How to be inconspicuous

Phasing in and out is clearly not the right way. On a slightly related note, the image that I used for the previous entry also works. Dennou Coil was a hive of concealment and evasion. And villainy.

I will immediately discount this entry by questioning the point of it, for the subject at hand is what many would not want to be: the proverbial starving writer, toiling in obscurity. Unfortunately, the make-words program is in effect, which is similar to its non-made-up counterpart, with hammers exchanged for keyboards and rocks for characters. Valid words may follow, or they may not.

I know the question in your mind, because I have made words and put them on your screen. "But why not write about how to be popular?" you ask. But you have asked the wrong question! Popularity is not, in fact, a phase-shift of π away from inconspicuous; clearly the antonym of inconspicuous is conspicuous! Famous or infamous, attention is attention, and isn't that what being conspicuous is all about?

The truth is, I would write about how to be conspicuous, but I don't know how. This claim has been borne out online as well as off (unfortunately). So while I don't know the first thing about drawing lots of attention other than wearing a red baseball cap, I can write your eyes out on how to hermit it up. And through the make-words program, I am afforded the perfect opportunity to do so.

Layout, the non-ASIC kind

People form impressions on appearance, so site layout is your first line of defense against the inquisitive. Opt for sharp corners. Visitors will instantly know that you are a cut and dry kind of person, with emphasis on dry. Perpendicular intersections are the hallmark of straight hair, horn-rimmed glasses, vests, ties, collars, buttoned up tops, business non-casual dress, slide rulers, pocket protectors, and large Xerox photocopiers.

But if those non-Web 2.0 corners don't clue them in, the colour scheme certainly will. Grey, black and white? That's so pre-colour television. Everyone knows that the world was greyscale before the miracle of the chrominance subcarrier, and consequently a pretty boring place. The notion that there might be attention-worthy content on a dominantly greyscale site simply doesn't compute.

α balance

What you write about has some bearing, which we will note later, but how you write is a much greater factor, and should be designed to be as unpalatable as possible so as to deter anyone from asking for seconds. By unpalatable, we mean nausea-inducing. Fortunately, the layout will assist in your endeavours as both appetizer and chaser.

There are two extremes to writing, depicted by the above Venn diagram. Both draw lots of attention. For instance, consider the right side, which is completely opaque. Opaque is nigh indecipherable, so that should be good, right?

Wrong!

Opaque writing has massive amounts of gravitational pull (i.e. it's pretty massive), and sucks people in even as they try, in vain, to extract the tiniest scraps of information from it. Incidentally, it has been conjectured that this is exactly how opaque writers expand: by drawing hapless visitors in, their mass increases which results in an even stronger force.

On the left, we have total transparency. It's so transparent, that we can't even tell where the set begins and where it ends. For all intents and purposes, we can't find a boundary, and that's precisely the problem. Transparency is the lowest common denominator, and as such doesn't have to consume anyone.

If you are a fifth grader, you are in. If you're smarter than a fifth grader, you are also in. If you're not smarter than a fifth grader, chances are you don't even read these things and thus lie wholly on some orthogonal plane of existence. And if you're vastly smarter than fifth grader, then with almost certain probability (as the number of trials approaches infinity) you have already been sucked into the opaqueness.

Now see where the arrow is. This is the mutual exclusion zone, the Lagrange point between total inclusion and the abyss. This is where you should be, because few people permanently occupy this space, and visitors are never in the area for too long, because inclusionists are repulsed, and anyone else is too busy "upgrading" towards the maw.

Vocabulary is your primary building block. You don't want to constantly use language that a fifth grader would understand, because that's too easy. On the other hand, you also don't want words that only a lit major might comprehend. Choice of words also plays into tone. Easy words tend to convey a friendly, inclusionary tone, while hard words make you come across as condescending and arrogant as all get out.

You want to write such that the see-throughs are left scratching their heads, and gravitons don't find you elitist enough. You may not get it right the first time, but that's okay. If you find your site developing a following, cease activity on it, start a new one, and try again.

On a totally unrelated note, many current source symbols were disassembled and disfigured until I got the above figure just right.

Miscellaneous DO's

• DO write about topics that are either tangentially related to, or completely uncorrelated with, your site's purpose, stated or implied. People don't like sugar on their steak or salt in their fruit salad, but if you do, you're a weirdo. Example topics include: your upcoming exams, the uncleanliness of your dorm showers, how you're a CS:S pub server all star, and politics.
• DO reference a dead language when naming your site. The dead part is key, and this point needs no further elaboration.
• DO put down lots of words. Uncited fictitious studies have shown that boredom increases not linearly with increasing word count, but quadratically.
• DO outsource as much site functionality as you can: comments, site feeds, image hosting, stats collection. Prefer subdomain addressing from a free content host. No one likes to see lack of bling and perceived laziness.
• Speaking of laziness, DO update infrequently and erratically. When the time intervals between entries is collected, an analysis of its power spectral density should result in a horizontal line stretching from negative to positive infinity. If you can achieve this, then you have attained the status of Gaussian Author. It's not quite the same as attaining enlightenment, but seek comfort in the fact that your site is a source of white noise.

Miscellaneous DO NOT's

• DO NOT stay current with the latest series or hottest trends. That is counter-revolutionary and would get you shot back in the greyscale days.
• DO NOT pursue tough literary or philosophical questions. In addition to being opaque and bourgeois (which would also get you shot back in the greyscale days), these topics never depreciate and so will continue to attract attention and, heaven forbid, trackbacks. Your best bet is to actually lag the popular curve by eight months to a year.
• DO NOT facilitate communication. Ignore comments, ignore trackbacks, ignore incoming referrer stats, ignore e-mail. While this is being opaque in a sense, you trade it off by preventing yourself from having any high-level discourse and eventually befriending dangerous intellectuals. Note that discouraging communication is not the same as disregarding it. The former makes you quasi-ethereal; the latter makes you an asshat.
• It goes without saying that you must not write like a fifth grader, but in the interest of providing a tighter lower bound on writing maturity, DO NOT write like a tenth grader. It is roughly around this time that slightly more complicated ideas emerge in English class, but is also the point where writing activities stagnate, never to progress beyond compare and contrast listings and the hamburger essay comprised of numerous hamburger paragraphs. The irony is that in some places, prose analysis begins in earnest at this level, but prose analysis never leads to prose synthesis.
• DO NOT create image intensive entries. This used to be a valid trick, until the advent of affordable high-speed internet access stole and corrupted the term "broadband." In light of this new reality, images are actually a positive feedback factor, as people are drawn to pictures, especially pretty ones.
• DO NOT write about your poverty. It screams sympathy because everybody is strapped for cash.
• DO NOT write about your conspicuous consumption. Anyone strapped for currency is always looking for display of it. Besides, this would get you shot during the tumultuous days of the Colour Revolution, also known as the Great Leap Backward.
• DO NOT proclaim apathy. Doing so draws suggestions for what to watch, and they inevitably wind up being current offerings.
• DO NOT be funny, unless your brand of homour is drier than solid carbon dioxide. One side of the chessboard will want to claw their eyes out, while the other side won't find you witty enough.
• Lastly, DO NOT be inflammatory. Where drama occurs, eager spectators must follow. If fanned enough, it may take on a life of its own, spiral out of control, and thus end the universe before we can quantumly sub-divide and throw galaxies at each other.

Conclusion

We have explained why writers should be inconspicuous and outlined steps that they can take to do so. The two most significant steps are layout and being grey. Of the two, the former is cheaper to implement, but may be sufficient for only 63 per-cent of cases. Coupled with writing style and other suggestions, it is expected that a writer can deter 99.999 per-cent of all visitors, with the difference being the writer themselves.