This particular item wasn't a very big story in the grand scheme of things -- it only made the wire services as a footnote in the Southern California regional briefs. Regardless, it was one of those that twists the knife.

Charley Aurthur took his own life in November 1996 -- a troubled 23-year-old who had struggled with mental illness for half a decade. His father, Jonathan, fought to understand the whole time what was going on inside his child's mind. After Charley's death, the process resulted in a book -- which incidentally got published by the same people who did "Chicken Soup for the Soul" -- and a website. In both, Jonathan tried to lay out their experiences, in an earnest attempt to prevent another tragedy in families going through similar circumstances.

Then, late last month, Jonathan Aurthur killed himself.

This was a man who knew firsthand the pain of suicide. A man who spent six years trying to redeem his son's death by bringing their story to the world -- who even quit his job to write that book. It may have brought him the redemption he sought ... but it obviously didn't bring him the resolution he needed.

According to the obituary, he leaves behind a number of family members, an ex-wife, and a daughter Jenny. We can only hope that they find more peace in their lives than Jonathan did.

Once upon a time, I wrote the Draconity FAQ --

-- No, no, no. That's not the confession, friend. That's just the background. I can't make assumptions about my readership; I want to set the record straight before I lay things on the line.

So. Once upon a time, I wrote what may even today still be considered the definitive basic primer for people who think they're dragons in human bodies. I spoke from experience. I was social in the online dragon community and went to a few regional "dragon gathers". I harbored dreams of a changed world.

It's been about nine years now. You know how the passage of time works. I haven't updated the FAQ since 1998; my interactions in the dragon community have gradually slowed down to occasional contact with a close group of friends from the old days. I grew, broadened; saw different sides of the human world I had a hard time considering myself a part of. Had a few big traumas in my spirit world and a few pleasant discoveries outside of it. Met a nice human girl and got completely broadsided by what quickly blossomed into a relationship.

Those days when I felt I had the universe figured out -- those days of heady certainty -- seem so far away now. I've graduated from college and moved out into the Real World; I've grappled with jobs and debt and tangled webs of roommates and relationships. I've gotten politically active and marched in protest rallies and donated good money to parties and issue groups (what can I say, blame Bush). I've met a lot of people who shared my intellectual gifts and my alienation, who never considered themselves anything but human and never struck me as anything but human, and who nevertheless got along just fine.

And then -- don't worry, reader, the confession is coming soon -- last night, someone pointed me at a piece in Teresa Neilsen Hayden's blog discussing a rather earnest born-again dragon. And I read that, and the scores of comments, many of whom made some rather cogent points about people who think they're not human ...

I read that with a sort of odd feeling brewing in my stomach. So I sat down, and listened, and gnawed on it as I went to sleep, and gnawed on it some more as I drove to work.

I think that's enough background. You probably see where I'm headed with this, anyway. My confession is --

Those of you who up until now were reading this with a growing sense of relief or smugness, and are now merely exasperated at me for wasting your time, are kindly advised to close your browser and go perform an anatomically impossible one-person sex act. I'll keep talking to the rest of the audience.

That odd feeling? A sense of conviction. Not in the sense of certainty. In the sense of being called out, convicted, by something greater than yourself; being shown a sign that you're not living up to your expectations. (I picked up the term from a book on Christianity my sister gave me as a gift, Blue Like Jazz, which has been a useful read on issues of faith even if I'm not taking away quite the connection to God that the author intends.)

Like I said, I've been gradually drifting away from the community. This isn't wrong; I got what I needed out of it while I was involved, and it was a great place at the time, but I'm beyond the phase where my desire for draconity determined my inner circle. Those dragon friends I keep today are increasingly those I like as people, and that's as should be.

I've also been backing away from writing about draconity -- although that decline has been more sporadic and slow. I've been feeling like I have less that I can say authoritatively as I've broadened out and gained a more worldly and nuanced perspective.

My draconity, too, has changed. Except it hasn't. Except it has. It's still the foundation on which my path is laid, and it still follows some of the same rules that seemed so familiar back then -- but at times I look around and don't recognize a thing. It's simultaneously critical and comfortable and alien and meaningless. Map and territory. Further explanation will be necessary later.

What's important is that the bottom has been dropping out of all of my reasons for believing. There are graceful intellectual and social outs; I have a peer group which would totally understand (and in many cases give me even more respect for) a reasoned decision to back away; my declining spiritual commitments would be easy enough to shut down. A dozen non-draconic interests continually compete for my attention and I could pick any of them up without looking back. The benefits of continuing to believe have gotten progressively more ineffable. The actual connection to my past and my identity grows ever more irrelevant as my focus turns to the remainder of this well-lived life. I'm growing more comfortable in my skin. I have a full life without it. And yet ... and yet.

I can't. It wouldn't be right. After the times I've walked away, it's still there. Now more than ever, since it has no reason to be but still is.

So I feel convicted about my draconity. About not knowing what to say about it. (I almost said "what to do with it," but it doesn't need doing; it's there, it's me.) There's all this wonderful discussion going on about draconity (inside the community as well as outside -- Hayden's blog was merely the spark for the epiphany), and here I am shrinking into a corner, letting people assume that the me of six years ago speaks for the me of today, not bothering to tell anyone where I actually stand and what I've seen since then and what implications this all has.

"I'm still a dragon, dammit" is a good start. But it's only a good start. It's the truth, but not the whole truth, so help me Thideras. There's so much more to say.

Trying to clear the rest out of my head may be a sporadic process, but with a NaNoWriMo novel under my belt, I have a lot more confidence that I can quietly and patiently work toward a longer-term goal like this one.

[ Comments ]

The word blog -- now used to describe any continuously updated online writing project in which entries are separated timewise into "posts" -- started its life as a contraction of weblog. Time was, a weblog was a very different thing than a diary or a journal; "webloggers" were primarily content aggregators, who spent their time finding interesting links from around the Internet and condensing them down into a series of links, optionally with limited commentary. Much like Fark still is today.

Over time, the category spread to include people who would occasionally insert personal anecdotes or brief analyses/rants in between their links. (Or perhaps high-profile "webloggers" started feeling a little more free to share their life once their audience was established.) Gradually, distinctions such as that between "webloggers" and "E/N" sites ("entertainment/news", or "everything/nothing", depending on who you ask -- the term was coined to describe someone who used their webspace as a forum to rant and riff on all and sundry) were lost.

The "weblogs" also acquired the catchier nickname in use today, dropping the first two letters. I guess that's meant to be some sort of moral to the story. "Daddy, why won't you let me guest-post on your site?" "Because, son, there's no 'we' in 'blog.'"

Somewhere along that line, "blogger" entered the public lexicon, and soon afterward, every Guy With A Website became a "blogger." In a strange twist, the original meaning of "weblog" is becoming somewhat gauche among people who proudly and with no hint of irony call themselves "bloggers"; if you merely spew out links to stuff you like, adding no original content, your readers won't perceive you as making a significant contribution to whatever field you're blogging in.

Such are the ways in which language evolves, I suppose.

Why? Basically for my own convenience -- in much the same way I used to collect good quotes in the quotebook I still carry around and be able to dig them up again with a few flips of a page, it can be tremendously useful having those links you've been reading and finding interesting just a few clicks away. Trying to remember just where it was you read someone cracking a dark joke about Iraq resembling a game of Quake? *clickclickclick* Ah! Jesse at Pandagon.

Now that MT's working again, since they're just sitting around anyway, I figured I would share the cream of the crop with y'all. I may even do this regularly if the urge strikes.

These are just the ones which I found especially worthy of note -- about 10 percent of my list of several links per day. And they're more or less pasted in straight from my linkfile -- this is how I write the notes to myself to summarize the page's content.

GENERAL

** Best. Camera. Ever: The Gigapxl
http://www.gigapxl.org/gallery-1.htm

* Hack your way out of writer's block
http://www.43folders.com/2004/11/hack_your_way_o_1.html

* How to fix breathlessness in 15 seconds:
http://www.ftrain.com/lungvacuuming.html

* Add polish to writing - Ten ubiquitous mistakes to correct during editing process.
(Some seem like pet peeves or nitpicks, but there's good advice too.)
http://www.holtuncensored.com/ten_mistakes.html

* Why are porn movies legal when prostitution isn't and they're both paying for sex?
http://www.defectiveyeti.com/archives/001080.html

POLITICAL

** Electoral maps of the U.S. in purple, not winner-take-all red/blue:
STATEWISE
http://www.boingboing.net/2004/11/03/purple_haze.html
COUNTY BY COUNTY
http://www.princeton.edu/~rvdb/JAVA/election2004/
Collection of all the election results maps (and humor maps)
http://www.bopnews.com/archives/002317.html#2317
... And the map of Civil War slave vs. free states:
http://www.learner.org/biographyofamerica/prog10/maps/

* Wonderfully insightful dKos diary on terrorist strategy - radicalize sides; their first opponents are the people willing to compromise.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/10/01247/557

* "Abandoning Libertarianism" - great essay on many of the same gripes I've got
http://homepage.mac.com/bbaugh/iblog/C289001406/E563561457/index.html

* Puritanism -- "the religion of the new commercial classes" in 1600s -- is becoming the model for GW Bush's American religious revival:
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2004/11/09/religion-of-the-rich/

* Abraham Lincoln was a badass - he really did stand up to the South:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/25/121323/39

* Discussing the Bible with fundamentalists - steer the argument to whether it is
foundational rather than authoritative; little else will get you anywhere.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/21/195254/65

* Omnibus spending bill quietly added permanent user fees for public land (!):
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/23/132457/57

You may get the same enjoyment out of them that I did. I hope at least one or two will prove useful. No warranty expressed or implied, etc.

We hope you have enjoyed this interlude of actual blogging, and now return you to your regularly scheduled journal.

That took a little longer than expected -- and the server switch is still deep in the throes of impendingness, so we're not going to have full functionality for a while yet. But at least forward progress is being made again. Yay!

I've just hired a webmaster, the inimitable Windigo the Feral (nyar!), to take care of many of the long(-long-long)-overdue back-end changes and the full migration from my legacy Web site at ecis.com. Which ... uh ... suddenly no longer exists. Hence the rush. But the Draconity FAQ has been moved here already and other documents will shortly follow. Update your links.

Also, I'm in the middle of National Novel Writing Month, so won't be posting much for another (*checks watch*) 11 days. See you then!

I'm definitely not going to be able to fix either of those until at least late this weekend, since it involves some coordination with a guy two time zones away and since my writing has been lapsing enough anyway that I need to tackle a few other things on my priority list first. In a worst-case scenario, my journal and forums may be broken until August, since if I don't get things fixed this weekend, I'll be spending a great deal of time hiking (with Rene and on Baxwalk) and totally away from the computer.

In the meantime, if I have anything to say, I'll try to post it at Livejournal -- I'm baxil.

It's going to be a busy few days. Hoping to get some writing time this weekend.

-- "Mr. Skullhead," in the Kingdom of Loathing forums

That's the pitch. Is it legitimate? Well, let's see. The site lists no corporate contact information; has a vague and unhelpful FAQ except for the extremely large sections informing you why it's perfectly legal; informs you that a paid subscription is necessary to access most of the site but nowhere lists prices until after you've already secured a "free" membership; and urban-legend watchdog Snopes has warned against them. At this point one should, at best, ignore them; or, if inclined to act more responsibly, complain to their ISP.

Consider them debunked as a scam at this point. The rest of this post serves mostly as a guide to the attitude one should have, and the considerations one should keep in mind, when confronted with unfamiliar sales pitches of this nature.

Well, no, because chances are good they're spurious "hits" to drive traffic to the site.

The two addresses of mine that SYE registered any interest in got nothing whatsoever until June 5. Then, suddenly, surprise! Over the course of a week a flurry of a dozen distinct users all at once registered a frenzy of activity (each new poster, of course, triggering an e-mail to me). Oddly, four of the 10 posters willing to divulge information about me claimed that their relationship to me was "professional" and either current or within the last year. And yet they chose to say they have information about me at two non-work addresses that aren't even listed anywhere on my current website! The efforts of these 10 mystery people are remarkably semi-coordinated, using exactly two dormant e-mail addresses out of the many alternates I've created (and placed somewhere on the Web) to filter my inbox, while avoiding my primary addresses, work address, and Livejournal alias.

Remarkable address coincidence aside, maybe 10 separate people really do have enough time on their hands and enough coordination to volunteer information about me that way? That theory gets shot down pretty quick, though.

About three in four of them were listed as paying members, and most of their membership numbers were in the range of 100,000 to 500,000 (my test account with a Hotmail return address was #600K-something). A site with hundreds of thousands of paying users should have a pretty useful knowledge base to build on, right? But nothing -- no confidants, not even any requests -- in the person database or e-mail database about such popular figures as Bill Gates or George Bush. Nothing in the business database about Amazon or Microsoft. (Nothing about the firm's head, either, more's the pity.) In fact, not a single search I tried yielded any results, except for the two e-mail addresses that the site helpfully told me were being prodded. With that sort of track record, the notion that a site that touts its "robust tools for research" on "experiences with other people and businesses" can draw 600,000 mostly paying users seems very silly indeed.

And the notion that someone wanting to dig up dirt on you can go to the site and successfully do so? Even sillier. How can a site that can't tell me jack about Microsoft be trusted to have information on Fred Smith of Pescataway, Wash.? And why would anyone seeking dirt on Mr. Smith pay $25 or more to solicit anonymous tips when searching for him runs into such enormous stonewalls?

Why would anyone wanting to spread dirt about Fred Smith use the site, when their own introduction to the site was almost certainly an e-mail telling them someone was interested in them? If you post a "I've got dirt" notice on Fred, the only person who is guaranteed to be notified is Fred himself! And due to the anonymous nature of the site's connections, anyone asking for your Fred gossip is more than likely to secretly be Fred!

One parting thought: Yes, sure, there's going to be someone on the Internet who doesn't like you, and they're going to try to spread dirt somewhere. It's unavoidable. But the way to think about sites like ShareYourExperiences, rather than unreasoning panic that SOMEONE'S TALKING ABOUT YOU SOMEWHERE, is to gloat.

There are a hundred free Web sites devoted solely to personal smears and drama of various natures -- and comments on all of those are public, immediate, and generally easily searchable. If your enemy runs to SYE, they will have spent a not insignificant amount of money to spread damaging information to one person at a time; only to those specifically looking for it; with no guarantee that anything they say will stay behind your back; and in a forum that defies any sort of user-friendliness. If any of those dozen hits on me weren't computer-generated, then those hypothetical detractors are doing me a favor by blowing lots of cash to be screwed over.

Don't make that mistake. Leave it to your detractors.

A person whose optimism was infectious -- who brought smiles to people's faces.

A person who, throughout their long career, was compassionate and worked to serve the least among us.

I think it's only appropriate that their legacy be honored. I urge you to go read their obituary and follow their parting wishes. I know I will:

In lieu of flowers or donations to charity, please give your next waitress/waiter a generous tip.

(That's all. Just a one-line-and-one-parenthetical-aside post. And it's sort of weird how neat it is that I can make a one-line post without a guilt trip these days.)

A brilliant failure? Why? Because it was technically well-done, enjoyable, and informative -- and, at the same time, absolutely guaranteed to not only turn off but also alienate anyone who isn't already a fringe leftist.

I'm serious. Don't click on that link unless you're totally immune to crude humor and also predisposed to hate everything Bush stands for. (Mom, Dad, I know you're reading this too -- especially don't click on that link.) Let's just say that it contains a very explicit (if cartoony) depiction of the Statue of Liberty being raped halfway through the introduction, and while the tone of the game flip-flops back and forth between serious and satirical, it never loses that unrepentant and in-your-face shamelessness.

That's what makes it so frustrating. The game, a side-view adventure-style shooter, is seamless and fairly deeply constructed, with plenty of boss battles and pop-culture references. It ranges from Enron to Iraq and every level is something fresh and new. It's interspersed with several cut-scenes laying out a set of populist economic critiques that really got my blood boiling. But the shock value of the game's crude sexuality means those who need to hear the message most, the swing voters and wavering Republicans, are not only going to get horrified and surf away before reaching any of the actual message -- but are going to leave with a strengthened GOP-driven stereotype of liberals as completely immoral, Bush-hating filth peddlers.

What I want to see is a game like this but without any of the offensive stuff. Not because I personally was offended -- but because the people we need to reach with the political message will walk away scarred by the medium.

The elements designed to preach to the liberal choir were beautifully done, but why make a politically educational game if you're just going to preach to the choir? Outreach isn't supposed to go inward.

What I'd rather see is more people pushing charts that show how Bush's "economic recovery" is all going to profits instead of wage growth -- or making the point, as the game did, that the wage gap between workers and CEOs has grown from about 40x in the 1980s to 300x in 2003. Or perhaps some troubling statistics that show the U.S. really has some deep-rooted economic problems as well as strengths when compared to other first-world countries. Then blowing away the myth that Republicans are better at fiscal management with cold, hard historical facts comparing presidents' performance over the last century. I can go on guiltily enjoying my blasphemous, depraved little Flash games, and the rest of the country can get the reality check it needs about what the legacy is going to be of the latest conservative revolution.

(Okay, and perhaps the game's politics could be woven in with a little more subtlety rather than through lengthy game-stopping cutscenes. Besides the game's blindness to its intended audience, the pacing's my only annoyance.)

Then we went out paddling on the Lake Of Updating The Home Page By Hand, and that kind of sucked too because it meant the first time an update was posted, the hand-written post would disappear and our life rafts were still back in the cabin and the XML was still under the seats!

But we survived that. Kinda. Then the mosquitos came.

(Original picture by Orion, here. Converted into vector graphics by James Todd to facilitate the life-size printout.)

In other news, I would just like to officially announce that CSS is utterly appalling. Or, more specifically, its consistency of implementation is. That is all.