silveradept | Heh - interesting day today.

First off, some bad news for us U.S.A. people - 2004 election postponed until 2008.

Second, just for you, TK - Thoughts in Captivity.

Third, for anyone who's ever wondered, the difference between n00bs and newbs.

Finally, the post I made earlier today has been knocking around my head for a while now - it's turned a few things topsy-turvy and set some others in motion. I'm beginning to think that the best retort to the question of "Who am I?" is "Tabula rasa." But it's a blank surface that everyone, has an irresistible urge to write on, and now there's all sorts of stuff scribbled on it, in the margins, in all sorts of hands of different sizes, styles, etc. And then the worst part is when the surface looks at itself in the mirror, it believes that the writing on the sheet is what's important. It's not! The writing can be scribbled anywhere, on anything. Depending on what sort of tool the writer is using, the writing may have varying degrees of effectiveness, (pen works nicely on paper, but isn't quite so effective on stone.) but in the end, it's just writing. At any time, the writing can erased, replaced, overwritten, appended, etc. Destroy the surface and the writing goes with it.

What's worse about the writing tools, is that each tool wants to write more of itself (or things that are like it) on the surface until it's completely covered with that writing. Since the space to write on is limited, they fight over how much writing is on the surface at any given time. Some tools will fight off other tools more successfully than others. Others will be elbowed out of the way by new tools that scribble themselves on the surface. And the surface looks at the writing on itself, and decides that it likes certain tools and doesn't like other ones, and so it will start letting the tools it likes write on itself more and getting rid of the other tools.

Then the surfaces started comparing the writings they had on themselves, and made exchanges of tools, and then began to think that whatever tools they thought wrote best would write best on everyone else. So they started to interfere with the other surfaces, trying to get them to write with particular tools and avoid other ones. They might even go so far as to destroy surfaces that wouldn't write with their tools. To combat this, some surfaces figured out a way to have tools write on them, but not permanently, so that they could see whether they liked the writing before they let it become permanent. While this helps the problem somewhat by preventing the aggressive tools from setting in permanently, the surfaces started arguing over whether or not having the layer was a good idea.

Wise is the surface that recognizes the writing for what it really is! The surface that recognizes that the important thing in dealing with another surface is not the writing, but the fact that there's a surface underneath all the writing is enlightened beyond measure. These surfaces often want to help the other surfaces realize that the writing is immaterial. So maybe "Tabula rasa" really is the right answer. This might just be the beginning of an Erisian myth. Anyway, I'm off to bed, having work in the morning and all that.