But only a little bit about that last one.

I'm a writer/editor who was horrified upon graduating from college to discover that people no longer wanted me to tell them what I thought about movies all day, but I still do that anyway. My film/literature degree, a testament to the fact that I wasted my youth watching movies and reading instead of learning how to be a surgeon, is presently crammed in a satchel alongside scribbled jokes about Philip Seymour Hoffman. My degree is very dirty because I recently fell down in the mud while staggering home from Chili's in the rain.

This page is named after the concept of the simulacrum illustrated by Jean Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulation, because when I chose the name I was a smarmy little bastard fresh out of my first critical theory class. If my withered knowledge of Latin declensions was correct, it means (among other things) "of or belonging to a simulacrum," and given Baudrillard's definitions, I thought that was a concise and acceptably smarmy definition of the internet. Do you want to know how much of an ass I was? I was such an ass, my original explanation of the page was just this graphic on a white background.

So yeah, I thought I was pretty hot shit. Years of unemployment and living behind a coffin factory took care of that pretty quick.

My first version of this page was based on a design by Nicolas Fafchamps. I have since pretty much rebuilt the entire thing, keeping only the habit of coming up with nontraditional names for everything, because his French class names were neat. My point is that if there are any appalling CSS errors, they're my fault and not his. I'd appreciate an e-mail if you come across anything that's so broken it embarrasses both you and me.

If you do want to reach me about something, I still check jon(at)simulacri.com. I wade through the junk mail every week or so, enjoying my regular allotment of hilariously misspelled entreaties and dubious promises.

Incidentally, if you're running IE 5/6 on Windows and there are no graphics anywhere, this is another inexplicable bug that you can blame on Large Corporations and not on me. After I noticed it I went back and resaved every single image on the site, but if I missed just one of them, the bug will still break everything. And really if you're still using IE 5 or 6 at this stage, you kind of deserve it. Please e-mail me anyway so I can go and resave every graphic again.