There is something that bothers me each and every time I visit deadmemes.net. Actually, there are dozens of things that bother me about it, but one in particular is particularly (yes, on purpose) bothersome. It is the positioning of the archives. Notice the third box under the title, above the text itself. There you will find the archives for January, February and March, and an empty space. In a few days that space will be filled by the archives for April. And in a month, where will be archives for May be fit? Will the box be increased? That would imply in increasing the other two boxes as well, or risk a very ugly imbalance in the layout. That, or a change of the whole layout. Or of the archives' links themselves. Seeing as each post falls in a category (leisure, work, nc), yet this division is not available for link anywhere except the posts themselves, one possible solution is to replace the monthly listing of archives in the third box with two links: "Archives by month" and "Archives by category". That would halt the monthly increase of one link in the third box, which would eventually ruin the layout, and open space for more links than what currently are there.
In a lost boy, once you get past the complete and absolute lack of everything, there are things to be bothered about as well. One of them is the lack of capital letters, combined with the presence of punctuation in the title. But my main complaint goes to the trouble caused by the messy bold given to differentiate "lost" from "a" and "boy" in "alostboy". Problem is, only "ost" is in bold. So I inevitably think "Al, Original Sound Track, boy" whenever I look at it. So I wonder what movie "Al" would be (no, not A.I., it is Al), and what would be in its soundtrack for a boy to like it so much that he would call himself the Al OST Boy. I have seen strange nicknames in reference to TV shows and manga and bands, but never a soundtrack alone. In any case, since we are at it, lackofspace is annoying, period.
That could lead to the discussion of form vs. content. And I would then proceed to bash concrete poetry, and hopefully find the willpower to extend it to performatic poetry, and haikus, and given time to ferment I would reach "Run, Lola, Run" and pinch it a little, in spite of not having seen it, just because everyone comments so much on how it is done, but I never saw one mention of what it is about (except to explain how it is done). I would have, then, to assume that the Brazilian movie "Amores PossÃveis" is better than "Run, Lola, Run", for having the same form, but also having some story. Not getting in the argument of how it is filmed, camera positioning et al, which I cannot for already mentioned reason, the multiple ending part has been done to Daventry and back in games, if not books, and in movies before Lola. I remember "Wayne's World" had three endings. Of course, it was a joke, and all three very unlikely, but there they were. "Stigmata" had two endings as well, with the bonus that the entire difference was so subtle it could go unnoticed, yet changed the entire meaning of the ending (and maybe of the movie, if the viewer was willing to analyze it and argue with some sofa critics and Catholics).
My real purpose was writing something, or rather, some things about atheism, existance of God(s), agnosticism, religions. It would be the product of the long discussion I witnessed in a very good blog not long ago. But I just lost the will to when I was faced with the problem of having to write in Portuguese to hope reaching those who were part of the discussion (possibility), and at the same time making it unreadable to half of my readers (fact).
By the way, I now declare ASCII art a form of concrete poetry. So mote it be.
(Now you picture me laughining maniacally like Yamazaki [yes, from KoF] at the mention of "So mote it be".)
Posted by Etienne at April 27, 2003 05:30 PM