Going Inkless

We've all heard it's not polite to discuss politics or religion.  If you're trying to avoid conflict, (and it's generally a good thing in polite conversation,) it makes sense.  People have very strong opinions on those subjects, and despite what you hear about the modern trend of political polarization in America, this is nothing new.  People have always been passionate about the subject, and some have started arguments, riots, or wars over political opinion all through history.  The same goes for matters of religion.  Why do you think we developed that rule for polite conversation? The problem is not that people have become more extreme about their positions but that we have become more aware of others' positions.  Without our social media tableaux of opinion, we might blithely go about assuming that our friends, neighbours, or even family must think the way we do.  Because the rules of social media etiquette are less solid than those of conventiona...

     Writing tends to be a solitary activity.  We may be able to perform it in crowded places if we're lucky enough to have the focus while riding the train or sitting in some common space.  When you come down to it, though, the actual act of stitching the words together into meaningful patterns is all done alone in your head.  With that basic fact established, I will also say that writing is more social than most other things you do alone.  For one thing, writers of fiction tend to walk around with all sorts of people in their heads.  Even when we are alone, our minds are often working in social ways.  But the aspect I wanted to examine in this post was the camaraderie among those who practice this solitary art.      While it could be said that authors are in competition with each other, you rarely see them behave as if they were.  There is a realistic limit on how many books may be published in the world, and...

a short trip...      In the course of planning and designing a website, I've started to wonder how the internet became a place.  It's a fairly new concept as a whole, and somewhere along the way as it has grown, we gradually decided to think of it as a place.  We chose terminology appropriate to that idea.  There are sites you find at an address.  You can go into a chat room or go to a page.  You can view a gallery or library.  You start out  and return to a home.  Every mailbox has a place it's @.  Yet all this real estate is in your head.  It's imaginary.  Of course, the information that makes up this imaginary landscape is kept somewhere.  Even the airy "cloud" you picture is a heavy, earthbound mass of silicon and wiring somewhere in the physical world, or rather several masses.  But that information is what constitutes the internet, not the machines it's stored on.  The internet is really an id...