it's a bloody blog
I've been told that calling a collection of thoughts a blog is no longer cool and it marks me as firmly milennial. "It sounds ugly." Some prefer to simply call it "content" which to me disappears it into the vast ocean of the internet.
The blobfish has often been called the ugliest creature in the world. The way it looks, one might imagine that the sound it may make would be a drawn out, guttural BLOGGGG, something closer to a burp than a groan.
But the blobfish is only ugly because it's been yanked out suddenly from the dark depths of the sea. It's used to pressure. The pressure shapes its body and gives its structure; there's no need to develop much bone or muscle when the environment provides the tension. When it is removed from the steel crushing deep, the blobfish decompresses, its gelatinous skin goes splat (the darn thing doesn't even have a swim bladder, instead relying on its skin to float rather than swim).
I often worry that I've always worked in organisations and cultures where it's all push push squeeze squeeze. I worry that outside of that, I won't have the sinews to be anything but a blob. But I am embracing that, little by little, because the blobfish is endearingly memeable, looks friendly, and is pretty damn ugly cute.
So this blog/ blob of thoughts is an experiment in producing without pressure. I hope that some of you might find some joy in it.
trans-xyz
I'm quite serious about straddling the lines between disciplines, industries, time periods, and mediums. There's been too much specialisation, policing of the boundaries, when there's so much to be mined at the tensions between things.
It may also be a way to justify just how messy of a CV I have.
durian democracy
The name of the blog is simply my social media handle, which I've had since I was 13, when I was on Blogspot. 13 year old me was, to borrow the words of Denis Villeneuve describing his younger self: "arrogant, pretentious, a totalitarian dreamer".
A few years ago, when I was still working in the tech industry, I read the words of Ellen Ullman, who wrote in her memoir Close to the Machine her visceral reaction upon meeting a bunch of cocksure young programmers:
"It was not only their youth and self-assurance that bothered me, not simply their high-IQ arrogance...It wasn't just their unbelievable condescension...No all this was common enough. I'd seen it before, everywhere,. and I'd see it aain in the next software engineer I'd meet. What bothered me was just that: the ordinariness of it. From the hostile scowl of my own programmer tothe hard driving egos of these "internet heavy-hitters": normal as pie. There they were on the cutting edge of our profession, and their arrogance was as natural as breathing. And in those slow moments while their vision of future was sketched across the whiteboards—intranet, Internet, cool, hip, and happening—I knew I had utterly and completely lost that arrogance in myself.
I missed it. Suddenly and inexplicably. I wanted my arrogance back. I wanted to go back to the time when I thought that, if I tinkered a bit, I could make anything work. That I could learn anything, in no time, and be good at it. The arrogance is a job requirement. It is the confidence-builder that lets you keep walking towards the thin cutting edge. It's what lets you forget that your knowledge will be old in a year, you've never seen this new technology before, you have only a dim understanding of what you're doing, but—hey, this is fun—and who cares since you'll figure it all out somehow.
But the voice that came out of me was not having fun.
I'm only hoping to recover the having fun bit.