Last Friday, a bumptious ignoramus hit me with a corollary to the old “Information just wants to be free” mantra, and I’ve been on a slow boil ever since.
“Information just wants to be free” has been the call to arms for every digital anarchist in the last three decades, and it is used as the justification for everything from hacker attacks to electronic piracy.
The corollary, with which I was hit on Friday, came in the form of a troll-post berating an artist who (gasp!) was charging a fee for her creative services. The outraged boob publicly shamed this artist, telling her that her “gifts should be given for free,” not hawked on the streetcorner.
In other words: Talent just wants to be free, too.
The idiocy of both of these rallying cries is blatant, and I’m bloody sick of it. Continue Reading »
As a writer, I’ve always been fascinated by so-called “famous last words,” but not the pronouncements made heading into battle or climbing the gallows steps. In those situations the speaker has prepared, is aware of what is likely to come, and has given their words some forethought as “famous last words.” Lines spoken at times like these are spoken for posterity, and are likely to contain not a small amount of “spin” for the history books.
It’s been an interesting week, writing-wise, and while no, it wasn’t “interesting” in the sense of “Oh God Oh God We’re all going to die!” it was interesting in the sense used by the old Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times.
You’ve noticed it. Websites are more in-your-face, lately; in some cases, they’re downright adversarial. Navigating them can be an education in frustration. Ads, videos, pop-ups, overlays, log-in requirements–it’s ridiculous. Advertisements are no longer passive; they’ve even moved beyond passive-aggressive. They’re just plain aggressive, now.
It’s the end of an era in Seattle. Our last great hometown pitchman, one of Seattle’s 
A large part of my “journey” from IT professional to editor is bolstering my own confidence level. While I’ve edited, copy edited, and proofread over a dozen novel-length books and scores of shorter works — both for myself and for others — I haven’t done this work as an editing professional. That, when put alongside the generally unstructured education I received in grammar (Hey, it was the ’60s; we didn’t burden ourselves with rules), means that while I have an innate command of the English language, I sometimes struggle to put into words exactly why an error is, in fact, an error.
Kurt R.A. Giambastiani 