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Descartes’ Bones
Yesterday I spent two hours with Russell Shorto, author of Descartes Bones, thanks to the New School.

Bones for the Media
Who needs Wall Street? New York media has a friend in Washington.

The Size of Blog Space
To hear talk about it, blog space is so big that bloggers outnumbered people three or four to one. But is it really, or is burnout already setting in?

Spring Awakening Closing in January
After a total gross of $52 million…not bad for “a bitch of a living”

It’s snowing in New York…and the weather’s bad
With snow in the City and on the financial markets, even Iceland is hoping for a little global warming

This just in from 1885
A fun review from Bill Peschel about poet Arthur Rimbaud “Rimbaud had abandoned poetry, but not fiction.”

It’s human nature; we find the quickest way to apply a map to a simple fact and extrapolate from it grand conclusions. The biologists say it’s evolutionary. It’s hard wired in us, they say, and it’s part of what makes us greater than the apes.

“We are in an ontological pickle” a friend told me recently, and she was right.

To deal with this I suggest a “Rule of Three”, but be careful that you don’t eat the pickle along the way…

Buzzing around the web has been the story that Google CEO Eric Schmidt called the internet a “Cesspool”. Cnet reported that “the Internet is a “cesspool” where false information thrives…Schmidt gave the magazine publishers hope for their future. Brands, he said, are the way to rise above the cesspool”

Really? Old media is the answer?

Looking to the mainstream media brands as a model of fair and accurate reporting is like looking for a pacifist at a prizefight. Here’s why…

Just like Joan Didion, my notebooks start with an entry prompted by real life. I jot down a few observations, a description of something that passed by, a taste, a smell, a pretty girl. Often it’s a note about an event, because I tend to be a describer and an image painter. But soon the entry turns into something else, something moving on its own, moving swiftly. A wind picks up and the words begin to flow and before long a few hours have gone by and in the settling dust some trail of pure fiction has been created. My biggest job is just to keep up before it passes, the original real life idea left far behind.

After reading: Joan Didion - On Keeping a Notebook

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A few things that grew out of my notebooks…

Viagra Cialis

Juvenilia

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For about a week now my Macbook has been at the doctor’s having its failed hard drive replaced. Since I do most of my writing in Journler, I’ve taken this little interuption as an excuse to play way too much Ogame.

Along the way, between launching space fleets and building colonies, I’ve been thinking about whether this simple but wildly popular game is a harbinger of the future of gaming environments or a remnant of the past, and what it tells us about the formation of the Web 2.0 organizations that will increasingly be in our lives.

I wrote

“The inflection point of web 2.0 is not about the progression along a path of increasing functionality, where each subsequent development leads to more and better. Web 2.0 is about a whole new way of interacting, with conection and interpersonal interaction trumping the output of processors and their supporting databases. At its core the technology has gotten powerfull enough that we can be simple again, and in that simplicity find a vastly new level of complexity.”

Oh, and I’ve certainly increased my level of Ogame addiction, because well, what else am I going to do? They don’t cal it O-crack for nothing….

I’ve been chatting with the folks over at digital complements + about Journler and they pointed me to Karl Stolley’s The Lo-Fi Manifesto.

Reading it reminded me of when I was serving my time in the land of technology management. Back then the Architecture and Planning group reported to me and we were pretty sure that the age of applications and hardware was over. The future was about data. We spent most of our waking hours trying to find ways to undo the mess left from just about five decades of applications dumping data into siloed databases…

Amanda, a rising star of the New York literary world and my occasional lover, is not pleased that I read my poem, Endless Visibility, to her friends, a group of emerging literati.

In fact she is rather upset.

I’m sorry Amanda, I asked them a question and they didn’t like the answer. Does this mean our date is off?