Unfinished

This post is inspired by the excellent track entitled Lamb’s Garbage (Unfinished), from the classic album and one of my favourites, Mr Oizo’s Lambs Anger. The concept of the song, as its title suggests, is to regroup bits of songs that were never completed to be full tracks.

Since I’ve been sitting on a few short drafts for a while now, and since I can’t seem to convert those drafts into full blog posts, I thought I’d borrow the idea and compile parts of these unfinished posts into an inaugural “unfinished” post, a format that may or may not return. In the meantime, this is a format I can only encourage you to try on your own blog, as I found it quite liberating to get rid of these old files.

Things I don’t care about

A few years ago on Twitter (which in itself feels like ages ago), Canadian DJ/musician/podcaster/truly-funny-guy Tiga wrote something along the lines of “here’s a list of things I don’t care about.” While I can’t remember exactly what was written in it — I think cologne was among the things listed — it made me laugh and I found it somehow interesting. Since I’m still thinking about it today, I thought I would do the same.

Getting off of sleeping mode like an old Windows PC

Getting out of bed may seem quick and almost instant, but for the next half hour, everything in my brain will be very slow. This reminds me of the Windows PCs from the early 2000s, where “coming out of sleep mode” somehow took longer than booting up, with the hard drive spinning for ages for unknown reasons. Or maybe I had a shitty PC?

Not clickbait, but “blogbait”

I’m guilty of this. Writing things everybody knows, on which everybody already agrees. Or doesn’t agree. Blog post in which I am not saying anything new or really personal.

But writing these ideas down, as well as reading them from other people, helps understanding them better, and makes them more like a thing. Posts like “Why you should start a blog” or “I love RSS” come to mind.

I tend to read all of these posts, and I enjoy them. I write a few of them myself. However, it feels like “blogbait” has indeed become a thing, whether it is done consciously or not.

Hard to define words

I am a word guy. It may not look like it on this blog because I write in English and not in my native French, but I can be very annoying with people around me when I keep asking questions like “What does this word mean exactly?”

This is not about rare or complicated words, no, it’s about words we use every day, without really being able to explain what they truly mean. Here are a few examples below:

Not that the work I do is all that important or memorable, but I prefer to think of it as “writing” rather than as “content.” And for me, that’s an important distinction. Content and writing are not the same thing, at least the way that we’ve come to define them in contemporary society. Content is inherently transactional; its goal is to drive towards some kind of conversion, some kind of exchange of value.

Please let me know if you have any more words like this. Words that we all use but never really try to define precisely, and when we do, it becomes a confusing fog of thoughts.

Final design

I’ve recently noticed that I may have finally stopped working on the design of this site. I know that wasn’t the case a few months ago, when I was always trying to add or remove something, either trying to shave a few bytes of the size of the whole website, fine-tuning the aesthetics (should the bottom borders be 2 pixels or 3 pixels wide?), or editing the code to make it pass the W3C validation.

How do you know when a design is complete, if it ever is? Just this week, I made slight adjustments to the spacing between blocks: does it count as a modification? Or is it acceptable to consider a web design “alive” and therefore subject to occasional slight changes?