An appropriate vehicle
Feb. 8th, 2005 12:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
garran1. My livejournal does not actually have a title. When I started my weblog, long before the mirror existed, I spent a while trying to come up with (or get someone else to come up with - I recall Sumana submitting 'Memery', which I did not feel hip enough to suit) a brilliant name, and eventually gave in; officially its title is Andy's Journal. Livejournal chose something very similar with very little intervention on my part.
The <TITLE> tag of my webpage is Crawling out of timelessness..., which many people have mistaken for the title of my weblog (and which perhaps should have been, eventual irony aside). That was about how, after a long period fallow, in stasis, my website was beginning to move again.
2. The subtitle is similarly void.
3. My Friends Page, too!
4. My User Name is 'Garran', which I invented as a small child to be the perfect generic male fantasy name. That 'generic' is actually quite interesting...
My other username is 'glump', a useful word which I used to describe a lot like this.
5. My Current Default Userpic is a small, grey square. Number 5 here is, in fact, what encouraged me to adopt this meme despite the fact that so few of its fields apply to me very usefully, because for a while now I've been meaning to write about
What's up with the grey square?
I originally threatened this, jokingly, a couple of months ago, in response to J. and Kitchan's posts about their own respective totem animals, but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like it might actually be a worthwhile thing to explore.
The story is pretty well known among my friends. Long ago, when the world was young and the Megatokyo forums were not so vast as they are today, a new age was begun by new software. Perhaps the most prominent added feature was the way that each user could now upload a little picture, to keep under their name.
Curmudgeon that I am, I resisted this, rather; I thought it was garish (I'd never even liked theBeatles with their long, long hair graphical emoticons). But one day, it occurred to me - what if I could have an avatar that was effectively invisible, because it was the same colour as the background? That seemed fun. So I quickly whipped up a little avatar-size (for avatars were smaller in those days) hunk of bland grey, and stuck it up, and it worked just fine.
Then I remembered that I wasn't using the default colourscheme.
Turned out that not only was the avatar visible to most users, but it actually clashed horribly. And when I saw that, I began to laugh, and, even happier than before, left it there.
Why is the grey square still pretty hilarious to me? I think it's mostly because I imagine that, to the casual reader, my motives are completely obscure. Why would anyone bother to upload that as their avatar? I imagine them asking themselves. Even though I'll happily explain to anyone who inquires - and, now, even to the portion of the general public that reads my weblog - this still makes me grin.
And that might be the end of it, except that I recently realized that the square isn't unprecedented.
(I have to go to school, now; more to follow.)
Okay, where was I? Right.
So, before Megatokyo, for several years, I was most prominently Garran in a melodramatic web-based roleplaying chatroom called "The Gamer's Inn". I wasn't much involved in the main flow of the roleplaying, what I called the Soap Opera, the marriages and blood feuds and so on; mostly I just sat on the fringes, making puns and friends. The main reason that this is interesting now is my character concept - as though it were a race or a class, I described Garran as a nonentity.
When this is taken together with my aggressively boring avatar (what do I look like? Apparently, an empty field of grey), and the fact that my preferred nom de net is a name that I invented to be standard, it begins to suggest a pattern; apparently, I have a tendency to dress myself in the trappings of blandness.
This has a couple of interesting functions; first, it is, of course, a bit of shy, wry self-effacement, much like J. Random Lurker's forum name - an active failure to be truly grand. But I think it also acts to help me feel (as I enjoy feeling) like the Fool in this play - a little separate, able to make fun.
(I've also noticed that the grey's origin story behaves as kind of a neat social metaphor, the way I attempted to blend in but could not but remain distinctive.)
In other news, I've been feeling generally physically out of sorts; today, my nose is stuffed and stinging. I hope that it's nothing worse than a cold.
The <TITLE> tag of my webpage is Crawling out of timelessness..., which many people have mistaken for the title of my weblog (and which perhaps should have been, eventual irony aside). That was about how, after a long period fallow, in stasis, my website was beginning to move again.
2. The subtitle is similarly void.
3. My Friends Page, too!
4. My User Name is 'Garran', which I invented as a small child to be the perfect generic male fantasy name. That 'generic' is actually quite interesting...
My other username is 'glump', a useful word which I used to describe a lot like this.
5. My Current Default Userpic is a small, grey square. Number 5 here is, in fact, what encouraged me to adopt this meme despite the fact that so few of its fields apply to me very usefully, because for a while now I've been meaning to write about
What's up with the grey square?
I originally threatened this, jokingly, a couple of months ago, in response to J. and Kitchan's posts about their own respective totem animals, but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like it might actually be a worthwhile thing to explore.
The story is pretty well known among my friends. Long ago, when the world was young and the Megatokyo forums were not so vast as they are today, a new age was begun by new software. Perhaps the most prominent added feature was the way that each user could now upload a little picture, to keep under their name.
Curmudgeon that I am, I resisted this, rather; I thought it was garish (I'd never even liked the
Then I remembered that I wasn't using the default colourscheme.
Turned out that not only was the avatar visible to most users, but it actually clashed horribly. And when I saw that, I began to laugh, and, even happier than before, left it there.
Why is the grey square still pretty hilarious to me? I think it's mostly because I imagine that, to the casual reader, my motives are completely obscure. Why would anyone bother to upload that as their avatar? I imagine them asking themselves. Even though I'll happily explain to anyone who inquires - and, now, even to the portion of the general public that reads my weblog - this still makes me grin.
And that might be the end of it, except that I recently realized that the square isn't unprecedented.
(I have to go to school, now; more to follow.)
Okay, where was I? Right.
So, before Megatokyo, for several years, I was most prominently Garran in a melodramatic web-based roleplaying chatroom called "The Gamer's Inn". I wasn't much involved in the main flow of the roleplaying, what I called the Soap Opera, the marriages and blood feuds and so on; mostly I just sat on the fringes, making puns and friends. The main reason that this is interesting now is my character concept - as though it were a race or a class, I described Garran as a nonentity.
When this is taken together with my aggressively boring avatar (what do I look like? Apparently, an empty field of grey), and the fact that my preferred nom de net is a name that I invented to be standard, it begins to suggest a pattern; apparently, I have a tendency to dress myself in the trappings of blandness.
This has a couple of interesting functions; first, it is, of course, a bit of shy, wry self-effacement, much like J. Random Lurker's forum name - an active failure to be truly grand. But I think it also acts to help me feel (as I enjoy feeling) like the Fool in this play - a little separate, able to make fun.
(I've also noticed that the grey's origin story behaves as kind of a neat social metaphor, the way I attempted to blend in but could not but remain distinctive.)
In other news, I've been feeling generally physically out of sorts; today, my nose is stuffed and stinging. I hope that it's nothing worse than a cold.
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no subject
Date: 2005-02-08 11:07 pm (UTC)Also, aren't -you- her other children?