RKNet Blog... Thing

Gentle readers: Well, it’s happened. I done hit the big time. It’s only a matter of time before I’ve abandoned you to go sip expensive bottled waters on yachts and anal-retentively police my own wiki entry.

What, might you ask, has caused this sudden surge in adulation for and popularity of yours truly? Well whether you’d ask or not, I’ll tell you! I’m published!

A while back, I heard about a six word memoir contest being held by SMITH Magazine. I mulled it over and decided that sounded like a lot of fun. So I cruised by the contest site, mulling over my life and adventures and everything so far. It’s hard to write a memoir when your life is still in full swing, but I found six words that I really felt fit who I am and where I am at this point in my life, submitted them with my contact info and that was that.

Some time passed and I got an email from Rachel Fershleiser, the woman who did an awful lot of work to make this happen. The editors of SMITH mag hand selected my entry out of over 5000 that had been submitted! WOW!

Truth be told I didn’t really believe it until yesterday evening when I got my contributor copy of the book in the mail, along with a press kit to help promote this volume that I had a hand in creating.

The book that is the result of so many people’s honesty and wit is called: Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure. They aren’t kidding about the famous, either. They were able to get six words of to-the-bone slices of life from the likes of Stephen Colbert, Aimee Mann, and Mario Batali!

It is a privledge and an honor to have my words chosen, and put into this really interesting volume. True, I cracked it open to find my name, but wound up reading the introduction and marvelling at the process and the TLC the editors clearly put into the project. The memoirs themselves run between hilarious and heartbreaking, with about every other sentiment you can imagine in between. I wound up going through it cover to cover already, and I keep thumbing back to share with my co-workers and friends. I actually can’t say enough good things about this, and I’d say only 25% of that excitement has to do with seeing my name in print.

For anybody who lives near me, if you get a copy and want to get my signature next to my entry, I’d be positively ecstatic to do so. I actually think it would be a lot of fun to go around getting signatures from as many chosen entrants as possible. (Especially if you could get a signature like Colbert’s!)

And in truth, this isn’t exactly my big break or anything, but it is certainly a lot of fun and I got a really entertaining book for free out of the deal, so I certainly can’t complain. Check it out! Oh, and you can still submit your six word memoir at SMITH and read contributions that you won’t get in the book.

No, not the abandonment issues you the gentle readers feel when I neglect to update. Nor the abadonment issues my shoutcast listeners recently developed due to my foolish desire to pull the plug on that project.

The abandonment in question is a series of really engrossing photos on buildings and areas in the former Soviet Union. There’s a fortress, a prison, and even an entire city - all unfinished or simply left behind due to various conflicts or changes to the Soviet political landscape.

Weburbanist has links to several other abandoned building photosets at the bottom of that article, which I’d recommend taking a peek at also.

The man was busily filling out forms. he had to complete two of them and fax them back to headquarters or he wouldn’t get a lick of benefits. The first one done he slammed the number into the keypad and fed the forms, all at once (beige, pink and blue, as each had to be in triplicate, naturally) through the vertical fax slot next to the pad.

Frowning his way through the second set of forms he looked up through the clear door to his left to see someone behind a desk saying something about preparing for landing. Indeed, gravity felt a little bit off and there was that sickening feeling of his internal organs shifting, like going downhill on a bike really fast.

Not much time then. Some other vague announcement, and as he was feeding the second set of forms, it was announced that landing was nearly completed, and only a select few were going to be let off. The rest were to be left behind on the ship.

NO! was the first and only frantic thought that ran through his mind as the door to his empty holding area whooshed open. Apparently there was to be free run of the ship, even if they weren’t going to be let off. Surely there was a solution here, a way out. Either way, there would be limited resources and securing a position without… hurting someone would be challenging unless it was done soon. No time to consider the inevitable, really.

Scurrying about proved useless. The place was as vague his forms and featureless as his containment area.

A panel opened up to the right. What is this?! A face appeared and disappeared from this opening quickly enough to cause some serious consternation regarding an early departure of sanity. Not a good sign, the only thing to be done was investigate, obviously.

The underbelly had ostensibly more to offer, although that really wasn’t saying much. Pipes and grey corridors, some blinking lights. Not much of a shift from the clean powder blue, spotless glass, and white ceilings. It was a start, nevertheless.

…….
and that’s the last I remember.
There were other dreams about plane rides, some things involving cephalopods that it’s apparently better not to share, uhm, and some other stuff I don’t really remember.

For anyone who takes censorship seriously, I would strongly suggest taking a gander at Susie Bright's articles on “NSFW”. (As pointed out to me by the intrepid Regina Lynn at Sex Drive Daily. Read her take on the matter, too..)

• Paul Rudnick's Naughty Bedtime Stories— And the NSFW Bogeyman
• This Post is NSFP: Not Safe for Prudes

I myself have been known to use NSFW to caution people when I'm providing links to other people's content that may, indeed, get your ass put into a sling at work. Yet I don't pre-qualify my own content that way often, if ever. That is a bit of a double standard to say the least, and realistically isn't fair to the owners of the other content to have the stigma of the “inappropriate” put on their work by me.

The other challenge is that the NSFW tag is subjective much like harassment laws in the (US) workplace are purely subjective. However, if the “harassment training” I was forced to attend recently is any indication, you are not allowed to do anything, at all, ever, that could be construed as offensive to anyone. If someone reports you for being offensive, you are in trouble, regardless of context or intent. While that may not be strictly the letter of the legislation, that was the very clear impression I had walked away from that meeting with.

This relates directly to NSFW because by rights, pretty much EVERYTHING is not safe for work. In a world that makes sense (to me personally), idle surfing should be punished on the basis of excessive abandonment of duties. However, due to harassment laws in this country logic need not apply. Welcome to America.

What say you, gentle reader? Are acronyms and concepts like “PC” and “NSFW” ways we fuck ourselves out of free speech by way of self-censure to avoid the warm spittle of the more reactionary members of society? Or are they a necessity that helps protect all society and not just the reactionary individuals?

Also, in the spirit of NSFW, I was going to post up something clearly “NSFW”… but I didn't want to repost any SG girls photos and nothing else really was what I wanted. So instead you get this: