There is no “content” on this website.

No high-value posts. No downloads. No add to carts. No behavioral retargeting. No aspirational realness, press releases, or bikini-clad influencer pictures. No strategically-crafted life updates. No smoothing myself out for the clicks.

No, thanks.

My first website was a music review zine thing on Geocities. Like a good tune let down by a bad music video, the reviews I wrote were overwhelmed by the utterly mediocre and naïve ’80s‐vibe‐spilling‐over‐into‐the‐’90s internet “aesthetic” of the site. [Editor’s note: THIS ISN’T HUMILITY, IT WAS REALLY BAD]

Then one week, while trying to recreate the visual look of Squarepusher’s Feed Me Weird Things for a review [THAT NO ONE WOULD READ], I discovered the existence of Adobe Photoshop on a douchey schoolmate’s Macintosh and clicked my way into a world of systems, standards, and sheep.

From time to time, he refers to himself in the third person, which can be somewhat disorienting or sound like something really momentous is going to show itself. But inevitably does not. A mechanism primarily intended to maintain a healthy distance between his work and non-work self, it remains an exercise in futility as Jaffry spends too much time at home building things on the web anyway.

Sometime between the Asian financial crisis and the dot.com bust, I started designing websites, Flash games, and interactive pieces for fun under the moniker of ‘dullneon’ [TO SHIELD HIS PRIVATE LIFE FROM THE GLARE OF NON-EXISTENT FAME]. Doing design work was a great way to earn cash to buy obscure books and CD singles on the interwebs to impress girls with.

You may have trouble deciding whether I am kidding. Or not. Henceforth, I will tell you when I’m kidding. Then you can determine if it was funny, or in bad taste.

To be honest, I was never a big proponent of the Oxford comma until I was persuaded otherwise by two former colleagues, a comic and a musician.

While I’m not against cloudy music streaming, I prefer buying music outright (in fastidiously foldered [THAT’S NOT A REAL WORD] FLAC files) if only to avoid the bifurcation of my existing collection.

Tragically, I listen to my high-fidelity digital music on a low-end Android phone because they tend to be affordable hand-helds that can actually be used with one hand. I’m pretty fussy about the features I look for in a mobile phone, too.

[DIFFICULT TO DISCERN IF THAT IS AMBITION OR DELUSION] I’ve always wanted a phone that could natively double up as a Bluetooth mouse on any modern laptop. So until I can find some chumps on Kickstarter to pitch this to the future arrives, I’ll just get by with my ‘Look‐ma‐this‐has‐a‐3.5mm‐headphone‐jack’ Samsung A52.

Because I’m a sucker for mailing lists, you’ll find my inbox lined with emails from:

• Matt Levine's incredibly elucidative Money Stuff
• Dave Pell’s indispensable Next Draft
• Space Business from Quartz
• Medium.com digests with posts on how I need to wake up at 5am, amazeballs things you can do in JavaScript, and excellent reading recommendations from the National Library.

I borrow/buy more books than I probably should. [HE WAS A BOOKWORM KID AND IT SHOWS] Every time I get a new book or ten, the unread books on my shelf always laugh at me. My e-books are much more polite and don’t do such things. Because when I can’t see them, I don’t remember they exist.

My long-term memory is uploaded to the hard-drive otherwise known as the internet. Visual memories on VSCO, music listening history on last.fm, people I know on a CardDav server, and so on. Once upon a memory when I had a stable IP address, I ran my own mail server. It wasn’t that hard [ACTUALLY IT WAS] though it was a lot of work. Probably even more work now with all that spam.

That was Experiment #5322 [THIS NERDY REFERENCING IS EXHAUSTING] where I naively test if spam harvesting bots stop scraping after the first unobfuscated [THAT’S NOT A REAL WORD EITHER] email address they detect. You, dear reader, can be the second mouse who gets the cheese.

Alternatively, you can contact me on LinkedIn. But staying professionally connected with people also means consuming the convulsing stream of crap the feed algorithm serves up.

Social media software can be such a pain in the ass.

I deleted Facebook after it became an exhausting parade of product peddling, plasticised positivity, and political prattling. [HIS PICTURES OF CATS AND SUNSETS DIDN'T GET ANY LIKES] This newly excavated Quality Time™ enabled me to build this website where I have had a wonderful time talking at you.

I could talk all day about why we should all use Firefox, but I’m kinda in the middle of James May: Our Man in Japan right now. That’s right, the Quality Time™ saved from getting out of Twitface is spent on films and TV [AND WEEKDAY NAPS].

Thanks for scrolling down all the way here and all, but I’ve got another episode to catch up on. So until next time…