What's This?

So here's the obligatory "About" statement. First the what, then the why.

This site is home to my various mental wanderings, which tend to fall within (or between) such topics as: speculative fiction, movies, user-centered design, new religious movements and other socio-cultural oddities, retro-futurism, the aging process and how we perceive it, associative learning, gender and gaming, obsolete cultural objects such as maps and dead technology, entertainment through hypertext, and feline diabetes (from which my cat suffers).

As for me, I am a user experience designer (focusing primarily on information architecture) by trade, enjoy reading books and watching movies and the telly, write fiction (miserably) and poetry (a much more comfortable form for me), and have lately been spending time in the GNE. My world would seem smaller without intermittent doses of the sites listed here.

(Oh, and I also seem to adore parentheticals.)

And now the why. This site serves a couple of functions for me. First and foremost, it's forcing me to release my thoughts from their mindtrap and put them into a log instead.

I have a bad habit of never writing thoughts down, and my hope is that doing so more often will help me to extend those seedlings beyond their nascent, limited forms. When you don't have to hold everything in your head, you're more apt to make interesting connections between seemingly disparate things, which is what I hope to do.

Of course, I'd also like to simply remember things, and recall them in a way unsullied by the person I am ever becoming.

I also love making annotated lists, as evidenced on this site by the Annotated Xenu Companion. Expect more such lists in the future. I owe several friends some SF book recommendations, so perhaps that will be the next one.

This is the work of Abbi Ball, and is licensed under a Creative Commons License.