Wednesday, May 2, 2001
A deep thought on FAQ's
"Most FAQs aren't really Frequently Asked Questions. Most of the time, they're questions someone thinks might be asked at some point, and they want to be ahead of the game.

Q: Who let the dogs out?
A: Get the hell out of my office."

Just in case anyone ever cares one way or the other about these things, here's my NAQ. Yes, I'm incredibly bored at work today. (Note: All links in the headlines below here just go to fullmoon.pitas.com, there doesn't seem to be a default empty link thing to go with the headlines.)

Wednesday, May 2, 2001
Who are you?
I'm Jennifer. I'm currently a student at UC Davis (albeit not for much longer after June 2001, getting degrees in design and English) and a reporter at the local newspaper. I also have a homepage, but it's kinda insane and not updated nearly as often as this one. The halfassed, rarely updated journal is at Elgonquin. In the event you want to contact me for some reason, this e-mail address will probably work even after graduation: jennifer@elgonquin.com

Wednesday, May 2, 2001
So why the title?
I originally called it "Whatever" (which you can see in the first few archives) because (a) I use that word a lot, (2) that word summarized what kind of stuff I'd link to and (d) I was being fairly lazy. After I finally found time to change the visuals and other things here, I decided the name wasn't weird enough (I tend to like blogs with really odd names). I was going to go with deceptively packaged (see the top of your browser), but that just sounded too predictable. That kinda referred to how people always say I look normal until I open my mouth. Finally I went with a similar-but-not-quite reference- namely, my ex always referring to me as "sweet and innocent"- to kind of get more er, deceptive with the title. Yes, the blog's all pink and purple and blue pretty girly, but inside? Yay sarcasm!

Wednesday, May 2, 2001
Does your ex know about your using this?
I highly doubt it, but he probably wouldn't care. The chances of him getting off of EverQuest and reading it are like a million to one.

Wednesday, May 2, 2001
Why fullmoon?
It's my nickname. Usually just moon. I registered on pitas before thinking of an official name. Eh, what the hell.

Wednesday, May 2, 2001
Why the totally twisted/weird/lame/psychedelic/pick your own adjective here design?
(Note: My design degree is in clothing and textiles, NOT graphic design. I would have liked to have done more graphic design, but the major is impacted up the ass worse than any fabled gerbil, and if anyone's getting into graphics these days they must have sold their soul to the devil.)

I liked the general layout that pitas gives you, but was completely bored with the backgrounds. So I originally was trying to do this odd sketch of colored lines flying around for the background. Then I started fuddling with Photoshop filters and ended up liking it blurred into a whirlpool better. I put that on as the background, but then thought the blocked part looked boring, so I swapped colors and shrunk the first whirlpool. I'm not sure if it's completely awful webpage design or not, but I wanted something strange and colorful so it works for that. And it's readable. Maybe I'll change it at some point.

Wednesday, May 2, 2001
Why did you decide to do a weblog when approximately 5 billion people are doing them?
Because I think I'm a clone now...okay, okay. Since surfing the web has basically become my favorite hobby (it's like being locked in a really weird library overnight, only the material comes from everywhere), I tend to find a helluva lot of weird links. I went around bookmarking them, but didn't really do anything other than reread them on occasion. In the meantime, my bookmark file is/was huge. So I figured a weblog would be the perfect use for this stuff.

Wednesday, May 2, 2001
What kinds of stuff do you put in here? What's your criteria?
If I read it and think this could be something good to share, it goes in. That's it. No regular beat covered here, just completely random weirdness. Stuff that's likely to come up includes feminist stuff, reality TV, net toys, bizarre news and thoughtful articles, and the totally silly. Everything usually is reviewed twice before I put it in to make sure it's interesting. Links are pretty much from all over the damn place. Even I don't recall where I found them.

Occasionally, I will do a special themed weblog page in which all the links are related to a particular topic, such as comics. This basically occurs when I find a ton of similar links around the same period of time.

And I've started doing this occasional column to practice up in the event that I ever get an official one.

Wednesday, May 2, 2001
How do you put this thing together?
I usually browse my favorite sites in the early mornings and do some more searching when I get home from work/school. (And some at either of those places when there's downtime.) I pretty much start reading, go "Ooh!" and e-mail the URL to myself quickly before moving on. I end up with this huge pile of links (estimated 15-30 before I put them up) after a few days/week, so when I get to posting I review what they all are again. In the event you feel like sending me a link, I'll probably read it (unless it crashes the computer or something), but I won't promise that it'll get up.

Updates are sporadic because I'm busy a lot of the time (they tend to go up on weekends though), so I recommend signing up for ye olde mailing list.

Wednesday, May 2, 2001
How many hits do you get?
No idea. I don't have a referrer log, I don't have a counter, I don't keep track beyond who's on the mailing list (which so far is quite small). I'm trying to avoid turning into a hit slut. I figure that if I see it's a big number of people I'll be totally shocked, and bummed out if it's like, two. So why find out?

Wednesday, May 2, 2001
How come you don't credit where you found links like the cool webloggers do?
(Example for those who don't know what I mean: "Link found via some fabulous blog")

Several reasons:

1. I really just don't keep track of where I find stuff- usually I'm cutting and pasting links into an e-mail for storage and finding them days later. By then, who knows where they came from, since I'm usually too busy to make a note of origin. At some point I'll probably get around to adding more sites (particularly weblog ones) I visit regularly, you can probably guess that some came from those.

2. I'm not at all sure I see the point of citing a link, actually. At work and in school, I'm very good about citing original ideas, quotes, etc. because those are original. But in all honesty, I could have found that link anywhere, and the weblogger that posted it probably found that anywhere, or off someone else. It's not an original idea kind of thing, so it doesn't seem too important to me to do that. I've heard people do it so they'll show up in referrer logs and get more hits, which I guess makes more sense, but that's not terribly important to me. If this is a real problem for you that I don't cite, go ahead and e-mail me as to why I should and I'll perhaps reconsider.

Wednesday, May 2, 2001
Are you completely weird?
Well, I know a lot of people who would beat me for sheer weirdness, most of whom live in Berkeley (no, I don't know the author of that page, but it's a perfect example of Berkeley weirdness). However, I do get a lot of stuff like the aforementioned "You look normal until you open your mouth" and "Do you know that you're weird?" The latter receives answers such as:
(a) Duuuuuuuuh.
(b) No, really? My God, I never knew that! Thank you so much for telling me! I'll straighten up and become normal right now!