The great irony of Ayarane Project is that this hub and all its offshoots is one ginormous vanity show… this despite my fervent HATRED and utter aversion to being perceived as self-absorbed. I am not a secretive person (and I’m far too boring to have much that is even secret-worthy, the few things that ARE redacted and obfuscated are merely done so as a courtesy to others who would object) but at the same time I am not the type to actively shove every mundane detail of my life in others’ faces.

I suppose the existence of Ayarane Project would also constitute a happy medium– lay everything out, but don’t feel pressured to go parading it about. Of course, there’s the question of “what about potential employers?!” because, of course, it’s expected that in applying for work you’re bound to be Google’d and such. To them, I say “do your worst.” There are many, many reasons for this… among other things, the biggest would be that it spares me the incredibly uncomfortable burden of having to talk about myself LIVE. (Fellow social phobics, PLEASE tell me you understand what I mean.)

And, of course, I do not drink, smoke, use drugs or otherwise participate in things that are blatantly illegal or would make me look bad-silly. Hooray?

In all seriousness, though… one of the secondary purposes of this hub is to identify, itemize and archive the otherwise intangible aspects of me. This is both for your amusement (or lack thereof) and as part of an ongoing process of self-discovery/identification/blah blah blah. Years ago, most people would do something along these lines by stringing together a bunch of pages and calling it a “personal site.” (If you’ve followed Ayarane Project WAAAAAAY back since I first bought the domain, you would certainly recall my many attempts at those.) But in this NEWER era of blogs, Twitter, YouTube and the like, to get the same point across requires a distinctly… different form of execution.

Hence, we have this current form of Ayarane Project, a WordPress blog that pulls the bulk of its fodder from my LiveJournal (if only because I am too lazy to write the same thing for two separate spaces, and it’d be redundant anyway), but integrates the rest of my presence on the internets via the many widgets on the sidebar. I like widgets– I’m not the type to add them willy-nilly, but occasionally I’ll find one that would, you know, actually make sense to loot and deploy here.

This, of course, does not pooh-pooh or otherwise rule out the use of separate pages. (See that “about yoshi” link up there, for one. And, at the way bottom, you’ll find another that profiles my two machines Blastoise and Dinah.) There’s still quite a bit to identify and catalog… it’s a matter of figuring out how best to do it. And yes, I’ve actually entertained the thought of doing it as a wiki, if only for the whole “interconnected” thing.

Also: The YouTube channel’s not seen much action lately… I know I still need to finish the captures of the Phase battles from the first four .hack games, except I appear to have misplaced my GameBridge. o_O;;; I know I lent it to Bren a few months back but I also know she returned it… But, I’m not too worried since I’m considering getting this capture box since it can do HD and appears to be the only HD-capable capture device out there that isn’t HORRIBLY-obscenely-priced. Beyond finishing those captures, I’ve some penciled plots on nefarious things I could post but nothing coherent to elaborate on yet.

Anywho… other recent tweaks to the hub:
- The title is now a graphic, just because. For the curious, the handwritten font is “Tony Steidler-Dennison,” and I looted it off some blog several years ago. Based on the name, I would assume the font was constructed based off someone’s handwriting? (Presumably, this guy.) Googling shows that the font is no longer available for download anywhere else, and I love to use this font as a header, so this is one of those rare files I take EXTREMELY special care to back up whenever rebuilding my machines. The pixel font is another one that I looted from a free font repository long long ago… It doesn’t so much have a name but some alphanumeric code: “04b03,” if you feel like googling for it or others like it.
- New widgets: Randomly Yoshi-Factual displays a random detail about me, just for the hell of it. Then there is also The Eternal Poll, which is an ongoing query about how you like your Yoshi fix.