Why a blog??

First posting. New blog. So this is like where I put my rationale for creating a blog, where I explain away the hubris of thinking anywone else than me is interested in my day-to-day life? Prepare to be disappointed.

This isn't a web diary. It isn't a regular blog. Web diaries suck. If you're good at them, you end up spending more time writing them than you do living the life your write about. I could do that. Art beats life any day. But there's too much else on my hand.

I've been involved in "LARP" and the indrama sub-form/meta-form for the last 8 years. Shite. That's a lot of waste of time. LARP won't bring me fame, money or sex. Nor will it make the world a better place, and my involvement with larp is too exhausting to be justified as "recreation". But it's my medium, the one I'm best at expressing myself through. To let it go would be a waste of hard-earned knowledge and experience.

I also do "design". I began with a crappy homepage. I got a job with webdesign in Istanbul, so I learned the trade in a record short time. I even learned to think about information architecture and colour combinations. Back in 98/99 I was a pretty good web designer, I think, especially for the Turkish market. But things move fast. Bandwidth is bigger, and designers have a lot more graphical control of the pages these days. So I study it. Not "web design", but "design for interactive media". That's what I do on regular days. I learn animation, programming, video and anything that's new, technological and interactive.

During the last year, I've sometimes done what is called "art". I'm not good at it. I do it with Photoshop. I'm crap at drawing and painting. I have no ambitions of having it displayed in galleries or anything. I just do it. When you spend a lot of time with design, you end up doing these experiments that only fit in the "art" category.

And I write. I've been writing since I was 12 years old. Writing like hell. Convinced that if I just took the time I would be a great writer. One of the big ones. All young writers, and a lot of folks who never became writers, feel like that. It's a survival strategy. If you're not the best, you may just as well lay down the pen. There's more than enough crap out there. Writing brought me into design, in the weird way these things work. I moved to Istanbul to write my Novel (capital N intended). I wrote half of it, and wanted to stay, so I got a job. I stopped writing the novel then. That was a good thing, I think, when I look back at it it was just a crap story anyway but webdesign, DtP and stuff has been paying my bills and paving the way for a carreer that will continue to pay my bills. But I still write. Just can't stop. No way. The habits you develop at 14 stay. And my habits from then included writing until early morning. In Istanbul, I sometimes wouldn't leave the laptop until I heard the first call for prayer, the fuzzy muezzin cry heralding the sun rising, even in smog-covered mid-winter dark stamboul.

Someone would say I need focus. One medium at a time. Or, as Alexei Shulgin suggests, you master one medium and then depart it for another. A way to focus on art rather than carreer, avoiding the establishments diminishing of talent. But that won't pay my bills.

Neither will my multitasking. But that's the way it is, the way I tick. So this "sketchbook-e" is a place to put all the crap I write, link some of the crap I draw, and reflect on some of the indrama crap I'm involved in. Deal with it, or leave this blog alone.