Empty Signifiers is being retired. I'm not going to post much of anything here anymore, but it won't be disappearing anytime soon. The only planned updates I can think of will be the conclusion to the apocalypticism entry, but I can't guarantee a date on when that might occur.
The long-delayed third segment of my articles on apocalypticism as social control looks like it will be delayed further--I am moving halfway across the country, and these next two weeks are full and hectic. I have completed half the apocalypticism article, and I have yet to arrive at my major area of interest, so don't worry, there will be more.
Brewing on the back-burner is the next series I will undertake, which I have tentatively titled "The Armory of Ardor: Sex and Semiotics," an examination of the symbols, codes, and communication of American sexuality over the past few decades. I am very much interested in the interplay of power in language, and the notion of the illicit and the taboo aggregates power and control around itself.
I will post as I can, and thanks for reading!
I’ve been experiencing sharp pain in my wrists and fingers that recently crawled to my elbows in both arms. Equipped now with hard splints for my wrists, I finally have a modicum of relief. But as much typing as I do at work—both at the 9 to 5 and for my own entrepreneurial ventures—it leaves me little room to write the kind of articles I enjoy writing for empty signifiers.
Expect a few new articles after I’ve recuperated.
I have been working pretty diligently this week on creating my own template for Movable Type--this default (very blue) template is okay, but the typography and the colors are not what I would like. In the interest of carving out a space that's more my own, as well as helping ease readability, I've spent my time nose down in CSS and XHTML files. I'm also finding that Movable Type has a ridiculous amount of crap piled into those transitional XHTML files... Originally I'm sure the aim was to provide as much flexibility as possible by adding classes and ID tags to nearly every element, but the redundancy is astonishing.
So keep your eyes out for a new Empty Signifiers coming soon!
The hardest part of starting up a side business while still keeping the nine-to-five is trying to drum up enough business to make it all worthwhile, and simultaneously drumming up just enough business that I'm not overwhelmed. Not entirely sure I've hit the Goldilocks point yet.
There's articles brewing, including one promising one about the reflections on religion of the illusion of omnipotence in video games, that should be pretty ripe for a fresh insight. But I've got Photoshop work to complete, prints to have printed, web pages to create, and most importantly a corporate identity (not my own) to solidify before I can even begin thinking about writing a worthwhile article. I might put up stub entries or compile a list of interesting links, but I apologize if there isn't more of substance available. There's a lot happening.
Off to Stubb's Barbecue to see the Arctic Monkeys and We Are Scientists.
Expect a writeup either late tonight or midday tomorrow!
First off there's recuperating from sickness. That's been a doozy--I got hammered by some kind of flu virus on Sunday when I was home, and it's taken about four or five days for me even to start eating again. Now that I am eating, sugary things are suddenly a hypersensitivity to my tastebuds. I can't explain that one.
Second, there's going to shows at Stubb's BBQ here in Austin. Woohoo!
Third, there's attempting to arrange a half-baked measure of competency from Yahoo! Small Business. Their domain system is an atrocious mixture of a lack of explanations, bastardized options menus, and illegible gibberish designed to keep your account in their greedy little hands. What I had originally intended, to separate out my personal blog from my professional web presence, and it's taken me this long to realize that I can't exactly do that when it's MY NAME attached to the address bar.
So there's how things stand for right now.
I'm planning on writing a post about Stubb's once I get back tonight, I'll let you know how the show goes. Wednesday has the Arctic Monkeys playing alongside We Are Scientists: good stuff ahead!
Tomorrow I'm heading home to Nashville over the weekend for Memorial Day, and hopefully there won't be the conflict I'm sure will crop up. Anyhow, I've attempted to set up a custom cron job for scheduled posting, and presumably I've done it correctly this time. (On the fourth try.) Unix shell commands and the nano text editor + total inexperience = occasional failures.
In any case, enjoy your weekends.
So, given that I am returning to the fold for Memorial Day, and bearing in mind the voicemail I had about a cousin who mentioned she didn't recognize me given how long my hair is, I went and got a haircut today. I decided I'd get it cut short enough to really accentuate my positive features and I think the end result is quite fetching.
Now to go to see my family tomorrow and inevitably have them express their satisfaction at seeing me after so long an absence.
It's the second day after my wisdom tooth surgery (extracted Friday morning) and my jaw is stiff and sore. It's become increasingly difficult to open my jaw wider without a hard cracking pain in the side of my face, which is somewhat disconcerting, but considering I can feel the stitches in the corner of my mouth, I wouldn't be entirely surprised if it was simply sore because of the incisions.
Tomorrow is another day at work, so I'll have to try and time my commutes to match the 30-minute window of opportunity between the horrifying agony of the jaw pain and the spaced incoherence of the pain medication. Lunch break should be fun.
So my wisdom tooth surgery seems to have gone off without a hitch, and though it'll be hard to tell if my problems were erupting tooth related or primarily TMJ disorder related. My brother came over from Tennessee to take care of me, and it's been good to hang out with him in the meanwhile--even if I've been laid up or in an altered state for a bit. In any case, I recently got a visit from victor and am now busiedly scribbling a price list/estimate template for a pair of potential photography commissions.
For my first surgical experience, it hasn't been too bad. Now to make sure "not too bad" is maintained.
At this moment, I am in the oral surgeon's office, sucking down nitrous and hopefully drifting off into the neon wonderland of bursett (an amnesiac that, during a prior procedure, sent me off into hallucinations of midgets and murderous leprechauns). Something tells me I'll be out of commission for most of today, so I figured I'd test the scheduling capacity of Movable Type and put up this wonderful explanatory message.
Here's to hoping that removing one impacted, decaying, erupting wisdom tooth and one nonfunctioning but non-impacted wisdom tooth will fix the TMJ problems I've had since February. I'll post an update to the site once I've regained the ability to put more than two words together.
Welcome to my new internet home. It's high time I got into this whole hosting thing, and this will give me an opportunity to test out Movable Type and all that jazz. So rest assured, the template will change, if you give me some time to learn and tweak.
In case you're trying to hunt down where I've been prior to this point,I've been one of two contributors to another blog, Mountains of Kaf, and if you're looking for my entries on that site, my nom de plume is Djinn. However, venturing onto the web and forsaking anonymity, I'll be Aden on this site, and most likely writing under the moniker "the Brightside" on Kaf from now on. That particular name is the one I post most frequently under on other sites, like Stylegala or Jason Santa Maria's page. It was first used as my Flickr name, and those photographs are still there.
Now that I've gotten the shameless self-linkage out of the way, I'll try and beef up this page with some of my more recent and (hopefully) more thoughtful posts from Kaf and other places.