Drowning in Miscellany

Today, I was at my bank in Gotham when the bank was robbed by a group of thieves dressed as clowns. They forced us to hold grenades so we couldn’t do anything with our hands. After watching them kill each other and watching every other grenade explode, I now have so much post traumatic stress that I can never go into any bank without screaming and crying. I am a bank manager. FML

At the back entrance on 35th Street, awaiting trash haulers, were bags of garments that appear to have never been worn. And to make sure that they never would be worn or sold, someone had slashed most of them with box cutters or razors, a familiar sight outside H & M’s back door.

H & M, which is based in Sweden, has an executive in charge of corporate responsibility who leads the company’s sustainability efforts. On its Web site, H&M reports that to save paper, it has shrunk its shipping labels.

“How about all the solid waste generated by throwing away usable garments and plastic hangers?” Ms. Magnus asked in a letter to the executive, Ingrid Schullstrom. She volunteered to help H & M connect with a charity or agency in New York that could put the unsold items to better use than simply tossing them in the trash. So far, she said, she has gotten no response.

• 10:48 RT @PAgent, et al.: graphic showing states that allow gay marriage vs states that allow first cousins to marry: bit.ly/6gYyQA
  
  
• 12:21 Quick story on NPR this morning described Avatar as a "mashup," which is the most accurate plot review I've heard so far.
  
  
• 12:22 Also, the reviewer dropped the phrase "a montage of tropes," which I really just want to turn into a catchphrase somehow.
  
  
• 18:43 Catching my second viewing of the montage of tropes with my buddy Dave tonight.

• 08:48 The brass signs swinging from my building whine a tinny hymn to the wind.

This entry originated at adampknave.com.

So Christopher Lee is going to release a metal concept album. According to Geeks of Doom: Charlemagne, which will be released on March 15, 2010, is a concept album about King Charlemagne, the First Holy Roman Emperor.

Here’s a sample:

Some more about the album: “The Carandinis, Lee’s maternal ancestors, were given the right to bear the coat of arms of the Holy Roman Empire by the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. Through his Carandini ancestors, Christopher Lee has a direct link to Charlemagne, and has decided for the first time in his life to pay homage to his distinguished ancestor, who is credited as “The Father of Europe”.

Charlemagne is a concept album with original words and symphonic metal music.

Composer Marco Sabiu, best known for his collaborations with Kylie Minogue, Take That, Pavarotti, Morricone, has created a truly epic canvas by introducing modern metal symphonies, in a style which resembles a movie score. Marie-Claire Calvet, a graduate from Bristol University, transports the listener into “The Dark Ages”, with a very powerful storyline and mesmerising lyrics. A full orchestra, heavy metal musicians, choir and special guest vocalists bring the legend of Charlemagne to life.”

I am allergic to...

This entry originated at adampknave.com.

Yesterday I talked some about why you should update your site. At the same time, Ariana discussed what your site does. As in what it is for. These two dovetail enough I wanted to continue the discussion I started yesterday.

I’m going to, quite obviously I would think, use my own site for this. I know it fairly well and it has all the problems I want to solve. Because when you’re redoing a site, and you’re looking at technologies to incorporate that maybe you’ve wanted a while, and a look that gets the right feel across you also can’t forget the most important part: form follows function.

I could build a beautiful site all about video blogging. Except that I don’t video blog (vlog, oh vlog how I do not like you as a term) at all so it wouldn’t help me much. My site needs to do what I need it to do. Which brings to question: what exactly is it that my site does, and, once that is known, does it do it well at all?

All right. So let’s look at adampknave.com and see what it does.

Huh. It does… way too much crammed into way too small a space. There’s a blog filled with both silly pictures and funny videos and essays like this and life rambles and humor articles. Then it tries to sell my books and comics. Then it also has links to my satellite things: twitter, columns, my tumblr (oh yes I have one, shhh) etc. Things that are me that I want to point readers to but are not, necessarily, part of the site itself.

So then what is the site? It’s a place to find out about me, as a writer, and also to … get everything else in the world. Why would someone coming to the site want to stay? The posts are scattershot, so maybe if they find a topic interesting they’d stay for a second post, until everything drifted off that topic again. Maybe they like the TV show parodies, etc. Well, all right, fine I need to admit and know that no blog I ever run will be a guided missile of purpose. It will always be the noise that falls out of my head. But separating the prose and the comics from that noise some wouldn’t hurt. Otherwise people come and they see everything at once and that can be a bit much.

Overloading visitors is never good. Simplicity is nice. Find out what they came for and give it to them. Let the visitor choose what they want to dig into and when. A controllable environment. Now, I have some ideas about that, and some of them may be outdated. A few of them are far above my abilities as a graphics person and coder.

But with some advice, and questions and a bunch of work I can pull it off. The trick, then, is to make sure that what I want to do is mobile enough to work as I move forward. Some things won’t be, of course, but the more that will the better. Less dead links out there the better. While designing this next incarnation over the coming months I will also be working, in my head, on where it could possibly go next. Now a lot of that will be scrapped when reality comes to play, but it doesn’t hurt to think about.

Finally, going forward, what will adampknave.com be? That’s the question, isn’t it? Well. It should be a hub for every aspect of my life online. A single source for everything I do, including information about my prose and comic projects, a blog/RSS feed for broadcast streaming purposes (and read Ariana, guys, if she doesn’t get to that one I know I will eventually. But chances are she will, and she’ll do it smarter than I will), consolidated satellite management and streamlined outreach management. One single place where you can, easily, find and touch and experience and explore every inch of any project I put in the public: from novels and funny images I dream up, right down to my 4am thoughts, if I want to share them. It should be a full data hub.

So what does your site do, what is it for and how can you make that come across better?