About me

Je m'appelle Mark...

I'm a psychology student at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia, and I will be for the next few years. A couple of years ago, I completed a Bachelor of Contemporary Arts majoring in Drama and Media (also at Deakin). I occasionally do some freelance videography, multimedia, and web design, although as of mid 2005 my priorities have turned sharply to my psych career.

From time to time I have the privilege of doing theatre related things with various people (you know who you are). Performance is great. I've liked acting ever since high school drama.

What else?

I use a Mac. I'm a trekie. I don't have a star sign.

Why do I blog?

In the mid to late 80s toy companies marketed pink plastic electronic dairies to pre-pubescent girls. These devices had names like 'My First Secret Diary', 'My Secret Diary', or 'Secret Diary, it's mine ,damnit!'. They were padlocked, or password protected, or both.

Male humans don't have inner thoughts, so there was never any need for non-pink alternative. Nevertheless, from an early age, I liked the idea of record keeping, electronics, and password protection. Some people are just born geeky.

From time to time I'd start up a diary, kept in plain text documents on my hard drive, and hidden through obscure naming conventions. They never lasted more than a week. I didn't have the discipline or the frontal lobes to keep it up. Furthermore, everything get's boring when I don't write for an audience; my dairies quickly become one sentence references to the days trivia.

Then, in late 2002, I ran into blogging. I started a blog on livejournal.com. I figured it might be quite good for my mental health to write things down, and blogging was geeky enough to motivate me to do it.

In early 2003, I moved my blog to its own server and started using Movable Type.

These days, I blog because:

- it's easier than remembering

- it will be something to look back on when i'm old

- it's cathartic

- it gives me a sense of identity

- i want to show things to my blog reading friends

- and there's always the chance of meeting some interesting people who've stumbled onto my blog from a misspelt google search