Our family name is Žurkić and we haven’t thought of anything clever to put here yet... Kinda, working on it..

Yes, pronounced like ‘Žurkić’ but spelt with an ‘Z’ and without ‘that sound that only "Balkan People" can pronounce’. That brings us to ... Serbia.... That is where we came from... It is a place where people understand music. This is also where rakija is used before and after lunch and as a cure for all kind of diseases... Sometimes people get our family name wrong (Curkic, Zuric, Cukric and one time even… Zubic???) and it used to annoy me when I was younger. Me personally (Saša) not ‘Sasa’, I managed to snag zurebor@yahoo.com back in the day before realising I was secure enough with my identity. But I still don’t like seeing myself in photographs. Even on a personal website homepage thing like this one.

Maria (not Marija) and Aleksandar (not Alexandar or Alexander) are our kinds and our center of life. They love Fortnite and Minecraft and are just adorable. Of course, when they do something wrong, then they are MY CHILDREN, but when they are nice and polite then they are normally, MAMA's angels.. Sounds familiar, right? As off 2018, we have one more family member.. Her name iz Ceza..

I also count Timothy Dalton as my favourite Bond. When I grow up, daydreamed eleven-year-old me while watching The Living Daylights, I want to be a spy who can transform into Ultra Magnus. No career counsellor could help me down that career path. On the other side, Aleksandar wants to be a ‘scientist when he grows up.. As father as son i guess.. Kristina always wanted to be a Hair Dresser, and Maria is going after mama's foot steps..... So, tradition is continuing as Marica (Kristina's mother) was also a Hair Dresser....

Admittedly, ‘coach people to create things’ may sound pompous and deliberately enigmatic. It is, however, a lot more economical than saying that I create, make, build, facilitate and teach in the areas of inter­action, visual, and service design, advertising, art direction, and frontend proto­typing (with HTML, CSS & JavaScript) to help people tackle the unknown frontiers of the future with flair.

(Yeah OK, that last bit there was definitely pompous.)

If you pinched your nose and drank coffee, the taste will be bitterly disappointing. [EDITOR’S NOTE: YOU WILL LOOK LIKE AN IDIOT DOING IT SO DON’T] Without the olfaction, coffee gustation lacks gusto. Coffee joints—here I exclude hawkers of coffee flavoured milks—transmit wonderful aromas that keep out the chatter of hipsters enthusing loudly about buying rope-dyed pants handsewn by anti-capitalist cool dudes living in a farming village where the aforementioned dilettantes also grow a special strain of salvia hispanica in limited quantities for their ’gram fam. As it were.

I figured jaffry@hotmail.com wasn’t so hot when I could get my own domain name in 1998. Which I then did. (This one, not that one.) I generally avoid local coffeeshop kopi recommendations; my body fights back with gut-wrenching reflux. I’ll have ginger tea. It's fantastic. I actually know someone who knows someone who has this friend whose colleague’s ex-classmate’s third cousin, twice removed, makes a mean ginger tea for a living.

You can also find me on Instagram where I am cultivating an exclusive online-only image as a stand-offish, insufferable, browbeating know-it-all. Also, you may be having trouble deciding whether I am kidding. Or not. [No shit, Sherlock!] Henceforth, I will tell you when I’m kidding.

Despite the occasional funny joke, the current iterations of social media work more like global stock exchanges of posts, likes, hearts, streaks, tweets, retweets, and how many connections you have. Where community is mined for money. Where art is sacrificed for #content.

If anything, there should be a federated social network of messaging platforms, so we can reach anyone on any network with any brand of telephone an interoperable messaging app. (A possibility as unlikely as Richard Stallman using a pay toilet.) Even if someone cracked that chestnut, I wouldn’t use it much.

Truth be told, I spend a lot of time in my own head. (You may have figured that out from all these (sometimes overly nested) parenthetical interludes, eh?) As a teen, I kept a journal which wanted to be like Anne Frank but turned out just awful. As a young designer, I maintained a chronological visual reference journal, before everyone else and Stacey’s Mom started terming it a ‘blog’. It wanted to be the offspring of K10k and Anil Dash but became a random hoard of links, images and notes.

If you’ve reached here, then it may be that you thought my blog was awful. [It lacks some of that modern social media sharing button things. R.O.I, they say.]

Or you could be a loveless, soulless, headless bot harvesting for haplessly exposed emails.

Once upon a memory, I used to have a pen pal, who, one day, asked me, quite forcefully, to halt my correspondence. Was it because I was as vile as a spammer? Possibly, as in my letters to my erstwhile pen pal, I didn’t provide an unsubscribe link. As a wise fox once said, what is essential is invisible to the eye. And with that, I bid you adieu.

You’re still here.

Well, you know what? Despite the pinball chaos of speeding asteroids in space, we are all still here and quite alive on Earth, whose rotation is slowing slightly with time.

I found it really hard to sleep 7 hours a day. I was grumpy, lost all my friends, and wasn’t sure when to eat breakfast. So I went back to sleeping 7 hours at night. Worked out great.

The morning meal is an excellent way to celebrate that one has awoken from what turned out to be an impermanent rest. Lunch is better utilised for napping, meditating, or watching movie trailers. Breakfast for dinner is exciting because it feels like a transgression and yet no one gets hurt. I wish I could have a roti prata with fish curry for every meal. But because frequent fried food could induce a permanent rest, I save it for special occasions. Like weekends.

People ask why I don’t just say “a diet that's mostly vegetarian but also includes fish and seafood” instead of using a big word like pescetarian. To which I ask “Why use eleven words to describe something when one would do?” [You must be so popular at parties] It’s like using a HEX code instead of waffling around trying express a colour.

I have fixations over small things that change across points in time. The objects of fixation change, not the objects themselves, of course. However, if we are talking about transmuting stuff, I’d like to snap my fingers to convert my remaining 600+ music CDs into accurately ripped and tagged FLAC files without manually having to use XLD/RubyRipper and Picard.

I’m not that into Spotify or other cloudy music rental services. I prefer buying music outright if only to avoid the bifurcation of my existing collection. I don’t have a lot of money to pass down to my kid (I’m sorry, sweetheart) so my music—organised in intricately named folders—will have to do.

My listening habits have been on Last.fm since 2005. If my reading habits were up online, it’d consist almost entirely of Google search results for whatever fatuous thought or fact void in my head. That’s what everybody with a smartphone and a stupid fast data plan does, right? Right?

Have I told you about that time when I got sucked into a black hole the size of my hand-held device because I felt like I needed to immediately know everything that I did not? This ‘need’ to know led me to cold dark places in my mind.

I was going to say something quite thoughtful here, but my phone beeped. New message, important but not time sensitive…

But I’ve long lost my train of thought. I wish there was a way to keep in abeyance non-urgent, non-now messages in some kind of digital in-tray which I could periodically check at my own time. That would be nice. [Let’s call it s-l-o-w-c-h-a-t] Porlockian distractions aren’t any good for thinking, let alone creative endeavours; you never stay in the zone for long.

I may also be one of seventeen people in this region who is not on WhatsApp (I hate hordes) and disturbingly owns a fax modem (I hoard). That is an unnecessary Venn diagram waiting to happen.

The luxury of not being on WhatsApp has social consequences: when you are not on the app’s contact list, friends can forget you exist. Which means I have a lot of free Friday nights. But I don’t get offended. I get nostalgic.

I have never really been comfortable with 90’s phrased in the decade-apostrophe-possessive format because it isn’t …you know… possessive. Furthermore, the lack of an apostrophe in front of the decade is slightly alarming because we’re not talking about the first century but the 20th. Thusly ’90s looks more accurate. I spent the noughties thinking about this. Those were good times.

Ah yeah… the good old days. When life was supposedly simpler. They say the past is always well-remembered owing to the distortion of peak experiences. Which prevents you from being in the present. Like really smelling the air. Or attentively tasting a raisin or two. Instead we get glued to our phones and miss out on human contact. Reading a book may be better — it makes the avoiding human contact a more deliberate and obvious escape from reality.

I borrow/buy more books than I probably should. Every time I return home from the library or with an Amazon package, the unread books on my shelf always laugh at me. My e-books are much more polite and don’t do such things. Because I don’t even know they’re there.

I’m also a sucker for mailing lists. Probably in my inbox right now: LinkedIn baiting me with broems of plasticised optimism, cool stuff from ‘Clark from InVision’ [I thought it was a Dutch dude actually named ‘CLARK VON INVISION’], Dave Pell’s excellent Next Draft, and a mutual fund factsheet from my bank that my inner bourgeois-self wants to know about.

Economies go bust. Companies fold. People die. Rivers run dry. But everything that ends has a beginning. There are booms, bubbles, babies, and bodies of water that connect our world. Because happiness is energy, suffering is also energy. That was my takeaway from a slightly hokey chakra re-balancing meditation pamphlet I picked up at a Chiang Mai pizza joint.

Non-fiction is a way to learn without actually getting hands-on experience. But if you don’t experience it, did you learn anything? But would you invest your money blindly without even learning soemthing first? But money isn’t everything. But you should read your Kindleberger. But a Kindle Burger would be a flat cake of grilled meat—usually beef—placed between two Amazon Kindles like a sandwich. But it’d be mostly inedible. But obviously.

Apocryphal stories don’t always end well, do they? Anyway, it’s nice you’re still here but you need to go. There’s so much out there waiting to be discovered. Let’s shoo start you off with an all-time classic: A random article on Wikipedia.