Publishing a new art project

Art, Music

I’ve been slowly working on an art project over the last few months and I’ve finally gotten it far enough that I’m sharing it. It’ll be constantly under construction but that’ll be part of the fun.

It’s named “Fan sites” and it’s just some simple zine pages celebrating music with my own nerdy flavor of web art. This started when I was restoring my old Nirvana website and I remembered how much fun I use to have wasting time on weird websites!

Without further ado: Fan Sites Just For Fun!

a screenshot of my new fansites page
I only have 3 new bands for now, and they’re not even done. But I have a queue of new ones to work on and will just add them over time as I work on them.

I’ll probably post more on this in the future and explain some of my attempts to make these visual/interactive sites also fun to play with when using a screen reader. I’m still experimenting with some parts of that, but it’s ready to give a spin now!

Black Lives Matter

Personal

I’ve lost many friends and loved ones. I know what happens when you keep ignoring your losses and don’t try to deal with the pain; you may not be dead, but you’re sure as hell not living. It took me over a decade to finally figure that out. Now I’m slowly crawling out of my mourning-debt, and many other emotional debts, to finally start to come back to myself and my life.

This life matters, right now, you reading this, your life matters. Even if you believe in an after-life that’s free of pain and suffering, you matter now. I matter now. Black people matter now. Those dying from Covid-19 matter now. Those who will die from Covid-19 because we as a society care more about billionaire’s checkbooks matter.

When I ignored that my life matters for all those years it made me sick. When I ignored the importance of my loved ones to me by not mourning them it broke me.

The purpose of death is to remind us that this life matters.

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Do you ever practice what you’d say to a celebrity so that you don’t fuck it up in your imaginary meeting?

pith

If I ever run into Krist Novoselic I want to be able to play it cool and be all, “Hey man, big fan! How’s <current band>1It’s: Giants in the Trees going?”

Yes, I just want to seem like an active follower of his career. We both know I’m just another Nirvana nerd about to pee myself. With practice I hope to project a “I’m a simple star struck nerd and you’ll be able to leave with nothing but a shoulder shrug”-vibe.

He’d use our tall-balding-guy connection to understand the vibe perfectly and respond with a simple “Good.” He’d just tilt his head a little with the “I gotta go” face and head out.

He’d even have the decency to not glance back at my sad “it was an honor to meet you!”, because if he did… he’d see the “this dude’s about to do the wayne’s world we’re not worthy” staring right back at him.

Nineties Web Nostalgia

Personal

Back in the mid to late 90’s most of the information you could find about your favorite bands was spread across many sites made by fans. Very few bands had official websites and Wikipedia didn’t exist. So we all just stole content from each other and created our own sites with 95% identical content presented slightly differently. 1I loved how each site had slightly different versions of lyrics.

I created probably half a dozen Nirvana fan sites with all the usual accoutrements and was part of a community that would help each other learn how to make websites with patience and enthusiasm. I still remember before that community when I couldn’t figure out how to make my first Geocities site show up and some dude in the chat pulled a “duh, you have to name the front page index.html.” How was I suppose to know that!?

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Blog year in review

Blog Meta, Personal

OK, you caught me… I’m just writing this so I can post something in December and have a more complete blogging year. Sometimes filler posts can be excellent because there are no expectations! Not this time. Sorry.

Anyway, I wanted to post something each month this year, which I didn’t quite accomplish, but I did post more than 12 times, so that kind of counts. My real goal was to be more open and sharing of myself with friends and loved ones and to scratch a little creative itch. I think I definitely succeeded at those goals despite having much more I wanted to do.

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