Hi, my name is Sebastian Biot and viralata.net is my home on the Internet. My home off the Internet is in Athens, Ohio where I’m finishing my MFA in graphic design at Ohio University.

viralata.net is also where I keep my blog, mus in pice. It’s not about anything in particular except perhaps graphic design, art, aesthetics, and politics. You can subscribe to the RSS feed. For more frequent updates, there’s always Twitter: @viralata.

“vira-lata” is a Brazilian Portuguese word meaning “mutt (dog).” Literally, the word means “one who turns (trash) bins.”

I use the Long Now Foundation’s five digit date format. That’s what the zero before the year — 02012 — is about. For the Foundation, it’s there “to solve the deca-millennium bug which will come into effect in about 8,000 years.” To me, it’s a good reminder that humanity is both a long and a short term project: long in relation to our own experience of it — merely a few decades — and short in relation to much greater scales of geological or cosmological time.

You can reach me on Facebook or, the old-fashioned way, by email at seb.biot@gmail.com.

Timeline’ography — A Paranoiac-Critical Biography

01512 (?)

Titian paints a portrait of a man wrongly identified as Ludovico Ariosto.

February 14, 01963

Federico Fellini releases “8½” starring Marcello Mastroianni.

June 6, 01972

David Bowie releases “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.”

July, 01972, 9:00 AM-ish

Born in time for (a late) breakfast.

01972 … 01990

Many things happen, most of which I don’t remember well. High points include watching “Chapi Chapo” and “UFO ロボ グレンダイザー” on TV after school, playing Lego, and, years later, reading Baudelaire and Mishima, and listening to Prince.

July 01990

Moved to Tbilissi, Georgia, for a year.
Georgian isn’t an easy language. This is what I remember:

მზეო ამოდი, ამოდი!
ნუ ეფარები გორასა!
სიცივეს კაცი მოუკლავს;
საწყალი აგერ გორავსა.

mzeo amodi, amodi
nu eparebi gorasa
sitsives katsi mouklavs
sats’qali ager goravsa

Sun, rise! Rise!
Hide not behind the mountains!
Cold kills a man;
That poor man here in the mountains.

Also visited Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia, and Kazakhstan that year.

September 01991

Started college; studied art history.
Underwhelmed, until I started taking archaeology and Akkadian classes.

August 01995

Moved to Baltimore, MD.
Three years of graduate school studying assyriology.

August 01998

Moved to Belo Horizonte, Brazil.
Taught English.

August 01999

Moved back to Baltimore.
Web design and net geekery.

October 15, 02000

HBO airs the first episode of Larry David’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”

January, 02003

Moved back to Belo Horizonte.
More net geekery.

March, 02005

Moved to Athens, OH.
More web design; less net geekery; more art.

September 02009

Grad school again; graphic design MFA this time.

Asa Nisa Masa

Meanwhile, on the Internet…