Boingboing's current guestblogger Paul Spinrad is a freelance writer/editor with catholic interests. He is currently Projects Editor for MAKE magazine and the author of The VJ Book and The Re/Search Guide to Bodily Fluids. He lives in San Francisco.
I'm thrilled to be guestblogging here and looking forward to learning a lot. I have many half-baked notions that I want to share, mostly in areas I'm fairly ignorant about, and so I am thankful for the opportunity to drink from the firehose of boingboing's collective knowledge. There are many books I haven't read in areas that I'm interested in, even ones that everyone else has read. The Wisdom of Crowds comes to mind here. I can't think of an online community that I'd rather tap into for diverse knowledge and pointers, and by the end of my two weeks I'll have an amazing new reading and check-out list.
Another thing I want to do is process ideas for a new belief system, something like a new religion or philosophy, that will be beneficial to all and resistant to being corrupted. I think people are ready for the next level of consciousness, taking more responsibility for human behavior– not through some passive mystical transformation, but through actively assembling an empowering and resonant outlook that grows out of the major existing belief systems, fulfilling their prophecies wherever possible, but taking them into a new direction. Let's try!
That's a tall order, I know, but I believe it is possible– many of the pieces are already here, and the timing's good. As above, I can't think of a better group to noodle on this with. I hope to gather whatever time and ideas you can spare. It's a good cause.
But I've been enjoying it at boingboing for so long, thanks to everyone's participation, and I don't want this to be just take, take, take, all about my needs. I do have fun links and other stuff that I'm looking forward to sharing. But honestly, the regulars here are hard to scoop. So many of the wonderful things I know about originally reached me through them!
How do I know the Boingboing gang? In the mid-90's, I submitted the short piece "Do Not Mate With Gentle Vegetarians" to Wired magazine for their "Idées Fortes" section. It wasn't a good fit, but it somehow got to Mark, who emailed me later to ask if he could use it for bOING bOING DIGITAL. Yay! A couple of years later I began working with Bob Parks at Wired, which introduced me to David and Cory, and Mark pinged me when he was looking for writers for the experimental first issue of MAKE. Later, when it turned out they needed more staff to produce the magazine quarterly, I told Mark that I was looking for a job– lucky timing! I love it– the Makermedia folks are a uniformly fantastic and nice group, and I really believe in what we're doing, and that it's making a positive difference. I feel very fortunate.
