Glass Maze Every jumbled pile of person

Posts from February 2008

Hi, Fascism!

Fascist! is a word that gets thrown around a lot by abstractly angry people who don’t like what their governments are doing. But sometimes those people don’t really know what “fascist” means. People like me, for example. The word has a viscerally ugly ring to it, and suggests all sorts of nonspecific nastiness, and it’s [...]


A Passionate Plea for a New Pronoun

For the love of god can someone please invent a gender-neutral singular pronoun? I’m trying to write a technical spec, and find myself fleeing again and again to the plural, because I’d otherwise have to fall back on “he” — or, worse, “he or she” — whenever I mention a user. The latter construction is [...]


Symbolism

My understanding of symbolism was dealt a near mortal blow in high school, when we were given an edition of The Old Man and the Sea with a symbol index in the back.

A symbol index is pretty much what it sounds like: a list of story artifacts, with accompanying capsule descriptions of what each of [...]


The Best Love Song Ever

… and possibly the best video for a love song, to boot. Bright Eyes.