I went back and did a new front page for the Tales of Sin and Virtue because, I don't know, it beats working and the old one took like four hours to load completely on a dial-up. It was pretty cool, though, the infinitely regressive television sets of the former design. Very metaphoric. Get it, it was like the story within the story within the story, and the deeper you go, the farther your head gets inside the media. It's like if the only way you could get to the center of the onion is to burrow through all that vegetable flesh, crying all the way. Like a journey to the center of the earth, but watched on the Discovery Channel, filmed through the pressure-resistant plexiglass eyes of tunneling robots.

But now the front page is just its own little screen and I'm less invested in the wow factor. Now it pops a new random image every time you load up, mostly junk from my collection but soon I'll add some more interesting things. The digital camera has me prowling the city again like I haven't done in a long time. Looking for memories real or simulated.

The new version won't really look so hot for those pre-3 browsers. Sorry, Luddites. But the previous version didn't either -- it actually looked even crappier in a bum browser. So there's progress on the accessibility front. Soon I will be fully accessible without using a computer at all. You will receive the latest Tale directly through your fillings.

Yesterday afternoon a New York client called to say he was in town and would like to get together and go over next steps for his website. We'd just gotten to that magical point where he'd really started liking the designs I was doing, which always comes as an odd revelation after that period when I'm trying to get a design out and I'm fully convinced that I'm an untalented fake who's running a loser company that will be first up on the chopping block when the economy turns south. This client likes me and my designs, which assuages my self-doubt a little, but also pays my bills and allows me to eat, which really takes the edge off occupational angst.

Unfortunately, I had to tell him that we're not well set up for client meetings here, since we almost never have reason to meet with clients in our office. It had never occurred to me that I might have to meet with a client at my office instead of theirs (on the rare occasions when I actually see a client face-to-face at all). I'm not interested in some shiny candy-cane working environment meant to wow visitors into a sense of chrome-based faith. I mean, I'm all about the web, why should I give fuck-all about the physical universe? So I suggested we conduct our business at a local cafe. I could tell he was momentarily caught off guard by this -- doubtless wondering if he hadn't contracted the services of some fly-by-night basement brigade. But I explained my situation and it turned out to be fine.

Still, I had a little moment of envy for the firms that take the leap and invest in luxurious office space. If you want to project that aura of modernity, you have to decorate in brushed-metal and wood paneling, a look so ubiquitous that it will soon seem laughably 90s, as stylized as chrome curves and neon of 50s diners or the raw concrete block brutalist constructions of the 70s. But for the moment, it has that perfection of current style, a seeming lack of historic context, a sense of being forever. Witness our infatuation with the fast-changing face of technology.

I realize now that this is largely why I update my front pages, again and again. A new design has nothing attached to it, no associations, gleaming with the newest and least known code. Gradually it acquires context, a location in time. The code behind it is incorporated into other pages I build, and becomes familiar and less impressive. We reach the point in the relationship when feverish love matures to friendly regard, and then I leave them. I scribble for an hour or so on my electronic tablet and design a prettier and younger face in which I might again fall momentarily in love.