In late 2004 and early 2005, two Fark users – erewhon and wizzywig – repurposed otherwise juvenile and snark-filled forum threads about space weapons and UFOs into something stranger and more compelling: a semi-public conversation steeped in real military jargon, speculative physics, and carefully signaled insider knowledge. Beneath the profanity and humor, they debated plasma stealth, gravity-defying propulsion, classified research culture, and the limits of what can safely be said in public, all while testing each other’s credibility in front of an audience that mostly came for laughs. This blog post unpacks their exchanges across two threads, showing how early-2000s defense anxieties, post‑9/11 secrecy, and internet anonymity combined to blur the line between informed expertise and techno-myth, revealing how, online, the future of warfare could sound at once like sober engineering talk and an elaborate inside joke.
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Your Credential Taxonomy is Not a Houseplant: Stop Watering It and Start Versioning It
Higher education loves the phrase living document. It sounds healthy, adaptable, modern. But when it comes to credential taxonomies, that phrase can sabotage the very thing a taxonomy is supposed to do: make meaning stable enough to travel.
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Solution Room successes at DrupalCon Seattle’s Higher-Education Summit
One of my co-leads for DrupalCon Seattle’s Higher-Education Summit proposed a simple question that revamped our event’s structure: “In a perfect world, what and how could we change our event?”. Driving that premise was a desire to bring authentic, realistic, and tangible feedback and knowledge for our attendees by our attendees – to use the summit’s physical co-locating of university contacts across the world to pass along knowledge, insights, and best-practices in the moment. That’s where the Solution Room succeeded beyond our expectations.
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