DREWspective

The last couple of months have been very stressful. As well as moving houses, dealing with shenanigans involving the end of the tax year, late nights and trying to balance many other things, I’ve been surrounded by a number of people who specialise in not helping. But here I am.

With regards to DREWspective: I’ve had this weblog up for about three or four years now, and it’s dawned on me that my posts suck. I’ve seen other people’s weblogs, and I have nowhere near the level of skill that they have in communicating their thoughts. I’ve also gone over some past posts and am embarrassed at some of the things I’ve written.
So you’ll notice that many of them have gone. I went through the entire list and deleted a whole bunch of them just now. If you’re one of these extremely sad, oh-so-fulfilled people who likes to dig up history and use it as ammo whenever they’re stuck for an actual defence, my old posts will unwittingly still be in cyberspace somewhere.

As intended, DREWspective is going in a new direction. I’ll still be voicing my opinions (as it’s my f***ing site), but there’s going to be a lot more great content. I’ll be featuring artwork and Lego creations from other people as well as myself, and just about anything I think is really cool.
But I didn’t feel comfortable going in a new direction without a graphical makeover. Even though the site design looks very simple, it’s quite tough to make a WordPress template… especially when using someone else’s as a reference!

2011 always felt like it was going to be scary, and so far things have gone wildly out of control. This is as good a time as any to restart and try again.

Without going into any detail about what happened today, I was reminded of what James Brown said when he appeared on The Jerry Springer Show many years ago:

You can’t be too tall to fall.

Even with almost seven years experience in my field (almost two as a freelancer), I keep making elementary mistakes. Pretty much my whole life is characterised by screwing up – usually with disastrous results. Part of it is idiosynchrasy; the rest I put down to “high school” mentality, mostly in other people.

A better resource than I could ever create comes in The Fine Art of Making Mistakes by someone named Dragos. The article acknowledges that making mistakes isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but overcoming them is essential.

I will add that there are always people around – probably engrossed in the “high school” mentality – who’ll never let you live your mistakes down. They’ll talk about you behind your back, and occasionally throw past mistakes in your face.
Some people just don’t want you to succeed (and sometimes it feels like they’re everywhere), but we can overcome them by constantly learning and improving. One thing I’ve noticed is that those same people are happy with staying the same, and usually winging it; they’re not interested in changing themselves.

As Charles “Tremendous” Jones allegedly once suggested:

We were not born to make right or wrong decisions. We were born to make decisions, then make them right.

I’ve voiced my opinions on society’s perceptions of strengths and weaknesses, the fear of being wrong, the danger of saying “no”, making mistakes and many other things. One area I’ve never been able to conquer is in taking different levels of criticism.
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[ originally posted Oct 29, 2008 @ 12:33 ]

I came home to even more dead fish in my fish tank. I’d lost a few fish the previous night, and I was still upset about the incident.

At first I thought the fish were being violent toward each other, which didn’t make sense – all the fish in the tank were known to be peaceful species. I did see one rainbowfish nuzzle (or even nip) at another, however.

So I began to do a water change, and I came across a disgusting bug-like creature at the bottom of the tank…
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