About
Welcome to the personal website of Kevin McGuire. The writing on this website expresses his opinions. They represent no other person, corporation, monkey or artificial intelligence. Got it? Because there are swears on here and I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. I like my swears. Not everyone does. Free speech, motherfucker.
This site was created with Wordpress and TextWrangler. Photoshop was involved in the initial layout and exporting some images. I also used a few miscellaneous plugins/bookmarklets, such as XRAY and Web Developer Toolbar. I should also give props to this Wordpress theme. This was the one that finally got me to understand how Wordpress templates work, mostly because it is so dead simple.
About the name
Cydonia Mensae is a region on Mars. Mensa is a mesa, mensae is plural. One of the mesas looks like a face. Perhaps you’ve seen this before. Perhaps not.
The mesa isn’t really a face. No one built it. It occurred naturally. But people believe there is a face. The same thing happens with tortillas, stains, and potato chips. It’s a type of delusion called pareidolia.
This is an important concept. People construct meaning, out of thin air, whenever they see fit. I use it here as a metaphor for all human behavior. People derive meaning from from words, which are really just patterns of letters, which are blots of ink on shredded wood pulp, or light reflecting on glass.
The Gettysburg address is just wind blowing through flaps of skin. But people derived meaning from this wind (what we conventionally call speech.) Am I really trying to say that the Gettysburg address is the same as the face on Mars? Fundamentally, yes.
I suppose this means that I don’t really believe in anything. If everything is fabricated from thin air, does that render the world completely meaningless? Yes, but that’s part of the fun.