By now, you already know that every time you allow a F*c*book quiz or game to access your profile, you are giving the authors of that application access to not only your own private data, but also all of your friends’ private data, too.

What do you get in exchange for all this private information? The ability to spam your friends by sending them make-believe alcoholic drinks? The chance to waste time tending a fictional farm? Understanding the meaning of your life by finding out what Gilligan’s Island character you are? Is that really how highly you value your privacy, and the privacy of your friends?

Having done projects for spammers online marketers in the past, it didn’t take me long to see the need to block as many of these viral data-mining tools as possible. Recently I reached a milestone. Thanks to you, my friends, I have had both the opportunity and the need to block over a thousand F*c*book applications, and I’m still blocking more every day (1,013 at last count).

Here’s the full listing of the apps I've blocked. I am posting the entire list so that you can see the critically important applications you traded your, my, and all your friends’ privacy for. I hope it was worth it.

Please look through the list. I hope you’ll find it enlightening.

( Clicky! )

American Buddhists really like Rumi, the prolific Sufi (Islamic) poet and inspiration for the proverbial dervish dancers.

I can’t count the number of times he’s been cited in the dharma talks I’ve heard and publications I’ve read. So while my reading list was at an ebb, I picked up and read one of Coleman Barks’ Rumi collections, entitled “The Soul of Rumi”.

Now, I’m a prose guy. Despite the fact that words are my preferred medium of artistic expression, poetry rarely connects with me. So it should come as no surprise that I wasn’t particularly whelmed.

The elements of Rumi that appeal so much to Buddhists—his praise of silence and the meditative state, and his immersion in the present moment—aren’t the primary themes of his work. He is much more fixated on the mysteries of faith and the ecstatic experience of God, which make for kind of flat reading for someone as skeptical and practically-minded as myself.

But having said that, there are three bits that I thought I would pull out for contemplation.

The first two actually come from the same passage, where Rumi is, in typically non-linear fashion, addressing himself to hidden truths. Among the rambling, disconnected thoughts is the following sentence:

Look for the answer inside your question.

For me, this gets at one of the first premises of Buddhism, one of the ones westerners never seem to examine. When we are suffering the angst that comes from an unfulfilled desire or unanswered questions, we typically do not consider the quality of the motive behind our desire or question. Is it a wise question? Is it the right question to ask? What does that question tell us about ourselves and our spiritual maturity?

The Buddhist suttas include stories that describe times when the Buddha was asked metaphysical questions about the meaning of life, or the existence of God(s). When asked such theoretical questions, the Awakened One refused to answer, explaining that such unanswerable questions are not useful. They have no practical influence on how one should live one’s life, and thus are distractions from the cultivation of wisdom.

There will be times when you find yourself with philosophical questions like why justice and fairness do not prevail, or how a man can do harm to another, or why there is suffering. Before you look for the answer, look first at your question: what is motivating you to ask it, and is it a useful question to ask? You may find more wisdom in understanding the reasons behind your question than you will by letting the question lead you around in a fruitless quest for an answer.

A few sentences later, still addressing the source of answers to our spiritual questions, Rumi goes on:

The answer lies in that which bends you low and makes you cry out. Pain and the threat of death, for instance, do this. They make you clear. When they’re gone, you lose purpose. You wonder what to do, where to go.

The longer I live, the more I see how pivotal our understanding of death is to our happiness. As humans, it is our nature to take all our gifts for granted until they are taken away from us. A cell phone or a car or a television is just another everyday appliance until we have to live without it. But we take just as casual an attitude about our comfortable homes, our eyesight, and even our ability to string coherent thoughts together. We only properly appreciate these things when there is a real and imminent possibility that we shall lose them.

The ultimate possession we’ll lose is our experience of sentient life. Ironically, we spend most of our lives taking it for granted, assuming that we and everyone around us will live to a ripe old age just because it’s statistically more likely than not.

As Rumi says, you gain incredible clarity of purpose when you accept your own very real mortality. Every moment is to be savored; every experience—even every tribulation—is relished simply because it is the experience of life. You don’t need to ask yourself the meaning of life, because experiencing life provides meaning. You needn’t worry about what to do or where to go, because whether you are here or there, whether you are eating or playing racquetball, the fact that you are living outshines all other pleasures and pains.

But the person who doesn’t foresee their own death, who wrongly thinks they have all the time in the world, squanders their most precious commodities: life and time. They wander around aimlessly, without happiness, and without any sense of urgency other than an anxious feeling that their purposeless life has no meaning.

It’s an aphorism for a reason: life is short. It might sound ironic, but if you view life that way and value it like a precious commodity, you will enjoy it and find it more than fulfilling. Whereas if you view it as a given and value it like any unending resource, you are guaranteed to enjoy it less and find it empty and lacking in purpose.

Finally, Rumi has this to say about religious practice:

Hypocrites give attention to form, the right and wrong ways of professing belief.

I find this just as prevalent in Buddhism as any other religion. There are people who effuse about the retreats they’ve been on, the teachers they’ve studied with, the books they’ve read, and the objects of faith they’ve collected. It’s commonly referred to by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche's term “spiritual materialism”, and is usually not highly regarded among American Vipassana practitioners.

I feel this somewhat acutely, since I’m not particularly attached to the ritualized forms of practice. In fact, I’m naturally skeptical of any practice until I can be shown and convinced of its value. A good example would be metta practice, which I only took to recently, after realizing the specific manner in which it would contribute to my spiritual growth.

The Buddha would agree. As stated in the suttas, particularly the Kalama Sutta, all his teachings were offered with the attitude of, “Try this and see if it is of value to you. If not, then disregard it.” So far, I have chosen to focus on Buddhism’s meditative and ethical practices, and disregard the more ritualistic, mystical, and dogmatic elements of contemporary Buddhism, since I do not see how they would be of value to me in my situation.

Naturally, I try to keep that skepticism reined in when others describe their own practices. The point isn’t to judge others, but to confirm my own belief in what’s right for me, free of the judgments and expectations of others. But I still find it discouraging when I see someone who is enthusiastically engaged in the outward forms of Buddhism (or any spiritual practice) without regard for the vital inner work that it points to.

Not so much.

It's over. It lasted longer than I had any right to hope for, mostly because she's an outstanding human being. But we're just not meant for each other.

It was a great year plus a few months. She deserves my thanks for her understanding and caring. I'll treasure the memories always. We'll still be great friends, and that's a fantastic thing to take away from this.

No shit, there I was: thinking evil thoughts. Or more specifically, thoughts about how evil compares across the major religions of the world. But I didn’t have to do all the footwork myself, when Google could do it for me!

So the first thing I did was a Google Image search on Satan. Of the results on the first page, fifteen were evil images, one was a happy little Satan, one was the Satan from South Park, and the last image was a diagram of nine “satan fingers” to flash in heavy metal concerts. Oooo, scary!

Next up: Islam. A Google Image search on Iblis turned up thirteen evil images, three interesting abstract designs, a Battlestar Galactica ship, and fan art for what appears to be a series called “Charmed” on WB with the caption, “The Tempting Ones”. Pretty evil, I’d say.

Hinduism is represented by Rahu. A Google Image search on Rahu again returns mostly the god eating the sun, but also with two charts of the orbit of the theoretical planet Rahu, which is the cause of eclipses, and a garnet ring from VedicStore.com. Pretty solidly evil.

On cannot discount the Zoroastrians. The results for a Google Image search for Angra Mainyu were 100 percent the evil god, if you count one instance of evil god on a tee shirt. This guy’s got evil down to a science!

In Egypt, Set is the big man. But the images returned for a Google Image search on Set include a tea set, a drum set, a chemistry set, a movie set, the Mandelbrot set, the Julia set, one image for a set of nude pictures, and setting a Guinness World Record for the number of bikini-clad women needed to form the Olympic rings (1202). As evil goes, Set’s name doesn’t carry much weight.

Finally, we get to Buddhism. In Buddhism, the evil one is known as Mara. But unlike all the other candidates, a Google Image search on Mara returns only one image of Buddha’s temptation, two photos of an Argentinian rodent, and an overwhelmingly abundant fifteen images of beautiful women! Score! Now whose evil do you think is best, huh?

Just thought I’d share, in case you were wondering.

I’d like to preserve and share with you an email I sent yesterday to the DargonZine Writers’ List, in observance of the 25th anniversary of FSFnet’s founding.

Twenty-five years. Two and a half decades. A quarter century.

I’m not sure how well you remember December of 1984, but here are a couple mental snapshots that I recall.

One is taking my friend Murph aside one quiet afternoon and asking his opinion about starting a fantasy magazine that would be distributed over BITNET. It would be modeled after the handful of other newsletters my friends were sending out by email, as well as the annual literary journal I once produced for the regional Tolkien fan group. He liked the idea, as did all the friends I mentioned it to.

The other image is set a week or so later. I recall sitting in the University of Maine mainframe computer terminal cluster after a particularly egregious blizzard, composing the eight-paragraph announcement and appeal for submissions that I called FSFnet Volume 0 Number 0. Between Christmas 1984 and New Years Day 1985, I emailed it to 100 people who listed fantasy or science fiction as interests in the primitive user directory called the BITNAUTS LIST. Two thirds of them would subscribe to the zine, and submissions would begin trickling in.

Thus was DargonZine born, twenty-five years ago this week.

Some of you have been here since those early days, and some joined somewhat later. Whatever part you’ve played in our shared history, you have my deepest thanks, and my heartiest congratulations. Or if you’re really new to the project, I look forward to the contribution you bring for our future. New writers are absolutely critical for our survival and thriving, so I encourage you to be an active, vocal participant.

While I was editor, amidst the urgent pleas for submissions and critiques and mentoring work, I probably never talked enough about how proud I am of what we’d accomplished. This is probably the best opportunity I’ll have until 2034, when DargonZine will hopefully observe its 50th anniversary, and I’ll hopefully be an overripe 71 year-old. So indulge me for a few moments.

When I founded FSFnet, I was a solitary 21 year-old writer in the woods of Maine, seeking focused exchange with other aspiring writers. I wanted to grow and learn as a writer, and to share that path with people who were similarly motivated. One of the things that brings me the most pride is observing the exchange of ideas and the quality of discourse on our email list. If I look back across our time together, it’s incredibly easy to see how much each of us has developed and matured as writers. I take great satisfaction in our having done so well in accomplishing my initial goal.

What I didn’t expect was how deeply people have valued their association with DargonZine. Many of you have been here one, two decades, or more. It’s humbling and very rewarding to have built something that other people value so highly. Your dedication is visible in the time and hard work you put into your stories and critiques, your tenure here, and your willingness to contribute your time and energy to keep the project running. Many of you have made DargonZine an important part of your lives, and that’s an amazing compliment to receive.

Another thing that actually took me by surprise was how important DargonZine was for me. While I was in college, FSFnet was a fun diversion, but it was also a way to do something meaningful that other people valued, which gave me a real sense of satisfaction. I guess it was natural that would be eclipsed when I left school, began a career, and got married, but it resumed even stronger than before when I returned to the zine after my separation and divorce.

Resuming control of DZ in 1994 helped give my life focus and meaning when both career and marriage were in the shitter. Its longevity (at that time ten years!) became a major source of pride, and as my career rebounded, DZ also became a place where I could practice budding leadership and motivational skills. I suddenly and unexpectedly found myself describing DargonZine and its mission of nurturing aspiring writers as my life’s purpose. While other causes have taken priority in recent years, I really appreciate the comfort, direction, and meaning DZ has given me throughout the years.

Let me talk about those years, because many of you should take pride in our shared creation. As you know, we’re the longest-running electronic magazine on the Internet by a huge margin. In 25 years we’ve sent out approximately 200 issues with about 500 stories, totaling over 14 MB and close to 3 million words of prose. We’ve fabricated a consistent shared world with over 12,000 references to over 3,500 named things, with a complete encyclopedic reference database. These might just look like numbers until you start thinking about how much work any one of them takes to accomplish; then you really begin to understand the magnitude of our shared achievement. But more importantly than any of that, we’ve published stories from five dozen aspiring writers, all of whom have come away from that experience with valuable learnings that have made them better at their craft.

Looking back, there are particular events that I’m proud to be associated with. Naturally, the creation of the Dargon Project itself, back when FSFnet was foundering, is a major one, along with its early development. Printing the Talisman epic and several other exceptional stories were others. But out of everything, I think the pinnacle had to be going from conception to the final printed conclusion of the huge Black Idol story arc, since it involved so many writers, required such close coordination, was such a long and grueling process, and finally produced such a memorable and noteworthy result. But all our collaborations—the conspiracy, the war, the comet contest, and others—are all highlights. It was an honor to participate in and preside over many of them.

I take a little pride in my ability to twice walk away from the zine, leaving my most prized creation in others’ hands; that’s not easy. But the real pride comes in seeing people step up to the challenge and keep the thing going out of sheer appreciation, since the other editors did not have the same sense of ownership and obligation and personal ego involvement that I did as founder. Leadership of DZ isn’t the most comfortable mantle to wear, but those who have taken on leadership duties—and not just the titular editors—have done us all great honor by helping the zine survive.

And, finally, the personal relationships. I have met about three dozen of our writers, both at our Summits and outside of them, and I’m delighted to have befriended most of them. While creating a network of social bonds wasn’t even on my radar back in 1984, it’s by far one of the project’s biggest and most pleasurable results, and another source of pride and honor. The people who have written for DargonZine are family, and one of the biggest and least-expected treasures of my life.

It’s been a surprisingly long and rewarding road, my friends. We’ve seen a lot, done a lot, and accomplished a lot. You’ve made me very proud, and I hope you take as much pride and joy in DargonZine as I do. Not just in the world-record longevity which we celebrate today, but in all the good it has done for so many writers. I’m honored to have shared the journey with you, and I look forward to many years and more adventures to come.

DargonZine can, of course, be found at http://www.dargonzine.org/.

Watched "Waters of Mars" last week sometime - it was fast, exciting, engaging, but while I enjoyed it I also felt there was something a little ... off ... about it. Aside from the "the Doctor does nothing to influence events" (until the end, when he shouldn't), it was really just a lot of noise and excitement and an ending that wasn't baffling but more like, just, eh?

Last night, I watched "The End of Time, Part 1", and it is Doctor Who back on form. No spoilers here, but if you think the previews have already spoiled the major twist (I mean, "John Simm" is listed just after "David Tennant" in the opening credits!), just wait until you see the end!

I've already got next week's conclusion set up on the DVR. I won't be deciding what I do next Saturday night by the TV schedule ... but I will be eagerly awaiting a convenient time to see "The End of Time, Part 2" with the lights down and nothing else in front of me.

(I've got Alice still waiting. TV Guide wasn't all that happy about it, but they didn't like Tin Man much either, and I enjoyed that one. So, when I've got 4 hours to kill, I'll catch up with that one.)