I’ve been listening to a bunch of Philip Glass while working on papers and revisited his opera about the life of Gandhi, Satyagraha.

Glass has a reputation for sort-of cheesy, new-agey stuff, so focusing on Gandhi as a topic doesn’t do much to reduce the overall corniness of his oeuvre. My cynicism requires me to ignore the silliness of the “message” and the overarching themes Glass tries so earnestly to get to by focusing each act on Leo Tolstoy, Rabindranath Tagore, and Martin Luther King, major literary figures with ties to Gandhi’s life. Luckily, the best part of the opera is not the story. (If you could even say it has a “story.”)

I finished this a while ago, but wanted to make it perfect before I put it up as my real front page. Since it will never be perfect, and it basically works now, I figured I’d just put it up and get it over with.

It’s an egotist/javascript dream, and pulls stuff from all the online places I regularly put content, including my tumblr, twitter, delicious, and blog feeds. Everything should work, with the exception of the “Other Work” link up at the top, which has no page to link to yet. Everything will probably break as soon as one of these javascripts stops working. Expect incessant tweaking (If you, for some reason, were compelled to look at my personal site more than once).

In terms of real blog stuff, I do actually have some things to write about, and I am going to work on writing stuff here on a regular basis. That is, as soon as I’m done with the current crunch time of schoolwork.

So yeah, enjoy, if you needed to know everything I was doing on the internet at the same time, now you can.

I couldn’t handle Unity Blue, so I compulsively hammered away at a draft of the new design. It’s up on the blog pages now, and eventually, the main page will sport a similar look, but with more content.

Lucky you, getting to see all my layout drafts. If this was a real website, I’d be making all these edits secretly and unveil them on some special day. But this isn’t a real website, yet, so you get all this stuff. And two posts in a row about being under construction.

Sweet.

In anticipation of a site-wide redesign, I’m messing with the blog layout, so it’s going to look really ugly for a while. Of course, it will look more awesome than you can possibly imagine when I’m done with it. Or maybe I’ll lose steam and it will forever be stuck in “Unity Blue” or whatever this garbage is.

(yeah, I realize a site-wide redesign doesn’t make sense until there is a wide site to redesign. That’s part of the redesign. Making a real site.)

While I’ve been neglecting this blog, I’ve been working on school projects, including a post for the blog of my research group, Project New Media Literacies. This is cross-posted from there!

Here at Project NML, we are very interested in how new creative works often spread across a variety of media types. The new media landscape is full of stories that exist in books, TV, and social networking sites. We call the ability to deal with these changing modes of communication “Transmedia Navigation.” But even before widespread digital communication made the nearly effortless flow of information across media possible, artists were experimenting with ways to break out of the limits of traditional media.