What happened lately

Persona

Moved to a new place. Markdown on blog. New themes, new plans.

Work

Completely immersed within Raphaël and “advanced” (read: “get tortured”) JavaScript. Revamped monoSnippets due to business needs. Scaffolded mono.calendarEngine & mono.twitterEngine based on old code, both scheduled to release by April 15th. Worked on COSCUP for a while, but did not have much time to push everything out by the end of the month.

Things are surely getting more interesting.

There are many people who work two jobs, one being the day job which provides shelter and sustenance, while the other “night” career sustains their soul. People are often taught that it is almost sinful to have a job worth loving, and suffering a bad job, or “working super hard” is often at most a necessity.

Once agreeing with the point, I do not see it the same anymore. Any minute that I am doing chores, meeting boring people, making the latest project compatible with IE 6, working on something that is extremely less interesting — is a waste. Any minute that I am not working on the most exciting thing that I could lay my hands upon is also a waste.

This explains the snobbiness which, given its adequacy, is a good thing.

Working with Raphaël the vector library.

I just bid yesterday farewell; spent approximately one month lingering over this dying project. It might be resurrected someday, but I am not so sure.

Pros: learnt JSON and JSON-based programming; learnt XML-RPC and how to give WordPress a plugin; got a fresh hands-on glimpse of object-oriented programming; learnt how to properly CSS cross-platform; got a lifetime hatred of Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Fate bestows.

Next: the data project, which is a fairly small one. And a photo visualizer. Computer Arts and New Media is a fairly interesting subject, but I am still shopping around for one right for me.

最近發現一篇很詭異的討論。總之是原文寫得很爛，所以缺乏誘因，但我真搞不懂為啥要因此生出一大堆文章。如果沒有才能、沒有錢、沒有地位、沒有好的容貌、沒有受過談吐的定型教育、⋯⋯那基本上這個世界很現實，不會有太多人理你。這時候會理你的人多半都是慈善家了。很多人沒有空慈善。

嗯，隨著時間推移而生出的容忍與豁達呢？疑惑大致上是這樣吧。基本上，不須要為生活擔心的人，纔有資格（跟實質基礎）談論這些東西。所以以假定為善的立場，傾向將這些爛事認知為結構性的問題。但因為結構故障，就順著爛路走，也是罪無可逭的爛事。

最近發生的事情非常地複雜。

; )

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Nota

Constant devastation after devastation.

And every time you breathe a word I die a little more inside. Life is a rotten lot and I’m en-sicken a day every once. I am estranged, alienated, forgotten by the old flock. I go to where the flock is going, not where they were.

Or anticipate greatness. A sleeve woolen, abandoned. Is there somewhere a corridor waiting, a glimpse reserved, a tiny hair of emotion yet be dedicated to its own?

Treading on my path, so intricate. There is warmth within.

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Perilous

The new projects are going smoothly and the relocation plan is, too. Albeit tedious, techniques must be learnt in order to realize the idealisms. Celebration? Another day in another form after finishing it. Never lament about the reality for responsibility may not be shunned. Debate never, either.

I did enjoy the midnight conversation — but that leads directly to me skipping off our painstakingly arranged second InDesign consortium gathering.

ps. I am following (follow as in following a Twitter account) ROC in exile and the recent lawsuit regarding it.

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Meteor

Seriously, seriously.

Yet everything went wrongfully wrong and out of place. We now have a few projects going but the future depends on fate. SCAD mailed a nice envelope-full of brochures and a huge book whose typography and design belongs to the top notch. Times over I told myself, amidst the fragrance, that this would be the destined place. Times proven the perceived destiny another shallow shadow in time.

I do not really trust in flying noodles, and my faith in fate is vanishing. But however, if fate favors. I shiver at the sight of myself becoming a rational person and I do cry for this.

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Fragrance

There is fragrance amidst the air. Spring is coming in its fullest and people are lovely. Or, so. Apocalypse has a beginning, and as quoted anything that has a beginning will go to an end. Artistic epistemology, or the reason behind the perception of art and beauty, would be the thematic pursuit that I devote my life upon. This is not to be realized with essays even though most people trust in the power of words. This is to be realized thru the power of direct perception, or in other words thru installments.

I would love to start a portfolio agency which mainly deals with artists and people with reasonable sentiments. Where ration and emotion both count. The agency would go all its way out to fulfill its sole purpose in refining, showcasing, communicating and broadcasting powerful ideas, no matter which media is chosen. Those clinging to a single media is to be let doomed.

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Watermoon

Watermoon is a new 15-villae project that calls for insanely high technology, devotion and — of course — insanely high budget. A close examination to their website proves that money isn’t everything, and what we learn from bad projects supersedes what we’ll learn from an impeccable average project tenfold. The typography is awful and a second trip to Maya Lin’s explains it all. Attention designer responsible for Watermoon’s site: if you must copy, do a better job. Grey on white links, damn aliased text, customized Flash UI elements that weren’t packed but are transmitted once and again and again, seemingly witty but actually treacherous list of alphabets and irrelevant, scrambled ideas forced under them… are not emblems of fashion, superior technique, nor your elemental sense of beauty. That’s torture. If you were going to build a website which sells luxuries that most visitors however are not buying, at least make it pleasant to browse, or you’re maximizing the noise our there in the dusted, doomed world we’re living in.

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Average People

Seth Godin’s talks are mesmerizing but his 2009 TED Talk by large resonated with his 2008 Business on Software talk. Let me do the summary for you:

1. TV advertising, direct mailing and those old marketing methods do nothing good, since there is no subjective permission from the customer and you’re merely sending them noise.

2. In order to appease their anger of receiving an unexpected message, you’re sending your messages in a way that offends nobody.

3. By sending messages just like products designed by a committees, you send average advertising; by sending them in bulk indiscriminately and without prior consent, you send them to average people; by sending messages really unprepared you are only able to send messages about average products.

4. The old way does not work anymore. Seth’s new way — “sell as you would to your tribespeople” is roughly equivalent to “love your neighbors” and a sage needs no further explanation.

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Bicycles

Steve Jobs had returned to Apple and he had completely changed once again. He is now a person with full gratitude. But his old ideas were sharp enough and let’s talk about the old ideas that made him the Steve we see today.

1. Computers are mental bicycles.

2. People make boxes, and in a clamorous world making the best boxes or having the most social tokens does not mean a thing.

QED, and a wise person needs no further explanation.

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Tunnel

Imagine a tunnel in which you go thru from one end to another, but not vise versa.

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Wrap

This is an extremely noisy world and most people are mere mortals who lived, loved, hated, thrived, fiddled, enamored, depressed, explained, quarreled and died. Most people are incapable of traversing thru time and space finding the key person that re-defined the decade, and most classics are just fads. People, on the other hand, could not withstand the most minute scrutinization. Yet people built art.

We are in such an epoch of massive enabling where people who would rather not have a voice were given one. (Speaking of witnesses.) The tide of ignorance and idiocy, built upon the axiom of “for the idiots, to the idiots, by the idiots” would crush everything including the idiots ipse.

Idiots and their very existence therefore are both career assurances. And if you are still thinking about Seth’s tribe as a brand new concept that revamps all the old methods, you’ve mixed a new and temporally correct implementation of an universal concept with the one that does not work anymore. People who are destined on the top stays on the top, but their thrones are more slippery nowadays. Be honest to yourself before thinking about anything else. I rest my case.

ps. Please go to Joel on Software and spend approximately 0.75 day or 6 hours skimming over / reading his articles. It does not matter if he contradicts himself every two sentences or so, since people who seldom make mistakes aren’t actually thinking, and a piece of finished code is not so educative as a rotten piece in which you do see the progress.

another ps. We would never, never be only friends would we?

third ps. Paradigms exist to be examined, learnt and tossed away. Those who don’t clean old things out would die for being too rusty.

We both agree that it equals to future career security but, whether moot or not, an imminent bad omen also.

Aaron Nieh, the acclaimed #1 Taiwanese fashion designer who (despite many recurring cliches in his work) mainly deals with book covers, posters and CDs, is going to publish another portfolio book and had decided to give away fake book covers that passes any comic or tabloid magazine as a classical reader with the book. That surely means something: design as the selling of the fashionable and perishable is at its all-time high here in Taiwan now (while the economy plummets and the government continues on its deterioration heading nowhere) and however, as said in previous email messages, what pays sustains life and the continuation of life is crucial to any serious creation or the preparation thereof.

This is an era of constant self-reassurance and massive anxiety. While geniuses and creators may have a knack at producing fine products from material, the mediocre have to drool on their own reflections in the mirror. The mirror should be adorned like a fine pair of glasses to fit their vision.

I deem most Taiwanese design curricula inferior for they lack serendipity (although my definition of the word may be way too ferocious, just like Roland Young’s extreme measures might be thought as abuse to a first-timer). But if schools from their very origin were simply built to support ideas, and mass-schooling was ensured only to support an intellectually superior labor task, our design schools are surely losing the ability to gauge the future and are shifting towards a school of the trade, where by the preposition “of” I really meant “being subordinate to”. The very fact here is that people do not crave fine art if it isn’t advertised, and the motto “by the people, of the people, for the people” has huge potential of being transformed to “by the idiots, of the idiots, for the idiots”.

I do think that swarms will overtake the rest but still they would have a leader who sees it all, and the idiocy theory was just abstracting individual prowess out from the picture. We are losing faith in ourselves, therefore losing faith in our own prowess and our own capability, ability and ambition to cooperate and create the next great thing. We lose faith in ourselves by not learning and not listening, and by constantly bragging loud.

And life is short. Despite the overwhelming positiveness of humans attaining life beyond their average 120 years’ lives, a person’s useful life usually ends within his/her thirties and before his/her forties. The baggage we carry are graven and would continue to grow day by day, while our brains and bodies deteriorating cell by cell, tissue by tissue till the next day after we die. The perceived impeccable responsibility of a well-established citizen is killing creativity, while creativity and the effort in keeping it itself is killing the creators. Life is short and there is no way back. Rejuvenation is likely a myth which should exist only in mythologies for good riddance and reference.

And every time you breath a word I die a little more inside.

Portal site updated at http://monoceroi.com with experimental experiments.

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Three years of life in the metropolis is convenient enough to have me forget about its people. I abandoned the pursuit behind science and devoted myself — or say, devoted I thought — to social science and the humanities, a beautiful error that could not take place more earlier nor later.

I learned the artificial boundary around the curriculum, and its impenetrability thereof; I witnessed the eruption and finally the dissolving of dreams in every junior mind. Torture takes its place in this democratic, open-minded society in forms of regulations and larger expectations; where love fled in advance.

Growing up is an irreversible process. Every once in a while I allow the brisk rays of sunlight arouse me from the very silent, immense darkness inundated by my own emotional detriti, I adversely die a little more inside.