October

Probably the biggest and best new thing is the category Strategies. which contains several new essays and subessays plus a couple of old essays that I moved from other categories.

I'm also particularly pleased with the essay Thoughts About Superorganisms and its subessays.

About a third of the new essays aren't really new. I wrote A Visit To Japan and its subessays back at the end of June, and only later decided to move them into the urticator.net project. I changed the top page a little, and added a note at the end of Language, but otherwise they're all exactly the same as before.

That's all I want to say about the new essays.

If you've been here before, you may already have noticed another change I made, which is that I rearranged the essay tree again. This time I took the categories Art, Memes, and so on, and moved them down a level, into Glue; I also moved the category Stories up a level.

Here are some pictures that show what happened.

I'm not entirely pleased with the rearrangement, because it means that all the glue essays, which I tend to think are the most important ones, are now a little harder to find. Why'd I do it, then? I just needed to make the tree less top-heavy, so there would be more room in the table of contents. I'm glad that the parallel concepts of domains, glue, and stories ended up on the same level, but that wasn't the original motivation.

By the way, I also reorganized the quotations a little, putting them into rough categories and bringing in a few items that had been misfiled before.

Finally, there's the matter of referends. I'd already written a few essays using the word “referent”, but it kept irritating me to see it, so I went back and changed it to “referend”. Now, even though “referend” isn't a real word, I figure the change is close enough to the correction of a spelling error that it doesn't violate persistence of content … but I also still thought it was worth mentioning.