Once you get into this blog, you’ll be rewarded with a sometimes ascerbic, usually humourous and good-natured insight into the life and interests of a thirty-something homosexual American who did, yes – really, eat paint when he was a kid.
Jason Ate Paint is a mess though. There’s no consistency to the design at the moment, with about a half dozen reasonable ideas for an aesthetic competing with one another for your attention. Unless you’re a designer, the design shouldn’t matter – it should be transparent and keep out of the way, allowing you to leisurely peruse the content on offer.
The weblog itself isn’t particularly accessible from the get-go. The latest post is shown, not in its entirety, but only with the first paragraph leading into the story as a whole. It’s a good idea in theory, letting you get a glimpse of a story before choosing whether or not to follow it; however, there need to be more entries to choose from on the first page for this to work.
The site is laden with neat ideas – almost bogged down, you could say – a poll, a random movie quote section, a glossary of terms (worth reading – some are quite hilarious), a random picture of the week, an events calendar and an announcements section, all on the front page clamouring for space.
You can, and will, get past the idiosyncratic navigation and discover the worthy areas of the site (and even then, the content is not as easy to get around as it is on sites with more conventional means of archiving). You’ll find yourself, as I did, continuing onto the next post just after deciding that the last one would be the last for the time being. You’ll identify with some of the glossary terms regardless of your background; for example, “I don’t know… Internet?” works on so many levels.
There’s not much missing from this site; maybe that’s because it’s all right there, on the first page you see. More likely, it’s because there isn’t much missing at all, and you should just settle back and enjoy an interesting read.