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Happy April 1st, everybody. I hope you enjoyed at least one of the day's shenanigans, whichever it may have been. I myself had a wonderful chortle at the ifMUD change (all role-playing names, all the time!) as well as all of Salon's stories and the Freshmeat listing for an incredibly stable, super-scalable operating system called "Windows". Too bad the Slashdot populace couldn't appreciate a buncha cute press releases run through the Dialectizer, though -- you'd think everybody'd get a kick out of something different and fun, but apparently some folks were really really really hard up for actual factual hard news on a Saturday. Go fig.

Of course, I decided to get in on the fun as best I could and thus put up a brand-new home page. This prompted many fine pieces of email, including one from Joe Schwartz who kindly informed me I'd be hearing from his "cool-ass lawyer". I also got several dubious replies, including more than a few which thought the page was for real, and congratulated me on a good job. Or where they just joking, too? APRIL FOOLS!! Ha! Ha!

I was actually pretty astonished at how much work one had to put into actually making a page look bad. Course, one look at sites like Ain't It Cool News or boo.com and you'll realize that yeah, bad web design is a true art and requires a lot of effort. But there's a difference between bad and bad bad, as in "I'm using a free web page creator so I don't have to even think about HTML oh by the way how do you like these eighteen spinny animated GIFs all around each other?" bad. You'd think slapping up a horrid page like that would be easy! Just type in your crap copy, don't even bother thinking about spellchecking, and the WYSIWYG editor does the rest.

I found that the process of creating a bad page is long and tedious and fraught with many obstacles which you need to overcome, the first of which obviously is removing any and all mental blocks one has in the form of good design theory and simple aesthetics. I estimate I got the hang of this in roughly two hours. It's somewhat akin to hiring on with a large online advertising firm and being expected to hand your soul over to the receptionist on your first day. Once those niggling little concerns of good taste and/or good judgement and/or actually caring that other people are going to be looking at this are out of your hands, life gets much easier.

So what did I want to write about on this page? Suddenly I was facing the same philosophical dilemma that has plagued many first-time developers (and many seventy-second time designers, as well.) Sure, you gotta have a web presence, you gotta have a web page, but riddle me this, Chucko; what are you going to SAY?! You're supposed to have a reason to your page, aren't you? So many personal pages these days have absolutely nothing to say. Most read like overglorified personal ads with a few animated Tigger pictures put in to represent the author's fondness for Tigger. And while all exhort you to "come back again!" you just know you probably won't, because if and when you do check back, you'll learn nothing new except maybe that the author learned how to use <BLINK> or <MARQUEE> while you were away.

Ok, perhaps I'm being a bit too harsh on personal pages. We've a wonderful system here -- anyone and everyone can sit down and say what they want to say. Say what they need to say. Anything and everything on their minds. And it's great! Never before has the average schmoe had the chance to get his or her message out to, well, potentially anybody in the world with a web browser. That's incredible. Incredible freedom and incredible potential. It's just that the medium is here but the message has yet to arrive. It all feels so obligatory sometimes. What do you say if you have nothing to sell?

So the first step was a tough one, but I think I solved it. Here is me, here are my interests, here's a link to Yahoo. It's information that in the right way can be fun to read and enlightening, but I had to remove any and all traces of enlightenment from it. So I had to remember I didn't want to scale down images so they fit in any reasonable resolution, and I had to remember I didn't want to use any aesthetically-pleasing color scheme (hot pink and electric yellow on black, anyone?) and I had to remember, above all, not to give the average user any reason to come back. Life was getting much easier but first I had to scour the web for bad clipart. I mean, it's not enough that your site (which is still called a "site" even if you've only one page) will be devoid of any and all content or meaning; you'll have to make it look ugly, too.

Looking for clipart is tougher than it should have been -- for me, at least. Of course, there is an easy way, as Cana McCoy pointed out. Just type in a Geocities URL with a random 4-digit number in it, and leech, leech, leech. But do you know what? The thought never occurred to me. The concept of actively unauthorized snitching graphics off of someone else's site (with the exception of Joe Schwartz' Joyrides) hadn't once crossed my mind. I was too busy pawing through so many awful clipart sites that I completely neglected to go to the true sources of animated embarassment -- the people who perpetuate the popularity of the blasted things in the first place. This explains why I couldn't find the picture of the guy peeing on the Microsoft logo and why I couldn't find any animated dancing Tiggers. But I did find the mother of all "under construction" images, and that amused me greatly.

Of course the thought of opening one's own page with the world's largest fully-rendered animated blinky on a sawhorse (rendered only for a white background, mind you) would amuse me greatly. It's so ludicrous you can't help but laugh. What poor misguided soul would actually, seriously, sincerely want to use it on their page to inform the viewers that no, indeed, this page was definitely not finished? The placement also makes me grin every time -- right up there at the top, because you can't have anybody looking at your stuff with the slightest notion that maybe this page is finished forever and ever amen. Nope, nope, nope. This is why I consider this horrendous image such an incredible find. I guess it's like the people who collect mainstream pieces of racist ephemera because while it's awful to realize such things exist, it's important to know they do because we must realize why people in days past were so damn stupid and avoid making the same mistakes ourselves. Plus you can have a good laugh at the stupid peoples' expense (Though I don't think I'd be interested in a "Dunk The Darkie" board game any time soon.)

Maybe we're just drawn to it because it's so damn camp.

And the FIRE ALARM graphic was also perfect, as was the "Budweiser NOW!" logo. What a rotten beer.

So I learned a lot while busting my ass on some stereotypical code. And it was worth it. Oh, yes, it was worth it. I only wish I had had a copy of Frontpage so I could be truly technically accurate, but oh well. Dreamweaver is almost the same.

MediaOne gave me the Game Show Network this week. It's great. I love it. I watch it all the time except for the Newlywed Game because I can't stand that show. Anyway, this is all the subject of a further writing, but heck, I have to say, I can't help it; I'm in love with the Match Game all over again. They show Match Game 7* reruns every night at 6:30 (this week: Match Game 75!) and damn, if anything interrupts me between 6:30 and 7 PM, it better be something good.

At any rate, Gene Rayburn died last year. Kinda sad. But I'm reminded of Colin Quinn's joke on Weekend Update: "In lieu of flowers, the family asks you send blank."

Cute.

Take care, and don't eat anything you shouldn't.