A new home

Well, I’ve finally completed a long deferred project: Archipelagoes has moved to a paid hosting provider and now has both its own domain name (www.iangarrickmason.com) and a fresh design. The new site will be my primary location on the web, though of course I’ll maintain the same cross-posting relationship with sans everything, and my plan [...]

A new coat of paint

Regular visitors to Archipelagoes may be surprised to find it with a whole new look. I figured that after a year and a half the place needed a bit of a repainting, and this WordPress theme offers some features that I thought you’d appreciate: the body text is darker and thus easier to read in [...]

Tesseractia

Two rather interesting blogs to let you all know about — both, happily, by fellow Canadians. First, Lee Hamilton’s Platonic Shift is a fun and often thought-provoking blend of commentary on pop culture, science and technology, and Catholicism. And second, Classical Bookworm (discovered via Platonic Shift), a blog written by a British Columbian (and, interestingly, [...]

The warrior ethic: a response

“The Flight of Aeneas” (1595), by Peter Brueghel
I can’t remember if it was the late Col. David Hackworth or the late Col. Harry G. Summers Jr. (author of the influential retrospective on the Vietnam War, On Strategy) who made the telling point that any American general in World War II worth his stars would make [...]

Points on the tesseract

First, in rampant defiance of Dennis Perrin’s kind welcome to the blogosphere [why a sphere? why not a tesseract? - ed.], in which he identified me as a key source for “your high-end cultural needs” — and thus, by the way, putting me under instant and enormous pressure to actually become capable of serving needs of that [...]

Blogging and memory

Jon Schwarz at A Tiny Revolution makes some interesting observations on the under-exploited ability of blogs to provide long range historical context for current events: “extending the memory of political discussions”, as he nicely puts it. I’m not sure if this is a capability unique to blogs — after all, a newspaper or a magazine is [...]

Unpacking

Well, here I am. The old house (www3.sympatico.ca/ian.g.mason/archipelagoes) was a good one, but it required a lot of upkeep. Tweaking HTML can really put a damper on a guy’s urge to post. Anyway, this new place is classy-looking and has all the mod-cons: comments, search fields, categories, you name it. And all for free. Not bad.
WordPress: You can [...]