The Act of Counting is More Theory-Oriented Than Social Media

My understanding of atemporality, which of course, is my own, is explained in this example that just happened to me:

There is more to do with Atemporality proper in the act of counting to three than there is in the world of social media.

Let me explain.

Of course, social media is very fascinating to us and to the regular media as well, because it is new and popular. Which, it must be said, happens to be a very non-atemporal fascination, and has everything to do with an understanding of what is "now" and "current". But heaven forbid we take any of our theoretical cues from the media!

But social media actually is just another way that people talk to each other. Talk that would go on elsewhere, and in other forms, if social media did not exist. After all, we may be a new generation constantly connected, logged in, twittering, and refreshing, but we're still humans. We still think with the brain, feel with the senses, and have weird rushes of irrational passion with the endocrine system.

So we're going to have to go back to philosophy on this one. Philsophy, love it or hate it, has a bit of a leg up on social media theorists, because social media theorists have only been on Twitter since some time in '08-'09, whereas philosophers have been going at it for thousands of years. Again, we're going to have to break out of the fascination with what is new and hip. Sorry.

One philosopher who was really hip back in his day was Henri Bergson. He gave public lectures that EVERYBODY went to, until finally he got tired of it. He also won some Swedish dynamite award, which I know is kind of like the Oscars these days, and not really a big deal. Well, this should suffice for an intro: William James thought he was great. If that doesn't prove it, I don't know what does.

So Bergson had this concept of the consciousness of time, which he called duration. Basically, it means that although time is commonly broken up into units, such as years, days, minutes, and seconds, our experience of time is total, and quasi-unified by a multiplicity of moments, which we know as time, our sense of temporality.

I understand it like this. Counting is the activity of a mental, logical category of abstract thought, which separates conscious experience into ideal units, for easy, categorical thinking. We can't clock into work with a hippie-Bergsonian, "you owe me for, like, a really intense duration, man," so we clock in for eight standard hours. It makes it a hell of a lot easier to plant crops this way. But this doesn't mean that beneath counting, which as an ideal category works pretty well, there still isn't duration as the basis of our consciousness.

Now for the example:

How many markers are in this photo?



There are three. Which is true.

But we don't actually have to count them. We can sense that there are three. We did not say, "there are one, two, three markers", or "there are one plus one plus one equals three markers." There simply are three.

You may think that you are just so good at counting, that you counted so fast you didn't need to add it up consciously. Okay, well how about this:

How many times did you urinate last Wednesday?

You could try and remember the actual instances of urine elimination you took part in last Wednesday, but you probably wouldn't remember all of them. You could say "I don't know," but actually, that's not really the truth either. You do have some idea that you urinated at least a few times on Wednesday. You know the answer is not "zero". But if you said, "probably 5 or 7 times", then you were making a conjecture of counting based on your subjective recollection that Wednesday was a normal day, and you normally pee about that many times. It's as correct as anything. Who could disagree? If I spied on you, and actually counted the number of times you went to the bathroom, and I know the "actual truth", then I am asking you the wrong question. I should have asked you, "did you count the number of times you pissed last Wednesday?" and then you would say, "no, and you're real weird for watching me go to the bathroom all the time." But I did didn't ask that. I asked you to make a subjective recollection, and you did, correctly, by not actually counting.

With the markers, its the same. You did not actually count three markers. You saw a trinity--a single multiplicity consisting of things that could be counted into three. Three is one of the numbers humans can very easily see. One, Two, Three, and Five are also very easy to see (all prime numbers, by no small coincidence. Whole number are whole by basis of their definition, and prime numbers are prime on the basis of their uniqueness within division of whole numbers. Five divides into two 2.5's, but we don't count that way. We have called Five prime on purpose, because by definition, we want it to be significant). You are not counting them, you are seeing a Singular, a Pair (or a Double or Couple or Twins, if they are the "same" thing), a Trinity, and a Hand. When Protestant's get on Catholics case about the holy trinity not being monotheistic, they are just pulling a mind game, counting the number of times Catholics go to the bathroom. Of course the trinity is a single god. Do you ever see two of the trinity just hanging out without the third? You may talk about God, as in the one and only, or the Savior, as in the One and True, but counting the trinity as three separate things is like looking at the three points of a scalene triangle and telling someone there are really three different triangles. There is one triangle, that can be counted as three angles. There is one trinity, that would not be a trinity if you could not potentially count the separate elements, and it would not be a trinity if they were not all present at once. At ONCE. One.

So beliving Catholics are actually more atemporal than social media as well, because they are consistently experiencing the ideal category of countable units simultaneously as they experience the unity of the multiplicity, i.e. duration. Why do you think so many religions describe their preconscious trances as "a sensation of one-ness"? Because "one" is not simply a number, it is also an adjective! It is a human way of feeling. The meaning of wholeness is the root of duration, our conscious experience of all that we know to exist. All elements must linger in the consciousness together or would not be sensible either as one or as separate things.

Now imagine the markers are "yesterday", "today", and "tomorrow". Past, present, and future. So how many different ways of experiencing time are there? Are we "remembering", "being in the moment", or "speculating about the future"? There are not three aspects of time, there is time, which is a trinity in that we can count these aspects differently. We need to count the difference between past and future so that action, i.e. motion, makes sense. Motion, of course, is distance over time. What is distance? Another way of counting, but of space. We need to break time and space into number lines so we can understand changing intensities of time and space. We need to pin time to a number line of past, present, and future. But that doesn't mean that we experience time in those ways, a priori. The trinity still is a multiplicity, and time is only our consciousness of time.

How about this: what colors are the markers? They are red, blue, and green. But you are viewing the images of the markers on a computer screen, which is made of tiny colored fragments of red, blue, and green. So each marker must be red, blue, AND green so that you can see one as red, one as blue, and one as green. The space in the image that is not marker (ce n'est pas un marker?) divides the difference between a blue and green and red marker in your perception, and so you perceive it as an image of three different things, when you are in actuality looking at a screen of tiny colored lights. Your perception is "tricked" by its categorical thinking into seeing objects, but we are all glad that it does. We need it to be tricked into categorical thinking. But at the same time, we shouldn't forget what it is we are "really" looking at.

Social media may give us opportunity to see time as a flow of duration, which we dip into consciously to sample with our perception only on occasion, and we rarely remember exactly what we see. But as I hoped to show here, we can also experience the truth of duration in something as simple as counting to three. Of course, social media claims to have a bigger pay off, with unique social consequences for connecting a wide swath of the population with the pure experience of duration. Maybe. But in the meantime, each of us is capable of tripping out by counting our fingers, or perhaps more interestingly, beginning to think about history and our collective futures as no more than an extension of the consciousness of duration we are all experiencing right now, as we sit, twittering away in front of computer screens.

The really interesting part is when you begin to realize that it is not possible to form a complete memory. Our duration is not a thing of one-ness. It is full of holes, rather than being whole. The atemporal consciousness begins when we start to think of time as an imperfect. It is a multiplicity missing many parts. It is a network, with more strands breaking every hour. Almost all of our contacts aren't online.

So where does history go, when we realize we can't remember yesterday any better than we can remember tomorrow?

The savants who can find incredibly large prime numbers in their head should be given libraries full of history books. Ask them to "find the primes". See what sort of theories they come up with.

America Needs Cartoon Heroes

[Unfortunately, this awesome video has embedding disabled. I strongly encourage you to watch it.]

Somewhere, America has lost its way.

Somewhere between the 1980s and today, we lost our cartoon heroes. Some of them became unpopular, or were cancelled. Others transformed into heroes we would have hardly recognized back in the day.

Somewhere along the line, Batman became goth, Vampires became sexy teens, and any sort of team vehicle just became environmentally unsustainable.

We lost the mythic urge to have timely, yet futuristic heroes that would help the us common, poorly animated regular folks in the background.

Now the cartoon urge is lost somewhere in the realm between Sponge Bob and Glenn Beck, and I say America is worse off.

I'm not saying we have been de-heroified, any more than we have been de-sexualized. But I think there is a certain sublimation in play in these sorts of cartoons. They are images of certain ways of being, certain ways of thinking about the challenge of evil to good. This lesson has fallen to either dadaist silliness, or biblical/fascist hate. These are not the only lessons children receive in their youth, but it is a powerful hole, left filled by horrendous replacements.

Maybe what America needs now is a race-gender-and-age-mixed team of cowboys to ride a robot horses into space to get into intergalactic fighter planes to fly off to blast humanoid dinosaurs driving hybridized construction vehicles with pink lasers.

Or do you think we should just leave the future of America's youth to Blues Clues and Dora the Explorer?

Just sayin'.

CMYK is the new SXSWi

This is to continue a twitter-burst about print, and the digital age.

I work at a commercial print shop. No, my company did not pay me to go to SXSWi. Hmm. Can't figure why not.

I actually had a pretty tough day at work today. The company is refiguring itself, and in the process, this means that often there is a lot of work to do with few people to do it. Other times, it means there is little work to do and too many to do it. But this is all part of "refiguring", right? I'm sure you know what I mean.

It's weird being a young person, artistic and idealistic, and working in the print industry. And I don't mean working as a "designer", because this is what all the young folks want to do these days. No one wants to learn how to operate a six-color press with a perfector, or mix ink, or play the irritating and demanding fast-slow-fast game known as "bindery equipment".

For some reason, I chose this. Not for least of reasons, because I'm a writer, so I have an interest in knowing a bit about it when all the old folks in the industry are gone. But also because I believe in print, even though I listen to mp3s, blog, tweet, and really really like my iPhone.

Those who "design" things, using computers almost entirely, regardless of age, know very little of the details about how the things they design turn into, often times, physical realities. Those who use those physical things mostly know even less. But the funny thing is, despite how digital everything is now, many things still wind up on paper, and probably still will.

As I just mused, ever see anyone using a ZIP disk? No. But still, despite Amazon, despite the iPhone, paperback book stores are still open for business. Paper is a hell of a medium. You can shape it, recycle it, repurpose it, you can even eat it. You can't erase it, you can only destroy it. It's made from plants, and you can make it in your kitchen sink.

My great prediction for the future of print is not really a prediction at all. It's more of a comment on any cheap, easily available, widely usable technology. Its use will change, as soon as we all figure out how to use it.

The greater change, if there is a change, is in capitalism. Capitalism has done the production and distribution of print for a long time now, and this production and distribution has followed capitalistic standards and typical tendencies. This will change, because capitalism, despite what the open-market profligates will tell you, is actually a pretty narrow window of production and general cultural momentum.

Economics, on the other hand, is not a narrow window. But economics has never been dependent on a so-called "open-market", or any of the features thereof. Actually, most economics has operated free from the idealistic zone of an "open-market". Black market, grey market, state market, or non-market economics is just as big as it ever was, and operates without an open-market at all.

Open-markets, which supposedly have their own prestidigititous logic less like the I Ching and more like a Ouija Board, have less to do with capitalism, than with an general ignoring of causes to prove the general fortuitousness of the effects. You have to admire it really. It's not even tautological, i.e. using the supposition as proof of its own validity. It is assuming anything to be valid, as long as it can be used as an argument for the validity of the status quo. "Things are great! This proves that things will continue to be great!"

I'm getting off track, but basically the open-market has allowed capitalism to not even wonder why it's getting so rich, and then when it stumbles, it can't figure out what to fix. Instead, it fixes nothing, and instead argues that it's still rich, and this is why it will be richer tomorrow. Anybody you know have a really expensive purse, and several thousands of dollars in credit card debt?

Print was sold as a commodity for a long time, not wondering about what sort of a commodity it was, not caring, as long as it continued to sell. When print stopped selling so well, all of a sudden the print industry had to make up some bullshit about what it actually was. Working in the print industry, I've had a lot of people try to tell me that print is actually junk mail, and that junk mail is actually the key to how businesses (the businesses paying for the junk mail) make money. This is funny, because they are arguing that junk is a commodity, and not only that, but that junk is the commodity that makes all commodities valuable. If we printed money, perhaps they would have a bit of a point. But we don't. So it just sounds stupid.

It should also sound stupid to anyone who has read a book.

I'm not trying to argue that there is some sort of a long-tail in POD publishing, or artisan books, or self-published e-marketing with a twitter presence. All of these arguments are just more of the same, i.e. the print industry trying to convince themselves that the products they have been selling at a profit all this time are still profitable, even though they can't make such a big profit on them anymore.

But I'm not in the publishing industry. I'm in the print industry. So let me tell you a little bit about print that you might not know.

- Print still exists. Sure, there's less work now. We lost the clients that had us print their forms in triplicate, and those that send out company wide newsletters every week. Now they do all that online. But we still print catalogs, envelopes, packaging, letterhead, business cards, magazines, postcards, art cards, posters, maps, manuals, and other stuff. We print less of that too. But we still print it. And we will, because people realize they don't need to spend money on it all the time. But often, they decide they do need to spend money on it. And not just because they can't use their computer.

- Print is still profitable. Did you know that five, ten years ago, it was normal to charge a 100-300% markup on print? Print literally was printing money. Now we make a 50-100% markup over cost. Apple makes a supposed 500% markup over cost on the iPhone. But that is assembled in foreign sweatshops. We can make a 75% markup with american materials and living wages in any american shop space with a strong floor, electricity, and fresh water. Yeah, I know: the capitalists are pissed they lost their gold mine. But this brings me to my next point...

- Apple can charge so much over cost for the iPhone because it is Apple, not just because it is something people want to buy. I don't mean that they simply have a brand, though obviously that is involved. The iPhone is a world-wide technological infrastructure, requiring world-wide IT support, communication networks, sales structures, and so on. They wouldn't have made X billion dollars if they didn't acquire X market share of the ENTIRE WORLD'S SMART PHONE MARKET. You and I could never make and sell an iPhone. Only Steve Jobs could. The best we could hope for is to maybe work in an Apple Store, or program an iPhone app.

On the other hand, you can earn a 75% markup by printing a thousand books. True, you have to find someone to buy a thousand books (wholesale or retail), and you have to own a print shop. To open a commercial print shop, you probably need 5-10 million dollars. That's not nothing. But if you are dreaming of opening a print shop, you could do it. If you are dreaming of inventing and selling an iPhone, you are an idiot.

- And the technology is changing. Thing about this example. You can lease a color digital printer, for, say, $1400 a month. You pay the base charge for all your supplies except paper, and then 5 cents per impression (one printed sheet). If you charge 10 cents a click (that's way conservative) you can make 100% over click charge, and it would only take you 21,000 impressions to break even. That's one run of 100 books with 210 full color pages. You sell another 100 books, and you just made $1000 pure profit. All you need is twenty square feet of floor space, and electricity.

- But then, of course, you have to think about paper, and binding, and someone to run the machine, and someone to buy the books (in the example above, a retail establishment could sell the full-color 210 page book for $30 and make 70% over the production cost), and someone to make the content of the books (do your own math for that). And this is where the capitalist says, "damn it, why can't it just print gold, or why aren't people showing up at my door with orders for 100K flat color sheets and providing their own paper?"

Well, this is where things are changing. The print industry would love to sell flat color sheets in runs of 100K. The rest of the world calls this junk mail. But the fact is, no matter how digital the world gets, can you see a world where there is not someone who would want to make/buy full-color books?

The fact is, print is just too damn easy, and too damn big. If you look around, you'll see a lot of new paper products you've never seen before. Some of it is cute letterpress stuff, some of it is paper craft inspired by Japanese arts, who have been more interested in paper than us for a while, even though they have plenty of smart phones of their own. Some of it is stuff you would have seen mimeographed or faxed or xeroxed twenty years ago, but now is crisp, colorful, and well-printed. Some of it will be free, or nearly so, because it is that easy to cover the costs, if you know what you're doing. Most of it, I would imagine, you will only see a few places, and then you will never see it again. But I'd bet you'll be seeing more of it than ever.

So the lesson of the example is that print is still possible, and even profitable, but it is shrinking in size. This means the capitalists are pissed, because no single book is going to be an iPhone. But it also means that someone is going to be making money, even if they are doing it in a garage, in runs of under 100, and racking their brains on who they are going to get to fill the pages and who is going to buy it. They might have a few hard days at work, like I'm having. They will never get any noticeable market share of anything. They will never be a publicly traded company. They likely will not be capitalists. But they will create their own market, as they learn about their industry and about their technology.

Humanity Double Shot

The writing project I'm working on now is largely about people, so I'm finding it easiest to work on at a crowded coffee shop, where there are plenty of specimens to observe, "in the wild", as it were.

Observations

-People order some fucked up weird coffee drinks. Not just with particular milk choices, but with tons of weird stuff in it.

-People are always weird about how they ask someone if a seat is taken.

-People almost always turn muffins upside down, and then pull pieces off from the bottom (i.e. the actual top).

-People look at each other all the time.

The last one is the most interesting. People are always looking at each other and sizing each other up. But this doesn't really cut it, description-wise. They are not just sizing each other up, but also judging each other, but also looking at each other like pieces of sexual meat, but also trying to avoid looking like they are looking at other people, but also looking at their clothes, or hair, or body type, but also looking at each other to see if they are looking at each other.

Of course, we know that people look at each other in these ways all the time, but the strange part is that they are doing it all at once, without really conforming to any of these stereotypes of Other-interactions.

And maybe I'm overly paranoid, and this is why I am projecting all these thoughts and motivations onto other people, or maybe I'm just over-analyzing it because I'm writing about it.

Anyway, it strikes me that any form of theorization about the Other needs to take the coffee-shop phenomenon of human interaction into account. That real dissociated interaction with the Other happens while doing other things, and while doing many things at once. How could you be judging someone's dress while simultaneously scanning them as a potential sexual partner? Not because they are same thing, but because you are doing both at once. Subjectification and objectification seem to happen simultaneously, as two component activities, rather than uniquely. Not even as opposite poles, but sort of a length X width of perspective, inherent in stereo vision. Caffeine is raising awareness, and our Otherness sensors are functioning on over drive. I mean, why would people spend so much effort trying to avoid watching each other, when they are all doing it, separately but equally?

It's time for another cup of coffee, to and to get back to what I'm actually writing.

Stop looking at me.

Interdome Content-Object Shakeup

Been thinking a lot about Tim's (of Quiet Babylon internet-fame) project, "Unlink Your Feeds".

The problem of multiple, interlinked feeds has long been a burgeoning neurosis of mine.

Let me share my problems with you!!!

I love interconnectivity. I use my Google account with great zest, trying out the new features as they add them. A lot of them are useful, but a lot of them I try to use, simply because having everything linked together makes it easy to experiment. I don't have to invent a new password and username to try X service, I just click the link. If I don't like it, I just stop using it, and never pay it another thought.

Additionally, Google's interconnectedness is a huge plus. There are plenty of portals and application uses between Gmail, Docs, Calendar, and so on, which I don't have to spell out for you. I use my iGoogle page as my widget desktop, and then access my cloud holdings from there. The interconnectedness makes it superior in function even when it lacks particular features, and all of this has made me continue using Blogger rather than going solely to Wordpress, caused me to shun Facebook, and even avoid using Twitter for a long time.

But Twitter... oh, oh Twitter.

It's just too damn easy. All those one-line witticisms I come up with during the day, with no one to share them. The ease of retweeting, rather than saying something original. The ability to take a picture of a strange car and share it with the world, all from my cell phone, while still driving with my knees.

Twitter isn't owned by Google.

So, I have this other feed going. In addition to my RSS feed, and my Reader feed. Now that I know what a wonderful world Twitter is, I get curious as to what the hold-outs who refuse to get Twitter are saying on Facebook. And I think maybe I should start cross-posting to Facebook.

Then they created Buzz, which is the Google-Twitter I always wanted, except that it still sucks, so everyone read on Twitter is still only on Twitter. So I linked my Twitter feed to Buzz, as well as my reader account.

And now I live in this hellish world I have helped create.

Tim is right--we cannot live like this. And while the idea of cutting the feeds free, and using each as each is best suited has a nice, Marxist "to each according to his need" sort of feel, I still have this need for interconnectedness. I just can't blog, feed Reader, Tweet, Buzz, and Facebuke (the verb?) separately and simultaneously. Hell, I'm supposed to be writing books! I still want to maintain my Internet presence, and read what I want to read, so there has to be some over lap.

How, oh, how, can I make all this damn technology work for me?

The secret to using a Google Account, in my opinion, is to be flexible, and also to be patient. Many things work, and over time, Google makes them work better. And, work better together. Also, as I experiment with different tools, I change my use of them as they work, and work differently, together. Only recently did Google Docs get to a point where I was comfortable doing serious writing with it. And, since I spend less time online in "open surf mode" than I used to, I now only bookmark certain feed posts, rather than keep detailed notes about various web sites.

The same is possible with my feeds. I think I've hit upon a way to link them so that people who want to know what the deal is can still find out, without redundancy, and with most of the input automated.

This is the way it is working now:

I am looking at these feeds in terms of objects of communication. Any feed-ready information posted to the web is an object, treated as an individual, accessible, feedable piece. Different classes of objects hold different amounts and kinds of content, which may or may not overlap other objects' capacities for content.

Additionally, certain objects may have a certain shape, which allows them to fit into different data flows or lines of assembly (feeds). For example, I can set up Buzz to attach Twitter-objects to Buzz-objects in my Buzz feed. However, this shape is a shape of intensive flows (in the sense that it allows a certain change-of-state transition of the object, rather than a transitivity, like A = B = C). I'm getting all complicated with my terms, but basically, think of it like how yeast can bake into a loaf of bread, but bread cannot be dissected back into yeast. A Buzz-object cannot be translated into a Twitter-object (at least not yet).

RSS is the smallest common denominator in terms of objects, more or less. Any feed, be it Twitter or Facebook or a blog, almost always has an RSS feed generated with it. There are various tools to mash RSS feeds together, Yahoo Pipes being the most well-known. However, I am doing this because I don't want to create a new feed, I want to merge and ally the feeds of services I already use. Many of these services also have APIs, and perhaps I could work out some sort of program for managing my posts among the feeds. However, I'm not so skillful in the programming department. Also, if I use the recognized features of these different feed services already in existence, I'll probably be in better shape down the line to adjust to new features, and also I have the services' dependability to fall back on.

Content-wise, Twitter is the smallest common denominator. You can't find anything smaller than 140 characters. I also use Twitter most frequently, because of its small content size.

Additionally, many objects translate into Twitter-objects. Via Feedburner, I can make my blog posts echo as Tweets. Using Tweetdeck, my mobile Twitter client, I can post to Facebook and Twitter simultaneously.

Granted, it is annoying to see someone's high score in a video game echoed as a Twitter post. However, I've been posting less and less on the blog, and when I do, it is a often something that started as a Tweet, but then grew too long. In this way, the Twitter-object derived from my blog's RSS feed is just a link to a memo, a "please see my memo re: X". The duplication is, in a sense, to force people to choose. Either they want my full feed, and tune in to the Twitter feed for the details, or if they wish they were spared my constant witticisms, they can just go to the blog RSS.

It is not yet possible to auto-transmute my Reader shared RSS to Twitter, but that's okay, because I can always post a single Reader item to Twitter via a sidebar tool. This is probably for the best, because I can share anything interesting to those who like my reading tastes, but reserve only the "mainstream" articles for my main, common denominator feed.

Buzz can, and in my case is posting all of these things together in one, lump feed. It is a taste of the chaos. But, because Buzz has set out to aggregate all of these things, it is less of a network in itself, with its own flavor, and more of simply an aggregator. The cool part is, it shows up in my Google profile, so if anyone happened upon me via Google, they could get a good taste of what I'm into on the Internet.

Blogger, with all the new Gadgets you can add into it, is looking more and more like MySpace every day. But this flexibility is good for me. I now have two columns here. One to store these text essays, and the other to provide an easy way to examine the difference between my feeds. The Twitter feed, on the top, is the general feed. Next is the blog only, then my Brute Press stuff only, then other-source RSS only. All of it retains its original, unique feed-object character and content, while one feed, the Twitter feed, acts as the main door way, strictly under my control.

Control, after all, is what this is all about. It's a personal micro-manager's Internet dream. The solution I just described for myself will undoubtably not work for anyone else. This probably won't even be my own solution in six months, as I discover new tools, and start using the tools I have differently.

This is the key philosophical lesson of Internet content, content-objects, and object feeds. (You knew there was going to be a philosophical lesson, didn't you?) If you told people in the blog boom that they would be abandoning their blogs for a service where you tapped in 140 characters with your thumbs from your cell phone, they would have thought you were crazy. Same thing if you tried to sell Gutenberg a Kindle, or some other such foolish spatial-temporal technology metaphor-mashup. I'm sure whatever's next will also be just as weird as the present, and the past. Time is aggregation, after all.

The tools we have to communicate change the way we communicate. Big surprise, no? I'm sure we'll eventually figure out our feeds, so we don't have to read cross-posts anymore. Otherwise we'll drown in echoes, or suffocate in Internet Balkanization catatonia. People will sort out how to mean what they want to mean to the people they want to mean it to. Right now, to me, I'm directing my meaning to the people who follow me on Twitter. If you don't like that feed, please consider the other options to the left. If you don't like that, there is plenty of other Internet out there.

This way, both my communications and the people to whom I communicate can grow towards each other and into each other, like roots into the earth.

Familiars

Picked up this postcard at the Armory show. Looks like Gallery Weekend Berlin pretty well ripped off Melville House.



If I was David Konopka, who designed the "Art of the Novella" series for Melville House, I'd be pissed.

Or contrarily, if David Konopka just happens to work for Boros, who did the design for Gallery Weekend, and I were he, I would be embarrassed.