dullneon.com

And so it begins with a conjunction.

My name is Jaffry Jalal and I don’t like links that open in new windows and tabs.

You are using a browser on a modern operating system and your IP address is currently unavailable.

But because I dislike having trackers following me around the web as much as you, I don’t save, stash, store, sieve, slice, shape, share, sell, or re-sell data about you.

As a young designer, Jaffry adopted the moniker of dullneon to front his non-commercial and experimental work. These pieces—manifested in a myriad of digital formats—explored the interplay of causality between humanism and technology, of the contemporaneous and contemplative.

Actually, back then the domain name jaffry.com had been taken by a cybersquatter.

From time to time, Jaffry slips into the third person. This out-of-body framing creates a reasonable cognitive distance between my work self and my regular self, allowing Jaffry to, for instance, write my LinkedIn profile without me dying of cringe over-identifying with my work.

Please note:(optional) This product is not to be construed as an endorsement of any product or company, nor as the adoption or promulgation of any guidelines, standards, or recommendations. If you arrived here expecting otherwise, the publisher would like to put on record their utter bewilderment. All trademarks and copyrights are property of their respective owners. The information contained on this site may change without notice. The views, opinions, and positions expressed herein are solely those of the publisher and do not reflect the views, opinions, or positions of the publisher's employer. The publisher rather likes his work and quite likes being employed. Thusly, be chill.

OK, yeah

Jaffry designs things and non-things. Now and then, he also teaches design things.

0. Start with ideas.
1. Learn the rules.
2. Master the techniques.
3. Break the rules.
4. Rewrite the rules.
5. Remember you’re always learning.
6. Go back to (0).

There is this theory of the möbius. A twist in the fabric of space where time becomes a loop.

There’s an ancient version of this site that’s archived on the Wayback Machine. The Flash player required to view my old sites has been largely erased from existence.

An obsolete plugin is the only thing stopping my cringey younger self from embarrassing me today.

It’s a wonderful day in Singapore where the time is now 23:55.

• It’s about 29°C with clouds out here in Malaysia.
• My Pixel 7A battery level is at perpetually low battery and high heat levels.
• Learning to read a binary clock.
• Still thinking about the Wachowskis’ film The Matrix Reloaded which I rewatched recently. It isn’t really that bad, you know.

Updated a couple of days ago

• Wordle in the mornings.
• Tools for doodling within reach.
• A self-winding watch, thank you.
• Trying to be radical and rebellious.

Of late, I find myself saying tchotchke quite a lot.

Tranquility Base Hotel + Casino

Arctic Monkeys

In Rainbows

Radiohead

Moth / Wolf Cub

Burial + Four Tet

The Campfire Headphase

Boards of Canada

▸ Watch

I have been listening to I DONT KNOW HOW BUT THEY FOUND ME on repeat. Such a good tune.

A cat would say I’m a lazy human who’s too mentally preoccupied to properly care for a non-human companion. I would have named such a cat J’accuse. Since our personalities wouldn’t really vibe, I decided not to have a cat.

16 personality types to describe the complexity of human beings? Nope, not a fan.

Mushy fruit that smells of vomit?
Not a fan either.

I am a fan. And a believer.

Before we started using computational power to make arbitrary money in the ether, some of us contributed our idle CPU cycles to search for extraterrestrials.

Because my drawing skills were shabby, I started sketching frequently to improve my technique. I sketched everywhere and on anything to visualise, brainstorm, or just let my mind focus.

This didn’t improve my drawing at all. Sketching, it turns out, got my hands to help with the thinking before the doing.

• Texticons
• Sportmanteau
• Can I Go (Archived)
• Random Notes (Archived)

Refer to Handmade products.

• Discovering joy in the daily grind.
• Tracking my music habits to feed my music habit.
• Films I would have bought on DVD if we were still in the noughties.
• For matters of profession on the odd occasion.
• When I want sponsored content about brands I don’t care about.

Refer to Advertising opportunities.

Refer to Sponsorship opportunities.

I had some ideas on creating content on OnlyFans. But I realised I didn’t have the balls for it.

Sometimes people—including you, dear reader—may have difficulty comprehending if I am joking or not. The likelihood of the problem being not me but you is positively non-zero.

I know π up to eight decimal places by heart. But however hard I tried, I could never get the subsequent digits to stick in my head. And yes, I admit trying to memorise the digits of π is irrational.

-1:

The largest negative integer ever

7½:

Hours of sleep I need to not be grumpy

50:

Air quality index in Singapore now

183:

Goals by Robbie Fowler for Liverpool

381:

Unread emails in my mailbox

I subscribe to way too many mailings lists but never have enough time to read them all. This—like the unread books on my shelf—was a source of internal anxiety until I learnt about the Japanese term Tsundoku (積ん読). Now I just embrace my email hoarding habit.

If you have exceptional proposals relating to Nigerian wills, dating thrills, and Viagra pills, please send your email to honeypot@dullneon.com.

While I like it as a matter of style, I am not dogmatic about the Oxford comma though I have been made aware of its benefits by my friends in media, Zach Weinersmith’s comic and Ezra Koenig’s music video.

I love moving images. Especially artful music videos, still-­fresh classics, wonderful one-takes, conceptual typographic pieces, black and white poetry, or even the occasional lyric video where someone with good taste worked hard to make the world a more beautiful place. Also ads with that perfect song, ads that shake you to your core, that 2002 Spiderman Marvel intro which still dishes out the chills, title sequences, sweeping opening scenes, slick movie trailers, and emotionally loaded scenes that make me shed a tear take us to a place where we ache to go again.

I take lots of pictures in case I forget.

But in attempting to capture it, was I really a part of the moment? Or did I realise I was in a moment because keeping an eye out for a good picture heightens awareness?

Is this considered ruminating?

• Why am I really writing all this?
• How will it end?
• Are we human, or are we dancer?
• They are not all questions, are they?
• Should I have replied to that email just because they flattered me?

Effusive or otherwise, I try to answer legit emails though I much prefer to read.

I last read The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. I used to read a lot more books and features. These days, getting stuck into long prose seems to require more effort. The irony is there’s an entire book about this.

The most sustained reading I do nowadays is with subtitles.

1. Really getting into Quantum Leap.
2. Studio 60 has also favourably hijacked my attention.
3. Trying to finish Beast Wars: Transformers but losing interest quickly.

You’ve spent 3 seconds here so far and your interest is, at best, flattering.

If you’ve been waiting for a twist in the narrative, well… I’ve got news for you.

There’s a clever idea I had for this part, but it isn’t here because I can’t remember it anymore. Maybe in the next version…

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jaffry-2019-MBP ~ % ver_info -a Encoding: UTF-8
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Caching: Operational
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This compendium is composed with Florian Karsten's Space Grotesk and default type provided by your device.

Crafted with VSCodium, Firefox 123.0a1, Tachyons, and ECMA-262. Live data enabled by Tasker and WeatherBit.

Best viewed on a computer while listening to Vegyn.

This page of words, pictures, and code has no end — only the point where I stop talking at you.

In between watching Studio 60 and maxing out on life before the world ends, for the next version I’ll think of a better way than just stopping mid-sente

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