What is Starship Merlin?
Short answer: it’s Mike Frizzell’s personal blog. I am a nobody you’ve never heard of.
Slightly longer answer: In trying to come up with a name for this blog I wanted to combine two of my loves: science and fantasy. More specifically, the intersection of the magical and scientific with the imagination. Nowhere are we as humans more creative than when we imagine what can exist, or what could have existed, given the proper amount of technology and magic (which are often indistinguishable). This blog, then, seeks to explore what it means to be human by examining creativity in the light of history, theology, and philosophy.
(Basically, I really want to write a lot about Dune and how frakking awesome it is.)
Long Answer: For years, I’ve written about and linked to science/tech stuff. After thousands of posts, and tens of thousands of words, I realized how unhappy it made me. I know examining how blogging makes you feel is quite a first world problem, but the core of my dissatisfaction was in how non-creative the whole endeavor is.
Linking to something some guy wrote and then adding a paragraph onto it is not creative. It is merely passing along a link with a quick thought, something I could do better on Twitter (and get much better results). Writing about how terrible Twitter’s quick bar is might have some effect on the future if you’re an important developer, but for the rest of us it’s merely a temporal distraction. In a year, no one will remember what you wrote and in ten years the whole “problem” will seem silly.
What I want to do, which is easier said than done, is to actually create, to provide original content. I want to post things that I spent time on, that I sweat over, things that require me to stretch my feeble mind. I want to create.
Of course, all of this is more than a little arrogant. First, I’m assuming I can do this, and second, I’m assuming it will be worth reading. Well, that’s for the reader to decide. Feel free to comment and any post, whether positive or negative, and let me know what you think.
