I feel my friendships more acutely these days. I read things online my friends have written and I think: I am going to miss these people when they’re gone. Gone away from the internet or gone dead. I’m clinging to things that are important to me while it feels like the internet is reaching critical velocity, starting to break apart. Oh links to New York Times articles. Oh RCOPIWS. Oh music that arrived before its time and will have been forgotten by the end of the month. I want context and thoughtfulness and the creative act. I want to surround myself with people doing things I wish I had done. But it’s difficult, it’s getting more and more difficult. Just because it’s free doesn’t mean it doesn’t cost anything. I will pay money for it, just show me that someone, somewhere, is still breathing life.

• things magazine – “Text is struggling to keep up. Only dense, layered, information-rich text cuts it in the online world, preferably broken up with images and other information, which might explain why the blog form, in particular the visual blog, is currently so successful.” (So I don’t totally agree 100%, but still.)

• Six Sentences: Affirmation – Not this story in particular, but what it represents, what it reminded me of. My loves for a) stories about offices, b) stories about temp jobs, and c) stories written on Post-It notes. Remember when Sarah Brown was a receptionist? There’s almost nothing I like more than hearing about what people like or don’t like about their jobs. That means something to me, in a way that a picture of a man with an Apple computer up his ass does not.

• Six Sentences: Of a February Kansas Cemetary – Yes I’m linking to two stories from 6S. Show me another site that’s regularly posting decent short fiction and I’ll link to that too. (You can’t.)

• Someone Please Have Sex With Perez Hilton « The Cold Inclusive – “Forcing inmates to have sex with bloggers is now expressly forbidden, thank you President Kottke.” I mean come on. That is it, right there.