Made At Understanding And Synthesizing Their Experiences Into Art, Which I Not-So-Secretly Feel I Will Never Approach But Long For Unendingly, And Therefore Must Sap And Leach Possible Strength From The Works Of Others — And Thereby Enable Others To Do The Same, By Posting Said Lechery In Easily-Digestible Chunks On The Internet — By Poorly Manipulating The Covers Of Their Monumental Books To Instead Say Something Degrading And Worth A Quarter Of A Chuckle If Someone Can, God Help Them, Even Possibly Be Amused By Half-Assed Hateful Bitter Book Titles.”

Tonight, my brother and I (not without a few oblique hints) deciphered and acquired the “Painstakingly Concealed Secret Track” from MC Frontalot’s most recent album, Zero Day. Which is so good.

We saw him and his band play twice in one weekend, in Atlanta and Athens, and had the best time, both times. There is no paradox.

His bassist Brandon Patton’s most recent album, Underhill Downs, is really good, too, and I’ve listened to keyboardist Vic-20/Ken Flagg’s other band Edible Norris’s album Ready, Set, Gonads approximately 2 dozen times in the last week.

Exquisite. All of them.

The web site I’ve been working on for months (at a fairly consistent pace, give or take) is now public. It’s for a local apartment management company, owned by the father of a friend. That friend also works there. She endured many hardships since asking me to make them a site in… October? Roundabout?

“Can it be ready by the end of November?” she asked.

“Oh, of course,” I said.

… I’ve heard that big projects always take three times the original estimate. That’s about right.

It’s not even that big or complicated, but represents an enormous amount of my time and is without a doubt the most-involved web-related project I’ve ever completed. Plate’s ‘lets took more of a certain kind of work and there’s “more to show” for that, but in terms of web thingamajigs, there’s a lot more structure and hidden stuff involved in GPM’s site. Every other project before this has been essentially a veneer of divs, purely visually-style. This one’s not much deeper, but there’s jQuery, and php, and it was written in haml and sass and then output through nanoc… some of which mired me for weeks, some of which compensated for that lost time through increased efficiency. Mostly I just learned and learned and learned.

I would like very much to document the various drafts and steps, for posterity and my own interest and because Frank Chimero said there’s not enough talk about process on the internet. And I agree. But not now.

That’s quite enough for tonight. Tell me if it seems broken or wrong in any way.

Been staring at things like this for hours. But not just at them; through them, and into the future.

Wrapping up a 7-ish hour session of web work. The second workday worth of work I’ve done since waking up this morning. I got an awful lot done, though there’s still a good bit to do. Turned out that several things I thought were pointless tangents a couple of months ago (12-column grid css, HAML) came back in a rush tonight to solve a bunch of problems. To facilitate pumping out all of these pages in rapid-fire, I’m going to give nanoc a try tomorrow. I wish I had it in place earlier this evening; might have saved me 30 minutes or so of page-by-page copy&pasting by inserting partials of the navigation bar, footer, etc. No big thang, but since I had to switch to HAML to get something else to work, it won’t take long at all to drop the files into a nanoc project and reap benefits. Reap reap reap.

I listened both of The Protomen’s albums on loop the whole time, which means I heard them both 4 or 5 times. That first album took a while to grow on me, but it’s great work music, especially in context with Act II. They’re playing at the Caledonia Lounge on April 17th, and that is going to be incredible you guys they are so good.