Random Seed Poetry 3: "Sight"

Seed words: cross, blessed, engine, astronomy, con
If you don't know what this means, read the first post in the series for an explanation.

"Sight"

The purest truth dissatisfies;
knowledge will ruin me.
An honest con with laser sight
never sees perfectly.
The engine's not the motive force,
it only carries it.
Before the fact, a vision forms,
something more beautiful.

Commentary: Alright, the random word generator is screwing with me now. The day that I have promised to write about something other than religion, the first two words it gives me are "cross" and "blessed." In any case, I did manage to write about something else, although I'm honestly not as happy with how this one turned out as compared to the last two. That may be due in part to two new structural things that I'm trying here. Firstly, I deviated from my usual tendency to use a single repeated metrical foot; instead, the lines alternated between iambic and dactylic meter, which I think gave it an interesting sort of staggered rhythm. Secondly, I wrote it unrhymed — which may not seem like a big deal, but rhyme is usually what I use to tie my poems together, aesthetically. Without rhyme, it risks seeming less cohesive, which might actually have happened — you'll have to tell me.

The topic is probably not very clear. I didn't state things very directly in this one. What I'm getting at is the notion that the experience of something is often more beautiful than the understanding of it. When analysis runs too deep, it can undercut and completely miss the things that made the investigation worthwhile to begin with. And yes, I am painfully aware that this sounds rather reminiscent of a certain pair of rapping clowns, but just because the way they say it is so inane, that doesn't mean there isn't any validity to the philosophical notion that they are trying to discuss. Except, unlike them, I'm not going to go around shouting angrily about scientists.

Random Seed Poetry 2: "Theodicy of a Cynic"

Seed words: staff, partitioning, flour, circuitry, consequence
If you don't know what this means, read the first post in the series for an explanation.

"Theodicy of a Cynic"

Among the dead, some live instead,
no less deserved of death,
the consequence of actions hence
defied with ev'ry breath.
The wrath of God, through Aaron's rod,
was illustrated plain,
but these few laugh and mock the staff
and yet they still remain.

Our laws defied and vilified
by villains and their gall,
we can't avoid that we're devoid
of any laws at all.
No justice then, within our ken,
appears to be at play,
and we cannot describe our lot
with what the prophets say.

Commentary: I know, there seems to be a pattern forming here. I'll try to get onto a new topic tomorrow. I suppose my religious views have been on my mind a lot the past couple of days, but to my credit this is at least about a different aspect of them. Here the title is fairly on-the-nose. It's a somewhat cynical discussion of theodicy (which is the field of religious studies concerned with answering the question, "Why does God allow evil to exist?"). The speaker of this poem isn't really me, it should be noted. I don't share these views precisely. It's simply a perspective which I find interesting to consider, and which arrives at a similar conclusion to mine.

Random Seed Poetry 1: "Trinity"

Inspired in large part by Jonathan Coulton's Thing a Week and Jonathan Mann's Song a Day, I have decided to take on a similar (but far less ambitious) project. Every day, I will randomly generate 5 common nouns and use two of them in a new poem. I will publish them to this blog as I complete them, along with a commentary of some sort (since, unlike many writers, I like explaining my work). Let's see how long I can keep this up!

Seed words: socialist, known, contraception, prayer, receiving

"Trinity"

I can't remember my last prayer
  living in this earthly box
there once was power in the air
  sealed away with cosmic locks
in lack of faith, I'm like a stone
  so sure am I, so solid here
I drop the soul and keep the known
  I place my faith in what is near

Commentary: This poem discusses my drift towards agnosticism and eventually atheism, which occurred over the course of my adolescence. I tried something new and possibly gimmicky with this. Try reading the poem three times — once in its entirety, once skipping the indented lines, and once skipping the unindented lines — and think of each as a distinct poem. The idea is to show a sort of internal back-and-forth, with different perspectives emerging from the conflict. The name is suggestive of both the Holy Trinity which I used to worship and the trinitarian nature of the poem itself.

Untitled and Unfinished

I came upon an awesome sight,

and poetry attacked me.

I suffered then a reckless need

to write the words exactly.

So when my verse could not create complete

the soul form of what I'm

The poem died; I won the fight,

embittered by my failing.

Social Google

I'm sure you're aware of the changes Google has made the past few months, but have you done your research on them? Read these articles:

• Gizmodo: Google Just Made Bing the Best Search Engine
• Gizmodo: Google's Broken Promise
• Wired: Google Streamlines Privacy Policy to Integrate its Products

Man, what's got Gizmodo's panties in a bunch? They should try to act more like their big brother Wired. These changes are something to be mindful of, and certainly precautions should be taken, but none of it is the betrayal of trust it's being seen as by some. What I see happening here is a chain of events beginning with Google's decision to enter the social networking arena and never done in malice.

1. Google, while staring hungrily at all the ad revenue Facebook gets, notices that social network users are growing increasingly dissatisfied with Facebook. They decide that it is a good time to start a social network of their own and try to claim all that traffic themselves. Innocent so far; competition is the essence of business.
2. Google+ launches to far less fanfare than Google wanted. The userbase reaches a plateau much below where it needs to be. Despite this setback, the company isn't going to let it die like Wave did. Google strives to do its level best to make people want to use Google+, so it adds a benefit for Plus users to its most popular service: web searches. Now, anyone with a profile on Plus will get results even more relevant to them, because it will also search their social network. The enormous problem is that this is not an opt-in feature — it is opt-out. The reasoning here is obvious: a feature that's on by default is visible to more users, and will therefore draw more users to use Plus. But those users who use Plus and do not want this feature are now bombarded with the unsettling surprise of very personal results appearing in a service which has always been seen as homogenized and impartial. Google has changed the characterization of their primary service by doing this, and that degree of redefinition will always have significant negative backlash.
3. Social networks, by their nature, aggregate samples of every single sort of interaction and information that is possible on the Web. Since Google owns the most popular providers of many of those mediums (YouTube, Blogger, etc.), it is absolutely in their best interests to try to streamline the interactions between their social network and their other services. If you upload a video to YouTube, for instance, and want to share it on Google+, it will help if there are mechanisms in place for precisely that. So, as part of this, they decide that it will allow beautiful integration of their services — hypothetically boosting the popularity of each — if they make it so that all your separate Google profiles are simplified and consolidated into just one.

Now, this is alarming to us because we're suddenly seeing that all the information we've given Google is in one place. But Google accounts should always have been combined this way. It's far more efficient, and in many ways can improve services. The bit that makes us panic is the social hub around which this is all built. When Google provided us with a social network, we do what we always do on them: we loaded it with personal information, safe in the knowledge that, short of high-profile hackers with vendettas against us, the only people who will see that information are the people we add to our circles. Now this private information — most notably, the name and photographs we've given Plus — will be propagated to all the Google services that we've linked together under the same account.

However, the proper response to this is not panic, and neither is it condemnation of Google. Google's dynamic is shifting slightly to a more social focus, and their structure must necessarily change to allow this. It is still, as it has always been with their business model, in their best interest to keep you, as the user, happy. This is why they've loaded your inboxes with notifications about their changing policy. This is why they have engineered a data liberation program to facilitate removing your information. The best course of action, if you have any concerns, is to simply use that service to remove private information, then wait until March 1 to see how, exactly, they will be using the information from one service in another. Personally, I seriously doubt anything beyond your name and possibly a photo would be visible to other users if you left all your data intact. Everything else will just be used to tailor ads to the user — and I don't know about you, but I much prefer seeing ads for things that actually interest me.