Now with even more parenthetical clauses!
Ever since I was first "turned on" to Nine Inch Nails (March, 1999), I've been of the opinion that Trent Reznor is a freaking genious. The music is great, if a little heavy for my current tastes. I have gotten "happy," I guess you'd call it, and have turned more to punk or pop-punk or bubblegum rock or whatever lately, and don't quite value the type of music I listened to in high school quite so much. But despite that, I've always held NIN in very high regard (along with Marilyn Manson, who happened to be Trent Reznor's protege). Musically and artistically I consider them to be flat out geniouses. M.M. may place a little too much emphasis on shock value, and NIN may place a little too much emphasis on how much the world sucks, but still... they are all kinds of cool, in my book.
I imitate M.M. roughly once or twice a month with my "goth days" - wearing makeup, spike collars, bondage pants, whatever else I can find, with the sole purpose of making people at my very conservative Christian school give me funny looks. And I've imitated NIN before with a
couple different
artwork pieces.
John recently informed me that a new NIN album (it's either "Bleed Through" or "bleedthrough", I haven't figured out which yet) is coming out shortly, along with a new tour. So I've spent quite a bit of time at the NIN site (see today's href). One look at that site, and you'll immediately see where my inspiration for
this piece of art came from. Even the name came from a NIN song (Heresy... "God is dead, and no one cares...").
Now, I've always loved minimalistic art. I've always wanted to do a very minimalistic site design. But the unfortunate problem with minimalism is, it really gives the impression that no time at all was spent creating it. And to a certain degree, that is very true. I spent maybe a couple hours just playing with stuff, but the actual time spent creating the Heresy design couldn't have totalled more than twenty minutes. Another idea I had tonight took maybe five minutes to create. I think it looks good, and maybe you guys will too, but it still seems like it will be (and truthfully, it did) take about five or ten minutes to make. It will still take a good amount of time to code the site, but as far as graphics work goes, it was honestly kind of slapped together with minimal effort.
For all my longtime site members or visitors, and for myself even, I will forever be in the shadow of sv20 (and to a lesser degree,
sv40. That was the most beautiful thing I have ever made, as far as I'm concerned. Part of me is scared to release any minimalist site, simply because no matter how good I think it looks, it just can't compare to sv20. Likewise, I spent more than a dozen hours in Photoshop working on the current siteskin, carbon.fx. I have an attention span comparable to that of a goldfish, so for me, 12-plus hours on a site (not even counting the time it took to code) is monumental. So I have no choice but to think that, if I were to do a minimalist site, I would be letting myself and my faithful following down. Yes, I think it looks good, and in all honesty, that's all that really matters, but still... if I'd constantly be kicking myself for ever letting it see the light of day, would it really be worth it?
Ok, I think this rant has gone on long enough. I have several beers under my belt tonight, so please forgive me if I've rambled on too long. I just wanted to get some of that off my chest. So yeah, I'll shut up now. Have fun, good night, drink one for me.
