Cogito, ergo non possum dormire
The above delightful phrase is the title of a new “mostly political (libertarian), mostly link-hound, mostly for my amusement blog.”
Oops! For those of you whose Latin has gone rusty, that means I Think, Therefore I Cannot Sleep.
Down the street was Cheapo Records, located now in the old Best Buy store. Cheapo sells used CDs as well as new, and dumps every day’s purchases in big bins marked with the date they came in. Most of the CDs are lame, but there’s always a gem in the dross. People flip through the bins quite quickly: crap. crap. crap. crap. crap. zamfir. crap. crap. 182 blink. crap. hippie crap. crap. crap. Whoa! Woody Guthrie! The sound fills the front of the store, drowns out the music: clack clack clack clack. It’s like listening to a Difference Engine made of hard plastic, or ten people drumming their tongue studs against their front teeth.
Most of my disc collection was accumulated in the early Nineties when I used to go to Recycled Records on Haight Street every month or two. Rather than spend an hour going through the whole stock and then decide which four of my twenty selections to buy, I hit on a system: on each visit I searched one letter of the alphabet, and bought everything that struck my fancy. Saved loads of time, and exposed me to lots of stuff I’d never have tried otherwise. After about two cycles through the alphabet, there was little left to find, so I stopped going.
What if I could go back in the past, take myself aside and say: You know, in the future, you will be convinced that Russian computers are sending you messages about barnyard sex photos.
I would have gripped my future self by the shoulders: am I insane in the future? Tell me!
No, everyone gets them.
My new title [“before i forget”] was suggested by Dori Smith’s Backup Brain (mentioned at Worldcon).
I thought of “The Harp of —–” after Dunsany’s “The Cave of Kai”; but sadly that harper is unnamed.
do as I suggest, not as I am constrained
Steven den Beste, in “An act of faith”, puts words in the mouth of an anonymous blogger:
. . . I, myself, do not admit to holding those opinions to those around me because I’m afraid of the consequences. But I believe that American voters should do what I say, not what I do, and they should publicly embrace the opinions that I myself fear to admit to in my own name.
They should be courageous and take chances based on my writings, even though I’m not willing to. They should risk social censure, even though I do not.
I haven’t read the blog in question, so I won’t comment on it in specific; but —you knew a ‘but’ was coming, didn’t you?— but it seems to me not unreasonable to say: “Here are some things I wish someone would do, and I hope to persuade you that they are good ideas. I am unwilling or unable to do them myself; but maybe my constraints do not apply to you. Maybe you can see a way to do whatever-it-is without the same risk that holds me back.”
Maybe only an underachiever would think of that.
Raphael Carter’s Honeyguide is one of the granddaddies of weblogs. Why hasn’t it been updated since April?
If Susanna Cornett hadn’t changed hosts, I might never have read Meryl Yourish’s rant on web design:
The first standard of web publishing I learned was: The reader is in control, not you. You shouldn’t care if your readers want to completely override your backgrounds and fonts. Web publishing is all about malleability; if you can’t grasp that, you should be publishing on paper and ink. Those of you who insist on using templates that don’t allow the user to increase the font size need to find another template. You’re cheating your reader out of the control the web is supposed to bring her.
Which, friends, is why my pages have as little design as I can give them. If you’re at all like me, you’re here for the words, not the colors. (And if you’re not at all like me, why the heck are you reading this?)
Let us join hands and pray that Samizdata sees the light.
Later: Bruce Baugh is perhaps more to the point:
Folks, you really don’t know who’s reading. Some people are color-blind, and depend on contrasts in shades of gray. Some people have optic nerve damage, from multiple sclerosis or other conditions. Some are nearsighted or farsighted.
(This is on Bruce’s old site; his new site did not carry over the old archives.)