May 2015 – Attempted Honesty

Like Kings

Technology today allows common people to do things that were once only possible for kings and emperors.

For example, in the past, only very powerful people could call for an item to be fetched from across the globe. Today, anyone can do this.

Or, in the past, only very powerful people could surround themselves with hundreds of yes-men to echo their own insane opinions, allowing them to slowly lose touch with external reality and spiral into sadistic madness while maintaining delusions of wisdom and benevolence. Today, anyone can do this.

Eggs Fly Away

Part of a series of pictures of a robin nest I took in the Summer of 2014. The parents were kind enough to build their nest in a place where I could walk right up to it and stick a camera in their faces. (They did not consider me kind for doing so, but…) Continue reading Eggs Fly Away

Attempting Honesty

It is always dangerous to claim that something about yourself is unique, because it probably isn’t. There is almost always someone who is just as adjective as you are or has done just as much gerund as you have. Nonetheless, I suspect that I might actually be unique when I name Redwall as a formative influence on my philosophy.

Millions of people have read Redwall, and nearly all of them have liked it. I found it deeply horrifying. Twenty years later, there is still no other work that has affected me as intensely. I didn’t immediately understand why, but in time I figured it out: Redwall was horrifying because its characters were dishonest. I do not mean that the characters told lies–to the contrary, telling lies was something which they sternly frowned upon–I mean that their perception of their world and the facts of their world were virtually unrelated to each other. Continue reading Attempting Honesty