Orange Orange (category:blogging)

Alright fine, I got the idea from somewhere else.

[XuHui by Montrasio International (Flickr)]

I don’t know why it took so long for me to get hooked, but it’s official: the Gothamist has sunk its claws into me. Or actually, Shanghaiist and Bostonist are the blogs that have made it onto my Google Reader, the first for its thorough (if at first a bit trigger-happy) coverage of the Beijing Olympic bar ban and the latter because, well, it’s about Boston.

But the addictive potential of the “Ist” family of city blogs don’t stop there. The weekly roundup of interesting stories from all the cities is the real highlight of the Bostonist front page. Is your hunger for postmodern hyper-connectivity sated yet? Didn’t think so.

[via NBC.com]

Found this link on passiveaggressivenotes.com, which you should definitely read if you want to laugh / get angry. Thanks Carolyn for the link!

Also don’t miss graphjam, the newest creation from the people who brought you icanhascheezburger:

I like all things pithy and beautiful.

No, I’m not talking about a nice olive, though I like those too. I mean pithy as in having brevity, that proverbial soul of wit, and beauty as Plato meant it — almost. His preferred beauty was probably singular, transcendent. I’ll settle for abstract, but not entirely rational.

I like lieder, poems and short stories; electro and animations. I love the not-quite art, the not-exactly-deep, and the hopefully-not-too-shallow.

I like an opera or a novel once in a while, but that can get overwhelming. It’s not that I don’t have the time to brood over seven volumes of some French guy’s insights (though honestly, I don’t). It’s just that even a 5 minute fragment of German sentimentality (though honestly, it’s more than that) is enough to set my neurons off on a conflagration of sparks for a week. I don’t want to blow any fuses.

Eye candy. That’s the word for it. Amusing. Some image that jogs your pleasure receptors but not much more. Perhaps unsubstantive, but certainly too brief. I like all the different kinds — ear-candy, brain-candy, tongue-candy, or I suppose, just candy.

Is this a problem? Is there some kernel of universal pathos (for example in a Tolstoy novel, sure to have me fidgeting before I even open the cover) that I’m definitely not getting from watching internet videos? Even if it’s a meditation on 20th century conflict and suffering? Do I have aesthetic ADHD?

Or maybe I am asking too many questions. I’m probably just a symptom of an era, at that point in life when I’m looking for inspiration anywhere I can get it, and avoiding perspiration anywhere it becomes necessary.

By now I’ve realized that blogging isn’t about articulating my views or having a thesis statement, even if by some miracle that happens. It’s more about the ADHD aesthete in me — procrastinating, deferring, being impatient, being too analytical. It’s also about being exuberant. This blog is revelry: in art, science, music, programming, whatever you call it, sometimes none, or better yet, all of the above.

There. I could probably use this as my About page if I didn’t know that my mind will change in a couple weeks.

The great thing about taking too many classes with problem sets is that one can still find room to procrastinate wildly between nights of not getting enough sleep. My reward for being behind in lecture? Migrating this blog from wordpress.com to my own host, and using the open source version of wordpress to hack up my own little theme for it.

Probably my only motivation for making the move — let’s be honest, it’s not like my readership is causing me bandwidth problems — is that I just hated the themes on wordpress.com. There’s nothing worse than having the same look as hundreds of other blogs, except maybe having the same look as hundreds of ugly blogs. Simple, readable designs (like the one on my favorite blog) are the ones I like best, and hopefully your eyes will agree.

Start reading the latest posts at http://jueseph.com/blog.