brett's logjam

The past few weeks have turned into one protracted case of writer’s block. After all the effort to make this an easy-to-update process, and I’ve contributed a bunch of links. Woo hoo. Part of it has been real life: Merrystar’s hard drive crashed and I had to install a new one and rebuild her Windows partition, my Windows installation went haywire and had to be rebuilt, Linux isn’t cooperating with my internet connection, my laptop at work died, I killed two other computers at work…

Oh yeah, and there’s this rather significant life event to plan.

And the Olympics. Can’t forget those pesky Winter Olympics. Especially curling.

So part of it is quite easy to explain: writing is hard.

But part of it is because I feel that what I have to say isn’t interesting. I watch the signal-to-noise ratio drop on places like slashdot and I wonder where the hell all the content went. I read flamewars over separating design from content, wondering what the content feels about it all, where it went, and if it’s nice there.

Merrystar and I had an argument about that last one. Why should you use CSS if you design simply with the HTML 3 standards in mind, avoiding things like gratutious <FONT> tags? Assuming a small (under ten pages) site, if you kept your design simple to begin with, why spend the effort to change?

It’s like this creeping malaise has me in its grasp, saying “what you have to say is worthless, so sit down, shut up and fuck off.” The more I read, the more I watch, the less I talk.

I have become quiet and reserved. I don’t like it, not one bit.