Now that our inaugural post is out of the way, I wanted to post some general miscellany about the site, just to satisfy any curiosities.

Origins of a nonsensical name

I first had the idea for Quantum Lens Cap in early February. I had purchased my Holga the month prior, which got me thinking a great deal about creative expression and how I could make the act of creating art a more regular occurrence in my everyday life. The “Holga lifestyle” suggests that one should carry his Holga with him at all times, taking photos on a whim. While that sounded great, I didn’t want to limit it to my Holga. I wanted to stop thinking about making art—musical, visual, verbal, or otherwise—as a special event I had to plan for or think about very much. Instead, I wanted to be prepared for when inspiration struck, to photograph and write about the world around me without hesitation.

Around the same time, I met a very talented local artist—the first artist I had met in four years. The remarkable thing about her was that she seemed to embody this creative lifestyle I was aspiring towards. Seeing her pursue an actual career in painting and illustration—a chance I was never willing to take with my music—only reminded me how desperately I wanted to bring my art back to the forefront in my life.

All of a sudden, I was writing more poetry, working on material for a new musical project, doing graphic design work for friends, and taking scores of photos; I was the most creative I had been in years. More than that, I started to feel an optimism and excitement that I hadn’t felt in a long time. As I told one friend, it was like coming out of a cave and discovering that there was light outside.

It was this artistic and emotional renewal that led me to the idea of Quantum Lens Cap. For me, it’s always easier to remain focused on creative projects when there is an audience for the resultant work other than myself. Quantum Lens Cap would be the medium through which I would communicate to my audience, that is, you.

Unfortunately, at that stage, all I had was a vague idea for a site. What I needed was a name—something to use as a guide. Considering my Holga’s role in this whole mess, it seemed like the new site’s name should have something to do with that. After about thirty seconds of brainstorming, I came up with Green Plastic Lens Cap, a reference to my Holga’s—wait for it—green plastic lens cap. I mentioned the name to a friend; he liked the Lens Cap bit, but suggested that I choose something more abstract than Green Plastic. We threw around some ideas until I eventually settled on Quantum, which sounded cool and was also a nod to my scientific/logical side.

There you have it. Quantum Lens Cap doesn’t really mean anything. It’s just an amalgam of words representing the left and right sides of my brain, and even that was probably an accident. I chose it ’cause I liked the sound of the words and the domain was available. The words themselves imply nothing about the content of the site.

What I hate about blogs, or Why commenting is disabled

You may notice that the layout of this site lacks many standard blog elements; there is no sidebar, no calendar widget, no blogroll, no trackback URLs, and no mechanism allowing you to post comments. I don’t see the point. Most of that stuff is just visual noise, and the rest of it can be supplanted with email. Sure, I may lose the “Web 2.0,” community-driven, the-consumer-is-also-the-producer sort of stuff, but I’m okay with that. It’s been my experience that most comments on blogs are absolute drivel. Neglecting comment spam, most blog comments are either in the “Great post!” or “Your[sic] retarded” variety or miss point of the post entirely. These comments tend to obscure the more interesting ones, the ones that are actually insightful and add something meaningful to the discussion.

I’m interested in exchanging ideas, but I don’t want to deal with all the garbage that blog comments introduce. If you have a comment about any content on this site, please email me. If I think your comment is of general interest, I’ll update the site accordingly.

What I did and didn’t steal from Daring Fireball

There’s a wonderful Mac-oriented blog out there called Daring Fireball, written by John Gruber. It’s one of my favorite sites on the web. If you take a look at it, you might notice some similarities between that site and mine. I admit it, I stole some ideas from him, but not as much as you might think. Here’s what I stole:

• The layout of the Archives index
• The idea for the Contact page
• The search box at the bottom of every page
• The Previous and Next links at the bottom of archived posts
• The lack of a timestamp on each post

That’s it. I have a Colophon because I’m a font dork. I chose Verdana as the site’s font because there aren’t a lot of other good humanist sans-serifs that work well on Mac, Windows, Linux, and iPhone. Other typographic similarities are probably due to the fact that John and I have both read Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style. As for the color scheme, the idea for a pale-grey-on-dark-grey was actually from a discarded web design that a friend and I made for another site. Beyond that, my site is quite a bit more colorful than Daring Fireball, though I suppose it’s hard not to be.

Anyway, I just wanted to give credit where credit was due.

I think that’s it for this rather long post. I’ll be posting some poetry/artwork/music clips soon, so be on the lookout for that. I’m off.