It has been a long time since I first imagined something like chasdanner.com, blinking in purple neon, connecting the world to me with pointed anecdotes and clever analogies. Really the concept of using hopefully polished ideas to change the world was probably the direct result of reading Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game when I was in what must have been 7th grade. Card had incorportated the concept of there being “Nets” in the world, where people could do things like access historical videos or communicate with each other. And really what he described (in 1985) was not too far off from what the internet became, minus a few billions dollars worth of porn and generally a lot more business and a lot less meaningful discourse. Characters in the book were actually able to change the course of current events by publishing their ideas in kinds of general forums that a huge amount of people would read regularly. The idea really stood out for me, the idea of writing something that was so persuasive it could quite simply change the world. And the “Nets” certainly seemed like the best place to do it. When I first logged into the Internet it seemed more like an information bike trail, especially trapped in AOL like I was, but soon enough I found out it’s true power: collecting sound clips from movies and impulsively sending extremely long self delusional emails to ex-girlfriends.

Now it’s 10 Years later and I could never keep track of the Red Sox as well as I do without hourly espn reloads, I would know about 1/1000th of the music that I have, and I would probably have no friends outside of my native New England. As far as directing the course of human history it certainly seems that political blogs have started to realize this potential in the past 5 years, although in no scale even comparable to that in the Ender future. Maybe in time…
For myself, I don’t pretend to believe (or at least admit) that I think I could write anything that could truly change the world. But at the very least chasdanner.com can give me an excuse to write (a lot) more and in that share what I hope are my interesting perspectives on life. (I don’t think that’s a cliché yet, but it sure just felt like one) If the world happens to change in response to or in spite of me or anything I do, so be it.

And if Steve Jobs is reading this, please read Ender’s Game and invent me a desk that’s also a computer like they had in there. That would be very cool. Laptops and Tablet PCs just don’t seem cool or big enough. And I also need a terabyte flash iPod with a built in phone and a complicated alarm clock that won’t turn off until I answer a series of AM-difficult subjective questions like which John Travolta movie was better: Staying Alive or Battlefield Earth. (Yes I’ve seen both, and you can’t ever take that away from me)(please try) Or perhaps a really difficult question like: “How can you make your website better when you understand code about as well as the Bush administration understands why New York City will be a tropical scuba diving destination for my grandchildren. (Hello NSA intern! That was actually a reference to global warming, but you’ll probably want to start a file on me anyway, just please don’t spell my name with a “z” There is no “z” in Charles. Unless you are a drag queen)

Thanks to my great cousin Nick who helped me with this initial foray.