• I think that one of the greatest compliments I can give to Eastgate, Mark Bernstein, and Tinderbox is this:

  On the few occasions I've been inspired to build my own clone of or cousin to Tinderbox, the first tool for which I reach is Tinderbox itself.

• Another Tinderbox thought:

  I've just realized that I tend to use the Map View in a way analogous to formation of planets in the solar system--at least, as far as I understand it. I spew various particles of thought onto the screen in a cloud orbiting a central star of an idea, and over time the particles begin to accrete into groupings driven by their own mutual gravities that eventually form categorical planets. Of course, I'm doing the nudging and taking the role of gravity, but sometimes the structure appears in a spooky Ouija-board-esque manner.

  By avoiding premature commitment to hierarchy or structure, this allows me to get things out of my head while still only partially encoding ideas in terms of relative position with respect to each other. This is something that's really gotten me to consider Tinderbox as a next generation beyond mere outliners. It's just taken me a while to really grok how this works. It's a bit like Card Sorting.

• Here's a comment I left on a friend's LiveJournal today:

The hiveminded, phosphorescent lichen are conspiring with the mechanized saurans in low earth orbit. They share a common conception of the color blue, at odds with the occluded vision of the mad pachiderms. They plan to bombard the elephants' capital city in India with M&M-shaped tofu blobs--an acceleration of 9.8 meters per second per second from orbit can pack quite a punch. The blobs will first have been electroplated in platinum, using the saurans' wireless electricity. This should help with the stresses of atmospheric reentry.

Anyway, I don't know what's up with Esther or construction workers. Does she like waffles and eyepatches?

• Time for lunch. Maybe I'll have more thoughts after food.