mahiwaga

I stupidly drank some Vietnamese iced coffee about 3 hours ago, and I’m wired and jittery and all over the place. I have to wake up in less than 6 hours to get ready for work.

And here I am, tap, tap, tapping away at the keyboard, whiling my time away working on this blog.

Wonderful.

I can’t seem to figure out a good layout for this blog. I hate all the non-fluid designs they have out there, but it’s ridiculous to have a completely fluid design when I can maximize my browser window to 1680x1050. No one reads lines of text that are that long.

The ideal solution would be to have fluidity up to a point. I figure most people are viewing at 1024x768 or maybe 1280x960. With good CSS settings for whitespace, I figure that should be comfortable for most people.

I’m also trying to figure out what the best way to make the sidebar less busy would be. I kind of dig the Hemmingway theme that is running rampant across the internets, but I’m finding the stylesheets and the actual HTML somewhat opaque and not easy to futz with. I like the idea of putting all that crap in the footer. I’m almost considering a big Web 2.0 no-no: frames. (The very thought sends shivers up and down my spine. Frames are almost as reviled as bestiality and incest by most sane people.)

Another idea would be a dynamic sidebar, where the default would be completely collapsed, with maybe three or four words on the sidebar, but you could expand each one as you so desired.

I want something similarly uncluttered as today.maganda.org (not to be confused with Maganda Magazine, a literary magazine published by Filipino Americans at UC Berkeley. Apparently they don’t own the magandamagazine.org domain anymore, but they do have a Myspace profile. How very Web 2.0.)

Wow. Now I’m kind of bummed. Did they manage to save the archives that me, Julie, and Sarah worked on? [the first conception][the last working iteration] Ah well. I wonder if I can yank the content from the Wayback Machine? It’ll be a copyright nightmare, though.

Hey, does this count as flight-of-ideas?

Anyway. I’m still obsessing over Tolkien and Middle Earth these days. I am now totally enthralled by the First Age. I’ve always had a soft spot for the story of Beren and Lúthien, but I found Túrin Turambar someone I could relate to (not the incest part, just the part about how everything he does, no matter how well-intentioned, turns out to be a tremendous disaster) and I found the Fall of Gondolin especially moving.

And of course there is the Flight of Eärendil. Coming on the heels of finishing Final Fantasy XII, I like imagining that Vingelot was an airship, and Aman was a floating continent, like Bhujerba.

In fact, I’ve ended up stealing re-imagining the whole episode, where the ship is in fact a starship, although Eärendil is still looking for the Gods to save the world from total destruction. This time, he’s got the Trickster God with him. And instead of a Silmaril, they’ve got a gate that lets them travel through hyperspace. And it has occurred to me that it would be quite fitting that Círdan and Cid ought to be somehow related. (Círdan was not a name, but a title meaning Shipwright. His real name was apparently Nowë, which is disturbingly similar to Noah, famous for his ship.)

Naturally, Google ends up spitting out an article about how Vingelot may well have been a starship after all.

Thinking about Middle Earth, I then spot the obvious allusions found in <p>The Wizard of Earthsea</p> by Ursula K Le Guin. The Quenya word for universe is Eä, and the first island created by Segoy in Earthsea is called Éa.

Then there is the story of the sinking of Soléa and the death of Queen Elfarran and King Morred (and for some reason I have the image of a sea gull in my mind—I am perhaps merely confusing the story with Eärendil and Elwing from <p>The Silmarillion</p> ) which, while obviously based on the story of Atlantis, also seems to be a homage to the sinking of Númenor. (Just as the Kings of Númenor, and of Arnor and Gondor are descended from Eärendil and Elwing, the Kings of Havnor are descended from Morred and Elfarran.)

And I suddenly think of Earthsea as an alternate version of Arda, where perhaps the Númenorians were powerful enough to actually beat the Valar, and they end up turning Aman into the Dry Land.

It’s getting later and later, and I still can’t get to sleep.

The actual reason why I started writing was because of how I started thinking about the walls that I’ve managed to build around my soul.

No one can touch me. And I have no way of reaching out.

I can’t help but think of Masamune’s swords that are folded more than four million times, making them nearly indestructible.

This is the kind of convoluted defense that wraps around my heart.

I’m not even going to wonder where life it going to lead me. It’s coming at me fast enough as it is.