Wordie hates “plurk”, I don’t understand why. Meanwhile, Plurk on “plurk” is very plurkily shiny-happy-people. They’re so… wholesome. I want to ruffle Plurk’s hair and give it cookies.
Rusty, why haven’t you signed up yet? Don’t you love us any more?
Today’s short story is Wikiworld, by Paul Di Filippo. Note ubik – a homage to Philip K. Dick coupled neatly with the play on “ubiquitous”.
“That digital text is just information, Son. This is a book! And best of all, it’s mongo.”
I tried to look up mongo in the ubik, like I had been taught, but couldn’t find it in my dictionary. “What’s mongo, Dad?”
“A moment of grace. A small victory over entropy.”
On a parallel but completely tangential note, book is the new cool. (via)
And finally, Neil Gaiman’s laptop is a Panasonic ToughBook CF-W4 – we have it from the man himself.
I was just reading this post about why blogging frequency doesn’t matter, because everyone uses RSS now anyway, etc., etc. It struck me because even as I clicked the link to read it (obviously, because of the ingrained impulse to follow anything that seems to be countering folk wisdom, and folk wisdom has long been that Those Who Would Be Muchly Linked Must Post Often), I had just been thinking about Paul Graham, my favourite geek essayist, who has lately been producing essays more and more frequently. At least, it feels that way to me and my feedreader.
(No, I’m not going to actually figure out PG’s posting frequency: I’ll just ask Drac to include the Unofficial Paul Graham Feed into Ach, and then use BigBlogger. I remain highly gratified that the SL net has such fancy widgets to play with.)
It would be just perfect if PG decides to increase his blogging frequency at the same time that the meme goes around that coolness lieth in the decreasing of said frequency, because PG takes distinct pleasure in countering folk wisdom himself. And folk wisdom would thereby be doubly countered, overlapping with itself, and the internets brains would explode.
Paul Graham is an essayist by general acceptance, rather than a blogger. He experimented with the blog format at one point (on infogami, I think), but may or may not keep that up. Says he prefers to write essays. As anybody who speaks a smidgen of French will tell you, essayer is to try, to attempt -Graham has an excellent essay on the subject. An essay is therefore not unlike an assay, which is a weighing out, a measuring, a test or assessment -this is not surprising, because assay and essay used to be the same word. In everyday usage, “essay” for me has always suggested a finished product, a burdensome requirement for academia. Ugly, polished to a dull shine, something you can rattle off and be glad to see the back of. That is, it had for me precisely inverted its ancient meaning, that it should be unpolished, experimental and exploratory.
Which is a tremendous loss, if you think about it -we don’t need a word to mean “boring and shitty writing” as much as we need a word that means, essentially, “writing out loud”. We badly need a word that means that, because just thinking out loud isn’t getting a fellow very far these days. (Very long strings of thought, and who can even remember where one started?) If we are even capable any more, after having our brains mutilated by schooling, of writing essays that are really assays, exercises in thinking.
Language and thought are twinned beyond doubt, whether identical or fraternal, and so it is possibly misleading even to call it an exercise in thinking. Isn’t that another word whose meaning has shriveled into inversion? An exercise sounds dull, repetitive, mindless. Energetic, perhaps, associated with “practice makes perfect” and all the furious energy of a hamster on a wheel. But who associates “exercise” with “exploration”? Not me. At least, not until now -because the word itself tells us a thing which hopefully we will not soon forget.
We know that the superficial meaning of “exercise” (as opposed to the connotations above, which can be personal) is to use, to employ or put into play, to put into operation. Its secret meaning, visible among its roots, is to free from restraint. To free from containment or enclosure.
To cut loose.
If you look at the Dapper Drake wallpaper art that people are coming up with, it mostly involves well-dressed ducks. Which is pretty much what comes to mind when you say “dapper drake”. Still, the roommate asked me earlier today about the word “drake” in connection with ducks -doesn’t it also mean “dragon”, and what on earth connects ducks to dragons?
One possible answer seems to be -nothing, because the two uses of drake have completely different roots. The use of “drake” meaning male duck seems to be about seven hundred years old, from German roots. (Duck, on the other hand, comes from ducan, meaning “to duck” or “to dive” -presumably because that’s what ducks do. In other words, ducks are ducks because they duck.)
The use of “drake” meaning dragon, on the other hand, is even older, being from the Greek via the Latin draco. Oddly, its origins seem to mean “to see clearly”, or “sharp-eyed”, or “with a deadly glance”, which reminds the mythologically minded of the basilisk or cockatrice, dragon-like reptilian creatures capable of killing (or petrifying, I think) with a glance.
That might explain it. But really, I have no idea. Even the mighty internets seem confused on this one.
See, apparently Marissa Mayer is a hologram. Or an android. (Technically, she can’t be an android -andros means male. A female-shaped robot would have to be a… gynoid? Unfortunately, anthropoid is taken. By monkeys.) Do you realize what this means? All these years, we’ve bought the “we have a secret algorithm” line that Google’s been handing out, when in truth it’s much simpler. Marissa Mayer is a super-intelligent AI who personally indexes the entire web and answers all Google search queries. You heard it here first.
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