I meant to write this on my birthday, but time has slid by. Time sliding by is mostly what this update is about.

I turned 36, which means I am closer to 40 than 30, and closer to turning 50 than I was the age when I joined this site. That is a pretty odd thing to think about! I also realized that the past few years of my life, while having lots of high points and interesting adventures, were in general not letting me live up to my potential. I have taken steps to rectify this, with many different plans scheduled to happen. The past can't be changed, but I have pretty much determined that I won't be in the same place next year. Part of my problem was my tendency to engage in level grinding: to set aside the large question of what I actually want and need to be doing, in favor of racking up imaginary points. I can be both a literal and figurative stamp collector. In some ways, my participation in this website through much of 2014 was like this: although I did do some writing that expanded my thinking, I was mostly trying to bribe the universe: if I kept on writing, good things will happen. I have now elected to get what I want more directly, although I still have ideas for things I want to write about. As long as E2 is the best venue for my writing, I will write here.

The second thing I wanted to talk about was the nature of E2, a text-oriented site, in an era when the internet is over a decade past images, and almost a decade past video. Text is an interesting word, designating something as prosaic as a file format to being a word that is synonymous with the basic unit of culture. Here, the meanings meet: the basic unit of culture and understanding here is how we can describe things with words. This is quite a bit different from how the rest of the world, including the rest of the internet, defines the basic concepts of our culture: through what is institutionally mediated. Wikipedia and Facebook define discourse and communication through connection to normative institutions, while we define it however we want. Though institutional culture depends on the written word and literacy, it is always uneasy with this debt. Text has already been, and always will be, something of a pharmakon to institutional culture. And despite the current direction in my life, the opportunity to be a pharmakopher is not something I will pass up.