Analog2Digital

I've got a job! I was getting sick of looking for a job, and despondent over the prospects for a web designer in this economy. So, I'm now working as a Help Desk Technician, doing tech support for Matthew Ferrara Seminars. It's kinda cool how my job now is, well, to be a total geek. I've done tech support before, while in school, but now I'm helping real people solve a weird variety of computer problems, and it feels good. It's my job to futz with computers and learn their ins and outs, and I know I'm actually helping real people whose lives are not centered around technology with their real problems. It's a huge divergence from my Web/Information Designer gig at O'Reilly, the oracle of the uber-geeks, and it's giving me a little more perspective on where the Internet really stands with normal human beings. Tech is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself.

posted by creon @ 8:22:30 PM

Dammit!! I am officially sick of Blogger. I'm having all sorts of problems with my site template ot loading, and I've been forced to use one of their templates now so I can get my posts back up. I don't get. So, if anyone has any great things to say about any other weblog services or software, please tell me. I gotta switch to something that works *always*.

posted by creon @ 8:14:36 PM

One of the biggest questions that has ever faced humanity, second only to "Why are we here?," is "How did we get here?" Cultures around the world have come up with creation myths, and now there's a fantastic (Flash-based) site that has brought many of them together as The Big Myth.

Though most of the myths are pretty different, there are some interesting trends. Many of the myths include the idea that there have been previous "unworthy" lots of humanity, whether created shoddily or just misguided, some that were destroyed by God(s) by a Great Flood, banishment to the Underworld, or some other mass extermination.

There's also a theme of the sky and earth being two embodied Gods in a tight embrace, who had children that struggled to break the embrace of there parents - separating the earth and the sky - in order to be free. In most of the myths there's a male and female being that create the rest of the world, but in a few they love each other so much that their children have to break them apart or kill one of them in order to be born.

Lastly, I was surprised at how few Gods demanded worship from their creations, something I thought was pretty "universal." Some of them were lonely, and just wanted companions; some of them had children who, in later generations, became humans; and sometimes humans just "happened" out of the primordial earth. Most of the Gods seemed to treat humans as their children or wards, rather than their servants, and stressed interdependence - between individuals, between men and women, between heaven, earth and humanity - as the way to order.

In the end, I think I just learned that, again, that probably no one has it right, either now or in ancient times, but that creation myths can tell us a lot about the development of ancient cultures and their value systems. And that's all we have; ourselves, each other, or ways of life. However we choose to begin the story, its the current chapter that really matters.

posted by creon @ 4:33:06 PM