Emptybottle.org

My design for 9622.net - which is a MeFi-offshoot community blog created by a bunch of groovy and determinedly silly Metafiltrons who outgrew their cult thread and have been demonstrated to harbour an unhealthy obsession with monkeys - has gone live.

The design strikes a fine balance between a total absence of useability and, well, determined silliness, I think. I just thought I'd link it to toot my own horn, as I've never done something like this for a group of people before, and I think it's pretty spunky. Considering I don't know jack about design, and just make sh-t up as I go along.

[Please note the liberal use of #006699, which is an homage to you-know-where, of course.]

Edit : [Warning - self-obsessed wankage ahead] It strikes me as I wander around, reading the words of people who know so much more than I about, well, stuff, that it would be, with the kindness dial turned up to 11, charitable to describe me as 'an enthusiastic amateur'.

I leap into stuff with both feet, I do, like that 'design job' I pointed to above, but it seems that I am almost never equipped with the training or tools to attempt anything but make sh-t up as I go along. I keep going at it with guns blazing, but I do wonder if my mock-buffoonery is just a cover to deflect accusations of real buffoonery. In my decision many many years ago to just wander the planet and see what happened (with 10 kilos of books in my backpack, naturally) I couldn't forsee that the truly Towering Influences in my life, the people that I'd meet in out-of-the way corners of the planet who would shape my vision of the person I wanted to be, would be the mad bastards, tinkerers, and yes, the enthusiastic amateurs.

On nights like tonight, though, when I'm exhausted, drained, and sweating like Corky The Magical Sweating Bear, when I'm reading things people say that I understand, dimly, but that are clearly just signposts to deeper and more tangled thickets of learning, it's times like this that I begin to suspect my approach to knowledge hasn't panned out to be as good an idea as it seemed at the time that I devised it. Which was probably on a nude beach in Greece or some damn place like that.

Is this the mid-life crisis of the childless? Damned if I know. I'll keep you posted.