I’m back. How have you been? We have a lot of catching up to do. Are you ready for the most exciting summer of blogging you’ve ever had? Then click that button up at the top to add me to your feedreaders, and be sure to check back every day for a dose of what scientists can only describe as pure, unadulterated hotness.
I’ve been retooling my personal portfolio site this past week. Any designer will tell you that portfolio sites are a cruel, unforgiving monster. Almost always, as soon as you finish all the work of concepting, coding, and design, you look back at the finish piece and feel disappointed. Because that site just isn’t you, and just can’t do a good enough job of representing you. And almost always, you’re too tired to care at this point – so that’s what goes online. And it haunts you every time someone asks for a link to your site, because in your heart you know if it’s not good enough for you then it certainly isn’t good enough to share with the rest of the world – and certainly not fit for sharing with potential employers who literally wear pants made out of money and would like to possibly give you some.
So designing a portfolio site is exhausting work. And I’m not going to share it until it’s done, which hopefully won’t be too terribly long from now. But I can share some ideas I have about it, and the crazy thoughts that have come along with it.
I want my new portfolio site to be an absolute celebration of dynamic content. I want the traditional elements of a portfolio to be there, the biography, the resume, all well presented. But I also want to make it fun and interesting. I want it prove that I’m intelligent and sort of well-rounded or at least not completely retarded outside the scope of my work. (Not that my portfolio would lead you to believe I’m some sort of creative savant, or anything.) And the way to do that today is twofold: First, you supply interesting content of your own – blogs, photographs, side projects, video, microposts, etc. And second, you show that you’re engaged with the rest of the world. You show other people’s content that you really like, because that will always say more about who you are and especially who you want to be and have the potential to be than what you’ve created to this point.
Plus, and maybe this is just me, I always think other people’s lives are more interesting than my own.
Obviously there’s a danger there in overwhelming your own work with that of other people, and I think it’s a concept that works for some portfolios better than others. Personally, I’m trying not to box myself to a design career, and I’m thinking a lot of about social media, viral marketing, and augmented reality. So I’m trying to show a little interdisciplinary flair here, and hopefully it’ll work out.
Okay, now here is where this post gets interesting.
Assume you want to own your online profile entirely. You want your site to be a portrait of authenticity, a portal to yourself. So you want your twitter, blog, flickr, last.fm, etc all lined up in a row so there’s no mistaking who Matthew is. This stuff is all cool, but pretty basic. Why not try something more unique, more interesting? Previously you’d need to dabble around in webapp API toolboxes and, man, I am just not ready for that level of development shenanigans. But it’s becoming increasingly easier to tether data from multiple applications together and produce unique (and extremely cool) applications of your own. Yahoo! Pipes, which I discovered today, has suddenly made this a lot easier.
So what’s to stop you from linking your latitude/longitude via iPhone gps to a flickr widget that will constantly display new images from your exact current location? Why wouldn’t you create a robot to trawl the internet to search for pictures of anorexic midget clown porn (that got your attention) to automate your new photoblog? Who is going to walk up to you and say, “No, Matthew, you cannot create a “The Path of Matthew” page that displays, historically, exactly where you have been for the past year as a moving icon on Google maps?
No one is going to stop you. The only thing stopping you is utility. How useful would these machinations be? We’re approaching a time where anyone with basic web design skills can assemble an app that does truly stunning things, and all you need is an imagination. So get in while the getting is good. Make something cool before someone else does it first, and then share the coolest things other people have done with the rest of the world. That’s how you make your portfolio something to be proud of.
If you’re a regular visitor of this blog, and who is, you may have noticed that this week was pretty slow. Dead would be the word, actually. That’s because I was spending a lot of time this week thinking about the blog, and blogging in general, and trying to figure out if I really like the direction this is headed. Writing here is fun and easy for me because it takes practically no thought at all, but that’s not really rewarding for me and it’s also not going to be very interesting for you, regular readers who do not exist. If all I do is continue to repost stuff I find on other, better sites like Andrew Sullivan, The Casual Optimist, Videogum, and Kotaku, there’s really no point in doing this.
I started this blog on a whim, borne out of a hasty impulse to start building a presence online and just have fun. The name was originally supposed to describe the various imaginary encounters in our head in a daily basis, the alternate realities we inhabit in a sort of Walter-Mitty fantasy minute on the train. It wasn’t a very strong concept to build a blog on, so I’ve been doing everything else. Plus, I realized all of my fantasy scenarios involved someone trying to attack me and me somehow escaping, which would have gotten boring pretty fast.
But from now on my goal is to write more original content, and make it more interesting and useful for people. So you’ve been warned: prepare for more interesting talky words, and hopefully some better writing. And maybe less pointless cursing.
So recently I’ve been having more vivid, more memorable dreams than usual. My dreams have always been epic, long-form dramas that usually involve some level of intrigue, plot twists, explosions, spies, et cetera. Last night’s dream was different, shorter, but it’s worth retelling here because it marks the beginning of a trend I find very disturbing.
I started playing Resident Evil 5 last night with a friend, and truthfully it is just a very fun game, and one that sticks in your head. So naturally, I dreamed about zombies. I dreamed I was fighting a bunch of zombies in a swamp with some other people, and after the battle was over and the combat music subsided, I clambered out of an old cabin window and walked around checking zombie bodies for ammunition and gold, because obviously zombies carry a lot of gold on them (who doesn’t?). Then, Christian Bale walked over from another building, holding a bag and mumbling to himself. Instantly I knew that none of my friends or I liked Christian Bale, and we all felt uncomfortable that he was here. But he didn’t seem to be aware of this. He made us sit down at a picnic table and then we sat for a moment in complete silence.
Then Christian Bale reached into his paper bag and took out a sandwich. He gave it to one of my friends without saying a word. He kept doing this until he ran out of bread, and then he just gave people big slabs of meat instead. I ended up with a slab of pastrami, which Christian Bale mumbled was “fake, but still good” but I wasn’t sure what that meant. It tasted fine to me. He kept mumbling about all the weapons he needed and doodled little pictures of guns on his napkin, which everyone thought was weird. And that is basically where the dream ended.
Anyway, this dream was different because Christian Bale was not actively trying to hurt me. Somehow, I’m not sure why this happened, somehow Christian Bale has become a regular fixture in my dreams. And he is always angry. He is like a manifestation of violence, a constant threat to my health, a perambulatory visitation of doom and dismemberment headed straight at me all the time, never resting, never stopping, unabated, undeterred. A relentless juggernaut of cosmic pain trudging ever forward in my direction. There is an end to all things, and its name is Christian Bale.
Anyway, so I’m basically afraid to fall asleep anymore. We’ll see how long this lasts. Maybe it’s the sort of thing where I have to visualize Christian Bale in a really stupid way to dispel this image of him as the destroyer. Maybe I could watch Newsies? I’m not sure, but I really need help here.
So I’m not posting this week because I’m busy with work-related psychic and physical trauma, etc. I’ll leave you with this. See you soon.
It’s time to evaluate. Movement has been made on a few of the 27 goals, but unfortunately one of them threatens the likelihood of all the others ever being reached…
These are the 27 things I will do this year. They’re all out of order, or in no particular order at all. They’re all priorities. Some of them have been redacted for public consumption, but it’s still slightly embarrassing so I think I’m on the right track. And I think making them public makes it harder for me to renege on them. It should make for a good year, I hope. Goals after the jump.
It’s about that time in my life when I look around and see that people of my generation are finally becoming the artists that will shape the landscape of this country, and of this world. People that I have known, been close to, to varying degrees; others that I’ve never met and never will. These people, all of them, are artists. And it inspires a strange and cruel mixture of jealousy and inspiration, the simultaneous imperative to join the ranks and create and also the knowledge that I’m already too behind to catch up to where these people are. Many of them already know what it is that they want to do. Some of them have always known. There’s something incriminating even in contemplating that – you already feel like you’re letting yourself down simply by not living up to the standards set by other people. This is why I feel driven to create, but I’m lost as to what direction I actually want to pursue. I want to experiment with music – electronic music, since as a kid I never had an interest in learning a single musical instrument besides the recorder, and even that was kind of a struggle; I want to learn how to produce great motion and 3d graphics and work on developing content – for games, movies, more?; I want to write, which is why I started this blog – but about what, again, I am unclear, as I am sure is obvious if you’ve been reading along.
The trouble with creation is that without motivation, you quickly come to a standstill. And I think that ties into the general problem of being an artist: your artistic motivation becomes your singular reason to live. Your art becomes your life. Without it, you wither and die – it is that integral to your personality. This is, of course, descriptive only of a certain kind of artistic personality – the one who goes “all the way,” so to speak, and necessarily must do so at the cost of those around them. Artists share in common with all creative people a general desire to make things better, so I doubt it is ever their intent to hurt those in their path. But inevitably the debt the ‘true’ artist owes is to him or herself, and so regardless of the distractions it always comes back to the self in the end.
This is what makes me nervous – this tension between art and life. Because they mirror each other, but you can’t commit to both. So the creative person, uh, me in this case, eventually has to make a decision between pursuing art, hardcore, at the cost of meaningful, intimate future personal relationships (that’s a lot of qualifiers, isn’t it?), and doing it half-assed, because I’d like to create, you know, but it’s not the most important thing in life. The second way is the destiny of the majority of artists, I think, and they don’t last too long because they find themselves in the middle of something that eventually becomes more important to them than their vision, which was probably hazily defined to begin with. They create, they retire, and if they’re lucky they have no regrets. I wonder how many are that lucky.
Of course this is pretty optimistic in my case – I think, pragmatically, that I will never be a ‘true’ artist (feel free to debate me on the legitimacy of this distinction I’m drawing), because if I was to be one I would have found motivation by now. But I’m not particularly upset by this – I think in the grand scheme of things developing and maintaining meaningful relationships is the metric by which we are measured. I’m sure this is biased toward the experience of an extrovert, so take it with a grain of salt. This is why I also feel a pang of regret when I consider being an artist – I know that it’s a dream, never to be enacted. Of course, I also know the unfortunate flip side of that commitment, so the sighs retire as quickly as they come.
So it goes.
Edit: Of course there are a great deal of artists who negotiate their creative work with the demands of meaningful personal relationships, and I don’t mean to belittle their work. But I do think it’s a zero sum equation, and you get out what you put in. A recent Zadie Smith essay (which is awesome, by the way, and worthy of its own post) in the New York Review of Books opened my eyes to the fallacy of the ‘additive personality’, which I’ll explain in another entry soon. But basically: you make choices in life, and they define you. That’s the whole point.
