The first decapitation in Spartacus: Blood and Sand occurs 11 minutes into the first episode of Season 1. Two swordsmen in northern Greece, circa 75 B.C., hack, block, thrust, parry, and dodge until one of them overcommits. The poor guy finds himself not only off balance and exposed at the upper torso but, fatally, lacking the power of computerized fast-motion technology that his opponent suddenly possesses. If he’d known his opponent had this power, he probably would have fought more defensively, but it’s too late. He’s shown his throat, whereupon his opponent’s sword, a few degrees into a roundhouse slash, accelerates to invisibly fast. The next thing we see is a body spinning hard to its left as its head releases from its neck at a slightly higher rate of rotation. You really only notice that the fighters’ skin has been digitally washed to the gray-blue of hypothermia, thanks to its contrast with the red of the centrifuging blood, which obviously comes from a warmer palette.
Writing for an audience is a special and important sub-case: it’s writing with feedback and consequences. Doing it yourself changes how you think about it and how you evaluate others’ efforts. The now-unfashionable word ‘empowerment’ describes a part of that change: writing is a way of discovering one’s voice and feeling its strength. But writing in public involves discovering the boundaries and limits of that power, too. We learn all the different ways in which we are not the center of the universe. That kind of discovery has a way of helping us grow up fast.So when I hear the still-commonplace dismissal of blogging as a trivial pastime or an amateurish hobby, I think, hold on a second. Writing — making texts — changes how we read and think. Every blogger (at least every blogger that wasn’t already a writer) is someone who has learned to read the world differently.
The main vector for the execution of Zuckerberg’s vision is Facebook’s platform strategy. Summed-up again by David Kirkpatrick: ‘Facebook’s long term strategic plan is to become submerged below the surface of the internet, providing the crucial identity and social graph layer which enables all of us to bring a social component to whatever we might be doing. With over one million websites using the Facebook Open Graph API in some fashion, the company is making steady progress on this path. [Zuckerberg’s intent] is to build a critical portion of the evolving internet, in the form of the identity matrix which, he hopes, will reside at the core of the net, offering social functions in conjunction to whatever we do, on and off the internet. I think we can all agree that a social graph at the core of the web is a valuable thing. It’s hard to agree who ought to run it, however. Facebook is the only entity making an effort to do so.’
Sunday morning chillin’
stonecrop
fall coming
I’ve been using Google Docs for several years to do the bulk of my writing work. But not until the last month had I used the collaborative real-time editing feature. And it’s awesome. It’s insanely fun to work on a piece of writing with someone else over the network—watching their cursor-avatar driven in turn by insight and frustration as it flickers amidst the words. With a chat box open, the juggling act becomes even more uncanny and enjoyable—it’s like opening a backchannel on one’s own thoughts. As the other writer taps away, I can comment and cheer him along; sometimes, whole blocks of chat text get picked up and pasted into the main doc.It’s striking the extent to which it turns writing into a kind of game. It’s like a game of cards, in a way, with each player laying down tricks, matching and blocking, answering and offering, while the hand each player holds—each one’s own books, locally-stored documents and images, the immensity of the internet and the dooryard garden of experience—stays hidden. The written document becomes a playing field, a virtual space made of words. And watching the writing unfold is likely to be more illuminating—and entertaining—than reading the finished text.
Solomon Burke has died at age 70. From the AP report:
“Burke combined his singing with the role of preacher and patriarch of a huge family of 21 children, 90 grandchildren and 19 great grandchildren.
”‘Loving people,’ he said at a recent performance in London, ‘is what I do.’“
slanting morning sun
early fall flowers