I'm Ratan, bitch!

In Brief

that's me as a Simpsons character.

My name is Ratan. Except when it's not. Ratan is a pseudonym. What's my real name? None of your business! Ratan was the snuff film producing villain in Paul Schrader's 1979 movie Hardcore (aka "The Hardcore Life" in its UK release). I chose the name Ratan because I misunderstood a line of dialogue. When the sleazy private dick, played by Peter Boyle, is talking to the father, played by George C. Scott, he tells him that "the man who can get you (snuff films, slaves, assassinations, etc, etc) is called Ratan." Stupid me didn't realize he actually meant named Ratan, so I thought there might be a real figurehead out there called Ratan in every big city that did unspeakable horrors. I even did a search at a Shakespeare database looking for Ratan, thinking that, much like Shylock, Ratan might have been a demon-type character in one of The Bard's plays.

Of course, if my dumb-ass would have Googled Ratan, I would have discovered it is a common first name of Indian descent (that's Asian Indian, not Native American Indian). I doubt any of this is a shock, and it's not like there are women out there who will be crushed to learn I'm not some exotic looking Indian dude, but actually a pasty, geeky White boy. But anyway, it's still a nice, if somewhat obscure, ref to a movie villain. Anybody who can stomach it needs to see Hardcore. It kind of reminds me of Taxi Driver, but is different enough to stick out on its own.

I was born in a small town that's south of Canada, but north of Florida. Try to guess where it is! I still live in this town. Will probably come to die in this town. There's kerosene around, etc, etc.

If you want to know some of the music I listen to, authors I read, movies I watch, etc, etc, click the influences button at left. Or click here, if you're lazy.

As far as sports go, I'm a huge supporter of The Pittsburgh Pirates, Pittsburgh Steelers and Pittsburgh Penguins. And no, I don't live in Pittsburgh. That said, now that the Steelers are out of the 2007-08 playoffs, I'm pulling for whoever is not The New England Patriots. Thankfully the Cowboys have already lost, so I won't have to root for them, but I would have, given the difficult choice.

The single most crushing disappointment of my life was in late 1991 (or was it early 92?). I had to write a report on South Carolina in a Geography class (why I picked SC, I don't know). Anyway, I wanted to call the tourism board for brochures, and thought "Hey, if North Carolina's number was 1-800-Visit-NC, then South Carolina must be, HAS TO BE 1-800-Visit-SC." Sadly, this number put me through to a Howard Johnson's motel. Probably one that isn't anywhere close to South Carolina. Live and learn...

Something that grinds my gears are the idiots on Flickr who upload "spaceball" pictures. If you don't want people downloading your pics, don't upload them to Flickr, dumb-ass! There used to be a way around this, but this feature has been disabled. Dag-nabbit!

I do not believe in the concept of idols or heroes, at least as far as human beings go. Once I had a story published I was approached by an indignant classmate who thought my characters and my own beliefs were one in the same. While this was a negative reaction, I would have felt just as weird if somebody idolized me for the same story (especially since it wasn't one of my better ones). That said, I do feel that I've had some influences over the years, both positive and negative. Or not really. Tongue in cheek list follows:

On the other hand, there are quite a few celebrities, artists and random people on who I'd like to push the history erase button. I would name all of them, but I don't have the energy (or the bandwidth), but Karl Marx, Eve Ensler and all of their followers would be good candidates for the first great purge. And really, the roots of all bad ideas, including communism, radical feminism and queer theory, can be traced back to Uncle Karl. So eliminating him would take care of all of my enemies.

Ratan loves the ladies. Especially cowgirls and geeks. While most men go for schoolgirls and French maids (boring clichés that most likely come from lousy porn), I like cowgirls and geeks, especially geeks. Sure, they're called "Emo" today, but it doesn't change the fact they're the same trifling, bookish geek girls I've had a love/hate relationship with since grade school. My current crushes are Zooey Deschanel, Natali del Conte and Brookers.

Ratan loves da ladies

Image stolen from Tatsuya Ishida's Sin Fest

Geek History

If you will indulge me for a few short moments, I will give you a brief overview of my history with web pages and html.

Unlike most people in the past six or so years, my history with web pages did not start out with blogging. Far from it. I'll say a few words that might not mean anything to some people, but if you were online around 96-2000, you're painfully aware: GeoCities, Tripod, Xoom, FortuneCity... Need I go on? Those who remember these services know they were barebones at best, and an absolute pain in the ass at worse. Most of their pages were littered with adverts and JavaScript was considered a luxury (this was around 1997 or so). But to keep this from sounding like an old man "When I was your age!" story, most of us didn't know much better and liked them anyway.

The very first "web page" if you can call it that, was hosted on Geocities back around August of '96. I don't even remember everything I posted, I think it was one small page, with a brief blurb about the actives I enjoy and a few links to CNN and a couple of bands I liked at the time. I vaguely remember something about a picture of a local lake I stole from my ISP at the time. In a few weeks I had forgotten about this page and Geocities deleted it. Doesn't really matter, I'd be embarrassed to claim it as my own. I put it together using the html editor that came with Netscape 2.0 Gold (they called it gold because it came with this editor, mail and newsgroups). If you think Mozilla Composer is bad these days, you should have seen that thing.

I don't remember which page came next. I'm not even sure where I hosted it (my mind says Tripod for some reason), but it was more fully flushed out. Still had a fugly layout (I didn't even know what tables were at the time), but I do remember experimenting more with writing code by hand. At the time I had a shareware html editor (don't remember the name) and once the time limit ran out, I went to Tucows to see if they had anything decent for free. My innocent mind didn't know I could just as easily use Notepad, but since I was spoiled by context highlighting, I doubt I would have settled for that anyway. I would only settle for editors that had a Five Cow rating and what I found was Arachnophilia. I know this because up until a few years ago, when I switched over to Mac, I used this editor non-stop.

After this I made a Smashing Pumpkins page that I uploaded to a directory separate from my personal files (something that everybody does now, but that was new to Tripod). I did it for the same reason I'm doing these pages, and... well, every page I do, because it's fun and like to do it. Sure, I couldn't compete with any of the Pumpkin sites that had professional hosting and a domain name (something that cost a whole helluva lot of money back then). But who cares? It was just fun to type the information in see my work online. I had a few friends online who liked my work, and likewise, I liked theirs, so it didn't matter that other people didn't know my page existed. In the attention whore world of the blogosphere, that's a very refreshing attitude to have.

It was the middle of '98 before I actually put some more care into how my web pages look. After reading a review of Macromedia's Dreamweaver 1.0 in a computer magazine at school, I visited the homepage when I got home and immediately downloaded it (on a 33.6 modem). Soon I also downloaded Fireworks. I went and had a bit of serial and toast, then I came back to my desk and tried my hand at image creation. And I failed miserably. But it was still fun to make funky graphics that would change on mouseovers. Even recoding with Dreamweaver was a pleasant experience, especially compared to the funky mark-up I had to deal with when editing pages created with the old Netscape editor (it was up to version 3 now).

I also discovered CSS around this time. By late '99 I was still programming pages the old fashioned way, but as browser implementation of CSS grew, I started abandoning nested tables (with dozens of spacer.gif images) and the dreaded font tag for something much easier. Of course, most of these sites were wasted on frames (something the W3 should have never allowed), but it's not like I'm the only one who made this mistake.

Enter the Blogosphere

I was a late bloomer in the world of blogging. I saw my first blog in the summer of '00 and quickly became addicted. People who I barely knew were telling about their lives, and favorite songs, etc. At this time, I still hadn't been introduced to the poison that is the political side of the blogosphere and was all the happier for it. Even before politics zapped my love of blogging, I started to get bored with it. I assumed most people would give up this fad, but by 2002 personal homepages were gone, and blogs were released in their stead. The movement didn't go away, it just spread like AIDS in Africa.

Of course, this didn't stop me from joining in with both feet sliding into the slime pit. It only took me a year to get out of that. And six more months to get back in (albeit with far less politics than previous). Then I realized, again, this wasn't much fun and wanted out. When you have a blog, you need to post on a daily basis. That is, if you care what others think and want to be a "success."

While I like some blogs, most of them are a chore to get through and, overall, I think blogging has ruined the WWW part of the internet. There are many great bloggers who blog with little or no recognition. The truly great ones among these don't care that thousands of people a day are not flooding their server. They blog for love, not narcissism. There are some personal blogs that are great AND get a whole hell of a lot of traffic. And lastly, we have the the idiots that nobody reads and in response the author whines like a little bitch. These people are so convinced their words are gold, and the information they're imparting (usually the same thing you can read on half a dozen other blogs) is so important that they just HAVE to be read by everybody, less the world will implode. These people are the true cancer of the blogosphere (and web message boards as well).

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to get anybody to ditch their blog and take the time to write their own personal home page. I'm just reminiscing about the past. One that was never perfect, but was more fun for both creator and consumer, at least from where I stand. Those who disagree and enjoy blogging should obviously continue on doing what they enjoy best. Just try not to whine like a little bitch when your traffic doesn't match that of <insert name of today's most visited blog here>

So, with those little bits of information out of the way, you can continue on to another section. Or close your web browser. The chose is yours.

Ratan
January 2007 (with ever so slight updates ever since)

Creative Commons License
This momentous autobiography is published under a Creative Commons Licence.

 

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