identity expression diversion egress

Introduction
A story
Until now
Navigating my site
Why me
DIY
Disclaimer
Introduction

This is my home page, and I am Michael Grasso. It has been a while since I've ventured onto the web with my own little pocket of personal expression. This is all brand new. Brand new content, brand new graphics, and so on.

So what is there to say? Oh yeah, my history on the web.

A story

Almost three years ago, I was introduced to web design by a friend of mine, Scott Tribble. He had been working on a web page for some time. Since I had been surfing the web that entire school year, I was intrigued at the opportunity of making a web page of my own.

It didn't take much. My first web page was nothing more than a collection of links, hastily arranged into some sort of state approaching order. The sites I liked, I'd link to.

Granted, this became kind of boring after a while. After all, there really wasn't anything of interest on that site; it was just links. So I took the page down my sometime in my senior year, and didn't think about it any more.

Until now

Until, of course, I got a job that actually involved the web, and got interested in utilizing the skills I had learned and honed on the job for a page of my own, again. So I began thinking about ways of making this one a bit more interesting and/or pertinent to me, myself, as a person. I hope this new site works, in that regard.

Navigating my site

So I split up my page up into four constituent conceptual parts, in order to try to preserve a personal angle for the site. Here they are:

  • identity is stuff about me. It's full of personal information, history, my resume, and much more.

  • expression is stuff I've made. Stories, musings, anything else creative.

  • diversion is stuff I like that I've brought to the web site. These could be anything from song lyrics to poems to quotations from novels and movies.

  • egress is the way to access links to sites I use a lot. Maybe they can tell you about me as much as the other sections.

Oh, a small note. The little quotations below the title of each of these sections are from Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace, a novel that changed my life. If you want to know more about it, go to diversion and check out what I have to say.

Why me

A web site sure is one of the purest forms of egoism, as a friend of a friend once said. I don't know whether I'm interesting or not, but if for no other reason, I'm doing this site for me.

Granted, this time last year I had big-time cynicism for the state of the web. Corporations were making the web their own, as style conquered substance and how a site looked was far more important than the quality of the content. With this happening, I blinked off the web, never to be seen again.

DIY

That's what I thought, but I've realized that the DIY ethic of the web never went anywhere, it's just been eclipsed by the influence of those monstrous corps. I don't intend to accept advertising right now, or any other subsidization (not that I'm sure anybody would even want to advertise of course) because it's all about doing it yourself. "It" may be lame, or uninteresting, but at least it's yours.

To add to that, I'd like to state that none of the HTML on this site was done using any sort of HTML editor.

Disclaimer/What's new

I make no claims that any link you may follow on these pages will be filled with content at this point.

...But! Here's what's new:

  • Plunked down a page detailing the many role-playing games I'm participating in.

Last updated: March 9, 2000

This The Randomness of RATMM site owned by mgrasso.
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