These pages are really just meant as a little life-sign of sorts.
It is not my intention to get into ‘a real blogblog’ with this, for the principal reason that in my experience there is an endless relentlessness in that pressure to constantly update things, and all of it… just to keep a random audience entertained in some fashion.
Even if that update ‘need’ is merely self-imposed - as a perfectionist (and I count myself as a hapless victim of that ebola-level disease) one cannot easily help oneself to stop using all the possibilities and not do it all ‘ever-so-nicely’.
Worse yet: in the aftermath you are expected to twirl nimbly with anyone asking for a dance. To put it mildly: it is a black hole of time and for some reason I am quite protective of the remaining CPU cycles for this old bod.
All in all, I am not even trying to ‘attract followers’ and there are no massive counts of ‘friends’ here, nothing like ‘like’ buttons and most certainly not any ads and such.
It is surely not that I ‘don’t get’ the social media concepts - I was on ArpaNet, TheWell, Earthlink, Connect, on the fledgling AOL I was just “Kai” - with weekly philosophy and pixel chats - and the status line of IMs was our Twitter, 12 years earlier. Been that, done it there…
This is not a case of Luddite but Peace‘nQuiet.
Frankly there should be a little tree diagram of Yes-No choices here, because half the readers have never heard of me at all - having spent maybe 100 seconds in an article or blog linking here - while the other half thinks they know me very well, having spent 100 hours in KPT or Bryce, Perspective, Convolver, Soap, Show, Goo or any of a dozen other bits of software I was associated with since 1982…
Surely there is quite a spectrum between these extremes. Hard to do justice to either one.
So basically I will just throw out a few bits and bytes in a hopscotch mishmash and see where it lands… New and old, serious and fun. I will try to paste in a few of the things that I had never put online before, which is actually a minor mountain of stuff.
There are essays, images, anekdotes and some Q&A in a quilt of Ascii and pixels. If the amoeba trolling the intertubes no longer know what a reference to ‘Ascii’ means, that’s fine, as long as I am not expected to explain the inside jokes, the language twists and least of all the meaning of philosophical texts to those who think Karl was one of the Marx brothers, but Groucho lived on Sesame Street.
If you like it, lovely.
If not, fine as well.
Plenty of cat pictures elsewhere.
As I am a distinct believer in detail, this might at times clash with the prevailing mania of the oh-so-busy set to reduce everything to core essentials, let alone the short attention span of the tweetarian faction. They may as well skip to the punchline (hint: there isn’t any)
True to the succinct summary by ‘the fat man with the cigar’ (that all babies look like!?)
"The length of this document defends it well
against the risk of its being read"
Incidentally, each page usually has a quotation or aphorism as well. I do admire the many instances of someone having found a particularly beautiful way to express a truth in a few words and consider it almost ‘a debt’ to the thinkers of the past to honor their creations and let the wit and insight survive over the random noise and chatter around us today. It is not at all to be mistaken for “borrowing someone else’s works” but rather an honest homage.
I think… there… 4a.m.
After three years’ study, you want to tell the world
After three more, you hardly want to move an inch
So here I am, after another three and another three, altogether 12 years spent ‘studying‘ and now wondering… if I will move an inch or flinch. ;)
These days I get such questions all the time… “So where are you? What were you doing? Why are you back now? What is that Frax thing anyway?”
And the answers are not easy to compress into a simple little blog entry in a few sentences.
Of course if you even just know my name still, you are showing your advanced age, ha… The old Meta stuff doesn’t even really run any more, and the new kids have basically forgotten all the early days - which is the right of every new generation :)
And yes, I paid absolutely no attention to trying to maintain a presence. On the contrary: one could fairly say that I deliberately chose to live my life off the public stage.
So here is my dilemma.
After over a decade of a strict press embargo I find myself suddenly out there again, articles, posts and magazine stories, one after the next - (just got nearly server-melted by Stephen’s ominously scary Fry tweet, ha) - centered around the one item where I decided to let my involvement be mentioned by name again: an iOS app called ‘Frax’.
At first glance it is merely some pixel toy - and I am by implication the pixel boy, I guess.
Alas may I raise my hand and wave to the teeming millions and restate this otherwise:
No this is not how I define my soul, no this is not the panacea answer to all and no this is also not “the big huge thing” I spent 12 years on - … it is just one cute little app.
But… as cute little apps go, this one is really quite unusual ;) It will sneak up on you…
Actually, I do know what it is like to see this from the outside, as a merry user of apps, tapping along, reading a MacWorld review and suddenly wondering “isn’t that the Kai guy?”
Indeed, here is the old geezer, hitting 60 in just a few years, still feeling ever so slightly lost on this pale blue dot planet of ours - or possibly in the wrong timeslice… or both?
But considering that general state of merry melancholia: not so bad, really.
At six feet still the tallest midget that ever lived, pretty skinny for a fat guy, I feel ok.