One reason to start this blog is the overwhelming jumble that I experience as a 74 year old when I try to grasp the world around me. The image that arises is a thing that grows incrementally with the incorporation of new observations and insights. That thing is my idea of the world. It has become too complex (and I too old) to oversee it. This blog tries to make a more accessible reflection of it as a kind of external memory.
I am Aernout Schmidt, born in 1945 and looking for a team to do the archiving. That is why I made “us”. We chose fiction as a vehicle because fiction is fun and better suited to communicate facts than facts can by themselves. So we (Mr Sum aka Harry Survivor, Mr. Node aka Ernie S,, Mr. Buddy aka Ian Mate, Mr. Stickler aka Henry Conformer and Mr. Winner aka Jack Sales) are fictional. We form a social network that experiences a lot and debates about everything. It thus offers access to those ideas and images my brain has involuntary selected from my memory to transmit to my consciousness, often fairly early in the morning, where I find them when waking up. Forgetting about them became daily routine. So I began looking for a mechanism to register and keep them accessible. I chose this blog – to create and maintain by and for ourselves. The fruit of that effort is our reward. This is the business model. The blog does not participate in the attention-devouring advertising culture of today. Whoever wants to read it is free to do so (we do not care about their number). Reactions are welcome by mail at aernout.schmidt@dotlegal.nl.