Tuesday, December 6, 2005

The cardinal rule of personal websites in the corporate world is simple. You don’t have a site. Admitting otherwise would be like confessing at a PTA meeting your tendency to hang around playgrounds, trench coat and dark glasses equipped, in a quest to feed your insatiable lust for Playskool playsets or something. That’s the general vibe I get, anyhow, and in some cases it’s a crying shame. It’s always fascinating to see another side of people, and I was pleasantly surprised to discover a link to us here, an old work buddy’s homepage.

Trading personal links in the working world is taboo, I think, because there’s the unspoken apprehension you’ll find something that’s liable to get the author fired. Certainly this isn’t the case with the above link, but you know what I’m talking about if you’re an office slave. The offending exhibit would look something like this.

Saturday, January 17, 2011 :::

Dear Diary,

You know Becky in HR, the one we call the office bicycle? Well, she’s the town tricycle now.

Wednesday, March 15, 2013 :::

Dear Diary,

Tried setting fire to the break room today, but Marty came in to microwave a bag of popcorn so I had to snuff out the starter and burned myself a little in the process. HOLY SHIT I AM GOING POSTAL.

Monday, June 21, 2013 :::

Dear Diary,

I am going to shank my supervisor with the very paperclips he so jealously covets. I will only use the blue ones.

Tuesday, June 22, 2013 :::

Dear Diary,

Got fired today. WHY GOD WHY DID THIS HAPPEN.

Current mood: a little sad or whatever they call the desire to hang oneself

Current song: entire Donnie Darko soundtrack ripped in the lowest bitrate possible

How did we end up on Artemenko.org? Haven’t the foggiest. This should solidify yesterday’s conversation, I believe, because it goes to show I have little idea who visits our golden shores.

The other cardinal rule is reciprocation, so there you go, buddy. Enjoy the massive amount of traffic I will drive to your site, which current estimates peg at 2.5 unique users–1.0 being me, the other 1.5 being a woman who still lives on Three Mile Island. Legend has it she constructed an Internet connection out of free shoehorns and trace quantities of cesium.

Monday, December 5, 2005

Counting is an amenity still unavailable to the Internet, even in our gilded age of technology, and you can take this to the bank. I’m not kidding. Slam it on the counter at your local branch and the teller will say, “This is precisely what I want. Thank you much.” And then you realize that, no, ATM’s do not speak to you.

I remember declaring back in the early days our independence from site statistics, a liberating move that’s come full circle. The detours were colorful and, as they say in the biz, feature-rich–graphs and charts conjured to decipher raw numbers and sunder the very anonymity we prize. The tools were free and accessible, until I realized nobody’s numbers agree on the Internet. A large part of the confusion stems from the unregulated terminology, where one man’s “unique visitor” is another man’s “pageview” is another man’s “ass” and yet another man’s “elbow.”

Until we reach the momentous day when the online equivalent of the metric system emerges, conservatively our readership is 7 to 150 people daily or, according to my personal analytics, fuck if I know. The Web is essentially the kid who, faced with the task of learning how to count on one preschool morning, proceeds to eat the peanuts the teacher had planned on using as visual aids. True story. My story.

Thursday, December 1, 2005

Winter on the Shore
Remind me again.
First snowfall of the season?
Four months of this shit.

I fully expect the appreciative snapping of fingers to begin–wait for my mark–now.