The Internet Tells The Story Of My Life

Submitted for your approval are a few random lines from a recent Roger Ebert blog post that proves my theory: Now that the Internet has reached saturation point (at least in the developed world), you will eventually find the story of your life. Oh, it won't necessarily be your life in the sense that it'll be a page about you, and you might not even find it all in one place from one author, but you can assemble a recognizable collage of digital bricabrac and someone will say "Oh, that's so you, it's not even funny."

That wasn't necessarily so back in the 80s when grad students and scientists were running the table, but now we have stuff like this.

My books are a subject of much discussion. They pour from shelves onto tables, chairs and the floor, and Chaz observes that I haven't read many of them and I never will. You just never know. One day I may -- need is the word I use -- to read Finnegans Wake, the Icelandic sagas, Churchill's history of the Second World War, the complete Tintin in French, 47 novels by Simenon, and By Love Possessed. [...]

Like an alcoholic trying to walk past a bar, you should see me trying to walk past a used book store.

Yeah man. Of course, the titles are different, and I don't have a Chaz in my life at the moment, but the core is on the money.

And yet, I know that the article starts off with "One afternoon in Cape Town I sat in my little room at University House and took inventory. This must have been in June, winter in the southern hemisphere, and it had been raining steadily for most of a week." Is that my life, too? Not even close. Keep in mind this is a theory that's still in development.

Plug Beach! Just In Time For The Off-Season!

Partially a low-content plug salad, partially a memo to make sure I don't forget these things. Either way, you should take a look.

• Letters of Note (via News From ME): Lots and lots of scanned-in memos and letters that for one reason or another are worthy of attention. Many of these are funny, some are sad, and a few are actually historically important. All of them are a great way to kill some time.
• The Constant Viewer (via Roger Ebert): Now here's somebody who, in a perfect world, would go a long way on the Intertubes. Framed as entries in an imaginary "cinema diary" which will eventually stretch from Muybridge's earliest experiments to this summer's blockbusters, most people would be content to watch the movies and write them up. Paul J. Marasa is much more ambitious than that, putting himself in the shoes of a contemporary viewer and conjuring up that guy's reactions. Even the writing styles his diarist uses are period specific.
  
  At a time where everybody under creation seems to be using their cozy modern sensibilities to skin the past (guilty as charged), Marasa is doing much heavier imaginative lifting by inhabiting the skin of the past. Currently, he's up to 1954, so now's as good a time as any to get in while the getting's good.