Online Community
Dec. 7th, 2007 02:33 pmI had the most wonderful experience yesterday. I've been off of lj for about a week now, due to cramming to get work done on a deadline, and then (gasp!) taking a day or two off and not hanging out as much online. Yesterday, I got a message from one of my fellow bloggers and community members, who wanted to make sure I was okay, because I haven't been blogging lately.
Wow.
This is one of those wonderful moments when I realize how much the online world has become so much like the office environment I used to have when I worked at a publishing house that it's almost an intersection of the physical and the virtual. What a wonderful thing to have people out in the world who notice when you don't show up--and how much more wonderful that is when they've never met you in person, but still care enough to drop a note!
So, thanks, my friend. You really made my day yesterday.
--
In the meantime, I've been collecting topics to blog about. Amazon just managed to win a debate against a federal request to give away customer information. Apparently, one of their marketplace sellers is accused of something or other, and the federal investigators wanted to contact all of the marketplace seller's customers to see what the fellow had sold. The whole story in the AP version is here.
The results for the Space Westerns limerick contest were posted, complete with plenty of Firefly limerick entries. The judges had a lot of great things to say, and some of them are as humorous as you'd hope. Others were actually pretty poignant, which is impressive in a limerick. Well worth reading.
And lastly,
sartorias linked to this entry by
superversive yesterday, but I wanted to quote from it here as well. It left me just feeling good about the fantasy genre, so I'll leave it with you until tomorrow.
"If Magic is an art by which the will is made manifest in the external world, then Elfland must be ruled as much by metaphysics as by physics. When the Half World spills over into the material plane, it may bring along the Platonic Ideals, which will then become real, solid objects like the ones we know. That is why, to the ignorant literary critic, it seems that all the characters in fantasy are mere archetypes. This is the exact converse of the truth: it is the archetypes who have descended from their Primum Mobile to walk the earth as characters. They have as much right to do so as any figment of the writer's imagination."
Wow.
This is one of those wonderful moments when I realize how much the online world has become so much like the office environment I used to have when I worked at a publishing house that it's almost an intersection of the physical and the virtual. What a wonderful thing to have people out in the world who notice when you don't show up--and how much more wonderful that is when they've never met you in person, but still care enough to drop a note!
So, thanks, my friend. You really made my day yesterday.
--
In the meantime, I've been collecting topics to blog about. Amazon just managed to win a debate against a federal request to give away customer information. Apparently, one of their marketplace sellers is accused of something or other, and the federal investigators wanted to contact all of the marketplace seller's customers to see what the fellow had sold. The whole story in the AP version is here.
The results for the Space Westerns limerick contest were posted, complete with plenty of Firefly limerick entries. The judges had a lot of great things to say, and some of them are as humorous as you'd hope. Others were actually pretty poignant, which is impressive in a limerick. Well worth reading.
And lastly,
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"If Magic is an art by which the will is made manifest in the external world, then Elfland must be ruled as much by metaphysics as by physics. When the Half World spills over into the material plane, it may bring along the Platonic Ideals, which will then become real, solid objects like the ones we know. That is why, to the ignorant literary critic, it seems that all the characters in fantasy are mere archetypes. This is the exact converse of the truth: it is the archetypes who have descended from their Primum Mobile to walk the earth as characters. They have as much right to do so as any figment of the writer's imagination."