About Me, My Site, and Everything
A number of people asked me (repeatedly) why I didn’t have an “about” page. So I googled around a bit, and it seems they’re almost a requirement these days. While it feels odd to write a page of the sort I usually avoid reading on other sites, I’ll try to make this at least vaguely interesting for you strange people who like reading about other people.
Me
This is what I look like, more or less:
Lose the hat and stubble, and now all you misanthropic motorists know who to target (note that I run against the flow of traffic, so your guilt will last a lifetime).
Right. My name’s Brian. I’m a musician who nurtures pet interests in writing, web design, programming, linguistics, typography, and quokkas (pun intended). I abhor specialization and consider earning the title “polymath” to be the highest human achievement. In our ultraspecialized modern world, this probably means I’m SOL.
I’m also twentysomething, single, and would actually enjoy long walks on the beach if there were one within a million miles’ drive. Rumor has it that I live in some small town in the mountains of Arizona (you folks outside the US will recognize the state as the not-quite-legendary home of the Grand Canyon). If you guys would get your act together and start sending me blank checks, I’d be happy to move to Portland or some other hip, verdant locale.
My Site
Why Aesthete-Lounge?
Short answer: because I can.
Long answer: there are two serious problems I’m trying to (help) address. The first is that “aesthetics” has become (at least in my homeland) some sort of academic pursuit relegated to philosophy students and graphic designers. That’s ridiculous. Form and function are inseparable. Ask any physicist or mathematician—elegance is a good sign in a theorem, ugliness a bad one. Elegance works. I’m no fan of Apple, but I’ll be the first to say their design sensibilities are excellent. Put simply: something that’s beautiful isn’t necessarily good, but something that’s good is almost always beautiful (note this rule does not apply to human beings).
The second is this: the web has…issues. The valuation of content is negative; that is, the cost most people incur in hosting their sites is greater than the income generated by those sites themselves. This is partly because until now it’s not been convenient to make small, voluntary, regular payments (i.e. “micropayments”) for good content. Facing the need to pay the bills, web publishers turn to advertising, which is not a good solution for anyone involved (except the advertisers). Which leads me to…
Everything
A promising new startup has a solution to the micropayment problem. I write music you can buy here. I also have a weblog I write with care and conviction. Put them together and you have the Aesthete Lounge’s business model.
Conventional wisdom among many publishers is to cater to the lowest common denominator: write buzzword-laden copy, ram ads down your users’ throats, and laugh all the way to the bank. The revolution of the “information age” is that it supposedly connects like-minded people as never before. So in theory, the lowest common denominator should now be irrelevant. Some of the better sites on the web now (2008) are pretty good examples of this, but I think it can be better still.
I want to push it as far as I can. I want to see if I can support myself with one website: no ads, no fluff, no gimmicks. Just good content. Or, let me rephrase that: I want to see if you are willing to support my site and others like mine—if you are ready to be part of changing the landscape of the web for the better.
The web is not a one-way street. You can and must contribute—donate to good sites, block ads relentlessly, join in discussions. The web will turn into Television 2.0 if you do not. Don’t let that happen. Act.