make-believe.org

About the author

Photo of this author

Joseph Pearson is a sometime writer, sometime programmer, sometime agitator, hailing from the largest and most nervous of antipodean isles.

You can contact me simply by clicking on this link.

Colophon

make-believe.org is marshalled by a blogging script of my own device, rendered in Perl. It doesn't have a name, and it isn't for distribution I'm afraid. The website is designed and marked up in XHTML and CSS, two modern standards that assist greatly in separating data from design (and therefore in building more easily maintained, and more reusable, content).

The site is hosted by the ace people at nearlyfreespeech.net, whom I cannot recommend more highly as webhosts. Seriously, this site costs me bugger all.

FAQ

In spite of this being the Frequently Asked Questions section of make-believe.org, no-one has ever asked me these questions. But I know you wanted to, so here's your answers.

make-believe? What's make-believe about this site?

In 1997 I began compiling various written pieces with the intention of publishing them as a short story collection with an overarching narrative. The collection was to be called make:believe -- the title comes from the piece in the collection that I wrote first, when I was 16 or so: the imitation of icarus. I have a love/hate relationship with the site's name; the component words are among the most powerful I can think of, but, compounded, they deliver an admittedly twee outcome. Anyway, the colon was substituted for a hyphen at the whim of Internic. If you're looking for babies' toys or some shit, lose the dash.

Damn. Who took that photograph?

That photograph was taken by Ashley Gilbertson.

What do you mean by emdashbedotto or 'dotto?

'dotto is the shortened form of emdashbedotto. emdashbedotto is the verbalisation of m-b.o. m-b.o is acronymic of make-believe.org. Bet you feel silly now, huh?

Where do I know you from?

In cyberspace? Um, well, presently you're visiting one of several websites I cultivate. I'm the technical director (call me web-monkey) of melbs.org, a mp3 review site concentrating on the vibrant, diverse Melbourne music scene. You may know me as the admin of the long since defunct mutation device. After that I did some coding for a NASA project, among other things, with the boys of Perilith. And later I was the AI programmer for a cult computer game called Devastation. You'll find pretty pictures of both on this page. In the physical world? I swear to god I've never seen you before in my life.

I want to know more about you.

Not a question, but try my old-skool home on the web.

Why doesn't this site support [insert basic blog feature here]?

Because the perl scripts that generate this site are hand-sewn. Why? Will you accept a blank stare? No? Okay, to tell you the embarrassing truth, at the time I developed this iteration of emdashbeedotto, I didn't realise that Movable Type was free software. I know. For some reason I thought you had to pay forty bucks for it.

Anyway, I have a list of features to add to this site, but I'm quite busy these days. Definitely near the top of the list is an RSS feed. Also, comment previews, for those of you who are imperfect the first time around. This site will never support Trackback, because I've tried and I've tried, and I still fail to see the point. But seriously, if you think there's some feature this site would benefit from, email me and let me know. It'd only take one email to put it on my todo list. Two, and it goes to the top. Three, and I'll do it tomorrow.

Why have you turned comments off?

Because this site's spam protection was always the virtue of being different. In order to hit me with an automatic spam robot, you had to do your research — you couldn't just do what you did for the MovableType blog next door, for instance. That was great protection for about two years, then finally someone decided my PageRank was worth hacking.

So I've got to code up some spam protection. That's not very exciting, and I'm putting it off. Meantime, email me if you want to talk about something on the site.

Why is this FAQ so soporific?

I know. I'm impressed you made it this far. I gotta rewrite it one day.