The Hard Philosophy

G+ has been on my mind a lot, as you can see below. I like it. I like it a lot. I want to use it, but it is only as good as the crowd which adopts it, which is why I sigh heavily when I hear people are dismissive of the service because they already have Twitter and Facebook accounts.

In a strange parallel, today’s Penny Arcade comic talks about the Windows Mobile 7 phone. Tycho’s words are true, in a sense:

This is 2011, and they’ve brought a cellphone to a knife fight.

The fight being between Apple and Android, with Windows Mobile being the weaker third party participant which, like G+, is automatically dismissed because people seem to have this steadfast resolution that there’s only ever room for two players on the field. The only sport I can think where this is the case is tennis, but that’s not really part of this discussion.

I can’t help but think of this quote from Clive Barker’s Imajica. It’s the opening paragraph, and sets up the rest of the book perfectly, and is fitting here because when you think about the point it makes, it is pretty immutable.

"It was the pivotal teaching of Pluthero Quexos, the most celebrated dramatist of the Second Dominion, that in any fiction, no matter how ambitious its scope or profound its theme, there was only ever room for three players. Between warring kings, a peacemaker; between adoring spouses, a seducer or a child. Between twins, the spirit of the womb. Between lovers, Death. Greater numbers might drift through the drama, of course—thousands in fact—but they could only ever be phantoms, agents, or, on rare occasions, reflections of the three real and self-willed beings who stood at the center. And even this essential trio would not remain intact; or so he taught. It would steadily diminish as the story unfolded, three becoming two, two becoming one, until the stage was left deserted. Needless to say, this dogma did not go unchallenged. The writers of fables and comedies were particularly vociferous in their scorn, reminding the worthy Quexos that they invariably ended their own tales with a marriage and a feast. He was unrepentant. He dubbed them cheats and told them they were swindling their audiences out of what he called the last great procession, when, after the wedding songs had been sung and the dances danced, the characters took their melancholy way off into darkness, following each other into oblivion. It was a hard philosophy, but he claimed it was both immutable and universal, as true in the Fifth Dominion, called Earth, as it was in the Second. And more significantly, as certain in life as it was in art."