In the information age, though, there's an increasing convergence between material objects and information.

I


  have something you might call "informational spirtualism." I believe the more "information" (as opposed to noise) I create, the more successfully I've lived my life. I don't think it's just about quantity, though there is a theory (advanced by someone recently in an email) that genius is more about quantity than quality, that history will find the many diamonds that are left in a prolific person's wake, overlooking the crap. This informational spiritualism has molded my thinking so that I view objects as just means to a more lofty end: interesting, useful, original information. In the information age, though, there's an increasing convergence between material objects and information. Think of the 604e RISC Processor. It's a wonderful object, something my materialist id lusts after, worth far more than its weight in gold (for now). But it's easily reproduceable if you have the right tools and, most importantly, the right information, the chip masks. Nature figured out the essential value of raw information long ago when she invented DNA.

Amazingly, I felt as if I was Al Schroeder for just an instant.

It's amazing how the sum total of my experience in the information age has been to throw me into a societal dark age.

The following paragraph is intended only for Web geeks. I moved the entire Big Fun Glossary into my ~gus account on Atlas. To do so required heavy use of BBEdit's multifile search & replace, because references between ~bigfun and ~gus were all absolute URLs. They're all relative now. This makes my site much more transportable should I need to ship it to some other physical location in an emergency. Unfortunately, it's also very big. On my Macintosh hard drive as I did the file manipulations, the volume of my site stood at about 35 megabytes. I fear it's full of too many crappy JPEGs. The Big Fun site, by the way, is several months older than my own home site; it was begun by Jamie Dyer in early May of 1996.

It's a rainy day here in Central Virginia. I wonder what tough guy is going to impress his friends with a promise to beat me up today. Whatever weapon shall I conceal? I hate the wild west. It's amazing how the sum total of my experience in the information age has been to throw me into a societal dark age.

I'm Andy Warhol and their logo is my soup can, doo dee doo




I


  just amused myself by reading a very Kafkaesque page at the Barebones Website, the people who make the almost indispensable BBEdit text editor (though I'm using the ubiquitous SimpleText just now). On this page, BBEdit has a complex licensing agreement for the display of their little "Built with BBEdit" logo, which is nothing more than an advertisement for their software. Now, while BBEdit is extremely good (it does exactly what I want, powerfully, while loading quickly, using little memory, and occupying a small place on my hard drive), why do they make people jump through hurdles and fill out long, complex forms for the right to advertise their product unpaid? And what the hell is so wonderfully special about their logo? I'm thinking about tattooing it on my ass. That ought to go over good in prison. My use of their logo above, by the way, is occurring without my filling out any forms at all. I'm Andy Warhol and their logo is my soup can, doo dee doo!

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T


here's nothing much else to say for today. I didn't feel like dealing with brutish human beasts, so I went directly home. I came across Zachary struggling to insert an earring in the Kappa Mutha Fucka bathroom, and I helped him. What a queer thing ... two boys in the bathroom fussing over jewelry.

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