I'm an inconstant martial-artist, occasional philosopher, wannabe world traveler, and 24/7 tech geek. I try to lead an active life, between lengthy periods in front of the keyboard. I revere learning and enjoy discussing almost any subject. I also greatly enjoy writing and talking about writing. I'm not particularly good at the former, which may have something to do with my enjoyment of the latter. Otherwise I'm a strong supporter of technology much intrigued by transhumanist thought. I'm also an empiricist, naturalist, and reductionist. I consider myself to be a deeply spiritual person and resist the idea of any fundamental disconnect between this and a scientifically sound epistemology.
If you're fond of political labels (I'm not against them): Economic Conservative / Social Liberal / Textualist
If you're not bored yet:
Online Profile Inchoatus
Myspace Rant:I like aimless online networking / I've got to keep up with friends spread across the eastern half of the third largest country in the world / I get a kick out of posting things about myself even though no one actually wants to read them / I actually enjoy reading the ramblings of people I don't know. I'm the perfect candidate for Myspace glory, but I just don't like Myspace. Frankly, I find a lot of it pretty juvenile. I don't understand why my generation chose to anoint it king of social networking sites, particularly in light of better options (livejournal), but choose it we did -- to the tune of 50 million users. So here I am. After all, you can't fight the tide.
Still, I'm not trying to be patronizing just to feel important (well, maybe a little) -- there are some pretty valid reasons why Myspace sucks. First, there are a couple of things that make it pretty clear to me that Myspace doesn't think much of its users. The default profile isn't just uninspired, with boring colors and no sense of flow, it's actually based on those chain emails we used to do in junior high. Favorite Movies? Are they serious? Isn't this supposed to be for adults too?
If that wasn't enough it comes with mis-aligned tables (the page is literally broken to start with from a web designer's perspective) and nearly impossible to read text colors. It's clear that this was just slapped together, and it certainly isn't the quality I'd like to see in something I'm supposed to put my name on. So, like everyone else I was forced to customize. Some might say that such is the point, but as it happens, Myspace has made customization ludicrously difficult.
1.) They actually named page elements ".friendspace" / ".table table div" and ".redtext" (not to be confused with ".redtext12")! I don't know who they hired to dream up that naming scheme. In order to make headings white I literally had to specify ".lightbluetext{color:white;}" Unbelievable.
2.) You can't add anything of your own to the page... no, all you can do is try to style various nesting levels of the crap already there. Of course half the time you end up unintentionally styling OTHER objects that happen to be at the same nesting level as what you're actually working on! It's infuriating and stupid.
3.) They don't even allow you to use the friggin "#" symbol anywhere in your code. That's right... you cannot enter a hex number anywhere on your Myspace profile.
4.) You can't do anything anywhere except smack in the middle of the friggin page. You can't put code in the Header where it belongs. And thus you cannot reorder, rearrange, or insert anything. All you can do is shoehorn objects into the middle of your "About Me" and "Interests" sections. Forcing you to choose between adding that playlist you wanted or having your description be within 30 lines of the "About Me" heading. Cause you can't do both!
To say nothing about the complete lack of spam control. I had to write in the CSS to limit image size in comments enough to keep them from creating horizontal scroll. I understand the Myspace people have incorporated this by default now but, come on... why should the user have to come up with that. And even with that done, you can't stop people from posting jumping, flashing, neon, whatever onto your page. The only solution -- turn off comments all together. What kind of solution is that? Isn't the commenting the whole point of Myspace?
And then there's the culture. Guess I can't blame this one on Myspace. No the culprits are my own fellow netizens. Which makes me vaguely depressed actually. It truly disturbs me to think that such a large portion of the net population cannot figure out that orange text cannot be read on a silver background or that gobs and gobs of images (preferably animated) from my favorite movie, might not tell the world anything good about me. Oh, and the blaring music that starts automatically (unless you dig deep into the settings page to disable it -- I blame THAT one on Myspace). It's a train wreck out there.
Ah well, I guess five paragraphs of complaining about Myspace in my profile doesn't say anything good about me, either. At least now there'll be a picture by my name when I leave comments.
/Rant
