My wife and I finally got around to seeing Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. I find myself feeling ambiguous about it. It was compelling and the visual direction was stunning. However, the storytelling left a lot to be desired, in my opinion. Since it’s impossible to discuss those flaws without dropping some spoilers, the rest of the review is behind the jump.
Roger Ebert recently posted about “NSFW” in which he largely decried American puritanism. In the comments section, many people pointed out that the issue was less puritanism than keeping adult material out of the workplace. Some of this was for ‘hostile workplace’ reasons and some was for ‘you’re wasting company time and resources’ reasons.
I think the commenters are right–the issue is far more ‘at work’ than puritanism.
To me, “hostile workplace” is essentially a problem I’d call “not being adults,” which is extremely common unfortunately. There are things that just don’t belong in a work environment, there are things you don’t talk about with people you barely know, and there are things you don’t suggest or do to people who cannot say no. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who don’t recognize those things or who lack the respect to not go there.
For example, I once worked on a project where we were teamed with a different company. The project manager for the other company felt that it was perfectly fine to tell vulgar sexist jokes ‘as long as it was just us guys.’ Sorry, no. We’re not friends, we’re not hanging out by choice, and I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to sit there wondering if I should speak up and object, when I depend on you for funding, or if I should let it pass. There’s a level of respect that needs to be present in professional environments.
Strike that–present in all environments. And respect doesn’t mean following a bunch of ‘politically correct’ rules. It means treating people as people and as individuals and treating them as deserving of dignity simply for being human.
The “wasting time and company resources” issue, though, is a doozy of a problem to actually define. Because the root of the problem is the nature of work. It’s hard to define work in much of our modern world.
Some work is easy to define. People who work on commission, or own their own business, get paid by the job. There’s an exchange of money for a defined product or service, usually with a contract and various laws and regulations to back up that contract.
However, this gets difficult for many jobs where the work can’t be cleanly defined. Take a secretarial job. There are probably hundreds of little jobs that the average secretary does in a day. Writing the job description for those hundreds of little jobs and writing a contract for each of them would be prohibitively difficult, so we lump them together in a more general description and then pay secretaries by the hour.
And that’s where the definition problem creeps in. Are we paying the secretary for having his butt in the chair for 8 hours? Or are we paying him for those hundred little jobs? And what if he finishes those hundred little jobs in 4 hours instead of the agreed upon 8? Or what if that day there are only fifty little jobs to do? Or what if the jobs are arriving at his desk sporadically, so that he needs to be there hours 1-4, 6, and 8, but he’s not doing much hours 5 and 7? Is he stealing if he does something else like surf the web during hours 5 and 7?
Finding fair answers to these questions isn’t easy. It’s further complicated by the way the job definition transfers risk.
The best example of this is salaried employees. If an employee is drawing pay that does not depend on the number of hours they work, their employer is betting that they will have enough work to fill the standard work week. They’re taking a risk here, because if there isn’t enough work, they still have to pay the employee. In contrast, if there isn’t enough work to pay a strictly hourly employee, they may be able to send them home (or get scheduled for fewer hours the next week, which is more common). If there’s actually more work to do than what fills a standard work week and the salaried employee does it, then the employer actually comes out ahead on their bet.
So… what if the salaried employee is ahead of schedule? Can she go home early? Fire up her iPad and websurf at her desk? Use the computer in front of her for websurfing? Yes, there’s are argument that the employee should be taking the initiative and finding more work, but that’s not explicitly part of the contract most times. So is an employee really stealing if they’re not living up to implied but not explicit expectations?
This vagary makes it difficult to know when an employee is using company resources inappropriately and when they’re not. There’s no easy way to say, “well, he would be working if he wasn’t surfing porn” and is therefore worth disciplining. And except in rare circumstances, it’s hard to say “she’s worked hard enough that we can ignore whatever she’s doing privately in her office.”
So, between the vagaries of knowing when it would be okay for people to surf, and the potential for creating a hostile work environment, any company above the smallest is better off with a standard policy. Ebert, since he works largely from home, kind of definitionally meets that ‘small company’ standard, even if he’s technically a newspaper employee. Even if he weren’t, I’m sure he’d be cut some slack on the ‘stealing from the company’ standard since he clearly brings in a great deal of money to the paper. So I’m not surprised he saw the issue as puritanism first and workplace second.
It’s been a week where I’ve felt like I barely got any writing done. I’ve been sick with a bad cold, which has eliminated my energy in the mornings and evenings. I also had three working lunches this week, which eliminated my other best writing time.
Yet somehow I managed to finish 6 pages of Deep Dish. I now have pages 1-52, 57, and 61 done. That means 10 more to go. Can I do it in two weeks, or will it take three? Of course there will be one serious final pass (in one sitting if possible) when I’m done to make sure I didn’t drop something along the way. I’d prefer to not discover that I’d made a character a smoker and magically discovered the cigarettes disappeared halfway through. But I’m still optimistic and kind of excited. The end is in sight!
Of course, that’s just the end of the script. I still have to shop it to a publisher or figure some other way to pay for the rest of the art. But I can do that in parallel with my next project, whatever that might be.
I’m not entirely sure what that’ll be. I should get back to Unmasked, but it’s not tugging at me. Instead, there’s a science fiction story that’s calling “pick me up from the abandoned file!” and my historical novel first scene is starting to take place in my mind–except for the fact that I still need to do some research in order to get the facts straight. And of course, TMI is still in the queue for whenever Nick gets done with it.
But for better or worse, I’ve got a couple of weeks to muse about it. There’s still writing on Deep Dish to be done. And maybe a few surprises along the way.
When I first started writing, I mentioned my new pastime to a friend of mine I knew to be open-minded. He told me that his wife had been a professional writer for a while and even had been in a writer’s group with several authors I knew. She ended up writing ten books, almost all of which were ghostwritten. She eventually moved onto other things, but we have had a few conversations since then about the business of writing and such.
Last year, one of her publishers called and asked her to return to ghostwriting. They offered her $5000 per book as work per hire. She turned them down–it wasn’t enough for the amount of work she had to do. In fact, she found it to be almost insulting since the works would require several months to do.
Well, apparently, they weren’t the true bargain basement hunters. James Frey topped them. Yes, that James Frey, the one that passed off his fiction as a memoir in 2006 before being roundly disgraced as a liar.
As discussed in the New York Magazine, Frey’s been recruiting MFA candidates to write books in which they own none of the rights, can’t put their name of the work, can’t write anything that might compete the work, and agree to all sorts of other restrictions in exchange for… $250. It’s one of the worst contracts I’ve heard about, and a person would have to be a sucker to sign it. Apparently 28 people did, and anything I write can’t top what John Scalzi wrote here chastising those who did sign up for this.
But as I’ve thought about it, I just can’t get past my incredulity. Why in the world would someone sign up for such a bad contract? It takes so little to do the research on good contracts or even what the going rate is for ghost writing a book.
Now, I’ve been conned twice in my life. Both times by fast talking street hustlers who never gave me much of a chance to think or question what was going on until they’d convinced me to cough up some cash. It was less than a hundred bucks, and in many ways that was a decent price for the education. For one thing I learned is–a good con has to cut your time to think. In both cases, if I’d been able to step back a bit and really analyze what was going on, I would have spotted the con. In fact, that’s how I know I was conned. The next day I went, “Wait a minute…” and realized what the only reasonable explanation was.
So what happened to the MFA students? Why’d they miss the con? It’s not like it wasn’t written into black and white.
Obviously some of the con was due to greed. If you’re hungry for a fame and riches and someone offers you a short cut or a lottery ticket… well, a lot of people would jump at it and refuse to consider that it might be too good to be true.
But I wonder how much was also self-esteem. Insecurity is the basis of a great deal of commercialism, after all. If we’re satisfied with our looks, jobs, etc., then why spend all that money on cosmetics, clothes, gym memberships, extra education, etc.? And if you don’t think you’re “good enough” to make it on your own, why not get a boost from someone with a name (however sullied) and connections?
Of course, I personally will probably never know. It’s kind of ‘that’s the way it is.’ But I do know–there are cons in the publishing and writing world and it’s worth keeping an eye out along the way.
It’s been a rough week, for reasons that I can’t go into here. Suffice it to say, my day job and my family life threw me some curves that took time to deal with. Nothing particularly bad–just time consuming. As a result, I didn’t get as much writing done as I would have liked.
This was compounded by the fact that I reached a point in Deep Dish where I realized I was repeating visuals. I really don’t want to have multiple pages of the characters sitting at the same table talking that they were a few scenes ago and a few scenes before that. So I’ve stared at a couple of pages going, “hmmm, now how do I make this look?”
Nonetheless, I finished the script for pages 45-47 and 61. I skipped to 61 because I knew exactly what I wanted to do there, so it was easy to finalize. I also did miscellaneous panes on other pages. So it was a bit of a drop, but fortunately not by much. Hopefully I can overcome the humps and continue making progress over the next handful of days.
This past week, I had the pleasure of having lunch with Monocle, a fellow author in the Tentacle Dreams anthology. He’s the third erotica author I’ve met in the flesh after becoming acquainted online and all three times have been both a delight and a surprise.
Now some of this is the standard dissonance that occurs in meeting someone for the first time that you’ve already gotten to know through the ‘net. I learned in internet dating (which I did for a few years and is how I met my wife) that it was actually pretty important to arrange that first meeting before one’s impressions had solidified in the mind. When all we have is words and maybe a photo or two, our minds fill in the gaps to define the ‘character’ we’re corresponding with, much like we do with fictional characters. I found that if I spent too long corresponding before arranging a meeting, then I’d have a more detailed, solid, and wrong image in my head of the woman. The greater the dissonance, the harder it was to stay present on the date and have a good time. Basically, my preconceptions tended to spoil things.
For example, I was constantly being surprised by height. Online, my imagination makes every woman the same height relative to me–which is just a few inches shorter. It doesn’t matter if her profile had said something different, it was how my imagination conjured her up. Of course, I’m 6’3″, so there are very few women only a few inches shorter than me. It makes little difference sitting across a restaurant table, but it’s often surprising standing up.
People online don’t have bad breath, eyes that wander all over the room, or funny moles in distracting locations. They don’t have an intense gaze that can either unsettle or entrance. They rarely have unexpected pauses in conversations and the ability to edit before hitting ‘send’ increases the intelligence of their discourse. Of course, they also can’t hold your hand, give you a kiss, or convey all that a smile can convey beyond an emoticon.
So I learned that the best way to avoid the dissonance was to avoid having built up a mental image ahead of time. That’s easy in an online dating environment–just don’t stretch out the online correspondence. It’s harder for more casual connections. Monocle I had not become acquaintances with the plan of some day meeting, like online dating does. It just happened because of fortuitous circumstances.
What can make it more complicated with an author is that there’s the person in the flesh and the person in their work. Monocle writes much darker stories than he comes across in person. I couldn’t help wondering if people who met Stephen King felt the same way–”Nice guy, but have you really considered what must be going on under the surface?” Of course, being an author myself I had a pretty good idea of what could be going on under the surface and how it related to reality (some, but not enough to be meaningful).
So, for me, the bigger dissonance was he had read my stories. I mentioned the trial to do tight plotting in Dealing with the Devil, and his response was “Oh, yeah, I read that one.” I did a doubletake. Usually, people I’m speaking with face to face knew me before they knew my writing. It was strange to be on the other side, wondering about what impressions my work gave of me.
Of course, most of what we talked about was writing and publishing. That was fun. Not only could we swap stories and comments faster than the internet allows, but we found that in many ways, we’ve had comparable histories. We’ve both been writing for about the same length of time and have recently hopped to publishing some of our work. His focus has been largely on shorter works, but he has a much larger backlog as a result (check it out, he’s good). We had similar experiences in the early online erotica communities and even managed to swap stories about people and places we knew.
Which, I think, was what ultimately made it pleasurable. Here was someone who knew. I didn’t have to explain what it’s like to be a writer. I didn’t have to explain what it’s like to write erotica. I didn’t get confused stares or sidelong glances about what I do. It was freeing and relaxing at the same time.
I had the same experiences when I met the other two authors, though it has been many years since those encounters. It kind of makes me winsome for some such face to face support group, though I suspect I’ll never join or organize one because of real life hurdles. But every now and then… the time with another author in the flesh may be a great touchstone worth having.
So, with the election over, my experiment in “Blissful Ignorance” officially ended. I actually checked the news online Monday night and then let myself browse a couple of news and sports websites on Friday.
It didn’t feel particularly good.
Yes, I got the information I needed, but I ended up feeling sluggish. It was like I’d overeaten simply because the dessert looked good. Except it didn’t look that good, it had just been put on the table in front of me. It felt like lard coagulating in the arteries in my brain.
It also wiped out a half hour of writing during Friday’s lunch. This did not particularly please me once I realized what had happened.
For my writing time has become more precious these days. I want to write more and I want certain stories in my queue finished. There is no way to do so, though, without simply taking the time to write. So a half hour here or a half our there lost to sluggishness now feels like an affront.
Fortunately, I still managed to plug on the Deep Dish script on other days. I finished scripting pages 41-44 and started page 45. I also hopped around a bit when I was stuck on page 43 and did some panels here and there where I knew exactly what I wanted. Sometimes picking the low hanging fruit keeps the motivation going.
I also realized that, while I talk in page counts for Deep Dish, it might be helpful to put it in word count for comparison. The Deep Dish script in Word in now 84 pages long, and 24,708 words. Given that the full script is 2/3 done and the remaining 1/3 is done at a detailed outline level, I probably will top out between 30,000 and 35,000 words. That means the script is equivalent to a novella itself.
So the fact that it’s taking me several months is actually pretty reasonable, given my pace on fiction just prior to this. I’m not going to pull up the exact stats, but my last 30,000 word story (Fireworks) took me many months to write too.
Anyway, if I want to pick up the pace, it looks like a low news diet might be a great thing to continue. We’ll see how it goes.
Remittance Girl riffed on my last post to talk about ideals and the disappointment of being real. While my original post had focused on the non-existent dream girl that many guys desire, she added the Mr. Right of the Romance novels. She wrote:
Similarly, women are forever tantalized by the strong, silent and unbearably buff Mister Right, who sensitive when it matters, with an IQ off the scale, masterful in bed and fiscally responsible to boot. Tender in all the right moments and utterly lacking in any baggage that might get in the way of them fully committing to a lifetime of blissful domesticity – or even a couple of months of it. Romance featuring just this sort of mythological creature still outsells every other form of genre fiction. And, in the 48 years I’ve been on this planet, I can’t honestly say I ever met a single one of those.
In doing so, she reminded me about the secret to seducing women: be that guy.
Now obviously, this archetypal romance novel alpha male won’t be able to seduce every woman. Nor will every guy be able to pull it off for an extended period of time. But those are only issues if the guy is trying to seduce a specific woman or aiming for some long term result like marriage and kids. If the guy is just looking to bed a lot of women, all he needs to do is ‘be that guy’ from first meeting until he’s done fucking the woman du jour.
And I do mean “fucking” on more than one level, because we’re talking about fucking women over as well as fucking their bodies. There’s a certain lack of moral compassion required to be a pure pickup artist. For even if a guy is being an ‘ethical slut’ and clean in his communication, he’s still taking advantage of deeper hungers that he almost certainly lacks either the intention or the ability to fulfill.
I know. I’ve been there. I’m not proud of it.
While my twenties had been very lonely and very troubled, by my early thirties, things had begun to change. I won’t go into all of what happened, but by the time I was 32, I had learned a fair amount and knew how to at least project self-confidence on early dates with women. I’d also discovered internet dating, which is a great way to make sure one’s first impression is intellectual instead of physical.
So I had a first date with a woman I’d met over the internet. It went well, in large part because I was in full alpha male romance novel lead swagger. By the end I could tell she was itching to be kissed. I did so, hard and passionately. We had the second date in my part of town and afterward I invited her back to my place. She left late that night, but not before saying it was the best sex she had ever had.
I was chuffed. I spent the next two weeks strutting in ways that would have embarrassed reality TV stars. I bragged to my friends. I invited this woman to spend the night over Valentine’s Day weekend for a sex marathon that I was sure would rattle the roof.
And I fucked up beyond belief. I was so high about having ‘scored’ that I really didn’t see her as a person. While I was confident I’d said that I wasn’t looking for anything emotionally serious with her and that I wouldn’t be monogamous, I honestly couldn’t be sure she’d heard me. In hindsight, even if I’d said them, I certainly hadn’t made sure that they weren’t lost in the blizzard of “I’m a great alpha male” malarkey I was also throwing her way (and trying to convince myself was actually true).
So she showed up for our overnight date with a bag of presents for me. Lots of presents. Handmade presents.
Oh, crap.
I learned in that moment that it doesn’t matter what the words are nearly so much as the what the energy and actions are that accompany them. For her, I was the Romance Novel dream come true. I knew better.
I did end the relationship as kindly as I could and we each went our separate ways. Later, as I continued to date via the internet, I encountered several other women who were projecting that same desire in early dates. If I came across as close to the men of their novels, they were eager to invite me into greater intimacy, be it emotional or physical. If I had had less of a conscience, I could have gotten laid often.
Since then, I’ve poked at the peripheries of the men’s pickup subculture, where guys buy a book or pay for a workshop to learn how to score with women. I haven’t waded into it enough to know for sure, but I haven’t encountered anything that would contradict what I’ve learned myself. The best teaching material is the romance novels that women buy.
Now I know that somewhere there’s a guy reading this and thinking, “yeah, but I’m not the guy from the romance novels and I don’t think I could be. Even if I could, I’m not sure I want to stoop to the low ethics of a pickup artist.” To which I say, “great!”
Now, as I’ve said, not all women want the Romance Novel idea. Also, there are plenty of women who are smart enough to know that the Romance Novel ideal is impossible. They’d be happy with just some of those qualities in the guys they date. In particular, “sensitive when it matters,” “masterful in bed,” and “fiscally responsible,” from Remittance Girl’s quote above, are learned behaviors that any guy can achieve. Additionally, in my experience, self-aware honesty is pretty high on the priority list for many women, and especially for women beyond their own early 20′s experimentation phase. So being self-aware enough to know you’d rather treat a woman as a person than a score is a great start.
Which brings me around to a conclusion similar to Remittance Girl’s. The Romance Novel guy is unreal. So is the pickup artist, and they go hand in hand. But isn’t reality, with all it’s beautiful flaws, better?
I came to that conclusion rather firmly before I was 35. Then I met my wife, and proved it beyond a shadow of a doubt. I’ll keep the Romance Novels as light entertainment because there are better ways to actually live.
It’s been harder to maintain my Blissful Ignorance this past week. The end of the week found me sliding into low energy due to the usual stresses and lack of sleep. We’re in a stage where our toddler doesn’t believe he needs to sleep, and that’s making it tough on his parents. There have been more than one time where I just wanted to zone out and flip to my habitual news sites. I have resisted, though.
The writing continues to be faster as well. I finished the edits on TMI and sent it to Nick. I reviewed the publisher’s proof of Irie no Kaubutsu. I also knocked out the final scripts for pages 37-40 of Deep Dish. I think I could grow to like this pace.
The hard part of the experiment, however, is seeing how upset I really do get when I see political ads now. I haven’t been able to entirely avoid them–when I’m driving I can’t always pull my hands from the wheel to change the radio station immediately. And there was the time I was trying to set up the DVR and failed to mute the TV–catching too much filth disguised as campaign commercials before I could track down the TV remote. It feels like being hit in the eyes with a flashlight after having gotten accustomed to living in a warm cocooning cave. It fucking hurts.
Which implies I’m likely to continue it. My mood’s up and I’m happier? The downsides seem pretty minor in comparison. Besides, I really want to finish some of my queue, and the only way to do that is to find more time. This seems to be one of the ways to do so.
I knew a woman once who had a successful phone sex career. She did well in part because she took her calls at her computer wearing a headset, which allowed her to take notes during the conversation. Then, when the client called back, she could quickly remind herself what they’d talked about and whatever personal details he’d shared. Her clients felt they were special to her, when in fact they were little more that a well-organized tickler file.
The other major contributor to her success was that she was a masterful story teller. She knew how to drop the little details into a story so that it rang true, even when it was completely made up. She also often included little vignettes that showed her embarrassing herself or in other unflattering light. After all, why would anyone lie about things that don’t make them look good? Her confessional stories rang ‘true’ and garnered a quick large following.
For me, it was just one more data point on how much men (or at least many men) crave authentic voracious feminine sexual energy in their lives. Skim any Penthouse Letters book or free stories site aimed at men and you’ll see that most of the women in them are high libido, highly sexual women with low inhibitions. That’s what enough male readers want to be able to sustain those publications and sites. That’s the draw for many fantasies such as wife-watching. And yes, there’s probably a longer post in here somewhere, since I didn’t address this head on in my Power of the Feminine post. But the point for this post is that I wasn’t surprised that a successful phone sex operator was able to tap into that craving.
Unfortunately, she made a mistake. It was early October a few years back and had recently snowed here in Denver. So in one call, she mentioned that she was going to take a break and go skiing. Unfortunately, the client she was talking with knew that the Colorado ski areas weren’t open and so caught her in a falsehood. He was furious. She told me that he flew into a rage and called her all sorts of names before hanging up.
She was shocked, but ultimately dismissed it as a minor loss in her customer base. It wasn’t exactly a Crying Game surprise, after all. She also didn’t understand why he was so upset. She kind of understood, but she really didn’t get it.
I did.
Which is why I wasn’t surprised to read about the takedown of Alexa, the blogger of The Real Princess Diaries. Her blog was highly rated and followed, but she turned out to (probably) not be a high priced call girl in San Francisco, and instead appears to have been a man living on the other side of the country. I say ‘appears’ because the blogosphere is still humming with possibilities and accusations and I frankly can’t keep up, much less intelligently comment.
Now, I’d found Alexa’s blog a while back and enjoyed reading it from time to time–maybe once or twice a month. The writing was solid and it included all those little details that made it ring true. I recall one story where she described joining the mile high club on a cross-country flight with a couple of marines she’d met in the back of the plane. She devoted a couple of paragraphs to describing the difficulty of finding a position that worked in the lavatory, and what they were bumping into as they fucked. There was humor in it, as well as the sheer hotness factor.
At the same time, there were posts that made me go, “this is, at a minimum, exaggerated.” One of the stories, for example, was about putting on a sex show at a private party in a rich section of San Francisco. The details of how she got to the party sounded like they were straight out of Eyes Wide Shut (review coming soon). She had a story of being a weekly morning office blowjob for a regular, which besides being an amazing risk that not one of the pros I know would ever willingly take (too much risk of getting caught), the details themselves rang as contrived (walking there, the blowjob always on the same day of the week just before his secretary arrived but never actually getting caught, etc.). Finally, too many of Alexa’s stories were just plain hot, whereas the sex workers I know would say that the majority of their memorable encounters were just weird. “Hot” was a rarity when they were doing it for pay. It was a job with its good days and its bad days, and how many of us truly remember the specifics about our average or slightly average days?
But while I doubted the veracity of many or all of Alexa’s posts, I didn’t spend much time on it because this is, after all the internet. Isn’t there a famous New Yorker cartoon that says, “on the internet, no one knows you’re a dog?” I read her posts firmly aware that they could be complete bullshit, but it entertained me from time to time and that was the whole point.
Obviously, it wasn’t for someone else. It could be a simple case of mental instability on the part of the person who outed him (Remittance Girl has some scary examples in her comments section, including one from me about an author friend I know that was cyberstalked). However, having read the original screed, I don’t think it was.
The person who did the outing was pissed. They did a lot of work, fueled by anger that was more than casual, in order to do the attack. While several sordid details of possible other improprieties have come out since then, few were included in the original post. This was personal, and whether it was because of some flame war that spiraled out of control or something else is currently unknown.
But I couldn’t help thinking of the phone sex worker I knew, by analogy and extension.
Because we, as an aggregate and often as individuals, want more from the internet than mere entertainment. Sometimes we want accurate information. Often we want community in ways that the physical world cannot easily provide. And sometimes we want connection.
I’ve been there. I celebrated my 25th birthday alone in an apartment with a pizza, a rented VCR, and some movies, trying to pretend I wasn’t desperately lonely. I had a year in which I went months when my only physical touch with another person beyond a handshake was a lapdance. The internet, still in its infancy, was a fucking godsend.
The internet allowed me to maintain some semblance of human connection. It allowed me to be emotionally honest in ways that I just couldn’t with those I spent my time with face to face on a daily basis (as most were coworkers). It allowed me space to sort out more of who I was and what I thought–trying on personas and growing from the experience. In some ways, it helped me stay sane.
And I think it’s that sense of connection that is at the heart of both the sense of betrayal and some of the reaction to it. “Alexa” apparently was false in some of her personal connections with others on the web. They felt betrayed. In response, there was a take down, which betrayed “her” in personal ways. It’s in that sense that Remittance Girl’s comments about the vibrancy of the web strike home with me.
I think a lot of the vibrancy of the web is in the connections. We can meet and relate with people all over the world with whom we might not otherwise ever become aware of. We can find support and friendship and community and the occasional good idea. Which just makes it sad when it’s perturbed by something like this.
Which is ultimately where I end up. There are plenty of places debating the particulars of Alexa and in the end, those particulars won’t matter much to most of us. It’s not like we’re the person that’s been destroyed, after all. But that doesn’t mean it’s not sad for the rest of us that it happened.
Big Ed's Place