Earlier this week, GeoCities became officially unavailable, a few months since YaHoo! announced its closure. GeoCities began in the mid 1990’s providing free web hosting and later on, paid premium service. GeoCities was initially organized into “cities” or neighborhoods, such as Tokyo for anime and other Asian topics, or SiliconValley for tech topics. When Yahoo! acquired GeoCities in 1999, they switched from the neighborhood based URLs to a customized ones.

        I first learned of GeoCities in high school, around a couple of years after the city was introduced to the World Wide Web. I was fascinated with Yu Yu Hakusho then and I would research about the anime in the Net. Information regarding Yu Yu Hakusho, however, was limited and so I thought of creating my own YYH website. After deliberating which web host to use, I settled for GeoCities. I learned HTML and came up with a crude lay-out filled with marquees and Java applets (they were all the rage then). I couldn’t exactly remember that site’s URL but I think it was www.geocities.com/yyh_profiles.

        In college, I collaborated with two my my classmates to create another anime site: www.geocities.com/anime_list. Our site contained categorizations of anime characters such as those with cool hair, or those with cool weapons, etc. Later on, we put up fanarts and also wallpapers for download.

        Also in college, I decided to create my own personal blog. I knew of the existence of blogging services such as LiveJournal and blogger but I opted to put up my blog in GeoCities because it offered greater control. My HTML skills have somehow improved and I learned CSS so I wanted to try coming up with my own design. However, since GeoCities had no blogging framework, I had to manually arrange my pages such that the latest post comes first. I also had to use HaloScan for the commenting and trackbacking system. My blog was at www.geocities.com/disruptive_camouflage.

        Eventually, I grew tired of having to rearrange my pages each time I had a new post so I migrated my blog to WordPress. In fact, the oldest entries here came from my GeoCities blog. I still kept the GeoCities site and used it as a file server of sorts.

        It’s been almost a decade since I’ve used GeoCities and now, the popular free web hosting site has gone to the far reaches of cyberspace oblivion. It is understandable though why YaHoo! closed GeoCities. With the rising popularity of blogging services and the arrival of social networking sites (which too provide blogging services), GeoCities has fallen out of fashion and its userbase has shrunk. And besides, it’s not making money for YaHoo!, as Rupert Goodwins, editor of ZDNet, said, “I think GeoCities was the first proof that you could have something really popular and still not make any money on the internet.”

        The curtain has finally closed on GeoCities and some things will be missed forever. Well, goodbye Geocities! You have served me well.

        because I have no business there,
        I will sit on this chair
        here and wait
        until like paint, I will be a memory
        of white, flaking and sullied
        revealing the dark iron
        of which it was wrought.
        this chair speaks Art Nouveau
        communicating through curves
        and circles and convolutions.
        I will sit on this chair
        here and wait
        until my slouching disappears
        into its concave,
        a non-pièce-de-résistance
        as intended by its maker.

        a faint petrichor lingers
        around you, and i inhale,
        deeply to collect
        the dregs into my lungs.
        i will exhale into
        a glass jar, seal it
        tightly, and store it
        in a cool, dry place
        away from sunlight.
        because someday,
        you will disperse
        into the atmosphere
        and i don’t know
        if i should follow.

        My officemate invited me to join the 3rd Japanese Literature Challenge. All one has to do is to read and review a work of Japanese origin between July 30 until January 30, 2010. There are prizes to be given out, such as a Moleskine notebook and some books. (You can view the link above for more details.)

        Initially, I had no plans of joining but yesterday morning, I picked up Uehashi Nahoko’s Seirei no Moribito which lay unread on my shelf. Had the book been in English, I would’ve finished it long ago but it was in Japanese, and reading it was slow. Resolving to finish the book, it dawned on me that it could be my entry to the Japanese Literature Challenge too.

        Seirei no Moribito is the first book of the Moribito series. It was published as children’s literature (for which it has won several awards) but it has gained many adult readers. Seirei no Moribito was also published in English by Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic but that’s not what I’m going to read. More than the challenge of reading a work of Japanese origin is the challenge of reading a work of Japanese origin in it’s original language. So for me, this isn’t just a Japanese Literature Challenge but a Japanese Literature in Japanese Challenge.

        When I’m done with Seirei no Moribito, I’ll move on to Yami no Moribito which is the second book in the series. The Moribiro series aside, I’d also like to read Mouryou no Hako by Natsuhiko Kyogoku and some of Haruki Murakami’s works in Japanese.

Do Not Disturb! by Yoshimoto Nara

        A foray into watercolors.

        Picture yourself inside a white room. A medium-sized room, with stark white walls, a stark white floor and a stark white ceiling. On the ceiling are a couple of fluorescent lamps brilliant enough to illuminate the entire room with stark white light. Apart from being stark white, the room itself is stark — no windows, no furniture, not even a door. (And you wonder how you got to the room in the first place. Let’s just say you suddenly found yourself inside that room. Perhaps you apparated or teleported yourself there. But it does not matter. What matters is that you are inside the room).

        At first, you look around the room but there isn’t anything of interest to you. It is even difficult to delineate the floor from the walls, the walls from the ceiling. And so your eyes wander, like a tiny bird under a stark white sky searching for refuge. And for some reasons, you feel just like that bird — vulnerable.

        So you walk around the room, locate a corner and sit there with your back against the wall. You feel drowsy and eventually, you doze off. When you awake, you check your watch but you realize you haven’t got any. You feel like you’ve slept for hours but then it could have been only a few minutes. It could have been days too, or months, or years! You suddenly recall a story about a man who slept for a long long time after drinking some draught. What was his name? Ah, Rip Van Winkle! You remember reading that story when you were ten. You lick your lips expecting some aftertaste of draught. You feel a little thirsty but you can manage without water for now.

        You stand up and look around the room. Nothing’s changed. The floor, the walls, the ceiling and the light are as stark and as white as before. You hear a noise, a low incessant murmur like the whir of an air conditioning system or late night TV static. You cringe at the thought that even the noise in the background is white.

        You search the room for an exit. You scour every stark inch of it but you could not find any hidden door. You call for help. No one answers. You call again. Still no answer, just the ominous white noise. You begin to panic. Your heart beats faster. Beads of perspiration trace your temples. You shout. You scream. But the dry, hollow sound that came from your mouth dissipates into the walls.

        You try to hurl yourself against the wall hoping that it would give way but the wall stands firm. You fall. After a while, you stand and you ram and kick and claw and in a final fit of desperation, you succeed in punching a hole in the wall. Funny, you thought, it was rock-solid a while ago. You tear the wall down with your hands and emerge like a chick from an egg.

        You look around and find yourself in a room. A medium-sized room, with stark white walls, a stark white floor and a stark white ceiling. On the ceiling are a couple of fluorescent lamps brilliant enough to illuminate the entire room with stark white light. Apart from being stark white, the room itself is stark — no windows, no furniture, not even a door.

        I don’t know. Whenever I cast my line into the great sea of words, I get nothing.

        And yes, there is a great sea of words, not unlike an alphabet soup. But instead of letters swimming in its depths, there are words. The alphabet soup is the so-called primordial soup. After eons and eons of linguistic evolution, these letters have combined to form words. There are short words like “dog” and “it” and long words like “antidisestablishmentarianism” and “pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis”. And then there are non-words — letter combinations that have no soul, no meaning — nature’s failed experiments. Sometimes I get these non-words, slimy little things dangling at the end of my hook. I throw them back into the sea and cast my line again. I wait. But I get nothing, no words. No non-words. Nothing. Nothing. Just protracted silence.

        A friend once mentioned that some words begin to look strange when they are uttered in repetition. I too, have experienced that phenomenon not through utterance alone but also through contemplation. For instance, I hear a word and it echoes in my head, repeatedly, until it loses all vestiges of meaning. Recently, I learned the term for such phenomenon is jamais vu.

        According to Wikipedia, a word has three characteristics: it has a form or a shape, which is a composite of sounds or characters (when written); it has a function, which is how the word operates in a meaningful sentence (i.e. as a noun); and it has a meaning, which is the concept the word represents.

        When one repeats a word continuously, one is merely repeating its form. Initially, one is aware of the word’s function and meaning but without a sentence, the word loses its function. Without a sentence, there is also no context, and thus, the word loses its meaning.

********

        In psychology, jamais vu is said to be the opposite of déjà vu. While déjà vu is the perception that a present event has already occurred in the past, jamais vu is the perception that a past event is happening for the first time. A common experience would be someone not recognizing a place or a person that is already known.

        Jamais vu literally means “never seen” in French while déjà vu means “already seen”. A related term, presque vu, the “it’s -at-the-tip-of-my-tongue” phenomenon, translates as “almost seen”.

        doleful dolefin
        sad pineapplefish
        on the way to the cannery,
        a delmontefish

        For Illustration Friday (supposedly). Didn’t get to finish coloring this until yesterday.

        Last week’s theme was “wise”.