twoplustwoequalsblog

The blog poster in Flock would be awesome if the cursor didn’t randomly disappear, but I guess I will have to wait until it is out of beta. Worth noting, Flock actually has built in spell checking on forms, which Firefox won’t until 2.0.

But this entry is not about Flock. Tonight, I will tell you about the latest member of the “I am too cheap to register domain names, so it’s at twoplustwoequalsfive.com/something” family. It is so new, in fact, that it lacks a favicon. I should get on that after I finish this.

It is called Major Distraction. I already wrote a lot of copy for it over there, so I will just blockquote an excerpt here:

So here’s the plan. You go to college next year, and you want to meet all sorts of new people, right? Well asides from the kids in your dorm or your classes, where are you going to meet new people? Facebook? The local 7-11? I have a way better idea.

There is something called a letter. You might know what they are because your school assigned you two mailboxes this year. One of them is the convenient one you can access from your laptop, and the other one is the one you have to trudge down to the student center for. It’s that second one that’s relevant here. Basically, you get paper and a pen, and then write a bunch of words on it. Except instead of taking notes for class, you write as though you were talking to another person. A person that didn’t say anything until about a week after you were done talking to them, but a person nonetheless. It’s a pretty obsolete form of communication, but I think we can revive it.

Here is what I propose we do. First, you fill out this form, then I take the results and, in about September, mail you who you should write a letter to, then you take the address I gave you and write them a letter…

I am rather fond of the concept once. It largely grows out of the time Colby sent me a letter at Frontiers, and the mail I got at 4H camp. It’s really fun to think that someone took the time out to specifically communicate with you, so let’s extend it to college! I’m not going to get a chance to see most of you, and IM leaves something to be desired. Letters are about three times more fun, at least. I also highly recommend giving me a dollar if you see me, because buying postage to send everyone their initial “write your letter to this person” letters is going to be very expensive. I could just e-mail everyone their first assignments, but that totally defeats the purpose.

So check it out, and prepare to waste countless hours with dead trees and an allotrope of carbon next year!