March 2012
17 posts
Few empty places can rival the emptiness of an empty hotel room. All the effort put into making it comfortable and welcoming only underlines how its amenities are disposable, and how transitory and unthinking is the nature of each traveler’s stay.
Reductive is the latest word to be appropriated by the internet to mean basically anything that it disagrees with. Please stop. This word has a real meaning.
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“I sometimes hold it half a sin
To put in words the grief I feel;
For words,...”
– Alfred, Lord Tennyson, fifth canto of In Memoriam A.H.H.
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There’s no polite way to tell a young woman she’s wearing so much makeup she looks like a stage actress or a prostitute, is there?
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Advice For Science Fiction Writers
“Sentient” does not mean what you think it means. Practically everything on the planet Earth is arguably sentient—dogs, cattle, birds, even perhaps some varieties of plants and insects. The word you really mean when you’re talking about all those blue-skinned space babes and hive minds from distant galaxies is “sapient,” meaning “having the faculties of reason,...
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It costs us nothing to be good to people who have loved us. Naturally, it follows that when we are judged, we will be judged on how we treated fools, cads, the ignorant and the hateful, the lost people that we loathed and despised, and—most cruelly of karma—the enemies who turned their hate and contempt on us.
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The kingdom of God is like a pretty girl, but a pretty girl is not like the kingdom of God.
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“Prayer and love are learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and the...”
– Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation.
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“The devil is no fool. He can get people feeling about heaven the way they ought...”
– Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain.
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“Indeed, the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is...”
– Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain.
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distorte:
I just found out that Apple is rejecting my new manifesto Stop Stealing Dreams and won’t carry it in their store because inside the manifesto are links to buy the books I mention in the bibliography.
Quoting here from their note to me, rejecting the book: “Multiple links to Amazon store. IE page 35, David Weinberger link.”
And there’s the conflict. We’re heading to a world where...
February 2012
28 posts
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I can be a damn fool when I’m not watching myself. Every once in a while you start writing how you think you should instead of how you want to. Writing is a discipline, but it’s supposed to be fun, too. For someone who invests as much of the self as I do in my writing, this can be a dark mood and a bitter one: “melancholy midnight of the mind,” was the ugly phrase that was...
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