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Late Night Musings
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Late Night Musings
Wisdom & Tyranny In Crowds
04.07.08 | Permalink | 5 CommentsCINNA. Truly, my name is Cinna.
FIRST CITIZEN. Tear him to pieces, he’s a conspirator.
CINNA. I am Cinna the poet, I am Cinna the poet.
FOURTH CITIZEN. Tear him for his bad verses, tear him for his bad verses.
CINNA. I am not Cinna the conspirator.
FOURTH CITIZEN. It is no matter, his name’s Cinna. Pluck but his name […] -
Late Night Musings
Conspiracies & Super-Villains
In my story Earthquake, we find a caveman out on a hunt trying to provide for his ‘family’. He doesn’t know why he cares about these people, but he does. And when the ground shakes, killing those around him, he’s also not sure why. And when he finds those he loves, somehow safe from harm, […]
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Late Night Musings
I fear we must burn something
03.24.08 | Permalink | 3 CommentsIf youth is no longer to be wasted on the young, then who shall waste the precious substance? And if the answer is nobody, how shall our society survive without youth?
My friends are more likely to have a pile of marketing and ’self help’ books on their shelves than works of discontent or offense. A […] -
Late Night Musings
Can’t They Just Be Evil Again?
“Have you considered what having a timeshare in Miami could mean for you?” the telemarketer asks me, interrupting my dinner.
“Have you considered using social media?” I reply.
“Social media? What’s that?”
“It’s just like this, only I pretend you’re not annoying so you’ll link to me.”
There was a time when the sweet, sweet taste of Coca Cola […] -
Late Night Musings
Does Smut Need A Holiday?
03.21.08 | Permalink | 4 CommentsI’m going to risk accusations of either being a frat-boy, a misogynist, a pervert, or pretentious in saying that our views on Pornography, it’s availability and legality, are, in large part, a major factor in who we are as a people and a society. A claim of misogyny, which would bother me the most, can […]
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Late Night Musings
A Godless Tradition
03.18.08 | Permalink | 2 CommentsNot objecting to special revelations, considering a curl of smoke or a hair on the back of my hand just as curious as any revelation,
Lads ahold of fire-engines and hook-and-ladder ropes no less to me than the gods of the antique wars…
–Walt Whitman
Perhaps it’s fitting that our most important poet and cultural ancestor, who built […] -
Late Night Musings
Why I’m against Gay Marriage.
03.17.08 | Permalink | 10 Comments“Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?”–H.L. Mencken
As we get closer and closer to our actual election, we are concurrently getting closer and closer to the resumption of the ‘Culture War’ and, likewise, the resumption of the ‘Defense of Marriage’. Well, in light of such fortifications, I think […] -
Late Night Musings
The American Freakshow
03.12.08 | Permalink | 2 CommentsIf there is one place in which I believe it’s perfectly alright to accuse the American media of treason it is in the constant showing of, reportage on, and giving airtime to that strange, albeit shamefully enjoyable, creature I call the American Fundamentalist. It’s not that I mind seeing the Preachers, the Reverends, the Dr’s, […]
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Late Night Musings
Killing Marketers: Is it fun?
03.11.08 | Permalink | 3 CommentsMurder is wrong, of course, is the common complaint I always hear. Agreed. Well, not entirely. As any lawyer will tell you, there are exceptions. If a man wishes to strangle you, wishes to kill you, it can be agreed by most reasonable people that–should you have on you the instruments for his demise–he’s already […]
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Late Night Musings
The Myth of Content
In the six months since I started this site, several stories, not all, but several have come from a deeply personal, sometimes embarrassing, sometimes painful place. This is because I’ve found the ‘write what you know’ mantra to be true, however cliché. I say this simply to explain why I no longer can use the […]
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Late Night Musings
Why Schemes Fail
03.06.08 | Permalink | 4 CommentsAs I walked home last night down a not particularly crowded street, a man ran past me; he was ragged, dirty, old, his hair was a mess, his shoes were falling apart. He was, clearly, homeless. It became apparent in a matter of seconds that he was not just running, but chasing someone. That man, […]
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Late Night Musings
The iPod’s wheel is the Automobile’s wheel is the Caveman’s wheel.
02.14.08 | Permalink | 2 Comments(or, Why there will be no more posts about social media on this site)
I’m done talking about social media. I’m done reading about social media. No more conversations about conversing, talks about talking, or blogs about blogging. I’m done with technology whose only purpose is to impress technologists, with web services that only interest […] -
Late Night Musings
A Coda For My Video Store
02.10.08 | Permalink | 2 CommentsSomewhere between last Monday and last Friday, my video store, that is, the small independent video store I’ve been going to for years, disappeared. No notice, no sign, no asking for the three dollars I owed, but mysteriously the decade-old movie posters were removed from the windows and replaced with large patches of brown paper, […]
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Late Night Musings
The Truth
Is there truth in life? There’s no truth in fiction. There’s many truths. There’s this character’s truth, there’s that character’s truth, there’s the setting’s truth, there’s the time period’s truth, and over all of it there’s the author’s truth, his beliefs, but a capable artist will allow that even that isn’t the truth. A story’s […]
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Late Night Musings
The New Renaissance Man
The question on the future of Art cannot really be discussed without also pondering the future of the artist. What will he look like? What will he be expected to know? Right now, in the digital age, the word ‘artist’ is increasingly applied to everyone and to no one. The programmer is a writer, the […]
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Late Night Musings
Is Art 2.0 still Art?
01.20.08 | Permalink | 5 CommentsA couple years ago famous film critic Roger Ebert caused something of stir when he said about video games:
Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control. I am prepared to believe that video games can be elegant, […] -
Late Night Musings
The Disposable Age
History is malleable. A new cache of diaries can shed new light, and archeological evidence can challenge our popular assumptions.
–Ken Burns
We know little about the period between 500 AD and 1000 AD. It’s not that we don’t have numbers and charts, or maps, or currency, or royal seals. But what makes it a […] -
Late Night Musings
Athens and Catalonia
01.06.08 | Permalink | 2 CommentsThe worst thing in the world next to anarchy, is government.
-Henry Ward Beecher
Democracy and Anarchy on the web.
We’ve all been told of the ‘democratic’ nature of the web. That it’s an equalizer for different voices, where everyone can be heard and participate. Where we can all ‘join the conversation’. I don’t really disagree with any […] -
Late Night Musings
Is communication ever useless?
12.26.07 | Permalink | 3 CommentsIf the Internet got a nickel every time someone accused it of being “trivial”, we might be able to blanket the Western Hemisphere with free WiFi for the next century. I myself have certainly put some change in that bucket. Many people believe the Internet is/has become a giant cesspit of Porn, Perez Hilton, and […]
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Late Night Musings
The Blitzkrieg Effect
12.25.07 | Permalink | 4 Comments“They must understand that we can only lose by taking the offensive. Patience and time are my warriors, my champions,”
from War and Peace
On the morning of November 3, 2004, I woke to find that the first candidate I had ever voted for in an election had lost. John Kerry, looking tired and lonely, announced […] -
Late Night Musings
The hardships of being a nobody 2.0
12.04.07 | Permalink | 5 CommentsIn social media 15 minutes is a career, so I don’t know what the equivalent of ‘having your fifteen minutes’ is, but it certainly does exist. Those who think the new conversation brings with it new values are either themselves new or are deluded. For some reason I’ve been getting asked a lot lately in […]
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Late Night Musings
Will 2008 be the year of the social media hangover?
“Oh, please, Americans don’t want privacy. They want attention! They’ll put a camera in their shower and show it on the Internet! To get on television, they’ll marry strangers and eat a cow’s rectum, and ice dance with Todd Bridges. They’re trying to get on a show called ‘Big Brother’!”-Bill Maher
If there’s one thing I’ve […] -
Late Night Musings
Whenever I hear the word ‘brand’, I reach for my….
Although I am a blogger (and fiction writer) I still have a small regard for empiricism, thus, to begin:
Webster’s Definiton of ‘Brand’:
a class of goods identified by name as the product of a single firm or manufacturer.
Of course, no sentence (or post) can really describe what the word ‘brand’ means today. Or–to get […] -
Late Night Musings
Five things you could be doing during the writer’s strike.
Like so many oppressed laborers before them, Hollywood Writer’s have gone on strike. Their claim/grievance/beef is that they’re not seeing profits from online media and digital distribution (um, guys, either are the executives). The last stachka of the prime-time bards happened in 1988 and lasted for five months. Now, five months may not seem like […]
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Late Night Musings
Life & Scalability
Gordon E. Moore, co-founder of Intel, famously predicted that computer chips would grow exponentially, doubling the amount of transistors they could hold every two years. He was right, but having been in the web 2.0 game for (approx)three months, I’m starting to realize that the promises of better/faster/larger memory are not very impressive anymore; it’s […]
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Starving writer publishing bite-size pieces of prose everyday. Also occasionally riffing on Culture, Art, and Media. I also do freelance writing and work for hire.Contact Me
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