Wednesday, October 15
regarding little ideas
Well, that kind of got out of hand.
Actually it's just that I didn't expect to spend so much of today thinking about something that combines triviality so neatly with impracticability. Still, there must be something there that's not fluff, especially if it can drag reasonably bright people in and hold their attention long enough that they actually respond.
A hypothesis about the attractiveness of ideas like handwriting-on-the-web and guerilla marginalia to minds like mine: For all their potential scope, they are usually the kinds of things you can wrap your head around and think furiously about with a certain satisfaction that you are getting somewhere, you are really making hay, even if you are probably never going to speak passable Japanese or shepherd the creation of a sustainable colony on some godforsaken, vacuum-blasted rock in the Belt where you can spend retirement penning wise and measured advice to your contemporaries which will be largely ignored, though eventually ensuring your remembrance as a founding father of interplanetary civilization.
(I believe the essential meaninglessness of "vacuum-blasted" in this context is overwhelmed by its more evocative qualities. Nevertheless, I concede that it may represent writerly excess, and its further unjustified usage will be strictly curtailed on these pages.)