10 Unrequested Suggestions Made to an Unpublished Novelist
I'm not sure how I wound up on the web site of Shannon Hale, an author I hadn't previously heard of, but I found this list pretty amusing. I can vouch for the fact that at least two of these questions are real suggestions that I've received.
Clive Thompson, Search me, pt. 2
Some thoughts by Clive Thompson, with links to additional stories and backstory, about search engines and how they're taking over our brains and becoming crucial parts of our consciousness. On the one hand I'm too young to say "Back in my day" or to come off as old and curmudgeony, but on the other hand I've been using computers and networks since before many current online diary keepers were even born (0), so I think I've got enough old-school cred on my card to go ahead and say, Oh, heebie-jeebie! I mean, I remember back in my day when we had to do all of our thinking manually! Like, for ourselves! And when we needed information, we had to actually stop playing Super Mario Bros. long enough to get mom or dad to give us a ride to the library so we could take home paper books about dinosaurs and the solar system! And we liked it! And, anyways, hasn't anybody seen a science fiction movie in the last twenty years? 2001? Terminator? The friggin Matrix? All artistic signs point towards the destruction of mankind when AI rises up and decides that we're a bunch of tools and that the computers could do a way better job of being people than we ever could. (1) Thought crime! Thought crime! Please, for the love of humanity--let us hang on to what makes us uniquely human. (2)
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(Oh, and Maureen--expect a bit of a tutorial on the footnotes stuff sometime in the next 987987 weeks, when I manage to put one together. It's not hard--the documentation on the program's website is quite useful--but there's a few Blogger-specific tricks probably worth noting.)
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