you are urged to run, not walk to sixteenpages.net

then stay and play.

Wow, the list has come a long way.

Alas, poor dreamless …

I have to agree with gary when he talks about rock owing a debt to the blues.

So who gets bitch slapped, err…I mean, who do we owe for paving the way for the music of artists like Britney Spears, *NSYNC, and the Backstreet Boys, hmm?

John Lee Hooker will be missed.

I have to say though, it’s really hard to hear how the blues influenced Black Sabbath.

Umm, I didn’t just use the word artist in the same sentence as Britney Spears, *NSYNC, and the Backstreet Boys, did I? Nah, couldn’t have.

Wanna see one tiny piece of CSS bring the whole tableless, CSS movement crashing down like a house of cards? Add this to the body tag in your CSS.

body {overflow:auto;}

Now look at your page in Netscape. Better yet, go try it out on any of the CSS layout techniques at glish.

Somebody wanna explain to me the reason Netscape is doing that? To me, that’s definitely a bug and not a feature.

I mean I understand that floating DIVs are considered almost non-existent, but this is just wrong.

The reason I tried this in the first place was to get rid of that unsightly scrollbar area in Internet Explorer. My page is laid out such that, at particular window sizes, there should be no scrollbar. And yet Internet Explorer always reserves that space and Netscape doesn’t. So I wanted to get rid of it in Internet Explorer when it wasn’t necessary. No big deal I thought. Then I tested it in Netscape. Then I started pulling my hair out again. It should have worked shouldn’t it? Please tell me it’s Netscape. Someone call glish, or Eric Meyer, or Rob at Bluerobot. Quick!

Ok now this is amusing—Microscopic Black Helicopters! anyone?

It’s an interesting discussion going on at metafilter [via gary], about the death of assembler.org. Sadly, since I am not a MeFi member, I can’t join in.

For me, a key point in any discussion, is making sure that the people involved agree on the definition of certain terms used in the discussion. Take the aforementioned discussion about assembler. They are using words and terms like art and artist, web and designer, publishing, communal and personal sites. Yet these terms are really left undefined in the discussion. People are expressing their viewpoints based on their personal defintion of what these terms mean. And without a clear definition, the discussion sways passionately back and forth, with each side making valid points. [ed. note—As more threads are added, some are starting to see the need for, and are defining the terms of the discussion.]

Ultimately, Brent is free to do whatever he wishes. And I am free to agree, or disagree, or be pissed off, or understanding about whatever decision he chooses to make. My personal feeling is that taking the site down was an extreme, but I am also not Brent, so I don’t know his motivation for doing so.

One of the distinctions, as some have now brought up in the MeFi discussion, comes down to what defines a personal work. There is also the topic of ownership. Brent owns both assembler.org and the works he puts there. As with any creative work, its life has meaning to the creator therefore making it a personal work. Nothing is art until someone else sees it, and finds it moving in some way. Philosophically speaking, it is only a personal work if it’s never publicly displayed. Artists understand that their work doesn’t take on life until someone else can appreciate it. But once it’s made public, the creator/artist gives up some of the ownership of his work. True artists also understand this. After all he cannot control how his work is taken, how it speaks to people, or what will be made of it. And it’s only recently, through the advent of copyright, that the creator/artist/owner can control what is done with his work, and thus retain ownership.

Most art created prior to the 20^th and 21^st centuries was created for someone else. A pope, a patron, an admirer, for friends, etc. The art never stayed with the artist. He was used to giving it up. Giving up control of it. Letting it go. The satisfaction for the artist is in the doing. Seeing the work to fruition, and allowing others to benefit from it. It is in the philosofical sense that assembler.org is as much owned by the people who frequent it, as the person who created it. This personal work was given to the public. It benefitted the public. It should have been left with the public. If Brent wanted to disown the work, he could have simply walked away from it and not looked back. Smashing it just means he is still attached to it.

It’s also in these more recent times that we as a people, have further developed this idea of the need for permanence. Needing to have everything archived for eternity. Preserving what was, for the future. In essence, embalming everything, so that nothing dies and nothing fades away. Again, philosophically speaking, this has alot to do with our fear of death and search for immortality. We don’t like to let things die and be forgotten. They must continue forever. Especially the great things.

Yet here we are faced with an inherently transient medium. URIs are essentially leased. You don’t permanently own it. Therefore how can anything permanently reside at that address?

Things are also swiftly changing in this young medium. It has made web designers/artists constant tweakers. We call them upgrades. And these upgrades are usually easily implemented. Our websites also get constant facelifts. New tools become available, new skills beg to be utilized, new ideas push us forward. It all reminds me of an art class that my friend Bob told me about. They were told to create a painting on a given subject. The following week they were told to paint over that painting with a new one. And that each successive week they were going to do a new painting on that same canvas. Great works were created and covered over each week. It was partly done to teach the artists detachment from the work. That once it’s done, it’s done. Give it up, and move on. The medium of the web is alot like this, except for the fact that the works created on the web are given up to public viewing. And although the web-viewing public is coming to expect that things can be replaced with new works on the same canvas whenever the designer/artist chooses, to me, it’s simply bad form to remove a work that has that much value to people.

Brent didn’t create a new work in its place. He also didn’t leave what he had created with the public. He just took his ball and went home.

Sitting in a little coffee shop, drinking my coffee and eating my scone, feeling like a damn hell ass king, I couldn’t help but overhear this young girl talking to her friend a few tables over. Though I couldn’t hear everything, this is what I got:

…and there is me and my friends, who are Gods, because we keep it all together…

and my mom is from Hell, she’s from Hell.

a…nd I’ve been staying with my dad, who is Satan.

…and he wanted to keep me in his dimensional box, but I wanted to go home…

…and eat dogfood in the car…

Oh God, he’s so ugly. He’s gross…

but I’’m ok, because I know…

I see him the way that I do, but I didn&38127;t see things like that before…

…like, this girl says she saw this guy&38217;s face melt off…

but I’m waiting…

All I can say is…

I understand you when you say you don&38217;t need a comb.

Maybe there was something in the coffee that had me hallucinating, I can’t remember.

And yes, there are comments here again. Don’t tell me you didn’t notice.

tweak, tweak, tweak

Is this the way we’ll wind up? Just shutting things down like assembler.org.

I have so far to go yet, and all these people whom I aspire to follow are closing up shop.

What is this poison spreading through the web, virtually killing all these sites?