Dear Past Self,

I hope this letter finds you well. I know you have work to do, but I expect you'll be able to take the time out to read this - after all, I always have been easily distracted.

Now, I know that sometimes the world looks pretty grim: the everpresent threat of war, of famine, of disease, the knowledge always aching in the back of your mind that there are so many people who are so desperate, so helpless, and that you are helpless to change it. And that feeling never goes away, let me tell you. Life will always be a struggle: some of your fondest hopes will give way to crushing disappointment, and your dreams will succumb, as so many do, to cold, hard reality chipping away at them - slowly, but surely. Science will never cure death, and God will never speak to you and tell you your purpose, and no matter how many times you open your closet door, Narnia will never be on the other side.

But, it's always worth remembering: sometimes you get it right, even if just by accident. The right words in the right place, and opportunity strikes. The skill you spent so long acquiring suddenly becomes needed, or the publisher you spent so long courting decides to bite, or the girl you also spent so long courting... also decides to bite. If you get me.

And hey, things don't have to be easy to be fun. The hardest things you've ever done will inevitably be the best, and once every sixteen days, the ringrise on Titan is still the most beautiful thing you've ever seen. So go nuts. The world is always worth the effort.

Now get back to work, you slacker.

- Etarran

PS. July 14, 2027: Don't get out of bed. I mean it.

Etarran Sums Up the American Federal Election

Actually, unlike the Canadian election, I have some things to say about this one.

Though I am of course tempted to spend this post going "woo Obama yay Obama yay!", and just generally painting a big Fuck You Republicans sign all over the internet, I imagine that will be amply taken care of by those both more numerous and considerably louder than I am. I desperately hope that an Obama presidency can do some things to stem the tide of failure and disaster that seems to be issuing forth neverendingly from the Western world, but that remains to be seen. Though I - surprisingly, given my general cynicism with regards to politicians - find myself able to believe that his ideals are good, I also must make note that, as with any leader, ideals must give way to issues of practicality and popularity. I wish the world would recognize that, in general, at least, ideals of peace and environmental sustainability and diplomatic foreign policy and other hippy nonsense are matters of practicality... but of course it cannot do that until the proponents of these ideals start treating them that way.

So, while my initial feeling about an Obama presidency is a matter of cautious optimism, rather than furious elation, there is something from the 2008 election that I am legitimately ecstatic about, and that is the voter turnout.

Despite the fact that an Obama victory was predictable from early in the election, which necessarily reduces turnout, especially in the West, we managed to get a voter turnout over 65% - higher than it's been since 1908. Now, obviously, this could be better, but I think it is trending in that direction. Unlike the Canadian election (voter turnout 59%), in which lackluster leadership, rampant apathy, and general justifiable political malaise have conspired to render half the population voiceless, American voter turnouts have done nothing but rise over the last twelve years. In a world in which each successive generation has been less politically involved than the last, with my generation plunging to new lows of uselessness (28% youth turnout last election, as opposed to 46% this election), this is highly encouraging.

Maybe, just maybe, we can yet prove ourselves worthy of democracy.

This Essay Gets a C Minor

Is it wrong of me to find this video philosophically fascinating? It is, isn't it?

In all seriousness (By which I, naturally, mean "more than a little tongue in cheek"), though, I wanted to change tack a bit with this post and discuss something I don't talk about terribly often: music.

This comic, from back before XKCD jumped the shark (Yeah, I said it. More on webcomics in a future post. Await with anticipation!) illustrates perfectly my feelings on the matter. We suck, guys. We really do.

This is not to say that there aren't artists, that we don't produce excellent music, or even that some of it isn't popular. But good music and great music are two different things. When you listen to Bach or Beethoven or Mozart, you know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that this is great music, that this is art which transcends everything that came before it and will be the bar to which all after it must be held. And the same, I will contend, is true of art from the musical revolution that preceded my generation. There is a sense of greatness, of achievement, of some kind of transcendental musical experience, that you get when listening to Queen or the Beatles or Led Zeppelin. Whether or not you like their music, there is a quality of greatness which must come through.

I'm going to go on the record here with an address to future musical historians:

Dear Future Musical Historians,

When you decide that the 1960s, 70s, and early 80s were a period of musical rennaissance which rivaled that of the late 16th and early 17th centuries, please remember that I totally called it.

Love, Etarran.

PS. I agree, Katy Perry's "I Kissed a Girl" is totally awesome.

It is telling, I think, that university campuses, supposedly bastions of cultural revolution, primarily have the sounds of forty-year-old music drifting from students' rooms. Not even the generation making modern music thinks it's better than our parents' music.

Perhaps it is too much to expect. After all, a great cultural revolution can come along only once in a very great while. And we do, of course, have our cultural successes. But even those, which are primarily internet-related, are based on technologies and cultures that fundamentally belong to the generation before. And I can't help but think that, in an era of unprecedented cultural freedom and diversity and intercommunication, surely we should be coming up with something better than webcomics and the Rickroll.

Perhaps art simply isn't our destiny. After all, we have more practical problems to deal with. Our parents may have produced excellent music, but they also produced a hell of a lot of carbon dioxide and enriched uranium. But surely we could save the world and rock out?

Get on that, will you?

PS. I was totally serious about Hot n' Cold being philosophically fascinating. I invite you to contemplate its symbolism, which is surpassed, perhaps, only by this video.

Going to Class

So, here's the story.

I sat down about an hour ago to write a post, because I felt like I should write something. So as I usually do, I began brainstorming ideas for topics. My thought processes when I do this generally run something like this:

"Hmmm.... blog post. Blog post, blog post, blog post.... 'blog' is such a stupid word. It doesn't even mean anything. You know what else doesn't mean anything? Election promises. Those wacky politicians, am I right? Maybe I should write about them, and their election promises, and how McCain's campaign has been going completely batshit insane.

Oh, right. Then I would be pretty much the mainstream media. Only without money or credibility.

Friggin' media. Seriously, what'd they ever do for us, anyways? It's just commercials and exploitation and capitalism and sadism and decadence. There's no real content or intelligent debate or examination of actual issues anywhere in the whole dreary nihilistic morass of it.

Hehehe. Boobies.

Okay, so maybe I could write about feminism and stuff, because the media is basically why modern feminism sucks, but I keep doing that. Then again, isn't that basically the point? You gotta keep saying stuff, gotta let the message free, because if you don't say it loudly and often, how will anyone ever take notice? Do you really expect to change the world by being silent?

Do I really expect to change the world at all?"

It was at this point that I made a realization. I do expect to change the world. I do, against all reason, against all better judgment and all prior experience, expect to be important. Expect to mean something.

So I asked myself the obvious question: why? What possible reason could I have for this ridiculous assumption?

And the answer quickly came to me: it's a class thing.

You see, as long as there have been civilizations, there has been a certain kind of person who knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they will be important, that the world balances on the tips of their fingers. Kings, aristocrats, oil barons, priests: all of these people have known, many for as long as they have been alive, just how important they are.

But I am none of these things. Though I live a life of shocking and frequently appalling privelege compared to the vast majority of human beings on this terrifying planet, I'm not, by any stretch of the imagination, upper class. I have no power, nor any particular prospect of power. And yet, I believe in it anyways.

Witness, my friends, the triumph of the modern world. Call it the American Dream, if you like, call it the historical dialectic and the principle of Communism, call it the triumph of rationalism and man transcendant... call it what you will, we are achieving it. For the first time in history, ordinary people can legitimately believe themselves to be special. Important. Valuable. Everyone can believe themselves to be the kind of person who is destined for greatness. And belief is the first step on the road to truth.

It won't happen tomorrow, and it may not happen for hundreds or thousands of years - it may not happen at all; after all, far too often we seem to slide backwards, to lose the progress we have made. But on the whole, the road we are travelling is a good one. Someday, I think, we will be free.

In Thunder, Lightning, and Terrible Trumpet Sound

While driving through the downtown core of the nation's capital this afternoon, a message scribbled on the glass plate of a newspaper stand caught my eye. It said, simply: "Our parents have failed us. Anarchist meeting July 15."

Now, while I think anarchy is usually pretty silly, and not practiced by people who seriously believe in it (if, indeed, such people do exist), their premise was an interesting one. As the newest generation, beginning to ready ourselves to take our place as the driving force of the world, that is a question we should probably know the answer to. Have our parents failed us?

A lot of history seems to point to yes. Our grandparents and great-grandparents gave us the end of the world, and put the trigger in our hands. Our parents are trying to drown us in black gold. Can we really overcome their failures?

In their favour, on the other hand, is that, for the first time in human history, we have some understanding of what we are doing wrong. We know the world is dying. We know we're the ones killing it. Maybe that knowledge is enough to save it?

I don't have an answer for this one. I suppose we'll just have to wait and see. And, maybe, do what we can to tilt the balance in our parents' favour. After all, they held the trigger on Armageddon too.

This begs a further question, though. What will be our legacy? When our children scrawl our failure on the streets, what will they lament? Will we at last fall off the delicate razor of ecological disruption, catapulting the earth and its people into storms, extinction, and a slow, cancerous degeneration? Or perhaps it will be the reckless transhumanism of cybernetics and genetic engineering that will throw our culture into the brutal worlds of Wintermute and Raven? Or perhaps it will be the nihilistic self-obsession of the computerized world that will render human life meaningless and obsolete?

Or maybe we just won't take our antibiotics, and smallpox will do it for us.

More likely, though, we will continue to just skirt the boundary of disaster, as indeed humanity has always done throughout its existence. Much as it might sometimes seem like it, I don't really believe the end of the world is coming. Surely there can be a Norman Borlaug for oil as well as wheat? We may be monumentally stupid in some ways, but humans are pretty good at surviving, on the whole. We'll figure something out.

I'd love to know what, though.

Life is the Bubbles (Excuses, Excuses)

So, recently I have been accused by several separate people of neglecting this blog, after having promised so faithfully to maintain it (and hug it and love it and call it George). To this spurious accusation I say: "Fools! You know not whereof you speak!"

Because, in fact, far from neglecting my blog, I've been paying it a lot of attention. No, what I've been neglecting is not the blog, but the readers.

"How," you ask, "is it possible to be writing blog entries but not have people reading blog entries?" Well, I'm glad you asked that question, in fact, because it's exactly the one I have set out this post to answer. The reason you've seen nothing here is not that I haven't been writing, but that I haven't been finishing what I write. In fact, this has become such a problem that I now have more than three times as many unfinished drafts of posts as I do actual posts.

So, in lieu of actually getting to work and finishing them, I have chosen here to post a list of the Top Ten Coming Attractions to the world of Fog and Castles. All but two of these posts are more than half finished, and of those two, one is totally made up. Try to guess which.

1. A post entitled "Sicklical," discussing the nature of health care in North America.
2. A post that uses the word "Fish" more times than any other single word.
3. A post explaining the name of the blog, and directing you towards the excellent work of an unknown artist.
4. The Internet According to Etarran.
5. A post explaining who the worst enemy of gaming culture is. (I'll spoil the surprise ending: it turns out to be gamers. [Specifically, Loud.])
6. Webcomics, and why Dinosaur Comics is funnier than yours. (Two words: Dinosaurs and, ummm... the other one's not really important)
7. A post discussing Penguins, and why they are evil.
8. The Internet According to Solipsism. (And vice versa!)
9. A post discussing Penguins, and why they are really, really evil.
10. Politics, Philosophy, Or Philolotics: The Poll. (Warning: May include traces of dinosaur.)