mutant liberation now

Other women would honk their car horns at me "in solidarity" when they saw it, only I was too poor for a car, and these exact drivers were the ones making my long long walking or cycling commute annoying and unsafe.

I wish everyone at risk of twerfism got to experience such an obvious parable of "plenty of people who share my oppression are also my oppressors on another axis" "being oppressed in some way does not automatically make you innocent of wrongdoing or even of being annoying on the sidewalk"

Anyway I changed my back patch to a big Clifford The Big Red Dog asking (implicitly) those same women "Are You My Comrade?"

Reblog this on the first of the month for good luck all month long!

2002

This reminds me that I need to get back into web design...

Geocities is definitely an inspiration, but the biggest influence has to be old CD-ROMs. Check out the YouTube channel JSmon for a great archive of them.

You have to take everything I say with a grain of salt because I could be poisoned by nostalgia, but I consider Eyewitness Children's Encyclopedia to be the epitome of interactive design. The design philosophy behind these CD-ROMs seems to be solid info organisation, but in a way that feels both accessible and vast. It's skeuomorphic design, but it feels almost hyperreal, because in real life buttons don't really make these sounds and things aren't really this tactile. Yet it all becomes part of the language of the interface. You felt like you were exploring a kind of cyberspace.

I really love how there's this CGI-rendered environment that you can travel through, whether it's a house, a garden, a jungle, outer space etc. Everything in those scenes can be clicked, taking you to its DK learning page. So there's two spaces to explore, the Virtual reality space, and the operating system like space. It's a great example of "interface metaphor" design.

Another thing I liked about the DK Interactive CD-ROMs was the ability to create a profile, and the basic tracking. You could make a fun custom profile picture and fill in personal details.

These programs were never connected online and weren't multiplayer, yet the profiles were still fun because it made it feel personable. For example, every new page you visited in Eyewitness Children's Encyclopedia awarded you with a star that marked that you'd been there, almost like stamping a map in a museum. I feel like this sort of thing would be really fun on a website, even a simple portfolio site.

Other examples include Packard Bell Navigator and of course Microsoft Bob. Another example I really like is the settings menu in Fin Fin, a 1990s virtual pet game, as seen in this LRG video. The settings interface looks incredibly tactile. Imagine polished semi-precious stones embedded into rough sandstone. I also think simple CGI rendering adds to the appeal because it isn't hyper-detailed, it feels more internal, dreamlike.

I know none of these are actually web design examples, but I think most of them could probably be recreated today with CSS3 and HTML5, with little to no JavaScript. Basically, I'm interested in personable, interface-metaphor-driven design.

I'm not trying to be stuck in the past, lol, but contemporary web design often feels like something out of the TV show The Chair Company. Everything seems flattened into the same set of corporate design principles and aesthetics.

If the web design industry is anything like graphic design, it's plagued by people captured by tech corporations, which just means you have to dig a bit deeper to find the good stuff. I'm sure there's plenty of contemporary work that would appeal to my tastes, but I haven't really gone looking for it.

Imagine with me, if you will.

Imagine with that deep faculty that built worlds for you as a child.

That, if you try, even now, can make trees speak and rivers laugh.

Back and back. Beyond the ages of Iron and Bronze and Stone.

Into the Golden Age, and this is not the age of metal-glint.

Oh, no.

This is the age of honeycomb and honeydew, of mead-blood and winedark sea. Of nectar and ambrosia and the golden apples of Idunn and the Hesperides.

Drink with me, all flushed and rolling, all whispering, all gorged on godflesh and wreathed in smoke. Swallow it down as it boils and bubbles in the belly and bowels. 

Falling back and back, dizzy and something lifting in your chest, something peeling back, the muscles of your face shifting, baring your teeth in a smile so very eagerly shared by all the others in the room.

Perhaps they have hair like snakes, faces all ash-white and blood-daubed; ochre-bodied, painting fingers that writhe and twist in strange and potent shapes that leave electric blue-traces across your vision.

Did you think you were the only one? The only child of this ancient knotted line; your breath like all the winds flasked in skin, all tied together with thread? 

And now you are undone, the storm unleashed:

And all should cry, Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise.  -  Kubla Khan, Coleridge

Imagine then. Imagine, yes.

Imagine the salt on the wind, the iron in the blood. The crackle of flame.

He waits beside the fire, there in the bloodlight of womb, there in the centre of the very heart of big bellied verdant Mother.

Heavy is the head that wears the crown.

The antlered shadow there, scalp festooned with the roots of the bone-tree, stretching up and down into darkness, wreathed in laurel and vines. There, all enmeshed, lie serpents and eagles, black-eyed and unblinking in their wisdom.

He throws the bones, carves the lots; weaves a cat’s-cradle out of his own viscera. She nourishes him there. in the darkness. Enfolds him as he tends the flame that he brought from the stars with a word that is not a word..

Such a handsome beast is he. Such a monstrous uncreated coming-together and breaking apart of vision and form. Did you think yourself the only one, when he still remains buried here in dark earth?

Well, did you?

The shining colours of his guts; with one deft pull he snares you; ten thousand masks cast out by his shadow; plays you like a lute, like a liar strumming a lyre.

Down and down. There lies his spear, his club, his bow, his skull-breaker, his arrow of gold.

Down and down, in fire and flux, in ice and pestilence. There he sits, in the age of honey and amber. Even the rocks groan and bleed at the pulsing of his drum, as he bores his way down through the top of your head, as he kisses, wakens the snake and she rises to meet him

The secret centre. He drinks from the freezing fount and transmutes it to intoxicating gold. 

Poisoner and poisoned.

Pharmakon. Body and blood. He gives himself to us, so to be devoured, to ignite the fire in our breast and bellies.

A mocking smile, echoed from the other end of time:

“Do this, in remembrance of  me.”

We, the hunted, lay ourselves prostrate, as his curved bone knife cuts us free, hands roughly kindling organs, filling them with light and darkness. With solemn mockery, he cleaves the stone of our heart in two; we are to bleed forever, to stream back across the tracks, to this, the place beyond beginning and end.  

Bones disarticulated and dismembered, we are naught but hide and flesh to be stitched together with thorn, scratched and cut down to the bones, our marrows stuffed with secrets.

Burns us black, so he does, until we all go up in smoke; draws us in, holds us there, and then expels us as changed breath and a gesture, so we rise and stream forth from that place; almost to see her emerge from the darkness, this lady of feline grace and hawkish beauty, this leader through the labyrinth.

We do not imagine her, flanked by kings of beasts, heavy pawed and golden. Do not see her in feathered cloak and covered in gleaming jewels. Do not see her place her hand upon his shoulder, and watch him strengthen, watch the weariness we never saw was there, the loss of what he gave for us, be banished once more. We do not see her give him the cup, the mark of her eternal favour.

For this is just postulate. Just a might be.