worldslaziestninja
I do believe I own a shirt that sums up quite succinctly what the individual atoms of my body fit together to create.
I'm sure that if you continue reading this blog over the coming months, you'd have to agree.
Nonetheless, I should speak a bit of myself, to give you, the reader, a feeling for what it is that I am.
What I am on the surface is easy. I was born in September of 1986... and since then I've become a lanky, geeked out man-child of 18. My current situation places me at Carleton University in Ottawa, the capital of Canada... studying Humanities, or for those of you not in the know, liberal arts.
How an asian kid (proficient in the use of computers, as all asian boys should be) ended up in Humanities and not computer engineering relates directly to the shirt above.
Some people call me a natural genius. I tell them that brains aren't worth shit if I don't apply myself... and I really don't. Not unless I need to, or it's something I really find interest in. Even then, not often.
For example... I love my courses this year. All but one or two, but all of the courses in the core Humanities program are thus far, spectacular. It doesn't mean I apply myself. I still try to go to class as often as I am awake (which is not often, mind you) but some of the essays become sheer busywork. I have an essay currently in my hands that is about a week overdue, with no end to the slacking in sight. Simply because I have nothing new to contribute to the analysis of Antigone that hasn't been said a thousand times...
Even my subject, the interpretation of Creon, Thebian King, by Sophocles as an unheeded warning against the failures of a political state turning its back upon its mythic past... *takes deep breath* has been done somewhere, somehow.
However, somehow when I do finish them (this is my first overdue paper, I believe), they come out of the box with a big red A circled in the same ink smack-dab on the front of the page. I did apply myself on one essay this year, and while I ended up with an A on that one too, it was an upward battle where I had to almost write another paper justifying my viewpoint. It just doesn't seem worth it, sometimes, to apply myself.
I'm assured, of course, that this will change next year, which scares me more than anything. I am unaccustomed to not having slack-off time to pound away at my synth or type out long diatribes such as this one.
I fancy myself as a bit of the writer. Whether this is true or not remains to be seen in the actual workplace, but I have had a generally positive response to the things I write (though they are typically finished in a night... I have no patience to engage myself in more than one or two large projects at a time). I'm sure you'll see and judge for yourself.
I have had a long and complicated history as an 'internet-savvy' individual. I would place my first experiences with internet administration and webmastering at about the time I was recruited to be the first (and for a long time, the only) moderator of the Legacy Headquarter's Works-In-Progress forum in 2000. While I remained a staff member at LHQ, raising the Works-In-Progress forum from its birth to what it is now at Blizzforums, I began almost instantly at attempts to create my own webpages.
I'll admit that in the first few months, my attempts were juvenile, and generally misguided. I relied heavily upon WYSIWYG editors, and simply did not know what half my site acutally functioned on. It wasn't that I didn't realize this... I just never thought I could actually learn HTML without some sort of computer science degree (which, at that time, was ages away). Since then I've managed to learn a lot more about webdesign, and I've burned through a bunch of sites... and hopefully, when I finish the design of johannkwan.com, it will be my last great personal web project. (though, of course, I am still open to doing contract work, despite several bad experiences with jobs that were pro bono)
So now that we've established that I'm not an internet amateur, and that I'm a lazy bastard... we can talk about my history of blogging.
For a long time, I was an aspiring journalist. I wrote for several sites, had my own site that spewed forth political diatribe one after another... and blogging just seemed to be a natural course of action. It started for me in 2002, when my friend Bryan Casey from the regions of San Diego (a damned nice town, by the way) invited me to join his blog, Healthy Frowns. It was a great time... writing long nothings about the state of the world, about music... when HF closed down a year or two afterwards I was left jumping from service to service (Livejournal, Xanga) until I created my own website.
Being a poor student in high school, I did not have much choice in the way of hosting, and for the longest time, I lost hope in creating my own site in which I could share my own portfolio... and more importantly, blog.
When my friend, Matt Goldstein, (creator of doormanbot) whom I knew well from my old men's choir (Bethlehem's Bass-On-Up) told me he owned his own hosting company... (and the man's still in high school, if you'll believe it!) I jumped at the oppurtunity to fulfill my dream.
So... here, after many delays, after putting off many an assignment, I finally bring to you blog.johannkwan.com.
I'll be honest... blogging hasn't always been good to me. There was a period I treated my blog as an artistic playground, exaggerating each emotion to the extreme, toying with various themes of violence and lust... and its gotten me in some deep, deep shit in the past with the lawmakers. There was a time when I couldn't write a damned thing without being afraid of the Man.
But this blog will end that. This blog's about my life, my views, and my whatever my goddamned imagination likes. There'll be times when it's dramatic, times when it'll be a little extreme. I don't make excuses for any of it, because damn it, you may as well arrest everyone who writes a damned horror flick. I'm not a violent person, I don't kill people, I'm not a sadist. So fuck off, you fucking pigs.