I kind of contributed to the creation of a meme!
Category: Connections
I do this too, but nobody’s ever noticed. I do it a lot less when I have my headphones on.
bloody_peasants wrote an actual Quantum Fox story! I like it much better than any of its Anacrusis predecessors.
Why should I update when I have Stephen to sing my praises in microfiction and Paint?
“There was once a small cat named Brendan Adkins. He lived a happy life in a happy house with his happy cat cousins and happy dog friends. Everything was great, all the time, every day. Little Brendan Adkins had kitty litter and yarn and a small rubber mouse to play with. He had everything!
Things continued on in this extremely pleasant fashion until one day, when their owner (a small Italian man whom Brendan had always suspected of being involved in the mafia, but felt guilty and prejudiced because of it) got trashed on horse and fed all the dogs antifreeze.”
Holly launched her food blog! Yay! You have to understand that these aren’t fake foods covered in shellac and developing fluid: these are real things that I get to help eat. That alone, so far, has been worth the trip.
Of course, now it’s my night to cook and I am experiencing more stage fright than ever did on an actual stage. It’s not as if I’m trying to live up to the house standard. I just want to avoid the part of The Birdcage where they all take one sip in unison and then quietly, carefully, put their spoons back down.
Sometimes things I write have weird consequences.
Holy. If you’re on the Interweb, you’ve heard about the Wikipedia guy who said he was a professor and deleted everybody’s stuff and nobody could argue with him because he was an editor? But then, no, he was a liar and a college dropout and a tool? Right.
I went to school with that guy.
I wonder why that wasn’t in the alumni magazine. KENTUCKY.
Also: WIKIPEDIA.
How have I not written about this yet! My uncle John has returned to blogging, and he’s busily winning merit awards with his fantastic collage pieces, of which I own two, which means I am also a winner.
Responses to my last post, saved from the feed:
Ben: “All this copyright nonsense gets worse, eventually spiralling into ‘The War on Information’.”
Josh: “Assuming that your parents are baby boomers, your parents’ generation were unique, the only generation in history to have been able to consume without responsibility. Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that any future generation will have that opportunity.”
Kevan: “I’m not sure how bad a thing it necessarily is, but the next generation being able to dig through their parents’ online diaries and data shadows is going to be quite big and strange. Reading unguarded entries about what their parents really thought of you when you were young, stocking up on ‘if you did this when you were my age, why can’t I do it now?’ ammunition, and being able to stalk some of your crushes or bullying-targets all the way back to birth.”
Catherine: “Also, the increasing dichotomy between rural and urban cultures. People from, say, Seattle can be a mite uncomfortable in rural Georgia. People from, say, Atlanta are often a mite uncomfortable in rural Georgia.”
All thoughtful, all excellent. Catherine’s response is closest to my own worries: that we will allocate greater bandwidth to strident, divisive, polemical speech than to speech that crosses boundaries. I’m not arguing for censorship of radicalism here–my own brand of radicalism is specifically anti-censorship–but warning against the rapid propagation of our trust networks through people who will tell us only what we want to hear. When you can find a thousand people who agree with you more easily than you can find one dissenter, you are on the road to becoming an instrument.