Imprimatura
(imˌprēməˈtu̇rə) noun A thin preliminary glaze applied to the ground in painting
Or, as I will be using it here:
(imˌprēməˈtu̇rə) verb The act of putting something, anything, on any metaphorical canvas.
Maybe this haphazard made up redefinition is a good example of such a thing. In fact, it’s likely I’ll change it before anyone sees this. However, despite that ephemerality (or perhaps because of it), it served it’s exact purpose, getting me to imprimate this canvas. Let me back up a bit:
For one, welcome to Microcosdom! Microcosdom, the website, is the personal website of me, Maya. The exact scope of what I’ll use this website for is TBD (another instance of imprimatura), but I imagine the bulk of it will be storage and sharing for blogs and projects; we shall see. Microcosdom, the word, is a portmanteau of microcosm and kingdom that I use for all sorts of “personal worlds”, typically in video games.
However, as of the moment of writing this, Microcosdom, the website, doesn’t exist. At least, outside of it being an unmaterialized thought-form manifesting its own creation through me. Huh, conceptualizing ideas as separate entities from yourself kind of lets you absolve yourself of blame if they don’t materialize. Unfortunately, this is the state most of my thought-forms tend to get stuck in, under materialized and over thought. I’m extremely prone to this kind of behavior.
I typically conceptualize the mental processes that lead to this as fear of a blank canvas, or a form of perfectionism. Undiagnosed OCD perhaps? Which is something that permeates everything I do, or rather, think about doing. This character trait is something I think about a lot (ha ha).
Of course, the creation of this website has been plagued by that process, fear, perfectionism, whatever you want to call it. I’ve been thrilled by the idea of making a website for years, but I am coMayaly prone to being caught in the minutia and needing things to be just right.
Do you ever think about websites? How they work? Why some are fast or slow? How much JavaScript they use? I do; I think about those sort of things a lot. I subconsciously rate ever website I visit, I ask myself why certain decisions were made, collect and stow a list of grievances, and feel bitter or resentful when things are “bad”1. Ya know, if I made a website, it would be good, it’d be perfect.
Ya know, if I made a website, I would serve it statically. Someone’s browser of choice would simply serve them beautiful, pristine, and well written HTML and CSS. Every browser speaks this universal language of the web, why complicate it? Keep it simple. Well, I guess writing raw HTML isn’t great… I’d have to copy and paste a lot of code, it would kinda suck to preview, and god forbid I want to update my navigation bar across all of my pages. I’m sure there is a fine way to do this in raw HTML but that’s beside the point. No worries, they make Static Site Generators, like Hugo. Should be the best of both worlds, a lean and fast website that sucks-less2. Well, Hugo’s just the most popular one, there’s tons: Astro, Jekyll, Zola3. How do you pick one? I guess Zola’s written in Rust, so bonus points for that? My love of Rust is probably unfounded and built off of a rudimentary understanding of computer science. We’ll be lucky if that rabbit hole doesn’t get re-opened. I’ll look up what others think, maybe read a blog or several about it. Oh, I need to host it too! How do you even host a website? How do you do it properly? Maybe I should get a dedicated piece of hardware for this website specifically, like a Pi or something. Well, if I’m going to do that, I really should finish the server rack…
Where’d the year go? Where’s the website? What am I even doing? it’s a bit cliche, but it seems like I let perfect get in the way of good, or anything at all for that matter, like usual. While being hopelessly at perfections mercy, I do acknowledge and respect strategies to avoid it. A particular piece of advice that’s wiggled it’s way into my brain is a moment from a silly video by YouTuber artist Jazza4. In the video, Jazza is getting ready to try “pendulum painting” and he says:
“Do you know the trick to avoid being precious about stuff? It’s the same with sketchbooks if you have a beautiful new sketchbook and it’s like ‘I don’t want to… I don’t want to get it messy and what if I don’t do the perfect thing?’”
Dips his hand directly into a bucket of blue paint
“Just start.”
That leads us to this: Imprimatura, the blog post, not the word. During a typical Maya-moment™: thinking about making this website, instead of making it. I finally thought of an answer I found somewhat satisfactory for a first blog: “just putting paint on the canvas”. I told myself I would just open up a document and start typing. I think it’s worked! Ignore the fact I spent days turmoiling over Imprimatura being etymologically a bad fit but couldn’t come up with portmanteaus that didn’t sound dumb. If I’m gonna make up a word I should do it right…
I finally decided to just put something on this once blank canvas, and I made something I’m proud of.
…
Now I just have to host it.
I’ll try to imprimate that part too, I’ll just download Hugo, Zola, or whatever and try to get something on web.
Even if it’s not perfect.