Guest Column: What Blogging Has Meant to Me

A guest column written by Liz Fine for Aheram Takes On... In this column, Liz writes about how blogging has enriched her life in more ways than one.

First, let me say I don't think I would have had the courage to start my blog without the support of friends. In 2004, I was hanging out in New York City with a friend venting about my horrible job. My friend suggested we make a blog featuring talented everyday people, shining some long overdue light on them. The process seemed monumental, but so terrific. Even though I was filled with apprehension, I couldn't let go of the idea. Right away, the voice in my head kicked in and told me a person needed an Ivy League college degree and loads of writing experience to start a blog. Typical, counting myself out before I even got in the game, but this time, my friend was pressing me so I pushed forward.

Right away, I set about designing my page and making all the decisions concerning content. I reached out to other bloggers for advice and they told me just to start writing and don't stop. As time went on my blog began to reflect my life and it felt good to be in control of something that was evolving daily. Anything I did that was fun or interesting to me made it to the blog usually with pictures. When I traveled, the blog reflected my excitement for the next location. When I pondered life's meaning, my blog became a spiritual place filled with food for thought. I created a relationship category and talked about my interpersonal struggles. When I discovered a great new face cream or lipstick I was suddenly a beauty editor.

Four years into a soul sucking, 9 to 5 job, I was thoroughly discouraged about my work life. I felt I had potential that would never be tapped in my cubicle-shaped prison and without realizing it, I began escaping through my blog. I was conducting interviews, taking loads of photos and generally spreading the word of my blog. I was shocked that people were taking me seriously. Eventually, my employer did for me what I couldn't do for myself. One day, she called me in the office and said that she knew I was unhappy and I was fired. A weight immediately lifted from my shoulders and I felt free!

Shortly after being fired, I interviewed a young artist from Temple University. I took my own photos for the article and it was published in a magazine about edgy, up-and-coming musicians, designers, writers, and DIY entrepreneurs. Blogging had given me a safe place to spread my wings, take risks and most of all find out what doing something fulfilling actually felt like. Today, I'm at a job that I love. I still travel and still live for the next great lipstick shade, but since starting my blog, I have gained three beautiful nieces and become politically active. Today, blogging is still a big part of my day to day life. As I update with new people, places, and events, it remains my tried and true form of expression and yes, even dare I say... a friend.

Liz Fine is a long-time blogger and chronicles her thoughts, relationships, and travels in her blog Urban Addiction.

Test of Email Blogging

This is my third attempt at publishing a post through email. Settings:
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My Social Networks: Then and Now

I have a profile on every major online social network (and on little-known ones as well) that exist. My space is on MySpace, my face is on Facebook, and my work history is linked in LinkedIn. I am live on Livejournal, a furry in Fur Affinity, and a tweeter on Twitter. I am a Flickr addict, a Stickam user, and a Digger of articles. In the online medium, I am a social media maven. I am a public figure by choice. I am always connected; always online. At last count, I am a member of at least eighteen different social networks. And those are just the ones I actively track.

Offline, of course, my network of friends and acquaintances is far smaller and far more personal. I am able to count in both hands, the number of people I choose to associate with in my spare time (not counting family, naturally). Either I gravitate towards those types of people or them to me, but more often than not, it is those who are unashamedly different or fiercely independent or ambitious that I find myself being around. I like people who are themselves, people who are not preoccupied with other people’s perception of them, people who not only think, but think for themselves. I cannot stress how important an independent mind in a person is to me. I like the dreamers, the idealists, and the impractical. I take great joy in exploring the depths of someone’s intelligence and imagination. I enjoy watching someone think, for it is only then that I do not feel so utterly alone. Descartes once claimed that “I think, therefore I am.” I claim that “They think, therefore they are.”

When I was just a young kid in school, I was blessed (or cursed, depending on your viewpoint) with a vibrant and outgoing personality as well as the fearlessness of being the weird kid in school. I was the kid the Catholic schoolteachers had to ban from the library because I was reading too much and asking too many uncomfortable questions about religion. I was the kid that needed to be punished for singing songs outside in the rain during class. I was the kid in my public high school that gave to and received hugs from girl friend to the ire of their boyfriends. I was the kid that ran around with a pair of Pikachu ears on his head and screamed, “Pika!” Though, I was not quite popular (infamous would be a more fitting term), I was well-liked by my fellow students.

I was neither so wise nor so fickle in my choice of company in my younger years. In fact, when I was in high school, I hang out with a quite a large group: my English honors class. From the time I was freshman until I left before my senior year, the people that made up my English honors class remain relatively unchanged. And oh, what a group it was! Mostly females (I was one of six boys in a class of thirty), we represented most of the school’s civic life. We made up the leadership of all the major clubs on campus, from student government, to homecoming council, to the volunteer organization, and even the Japanese club. I like most of them for their ambitions, sometimes for their smarts, but mostly because they were for the most part independent thinkers. I remember a teacher saying one time to us, “You are the loudest class I have and I sometimes wonder why. But then I figured it out: you all have something to say.” But, being high school, there are occasions when some exhibited her mentality. And I resented it deeply.

Herd mentality was even worse in the online networks I logged on to after school day after day. Excite’s Virtual Places was the online version of my high school with none of the learning and all of the drama and more. It even had a social hierarchy that mirrors that of high school (though, being a network on the relatively new World Wide Web, it was in favor of the computer geeks, where the hackers are the rock stars). There were the speed-fighters who often wore Dragon Ball Z avatars. Like their high school jock counterparts, they moved in groups, hyper-masculine, and just as dumb. There were the roleplayers whose only roleplaying setting seemed to be the tavern. I, myself, hang out with the anime aficionados. The rules of etiquette that were followed were as contrived as it was silly. For one thing, the quality of your avatar and what anime you wore determined your status within this group. (A side note: I learned much about graphics design and composition from cropping anime pictures for avatars.) It was considered faux-pas to wear the same avatar as another person. It was considered a crime to “steal” a personally tagged one.

Despite the inanity of Virtual Places, I was able to create strong relationships with people that last to this day long after Virtual Places shut down. I met my best friend Devin there as well as others I am still in contact with. Nothing has replaced Virtual Places in my life (though, Flickr + Photophlow make very good candidates) with its soap-operaish drama and cryfests. We were young then, just coming of age, and barely reaching adulthood. We were coming to terms on who we are, striving to forge an identity that is genuine to whom really we were. We are now older, hopefully wiser, and still message each other on MySpace.

A New Logo for Copyfascism Watch

Though plans for Copyfascism Watch were in the works long before its official launch, the logo made its debut even before the first post was drafted. In fact, the logo was created long before I had even settled the question of where will I be hosting the blog -- I finally decided on hosting my blog in the Ludwig von Mises Institute Community, where I hope to differentiate myself from the copyleftists that make up the bulk of the copyfight.

My first attempt at the logo consisted of swiping the Mises crest from the Institute's website (without permission, of course) and super-imposing faded copyright symbols on it. The font color is inspired by the color scheme of the Mises crest, with its rich red and blue hues. The font face I chose was Courier New, a font with strong associations with the United States military. It is, by regulation, the standard font used in nearly every page of the official documents and correspondence typed up, printed, and delivered by motivated company clerks to and from their superiors. The simple banality of the font, with its traditional typeface and utterly conformist fixed-width, will serve to emphasize the utter, yet dangerous, dullness of copyfascism. It is Serif! It is fixed-width! It looks like it belongs to a type-writer! It is perfect! The logo lasted two weeks before I decided that a better, simpler logo was sorely needed.

I spent a grand total of fifteen minutes creating the first version of the Copyfascism Watch logo. While I do not regret creating it (I never regret any creative expression), I did feel that I can do a lot better. In the second attempt to create the blog's logo, I made sure to review what it was that I did right in the first logo and see if I reuse some of the design elements in the next attempt. I did not feel like reinventing the wheel; I just wanted to make it better. The font face, Courier New, stayed. Its simplicity and all of its Serif, fixed-width glory (as well as its military associations) emphasizes the banality of copyfascism itself (I will admit, intellectual property is considered neither exciting nor sexy). The color scheme remained the same, with the word "fascism" highlighted in blood red. Beyond the font face and the font color, however, nothing was left of the old design.

The one that needed to go was the Mises crest. It was too strong of a design element for it to belong in a proper logo (at least, the Copyfascism Watch's logo). And the way I implemented the design made it seem that the Institute was guilty of copyfascism or was that it was any way associated with the blog besides hosting it and inspiring the ideology driving its articles. My attempts to incorporate the copyright symbol into the original design failed miserably because of my inclusion of the Mises crest; there was no room for two aesthetically-opposite logos. By removing the Mises crest and making the copyright symbol a very prominent part of the new logo, I was able to solve two pressing problems: how to inform the casual visitor the purpose and subject of the blog (i.e., copyright, intellectual property) and scalability. Being a universally recognized symbol, the copyright symbol lends its meaning to the logo. Also, at any size, my logo will work; I can resize it the size of a billboard or shrink it into a tiny website button and it will still look the same.

I am not entirely happy with the final design. I wanted to evoke the Nazi insignia, with its red background and striking black swastika (yes, I realize that the Nazis were not fascist, but socialist. But really, is there really any difference between the Nazi ideology of hate, Communism, and Mussolini's Fascism?), but I grew attached to the clean white background. The white background allows me to transfer the design on different colored background besides white.

Photography: 2008.04.26

Riding Through Arizona by Jayel Aheram

Photographs recently uploaded to Jayel Aheram's Flickr:

1. Riding Through Arizona - At least, I think we were in Arizona. We could have possibly been in California.
2. I Can't Contain my Joy - "Oh oh oh! Woke up today, feeling the way I always do!"
3. Justin Smiling - At the beach in Okinawa.
4. Chris During Dinner - We were having a steak dinner. It was not worth the money I paid for it.
5. That Morning - We sang and danced the night away on post (while still being vigilant and doing all the normal responsible guard duties).
6. Protection from the Elements - I always tell my marines, "Bring toilet paper, baby wipes, some snacks, a bottle of water, and if you can, a trash bag or two in their day packs. You never know when you might need it."

Copyfascism Watch: 2008.04.26

Copyright is Anti-Private Property

One of the weaknesses of the copyfight is the decidedly anti-private property bent of many of the arguments made against copyright. In fact, much more could be achieved in the protection of our besieged civil liberties if the lawyers and activists insist upon the private property rights of the individual...

FULL ARTICLE >>

Articles recently published in Copyfascism Watch:

1. Copyright is Anti-Private Property - One of the weaknesses of the copyfight is the decidedly anti-private property bent of many of the arguments made against copyright. In fact, much more could be achieved in the protection of our...
2. What is Copyfascism? - Copyfascism \'kä-pē-fa,shi-zəm\ - the belief in a state-granted monopoly on ideas and information utilizing governmental power and coercion in...
3. This is Copyfascism Watch - This is an age when innovations in information technology occur in breakneck speeds. Everything from music to books to software to full-length movies are becoming more widely and easily available...

Test of Anarchy Media Player

This is a running test of the Anarchy Media Player.

Test of Anarchy Media Player - This is an mp3 file I created to test Anarchy Media Player.

Art: War and Peace Remixed

War and Peace by Jennika

Jennika is an aspiring painter and she recently remixed my photograph War and Peace as a painting for a scholarship. Truly wonderful work.

Photography: 2008.04.23

In the Honcho by Jayel Aheram

Photographs recently uploaded to Jayel Aheram's Flickr:

1. In the Honcho - This was the day before the birthday party on our way to the military commissary for some food and necessary birthday supplies.
2. The Middle of Somewhere - The birthday boy in his big day.
3. The Birthday Mascot - We were in the military commissary and in the produce aisle when my eyes happen upon this robust pineapple. It was perfect, I thought to myself.
4. The Elusive Yeti - A portrait of the elusive and secretive Yeti.

Video: 2008.04.23

Voices of Iraq II by Jayel Aheram

Videos recently uploaded to Jayel Aheram's Flickr:

1. Voices of Iraq II - I do miss them, my Iraqi counterparts.
2. Voices of Iraq - He sings for me a haunting melody.
3. The Tanuki Song - Kim was telling me how she loved hearing me speak in Japanese. How about me singing in Japanese?
4. What is Taco Rice? - Some of my regular contacts have asked me about this. I present to you the Taco Rice, Sin Ville's specialty.

Twitter: 2008.04.23

• Wicked cool! Jennika painted her version of my "War and Peace" for a scholarship. Wonderful work! http://tinyurl.com/47dsa2
• "Copyfascism Watch" is now live in the Mises.org Community. I am currently polishing the template. http://tinyurl.com/3qo89q
• Young Aheram, Now Aheram. A recreation of a childhood photograph. http://tinyurl.com/5dp3b7
• My friend Stacy posted video footage from the opening of "The Harsh Desert." http://tinyurl.com/5pcvh6

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Web Design: Dynamic Creativist Pursuits

After working for five incredibly long days and producing several pages of code revisions, an updated version of Creativist Pursuits went live early Monday morning. It is nearly identical to its previous incarnation, but this time it has dynamic content.

Anatomy of a Website by Jayel Aheram

My friend Stacy Wiedmaier was the one who originally implanted the idea into my head of turning Creativist Pursuits into one-stop shop for everything Aheram. The goal is to create a sort of web portal that follows everything I do in the online medium and publishes snippets and previews of every content produced by me. A sort of supra-MySpace that is more than twice as fun to create and with an underlying code that looks as good and clean as its graphics.

Not a Vanity Page

One thing Creativist Pursuits is not is a vanity site. I believe it offers something more than your usual vanity page. It is a self-updating website that pulls from various sites the content generated by me. It is not static and people can actually find new content everyday, from Twitter updates to newest Flickr uploads to recently published articles from my blogs. However, it is not my intention to keep the casual visitor in Creativist Pursuits. My goal is to funnel them as quickly as possible to my content.

An overwhelming number of visitors to Creativist Pursuits landed there not because of direct traffic, but rather were referred there by external sites.

1. Most people do not type the address of my website into their address bar from memory in order to access my site. Most are referrals. A lot of it from outside sites like MySpace and Flickr. Some are referred to the website by other people talking about me in blogs or news articles. And a few are referred to my website by the Moo cards I hand out. In many of the social networking profiles I have, I link to my main website.
2. If they are interested enough, they will usually click the link and land...
3. On Creativist Pursuits. Successful implementation of the ideas I am putting forward in this post will ensure that people are
4. ..properly funneled to my...
5. ...content. Whether it be my blog, my about me page, my contact information, my Flickr photographs, or one my many social networking profiles, the goal of Creativist Pursuits is to guide people to those pages.

It is the digital middleman, the online concierge, the traffic warden in a world of Aheram-generated content.

User Interface

If it is takes more than five seconds for people to find what they are looking for in this website, I have failed. User interface does not apply to just iPods and computers, it also applies to the website. One of the challenges I faced was how I can best make sure that the design of the website complements its function in streamlining the user experience of the casual visitor. I made generous use of obvious navigational graphics. They are displayed in a very easy-to-read font, yet remain aesthetically consistent with the design scheme. Also, I made sure that the graphics I use worked for me and the website. They are not merely there to look pretty, they actually do serve multiple important functions. Not only do they provide a preview of the content they link to, they also serve to attract the attention of the casual visitor to the information that surrounds it. The visitor's eyes are drawn to the distinctive graphic that accurately represents the content the graphic itself links to.

The interface of my website should not be a hindrance between my audience and my content. I utilized white-space to effectively compartmentalize each block of information so that the casual visitor can easily navigate and separate different kinds of content from each other.

Social Networking and Feeds

There is a bit more emphasis now with social networking in Creativist Pursuits. My Twitter and Flickr, as well as my profiles in MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn are prominently linked to in the index page. Joining those are links to various RSS feeds of my regularly updated content. Clicking >> SOCIAL NETWORKS will lead the visitor to an even larger list of social networks I am a part of.

Dynamic Content and XML Parsing

One of the biggest changes implemented in the site is the addition of an XML parser. Using a Magpie derivative called Feed2JS, I am able to republish snippets of my blog posts in my website. Unlike the original Magpie RSS (which was quite unwieldy), Feed2JS was painless to install. It parses RSS feeds from FeedBurner and converts it to a simple JavaScript code that I am able to include in my website's source code. It looks clean, it is painless to edit, and it just works. The republished feeds joins the Twitter and Flickr badges in providing new content to Creativist Pursuits.

Thinking Ahead

I created a mock up of what I intend to do if I were to announce an important event or news like an upcoming gallery exhibition or something. Of course, it will be temporary and will most likely go up and remain up from a week prior to the event until the duration of the event. I am debating if there is some way I can automate this to make this as painless as possible for me. Most likely, just adding the HTML snippet is a lot simpler and easier.

The Purpose of All of This

The purpose of Creativist Pursuits two-fold and quite simple. Create an audience of my work and then facilitate opportunities by exposing audiences to my work. By providing ways to easily contact me, friend me on MySpace, drop me a line, follow me on Twitter, or view my work while making it very easy to do so, I am creating a base of audience that will appreciate and enjoy my creativist pursuits.

Guest Column: Molds of Introspection

A guest column written by Devin Swick for Aheram Takes On... In this guest column, Devin explains the inspirations and processes involved in the creation of his latest creativist pursuit, Oriental Intension II.

Oriental Intension II by Devin Swick

I am an artist of duality. My passions include culture and love; dreams and nightmares; death and fear. My work Oriental Intension, is an image of imitation and appreciation of Japanese art.

When I begin working on something, I usually don't know what the final result will be. I watch the colors and shapes in my subconscious spring to life what I think needs to be said about myself.

The rest of the world does not exist in these moments - I have to drag it in with me - and we become witnesses of creation, within isolation.

I started with a blank, white backdrop, and experimented with the colors of my mood at the time. I cannot say that blue equals sadness and that yellow equals happiness, it is just a color that feels right, and it's never the same. Next, I stroked my digital brush to fill the spaces I felt needed to be filled, guiding it with emotion and maybe even psychological need. I brushed in one direction, copied it, and repeated the process. There was a collection of these before I was done, which I layered together in differing opacities.

What was left was a raw mold of introspective design. Trimming what needed to be trimmed, arranging what needed to be arranged, I came out with a shape resembling nothing less than a kanji symbol. I took a step back and considered how best to represent this revelation. Between contemporary simplicity and a love for ancient design, I had many choices. I decided with something much less current and had to then decide how to go about it. This was my first time doing anything like this, ever.

At a low opacity, I burned my way through areas of the backdrop, and, using Retouch, smudged colors together to create an illusion of paint and age. I placed an illumination of a sun to give a stronger presence of Japan in the image, and then wrapped it up in a sepia tone to further emphasize aging. After, I painted a line down the image to contrast over the yellow sun, in which I feel was successful. Now, I needed detail.

Smudging the black line to give the impression of "running paint" gave less balance over the consistency of detail in the image, so I looked online for texture and found one that felt appropriate. It was an aged paper texture with some ineligible writing on it. Then I created an overlay layer that blanketed over the entire image, and lowered the opacity quite a bit to fit it snugly into the backdrop. The intention was to give the illusion of a painting on aged paper. After layering a Gaussian blur and adjusting the contrast (for dramatic effect), before I knew it, I was finished.

What I enjoy about the piece is that while it is not presumptuous or pretentious, I can believe in it. Some have even had to ask me if it were digital or painted on canvas. To an aspiring artist like me, it has made me feel proud, and in some way, validated, over what people may think of when their eyes explore my work, and in essence, explore who I am: an isolated person being discovered - dragging the world with them.

 

Devin Swick is an aspiring artist currently living in Arizona. You can view more of his spectacular digital paintings in DeviantArt and Flickr.

Photography: Youngme / Nowme

Youngme / Nowme by Jayel Aheram

A recreation of a childhood photograph. See other examples in Color War 2008 and the pertinent Flickr thread.

Twitter: 2008.04.19

• "I love the whole world, and all its sights and sound!" And this video! http://tinyurl.com/6gz7wh
• No, Oregon. You cannot have a copyright on what is every aspect already public property. http://tinyurl.com/5yuknh
• A timelapse of military casualties in Iraq. A sobering flash presentation of the war. http://www.obleek.com/iraq
• Liza Minnelli, Steven Weber, Bridget Moynahan, and me are judges for Sam Harris' War on War Music Video contest. http://tinyurl.com/4naf84

Follow Aheram on Twitter