Why Would I Write

  • Teething Problems

    Teething Problems

    There are many things we take for granted each day. And it’s only because we’ve been doing them our whole lives without having to change a thing. For example, walking, dribbling a ball, cycling, driving a car, and swimming. We can do all these things because we’ve been doing them for years. Muscle memory, they call it.

    One of the activities that fall under this category is typing. For my whole life until recently, I’ve been typing on regular keyboards. Though they have been in different sizes, they all maintained the standard 60% layout (number row on the top, QWERTY staggered layout, and modifiers accessible with both hands). I’m a touch typist, so for me to type, I rely heavily on muscle memory. However, that has changed recently with my acquisition of the Vortex Core – a 40% keyboard. For reference, here’s a picture of it:

    Ever since I started touch typing, I have been resting my fingers on the home row (ASDFGHJKL) – two rows below the number row on a keyboard. On regular keyboards, my method for finding the home row is touching the edge of the number row, and going down two rows. On the Core, this number row is missing, so I have to consciously make an effort to only move my hands down one row from the edge of the keyboard. Fortunately, typing letters on this keyboard is the least of my concerns. Without having to punctuate my texts, I can still hit my average of 70 words per minute.

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  • blorgy.net 3.0

    blorgy.net 3.0

    Some of you might have noticed that my blog has a new look now (it’s only obvious if you’re browsing on your desktop). Since I launched blorgy.net way back in 2007, I’ve only been through two revisions. The other day I was just thinking about changing up my site a bit since I had some funky keycaps which I could use to recreate my original logo and I just continued working on the site from there.


    blorgy.net 1.0

    I compressed the archives and categories section in the sidebar since I don’t think people use them too much, and they were getting a little too long for my liking (I can’t believe I’ve actually managed to keep this blog running for over ten years!). I added some social media buttons, removed dead links, and reduced the number of posts on the front page. I also added ‘related posts’ at the bottom of each post since I’ve got a wealth of posts to link to now (I’ve written over 700 posts to date). Hopefully it doesn’t link too many cringey posts.


    blorgy.net 2.0

    Overall, they aren’t huge changes, but I think the site looks a lot better now. Also, the color scheme is based on the Vortex Core keyboard (the keys in the logo are from the keyboard). I’m a big fan of its retro color scheme. The font used is Bryant Regular, which is similar to Gorton Modified (couldn’t find the font for that) – the font used on the legends of SA keycaps. Not sure if I managed to change all the elements of my site properly, but based on my initial checking, it seems fine. Let me know if I missed anything.

    Prior to this, I hadn’t touched CSS or HTML in a long time. I had to do tons of Googling for simple things like changing the background color. It’s crazy how much I didn’t know or remember! Anyway, it was a fun experience and I’ll probably make additional tweaks over the coming weeks if I think of anything else.

  • Generic Karaoke Videos

    One of the funniest things about the karaoke is the generic videos they create for songs that don’t have official videos. These generic videos usually consist of white people (usually attractive girls) running around beautiful scenery, doing random moves and maybe looking into the camera or staring into the distance. They never have anything to do with the songs, so it makes you wonder how such videos were conceptualized in the first place.

    Who thought those videos would be a wonderful idea? I’m pretty sure a lot of people thought they were good because they caught on. If they weren’t successful, there wouldn’t be so many of them around. Somebody definitely thought – hey! that’s a wonderful idea. They’re easy to shoot, and can be applied to any music video. And so the trend was born.

    After doing some digging, it turns out that these karaoke videos were commissioned by companies to circumvent copyright. Initially they were even weirder videos of random shit, but they were eventually replaced by the stock footage kind I was talking about. They were mostly low-budget and done by young, aspiring directors. Interesting read.

    Anyway, I don’t know why I decided to write about karaoke music videos today. I have a story idea about karaoke music videos though. It’s about a guy who goes karaoke singing one day and sees this extremely attractive girl in a karaoke music video. He falls in love with her and goes on a mission to find out who she is, so her can track her down and ask her out.