Sentential Links

I have linkage for you. You will click them. And then we will all frolic in the Land of Links!

:: If nothing else, that phone call was a valuable reminder that words have power, and the online world is not so insulated from the real world as we all like to believe. (This is a very powerful post...but you have to read his backstory to get it. It's all very sad, all the way around.)

:: Oh, man, Darrin’s bio-dad is just not going to give up on his mission of assholery, is he? I have literally no idea what he thinks is going to happen if he goes public with the knowledge that Dead Lisa had sex as a teenager and had a kid and gave it up for adoption. (This storyline on Funky Winkerbean is seriously goofy. There's this guy who keeps lurking around and sneering and saying things like "Soon we'll all be one happy family again!" FW is one of the worst things ever, and yet, I can't look away. It's like getting to drive by a mangled car wreck each and every day, in which nobody actually died. Except the fictional characters, who all suffer endlessly.)

:: I’ve thought for a long while that any long-running series eventually stops being about anything other than itself. Each individual story might be about something; “Let This Be Your Last Battlefield”, for example, is about the absurdity of racial prejudice. But that’s not what ‘Star Trek’ is about. Other episodes of the series were about friendship, or about sexism, or about obsession…until eventually, all you could really say about the series was that it was about the Enterprise crew and the things that happened to them. Each episode was like a color transparency, laid over each other episode until all you could see was a character-shaped hole.

:: Writing is one of the arts, or it used to be before people started treating it like a career choice. When I find myself suddenly without my Mojo, I mentally backtrack until I find where I lost it. Nine times out of ten, it’s waiting right at the point when I began to think instead of feel.

:: Tycho Brahe, apparently, used to put on his court robes every time he looked through a telescope.

One must approach one’s work with awe and respect.

I think that’s really cool. (As I noted in Sheila's comments, I've over the last several months stopped writing in my PJs and whatnot. I dress for work. Even if it's putting on overalls, it's something. I'm getting to work.)

:: Because there has not been a triumph of reason over irrational fear, or an embracing of the statistically probable over the unlikely (or some might say a return of denial to avoid messy reality), but rather a choice to live my life in a more peaceful way. I learned in war that violence can happen to me, a white kid from suburban Buffalo. I learned it is not something that just happens to other people. I learned that when you are being shot at you should take cover behind your weapon. That if you are shooting at them they will put their head down and not shoot back at you. That when bullets fly – and they will, remember – that I should fight and not hide. (Brian Castner is a deeply thoughtful individual with whom I do not always agree, and with whom my disagreements almost always prompt me to at least think a bit more about my position; even if I usually come back around to my original way of thinking, I'm on better footing. My opinion of guns has not changed, but I've considered it more.)

:: The great thing is that I've met lots of new and interesting people out there in the blogosphere, with many viewpoints and stories to tell. I expect I'll continue to visit them from time to time. Another benefit of this challenge has been the act of blogging every day without fail - getting into the habit and making it part of what I do. I'm also happy that I actually had something to say, whether it was in poetry, a quote or just a few words about wellbeing, which is very important to me. (This really is the main benefit of the A-to-Z Challenge. For me, I have found that two years in a row, it results in a brief and small influx of new readers, but they all tend to disappear again. If there's one thing that bothers me about blogging here in 2013, it's that the old sense in Blogistan of various communities emerging doesn't seem to happen much anymore. But I'll do it again next year; in fact, I've already picked my category.)

:: The main knock on the iPad as a camera is that the thing is big and people look goofy taking pictures with it. But, you know. If you’re the sort of person who judges another person for using an iPad to take a picture, who is the actual asshole in that scenario? Hint: Probably not the dude holding the iPad. (This really doesn't bother me, although it can get distracting at things like school concerts. You can always tell which parents have kids onstage for each ensemble because all of a sudden, a whole new set of iPads get waved in the air.)

More next week!