I have a silly habit of falling for pretty things, web 2.0, and personal projects by designers. Last year I ordered the Feltron 2007 Annual Report after reading about it on a website. Last month the New York Times featured the designer who created it, Nicholas Feltron.
In short, it’s a gorgeous collection of graphs and pie charts cataloging Feltron’s year of life (and it’s sold out). What he drank most, how many flickr pictures he took, the restaurant he visited most, the number of miles he walked, the best day of his year, etc. etc. All in all, it’s very much like life blogging except not as lame, stringently self-curated, and in pleasant graphic representation.
And now you can have a report of yourself, for yourself, on a beautifully designed site. Track whatever you want. You just have to request a beta account.
Here’s my Daytum site, and a sample from it:
Yes, I’m actually going to purchase a scale and weigh my garbage and recycling. Yes, this is fodder for a future writing project.
Fodder for a future writing project that will aim to be… fodder. Don’t do this. We all have blogs, and facebooks, and myspaces, and etc.. which, if we are honest with ourselves, almost no one else cares about. That someone took our national self obsession to the nth degree that Feltron did is mildly interesting, interesting enough to read a blog post about (and then consider one’s own self-obsession), but not nearly interesting enough to read. No one gives a shit about how much anyone else’s garbage weighs, or their average walking speed. You can be a good writer if you try at it, but please don’t write one of these “Stuff White People Like/death of literature/I’m mildly witty and have a degree so I deserve to be published even if it’s about a completely contrived situation that I created for the sole purpose of being published books.” There’s my rant. There’s so much good fiction, and non-fiction dealing with fascinating people in real situations to be read and yet to be written, spending your time and talent on trash (literally) is beneath you. It should be beneath us all.
In the words of Tina Fey, you can suck it!
Whoa whoa whoa! I’m not hating on you! I’m hating on our generation’s class of writers who for lack of ideas and inspiration, are writing the literary equivalent of reality t.v. And I think you’re better than that, so I am checking you, which is what good friends do for each other. As for “sucking it” if it’s Tina Fey, then “you betcha!”
[...] a few posts back when I was all excited about Daytum, the site by Nicholas Feltron that lets you create pretty [...]