It's not the first time I've been called a priest. And not the first time I've been called Liberal. But the first time I've been called them together? Maybe.

Pleased as punch when Creative Commons just works-- except it never does. Lookie here! This picture of mine was re purposed and reposted as part of a conservative catholic leadership blog. Or something. I have no idea. The Google translation seems to imply that my tie is somehow a liberal catholic? I'm confused.

Anyway, Nice of Kreuz.net to properly attribute the work. I hate to be a ball-buster on this, I know how you conservative clergy like to have special rules just for you, but I share my work under a Creative Commons, Attribution, Share Alike licence. Which means that you're welcome to use my photo for whatever you want so long as you offer your product under the same terms as I did. And the standard copyright notice at the bottom of the page implies that you don't.

So, yeah. No tacky tie photo for you.

This is, far and away, the funniest thing I will ever write on Facebook. It seemed a shame to leave it behind that walled garden. And so I'm posting it here.

Far and away. Far and away.

I don't Tumble anymore, but I have friends who do. And their feeds are the only thing you really need to read on the whole wide Internet. I used this post at work today to emphasize that, in spite of all of our frustrations, I feel like our work in addressing the stigma issues that affect mental health is really making a difference.
"Let's treat every disease like depression" may well be the magnum opus of the millennials. They don't get much, but one thing they do really understand is that emotional states are real things.
My only wish is that the author of "Treat every disease" had offered her work under a creative commons license so I could properly share it with you here.

Piggybacking on a previous post about War Driving: This is great. Listen to the caller try to get Leo to justify her belief that she's rightly using her neighbor's wifi access point for over the past year.

I don't agree with everything Leo says in response to her, but I am really amazed at the caller's sense of self-righteousness.

G: Oh my god Delicious Orange Juice!
G: Mmmm!
*later*
G: My mouth hurts. I drank too much orange juice.
*later still*
G: Oh! I think I'm going to throw up from all that Orange Juice. And Garlic Bread.
*even later still*
J: What?
J: When?

For Ashe...

The Soft Blue Light of the Season’s Second Yule Moon

Hearty souls, some wrapped in broad cloth and bundled in scarves, caps and mittens, bathed together in the blue light of Yule's second moon.

Lit by her silver glow, the powdered slopes leaned in to catch a glimmer of the light that shown within the circle.

They called, they sang, they laughed, they cried.
Though the winter’s chill crept into their bones, their hearts found warmth in fellowship.

Even in single digit temperatures, they found time to linger.

Dec. 29, 2009 \ Read it on Scribd \ Photo attribution

So, My friend Bob put a bunch of pictures from an event I was involved in up on his Flickr site a long time ago and I really liked a lot of them and wanted to use them as wallpapers. And I saw that Bob releases his photos under a derivative friendly Creative Commons liscence. Sweet.

I spent almost no time applying basic photoshop filters to try to make the photos less photographic and more suggestive of the magical and special place in which they were taken. Because I can. I like my wallpapers to strike a balance between photograph and graphic design. Also, I'm a sucker for the cutout filter. Hey, Photoshop is easy!

I've enjoyed having these as wallpapers on my computers for the past few months, and I hope you enjoy them, too.

I've put my wallpapers into a set on Flickr, and you can see Bob's originals in his set, along with many other excellent photographs from Septemeber's event. Bobs photos are so good, it's hard to imagine these as improving on them, but I'm happy to share them back out to the world. I enjoy them, I hope you will too.

My latest Craig's list masterpiece features rediculous pictures of @heathercore.

When I was a bruiser, I would cruise around the UW-Whitewater Campus in a size 3XLT leather biker jacket. It no longer fits, and I am no longer a bruiser. Perhaps you are a little bit smaller than me and also a little bit tougher.
This jacket is offered as is, with the understanding that it is a well worn, leather biker jacket that I wore every day for five years or so. Needless to say it is used. The zippers work. You're buying an old biker jacket, who are you to get uppity?

I love Craig's list. Love, love, love, love it.

Heather is awesome. You can have a little bit of that awesome. Just buy yourself that jacket. Instant awesome.

I’ve been quietly enjoying a The DrabbleCast for the past six months or so, enjoying greatly “Strange stories from strange writers for strange people.”

The Drabblecast is well produced, funny, entertaining, and digestible in small chunks.

Drabblecast 124 was a great description of a world slouching towards the singularity; people have their consciousness backed up to computers so that their beings can be accessed after death. Of course, instead of a happy occasion, it’s sad, disorienting, and kind of disturbing. Also, there’s a lady dying of cancer.

Wait, I swear, it’s a great story.  And, besides, its short. what do you have to lose?

First there was handwritten transcription. Then came moveable type. And someone sneezed, had some lunch. And they decided to tell their friend. And that friend told their friend, and suddenly we all thought we were the center of the universe. Why wouldn’t everybody you are kind of friends with want to know that  you’re not sure where your keys are, oh there they are, under your keyboard again?

The distance between the whim to publish something and the ability to actually publish it moves ever and ever closer. We live in an age where I can have a whimsical thought, jot it down on my scratch pad, and have it instantaneously translated into eight languages, uploaded into seven cross-referencing databases, piped across six social networking aggregators, and circled by five golden rings. This kind of immediacy has made publishing a deeply casual and a surprisingly personal experience. It would make Guttenberg’s head spin.

But, (like the wise man said, “Everybody I know has a big butt,”) nobody seems to have taken a breath, paused before they pressed [send] on their latest pithy cultural reference handcrafted into 140 characters, and asked themselves what the fuck am I doing?

This is the thing: Just because you can say something doesn’t mean you should. I’m not going to decry anybody’s right and desire to blather on and on, endlessly filling the world with content of marginal relevancy. If the pinnacle of your life’s work is to crack 1000 followers on Twitter, have at it. You go!

But if you value excellence, I ask you, are you living up to your part of the bargain?  Although I dabbled with a blog in 2000, I really  started blogging in 2002 on Live Journal because I felt like my employer was not giving me the resource to practice the kind of public writing I felt I needed to practice. Somewhere between then and now, publishing changed. The laws haven’t kept up. Attitudes toward the electronic order are in flux right now. It’s not safe to say your mind in America. Not without really thinking it through, anyway.

More importantly (and less insanely), I genuinely believe that “being present” is not as important as being awesome. And sometimes being awesome means giving presence a pass.

So that’s what I’m doing here. Merlin Mann said it better than I ever could when he re-launched 43-Folders. Ze explained it well when  warned you about brain crack. ToastyFrog said it when he took the archive off line. Again. No the other time.

The Writelarge.com archive is, as always, parked here. And the LiveJournal is out there for as long as Live Journal leaves it there. I’m not unpubishing, I’m just slowing down. Taking myself offline. I’m taking some time off, aside from notable exceptions, from self-publishing to work on something private, something great, and something that is notably more worthy of my prolonged attention.

This is not the end of Writelarge.com, but a fantastic new beginning. See you on the other side, friend.