Building the Mystery

The girl gave me a good boot in the ass, and I actually spent some time trying to engineer the Next New Thing. That's my SM community web portal, and the good boot in the ass was a figurative one, not a literal one. I'm keeping the domain to myself until it's ready for use. The initial plan was to take an exisiting PHP portal framework, and tweak it a bit, and give it a go. In thinking more about the database side of things, I've backed off on that.

What's going to make or break the site is the quality and power of the database model. So, that's the focus for now. It's not as much fun, because there is less to look at right now. This approach will yield better results, though. I want a solid database of kink which can then be accessed in a variety of ways: through a web site, through WAP, through XML... It just makes sense to seperate the data cleanly from the presentation. It also helps that I'm a database guy.


Too much information

I'm not an exhibitionist. Really. I swear.

Not in the literal since, anyway. Maybe I'm an online exhibitionist. I suppose anyone who blogs and talks about their personal life is a bit of one. I do tend to push further than most and address some very personal things, like sex. And talking about sex, at least in this country, is considered an impolite thing. Nice people don't do that. It's poor taste to talk about sexual activities. That would probably make writing about sexual activities on the web in really bad taste.

Sometimes I think it would make sense to have two blogs. One blog could be a vanilla version of nosuch, and the other could have all the SM stuff. Right now, there's so many disparate topics here: Clan Lord, relationships, game design, programming, divorce, web design, attempts at humor, and SM. What a mess that is. No one is possibly going to want to read about all those topics. So, should I splinter nosuch?

One of the reasons I started nosuch was to chronicle my efforts to get my life together. I mean "together" in an almost literal way. For the longest time, my life has been little boxes: the married box, the job box, the SM box, the gamer box. Those boxes made me less of a whole person in the end. The past two years have been about destroying the boxes, and become an integrated person. A man who does what he loves, a man who is what he loves.

Nosuch is all that. It's a big, weird mess of interests. Just like me. And no one has to like all of me, except me. So I don't mind if you skip over the programming posts, or the Clan Lord posts, or the SM posts. There are friends who I never even mention SM, or Clan Lord, or geek stuff. I can get a sense when I am with someone of which side of me to reveal. In a blog, I can't do that. So the burden of filtering goes on the reader. The only way to avoid that is to splinter the blog, but if I were to do that, I'd be taking the priority away from expressing who I am as a person. Instead of having a blog which tries to mirror who I am, I'd be getting back into boxes again.

Right now SM is a huge part of my life. Thus, there's a lot of writing about it. I also am strongly driven to share what I do, because I think it can educate and help people. I already know of a few lives that have been touched in a positive way by this silly little blog. If I were to close the door to my SM life for the sake of discretion, I'd be turning my back on people who are looking for guides along their own personal road of discovery.

If there was just one person who comes here and discovers that there actually are people who have SM as an active part of their lives, and that gives them hope to pursue that part of themselves, then good taste be damned. Someone's got to talk about this stuff. Might as well be me.

Obviously, some people might decide there's just not enough stuff here that interests them to warrant a return visit. No offense taken if you feel that way. Just don't slam the door too loudly on your way out out of consideration for those who are staying to enjoy the show. For those who linger because there is some stuff you enjoy, I appreciate your patience and tolerance. So far, there's no conclusive evidence that visiting the site of a kinkster will make you kinky, even if you don't avert your eyes at the kinky stuff.
posted 11:14 PM | link |