July 20th, 2006
Consider this:
A friend said to me (a few years ago) that the front page of this website (http://www.brianporter.ca/index.html) had a lot of extra space ... that the "wire-frames" took up too much real estate on the screen. (Back then, they had flourishes that rose about, below, and to the left.)
"Content is king, Brian," he said. And perhaps he was right. It took a couple of years, but I finally heeded his advice and changed the front page so that the look was cleaner and more compact. I also started writing these rants, which means that I have filled my website up with reams of content. A couple of hundred thousand words at last count, and rising ... er ... even as I type this :)
Around the same time as my first friend's comments, I received this assertion from another person, not so much of a friend as an acquaintance whom I strangely (and randomly) bump into from time to time:
"Brian, it's all about the substance. Ya gotta get rid of all that filler in your life and only worry about the presentation of it for as long as it serves the needs of the content. Forget appearances, for fuck's sake, and mean what you are!"
Hmm ... mean what I am, eh? Basically, he wanted me to see the Post-Modern light in a very personal way, where the content of my life defines the form. Forgetting that I had previously dismissed Post-Modernism as just an artistically critical statement made by hippies to justify their searches through the fragments for The Meaning Of It All (man) after partially damaging their brains through overindulgence in hallucinatory drugs, and ignoring the fact that the path one chooses to take through life very much affects the events that occur along the way, I thought about what this acquaintance had said to me. In fact, I thought on and off for years about what he had implored me to do. And as that minor search for the balance between meaning and form stretched into its fourth year, I met that acquaintance again.
He had costly hair implants ... symmetrically precise stalks of hair planted and growing across his forehead. Dear Lord.
So much for being "all about the substance". Or maybe, frighteningly, that was all the substance there was to him. In any case, because of the source, those words lost a lot of meaning that day.
Content may indeed be king. But I guess window dressing gets you laid ...
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