First it was purple … TVaB purple, i declared. Then there was a big to-do about whether or not you could see the side of my face at all or if it was just a puddle of three different colors of gray pixels. Then i decided to go blue, as the logo picture also decided shortly thereafter. And, of course, there is the issue of the menu, which currently doesn’t exist.
The apathy involved in this redesign amazed me. It basically got to a point where i knew there was a redesign coming, and i didn’t really want to blog until it happened, but i didn’t really want to work on it. Which, equated to not wanting to blog at all.
On April 26th at noon i was standing outside of the Electric Factory by myself; i was first in line to see Garbage. Seven hours later the line stretched out past the gate onto seventh street, and i found myself up front with a gaggle of cool people. Conversation ranged back and forth for a while, but at some point Blogging came up, as i was wearing my Blogger T-Shirt. The opinions were strong, to say the least. “Blogger… is that still around?” “Personal publishing is so last year.” “God, i think everyone i know just gave up and switched to LiveJournal.”
Suffice to say, i was definitely stymied by their quick opinions on the matter, and driving to Boston that night with three other Bloggers didn’t exactly help me to forget about our conversation. Rabi expressed shock at the proclamation that Live Journal has supplanted the Big B in functionality or usability, and my fears that my webpage had become suddenly irrelevant were assuaged by the fact that i generally drew blank stares from the gaggle when i started talking about switching to Moveable Type and how PHP & MySQL make GreyMatter somewhat obsolete. They just weren’t hard-core bloggers.
By the same token, I’d expect that they wouldn’t refer to me as a hard-core Garbage fan; i missed meeting Shirley Manson because i was on the phone with Amy trying to bribe her into coming to the show, i didn’t buy the reissued record of Shirley’s old band, and i don’t own a single MP3 of Garbage – not even their apparently hot new cover of the Rolling Stones classic “Wild Horses.” Of course, i have met (and spoken with) the entire band before, i do own a Guild Guitar signed by them, and i did collect a complete set of their B-Sides on over twenty import singles.
They are, as i like to mention, my favourite band.
My point would seem to be that everyone is a fan in a different way – i don’t read fan boards or subscribe to ‘zines, but i do know all of the chords and own (yes, own, not download) all of the songs. It’s really just like how everyone weblogs just a little bit differently; weblogging might be so-last-year for those who jumped onto the bandwagon, but for those of us who found it as a natural extension of our old decaying pages on dreadfully unreliable free servers it never “got hot” and it will never “be over.” And, after all, it’s not how big of a fan you claim to be, but what kind of things you do to prove it.
And to keep it to yourself.