Hello Cruel World
...Hello!
Wow, that was a lot more difficult than it should have been. I’ve long wondered if creating a “me dot com” site is something I should do. On one hand, it would give me somewhere to put my completed projects. On the other hand is a list, because my hands aren’t big enough to hold all of those reasons.
Why bother, Joe? Why does anyone care about what you’ve done or what you have to say? And it’s a bit vain, is it not? Won’t it be time consuming? What if people read this and hate you? Wouldn’t it be easier to stay quiet and keep yourself to yourself? Won’t it just be a burden? Won’t it just eat away at the limited free time you could be spending with friends, family, or helping the homeless? You don’t hate the homeless, do you?
For someone who’s not particularly comfortable with the modern idea of “personal brand”, putting a site together with my own name on it and writing words that anyone could come here and read has been daunting. I’m only comforted by the fact that the Internet is a near-infinite expanse of engaging algorithmically-targeted content, so the chances that someone will arrive here to read a block of uninteresting text written by an average Scottish lad are somewhere between “astronomically slim” and “zero”.
So why bother?
Why go to all of the effort of putting a site and blog together? There are a few reasons. I want to make sure I note them down here in black and white so that in the year 20XX, when I inevitably ask myself why I wasted time doing this, past-Joe will have an answer for future-Joe. He might not like the answer, but that guy can go stick his VRX hyperdeck where the sun used to not-shine before its removal from the Solar System due to a copyright claim from Alpha Centauri.
To stop myself overthinking things. I have a habit of allowing ideas to pinball around my brain until I’m utterly sick of them. By giving myself an outlane I’m hoping that I’ll be able to make some mental space for some new (and hopefully less bad) endeavours. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life mulling over thoughts that were originally scribbled on the inside of a Transformers pencil case some time in the previous millennium. I need to do a proper hippocampic clean-up for my own sanity. That camp of hippos need to be forcibly evicted. You’ve eaten up enough of my time you hungry hungry bastards.
To prove to myself that I could. As an IT professional I should be skilled enough at the old ones and zeroes to do some techie wizardry that results in a website. While I’m no good at the design element, if I find a nice site design template then surely I can redevelop it to my needs. This website will stand here as testament to my ability to do the computer things.
Because sometimes shite things are the best things. Back in January of 2017, someone said something that continues to resonate with me now.
Hi, here’s my life advice:
Always make stuff
Always always make stuff
Even if it’s shite, make it
And it made me think. So many of the things I’ve cherished, mentally clung to, which have eternally reserved vaults in my memory-bank are, by any rational measure, shite. Unpopular. Flaw-ridden. Unconventional. Simply fucking boring. But flaws are part of what makes things interesting, which is something I like to tell myself as a person who has plenty of them. So the site is here an avenue to share my shite things, and as a driving force for polluting the world with creating more.
…and to do it before some other less hesitant Joe Cruickshank comes along and nabs the domain name.