Apparently you can buy a subscription to Dangerous Intersection for only 99 cents at Amazon. I registered DI at Amazon about a year ago, but I had forgotten about this way of reading DI. I'm curious, though. Does anyone out there read DI on a Kindle? If so, do the layout and photos translate well on the Kindle?
Mark and I have been friends for 20 years. I've celebrated his many successes as a science fiction writer, and I was delighted when he showed interest in being one of the authors for Dangerous Intersection. I just checked the stats here, and I see that over the years, Mark has contributed 187 posts to DI. I've read every one of them, and I am repeated struck by the fact that there isn't a "cheap" post among them. They are all well-crafted and carefully considered. Every one of Mark's posts is still available at this site. Click on his name on the bottom right corner list of authors to see them. But perhaps you are not in the mood to read substantive posts tonight. If that is the case, you are in luck. About a year ago, I sat down with Mark at his St. Louis home and videotaped a long conversation with him. We covered many topics, which I am in the process of breaking into individual YouTube videos. I'm including the first three as part of this post. In Part I, Mark discusses his personal goals and the importance of art. In Part II, he discusses reading, heroes and censorship. In Part III, Mark discusses the blogosphere, including his impression of what goes on here at Dangerous Intersection. I know you'll enjoy getting to know Mark through his spoken words, at least as much as you've appreciated his written work. Without further ado . . . I'll be posting several more Mark Tiedemann videos later this week.
The Center for Inquiry has published this list of books for freethinkers recommended by well-known freethinkers.
Few times as a kid did I wish for a teacher to ask, What I Did on my Summer Vacation? The school year beginning in 1971 would have been one of them. I recently wrote a bit about one day that summer at one of my other venues:
TheObjectAtHand: Balloon Memory
My pet peeve today is Answers.com, which runs "WikiAnswers" (I refuse to link to these sites). They are apparently run by marketing geniuses who founded these deplorable companies thanks to the ability to have their vapid link-less "answers" appear high up on Google searches. I have learned my lesson, though--no more will I follow a Google page to these sites. They have quite clearly been created to gain market share by jamming key words into barely thought-out "answers." In short, the idea is to pump the sites full of link-barren word-salad garbage authored by know-nothings purely for the purpose of selling ads. I base this opinion on reading dozens of such "articles," but no more. I'm finished with answers.com. I refuse to be one of the 54 million monthly visitors to these sites any more. Barely better is ehow.com, which has published one million articles. I've got to give a little bit of credit to ehow, however. At least you'll find at least ONE link in these barely helpful "articles." The end result is always the same, however. Thousands of ehow "articles" are dashed off in one sitting by non-experts who are whoring their writing skills so that ehow can gain market share for its buckets of ads--enough ads to take in $200,000,000 in revenue in 2009. Consider an example - do you think that this took more than five minutes to write? Do you think anyone reading this article didn't know how to shop at a grocery store, but now knows? Here is the inside scoop on ehow published by Time Magazine. In this article, we learn that the authors of ehow articles are paid between $3 - 15. And it shows. Don't trust me on this. Go take a look. By the way, the above article about ehow was written by a guy named "Dan Fletcher" who seems to crank out an endless stream of tiny articles for Time (plug his name into Time's search field and you'll see what I mean). It's quantity over quality for Dan, who sometimes writes 5-10 articles in one day for Time. I'm sure that he's thinking, "Well, it's a living." I know that the Internet doesn't belong to anyone in particular. People have the right to write anything they want and I have the right to try to not read articles that are created solely for the purpose of filling web pages with keywords that attract Google. More and more, however, serious sites are being shoved downwards on Google's results pages by keyword laden ad-machines that are portraying themselves to be journalistic endeavors, and it's a shame.