My name is Michael Armida, and this is the third Book of Rant; the third volume of my blog. To reintroduce the topic of this blog's organization, I try to introduce a new layout in concert with the changes in the theme of my life. As the years go by - and this year the blog will have been running for five such years - it becomes necessary to change the wrapping for my blathering. It's not all just fashion; sometimes the things in my life make the theme wholly irrelevant and inappropriate.

The current look and feel is called, unimaginatively, Dots! As of this writing, which comes a while after the first launch of the theme, the look and feel are again irrelevant and eclipsed by recent events. A bit of history is in order.

The last blog theme was Blog Bebop, my tribute background to Cowboy Bebop. I had the idea several years ago that my life was turning into a colorful series of mercenery expeditions into a silly, strange urban wilderness that sometimes could be as different as that on different planets. I was going to find adventure, and on a shoestring budget, because I was reborn single. Hence the borrowed episode title: Stray Dog Strut.

Time passed and my renewed enthusiasm went the way it always does. It was a bit brash for me to think that I could maintain that sort of attitude. I never do. Things came crashing down again a while later and I was stuck with the wrong theme once again.

I started working on a replacement theme. It took me about forty hours of work (probably because I'm bad with Photoshop), but I was very, very proud of what I came up with. Themed around The Gift by The Velvet Underground, I had made my blog into some sort of weird package from the underworld. It was all full of ripped cardboard, grease stains, and smudged pencil. It was called The Revenge of Waldo Jeffers.

In 2006, before the new theme went up, I met and fell in with a wonderful woman, Selena Ma. The portion of the exceedingly hot summer that we didn't spend eating at Daikokuya or drinking at El Carmen was spent cooped up in my little (east-) Hollywood apartment. I was broke from the constant fun budget, and had again postponed my goal to buy a new, fancy computer with RAIDed drives. This would prevent any sort of data loss on that machine.

One day my trusty digital companion died. Something popped when I hit the power button. Blackness. No POST, no nothing.

I decided I could live without the computer for a while. I thought I would wait until I was able to replace the whole thing instead of investing more cash into an ancient, dying Frankenstein of a computer. A while dragged on until it became unbearable, and I began to try to fix the beast.

I brought it back up four months later after a few hundred dollars and lots of work. Apparently the pop had to do with my hard drive; I had lost all my work on the Revenge layout, among some other painful things (most notably and laughably my several hundred hours in Morrowind.

I couldn't stand having the brazen look of the old blog anymore, so I decided to make something on the quick. This is what you get. At the time, things were colorful and fun and quirky.

Things have evolved rapidly. Selena has cut off communication with me, as I guess is the fashion for women I try to win back. I now live in a half-destroyed, half-remodeled ancient apartment in Koreatown. Eventually my best friend Lindsay Foose will live here also.

For now, the place is a schizophrenic trash dump of old, dusty possesions of Lindsay's now-deceased grandmother in rooms of completely discordant colors. We have lots and lots of work to do in order to make this a liveable house, but unfortunately living doesn't postpone itself until that's finished.

In the future, I'm hoping this will be my excellent home base for urban expeditions into LA. Then maybe the new blog theme will be applicable again; it may even seem mundane and restrained compared to the colorful quirkyness of everything going on around here.

A list of first posts in prior blog books, and their introduction pages:

• Regression.analysis - My first serious fight with coping with an ex-girlfriend.
• Blog Bebop - Life after Angel and the search for fun in LA. (intro)