The Application of Imagination: Where Thought Becomes Matter

Imagination without application remains a private theater, brilliant perhaps, but ultimately sterile. The history of human achievement suggests that genius resides not in the capacity to imagine alone, but in the peculiar ability to transform mental constructs into material reality. This transformation requires something more demanding than pure creativity: it requires the discipline to translate vision into form, the patience to iterate through failure, and the courage to impose one’s internal architecture onto an indifferent world.

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Raising Cynical Children in an Idealized World

Ideally, we want to raise caring and tender children who rightfully grow into wise and smart adults.  Unfortunately, the way into adulthood is, and always had been, fraught with predators and disappointment and liars.  We prefer to pretend these evil elements are not among us — and within us — and the ability for adults to repress inherent danger in the spinning world is what particularly places children in a purposeful peril.

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A Warning about Google Drive Local File Permissions and Web Publishing

Google Drive is one of the loves of my online life.  I store all my local files in my Google Drive Folder and that Google Drive Folder gets synced between here and the — out there — remote Google Drive.  I do all my writing and publishing via Google Drive.  I can find pretty much anything I want just by typing in a few keywords in Google Drive and I’m instantly presented with what I need.  Life is good that way!

However, I just discovered a permissions problem when it comes to using a local instance of Google Drive and a remote, third-party, website publisher, and I’ll share with you now what I learned, and how I fixed it.

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Writing for Yourself: You are the Center of the Panopticon

Too many writers write for other people.  They write for lovers or lost hope or for an unknown, future, audience they hope will like them — when they should really only be writing for themselves.  Every writer is the core of their confounding world.  We are the center of our Panopticonic lives.

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Manhattan Skyline Art Mocks World Trade Center Jumpers

We know memory is convenient.  We prefer to remember the happy and the good while repressing the horrible and the cruel. We also know there is one guarantee in this life you can always count on:  There Will Always Be Bad Art.  The current “Jumpers Sculptures” pocking the heart of New York City is but the latest example of cruelty in convenience masquerading as inspired artwork.

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