A la Node

Once upon a time, a man was busy moving. He worked hard all week, hauling big heavy boxes, piles of wood and woodworking tools, and even an anvil. While he was moving, exhausted and dusty, he lost track of time and didn’t realize that a very important deadline was approaching fast. After one particularly long day of moving heavy equipment and sorting through a very dusty, dirty workshop, he suddenly realized that his deadline was only half an hour away and he had not written the story he had promised to write before the deadline was up. Even worse, he was in his new house, which didn’t even have an Internet connection yet! How would he upload his story? The old house still had an Internet connection, but it was all the way across town, there was only half an hour left, and he was so tired he was already in bed. Everything seemed lost.

Then, as if by magic, a wondrous and amazing thing happened. But it didn’t happen to him, sadly. He had to drive across town after all.

Moving by Kenneth Lett is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

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I’ve been enjoying this webcomic lately:

I Drew This
Despite the rather philosophical bent of recent posts, I’ve been thinking politics a lot recently, and this one sums up well a lot of my own gut reactions to what I hear in the news.

I’ve always wanted to draw my own strip, but I know I don’t have the drawing chops, nor the devotion to keep it up. I respect those who can consistently turn out good comics, and if you are curious, here are a few like to read:

• Diesel Sweeties (social commentary, robots)
• Schlock Mercenary (science fiction)
• Sore Thumbs (absurdist social commentary)
• Superosity (even more absurd social commentary)
• Sluggy Freelance (adventure?)

I should also mention Goats, but with a caveat – I’ve only found the storyline interesting in the last few months, but there have been good comic moments throughout.

You might detect a pattern here, you might not…

What do you like?

So I am obviously spending a bit more time in front of the computer lately, as you can see by the volume of posts. While writing, and considering things others have written, I realized (not for the first time) what an incredibly lucky person I am to have what I have in my life. I know only about three people read this blog, despite my efforts, and thats pretty frustrating sometimes, but at least two of those readers are people I am incredibly lucky to have in my life. A little too lucky, it seems. Without listing a pile of things that are similarly beyond what I feel I should be able to expect from life, lets just say things feel a bit unbalanced sometimes. It makes me feel like I owe the universe something.

Now for the record, I don’t owe the universe anything. It is not a conscious entity, and the concept of owing simply doesn’t apply. Nor is there any cosmic karmic scorecard keeping track of my good deeds.  In fact the word luck here is simply a descriptive word describing my personal opinion of what I have managed  to get away with in life, it is not any kind of mystic force that influences or can be influenced.

Still, I feel like I need to be doing things in the world. Good things (by my lights, since I don’t have anyone elses to use). Things that will make the world a better place for the species, and perhaps things that will make the species better for the world. Would I feel this desire/obligation if I didn’t find my situation so “lucky”? I like to think so, since this notion has come to me via more philosophical/logical routes, but who knows. I suppose if I felt hard done by, I might also feel a need to change the world.
So here’s the question. Leaving aside the why’s and wherefores, what do you feel obligated to do in this world? Anything? If not obligated, what do you think is a good thing to try and accomplish? Is there anything you would consider a worthwhile purpose?

In theory, practice is the same as theory, but in practice, it isn’t. I need to write more. Every time I pick up a book, a thousand stories well up in me, and I have to fight them down just to read the one in front of me. A lifetime of reading has precipitated an ocean of ideas that wants to slosh over the sides of my mind at the first hint of imbalance.