Elf Sternberg

I’ve been having trouble ending a thought recently.

I burst onto the Internet at the ripe old age of 24– which is three years before “the Internet” as most of you know it even existed. I was on the old Internet, before there was a web, before there was HTTP. We used FTP to transfer files and NNTP to talk to each other. I posted my first story to Usenet on August 21, 1990, which means that this year the Journal Entries will officially be 32 years old.

That math makes me 56 years old. Which is a surprisingly long time to be alive.

But recently, I’ve been trying to write and code again. Oh, I can do my professional job without much trouble, but that’s because other people have assigned the goals for me and my skillset for learning is still one of the best. But when it comes to my personal projects, my writing and software, I have two painfully contradictory problems: I’m desperately unhappy with how much is left unfinished, and I have no idea how to finish them.

The stories are one thing; the first 15 years or so of their existence, there was only one major outlet for all things textual on the Internet, and everyone who wanted to find smutty stories had one channel to visit. Now, with the explosion of stories and outlets out there, I’m no longer a big fish in a little pond (although I do think that as science fiction erotica my work is still better than 90% of the crap I read), and I have no idea where to go to release my work.

And as for my coding projects, I have only so much energy at my age anymore, and I don’t see myself contributing much to the open source community around me. I’ve done a few things here and there, bugfixes, but I’m never going to make any more big splashes like I did twenty years ago. It is right and proper for people to ask, “So what have you done for us lately, Mr. Sternberg?” Because the answer is, not much.

I’m sure part of it is that Usenet put me in the habit of consuming absolutely massive amounts of text every day, and the algorithm is doing its damndest to make me depressed. I look at the state of the world, at the ongoing cruelty, and I think that my happy horny furry lovely funny silly stories have no place in this world. I think that the “problem space” of computer programs is pretty full and I’m not going to do the world one damn bit of good if I release yet another thing into it.

So when I go through the “I want this because…” exercise, I can’t find the justifications. I can’t see what I’ll do with this thing once I’ve made it. And I can’t see anyone else using it.

So that’s my whining for the week. I’m sure I’ll figure something out. It’s just that, right now, I’m not sure what it is.

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The title of this post comes from this wonderful song from London Electricity:

Dear Goddess, why isn't there a spam filter for real life?

I haven't read one single article about this certain celebrity fiasco and yet I feel like I know every damn intimate detail from the headlines on screamsheets alone, and now the latest detail is a "Reuter's Top Story?"

Come the Singularity, I hope all three of these so-called celebrities and their whole entourages end up running on a Microsoft OS. I am tired, tired, tired of hearing about such petty, banal, ridiculousness.