Ashes.

'"Since when did you bring a gun?" Navidson asks, crouching near the door.

'"Are you kidding me? This place is scary."'

As if a gun would fix the things that frighten, in that place...

Going to be reading House of Leaves and Dune, together, after I'm done with The Watchmen and Tales of Pain and Wonder.

Seems reasonable, to me.

Mom? Are you reading this?

I just had a thought, while checking newly added Twitter people: for whom would you censor yourself, online?

Before you answer, read this (as if yoou haven't, already): http://xkcd.com/137/

That's the philosophy by which i tend to live my online life. The understanding that my conversations and writings cover things which would most likely come up in every day conversation, when I've known you a while, anyway.

slackmistress is coming at the whole thing from the same angle, I believe, in saying that the online and meatspace lines are becoming blurred. Though I might say that they're the people behind those lines are beginning to recognise that they are, more often than not, in overlapping conceptual territories.

They don't need to conflict. They don't need to fight. We did not, 24 years ago, cut out a swath of thought and ideas prededicated to something else, and decide that that was now the purview of The Internet. That was a descriptive allegory, in no way intended to be a judgment on any existing nation states, by the way. I use it as a descriptive allegory, because we have, in hand, the crux of what could be either the end that we see, there, or a new end, embracing similarities.

You see, as I was saying, we didn't cut out chunks of television, telephone, board game, calculator, Science and Math and then say "There. All this? It==Internet." What we did was say, "We need a way to transmit things. We need a way to talk to each other and share information, a way to Augment these things that we have, here. It would make use of telephony in a heretofore unheard of way, and it may in fact revolutionise communications." Of course, we said that last part while in a prescient Delphic haze, soldering fumes having attached themselves in new and interesting ways to the parts of our brains which regulate the access and interpretation of probabilities in time and space, but there it was.

The Internet.

It was designed to augment the everyday professional lives of scientists and government officials. It was propagated as a tool to revolutionize human connectivity, to make your access to and grasp of information easier, faster, cheaper. Just like your mom. And it was.

The Internet has done all of those things, and we should not be surprised that it intersects with school, professional life, friends, family, all of it. Take a look at the Internet and what you do with it, daily, and you tell me if everything I just said isn't true. Even that thing about your mom.

No. I take that back.

ESPECIALLY the thing about your mom.