Friday - March 4, 2005:
"it's more like a blog, only it's actually worth reading."
-from
Tailsteak.com
One of the world's next ten true geniuses is going to share ideas with the world using something similar to
Tailsteak.com. The structure is indeed similar to a blog, but calling it a blog is problematic. Tailsteak is a much tighter and permanent home for ideas, lots of ideas.
In 1988, I began to keep a folder labeled "ideas". Before I got married, I used to wake up frequently in the middle of the night with ideas about next to anything. It still happens occasionally. The first idea I deemed worthy of putting in that folder had to do with the nature of the universe. I was struggling with the concept that the universe might be turned in on itself like a mobius strip only with three dimensions instead of two. For me, a young man with little background in science, that wasn't a satisfying answer. Even a three dimensional mobius strip would have to occupy and be surrounded by space. At the same time, I was bothered for many of the same reasons by string theory, part of the idea being that the big bang could have come from a line just as well as from a point, both occupying zero space and being incapable of existing with infinite mass. In my mind I extended this one step further and added a plane to the equation also occupying zero space. At the time, scientists were wondering a great deal about the expansion of our own universe and whether or not there was enough mass in it for it to continue expanding forever. Since then, I understand they've found lots more of our universe's mass, dark matter, I think they call it. Long story short: Out of all of this came a notion that the universe could act lots like a room full of breathing lungs or balloons all squished into one another but without such well-defined sacks. The contraction or breathing of one sack would force the expansion of another (like a balloon in a vacuum). In other words, the forces needed to keep a universe expanding or shrinking might have lots to do with the nature of the expansion and collapsing of the other universes it is smooshed together with.
I tried to go further by reading Stephen Hawking's
Brief History of Time. I made it half-way through and decided to ask for help from some of my Dad's friends, physics professors from the local university. (He met with them to design, test and build gliders.) They laughed at my attempt at Hawking and handed me several books on special relativity, the kind full of math I didn't quite understand. I love solving equations, but was in over my head. But I had pulled together a good deal of material on that night and I'm proud of that particular piece of paper in my idea folder.
Tailsteak is a giant folder full of ideas. they're not all original. they're not all ground-breaking, but it is a brave man who lets you into his idea folder. it's his mind on display and in so many ways, logic games, philosophical essays, programming tricks and games and for the web-comic fans, some of the best-written sequential work on the internet. The art's not beautiful. It is just another tool to help Tailsteak deal with and share what's going on in his head. Did I mention there's lots going on in this guy's head.
Tailsteak has helped to reassure me that it is not too late for the internet to be the open playground for creativity that I've been hoping it would be for a decade now. I do not think it is a coincidence that the site uses the comic form regularly. I am a firm believer that comics can be an incredibly intimate, direct and effective form of communication - particularly webcomics because of the comparatively low cost-to-eye ratio combined with an extremely low pen-to-eye-time.
Thanks for submitting the site. It was an honor to dig through your brain a bit.
(Navigating around Tailsteak can be a bit confusing at first. Keep in mind that there are basically two ways to dig through things, chronologically or thematically. The red icons guide you through a theme and the white guide you through time. The site is worth experiencing using both methods.)
-Bob Stevenson
