Sotto Voce’s First Derivative of Clarke’s Third Law:
“Any sufficiently complex system is indistinguishable from randomness.”
Sotto Voce is the quieter side of Active Voice Writing & Editorial Services, which, in turn, is Paul Lagasse. Here is where I express my non-professional writing self, and play with ideas that move me, that affect my perception, that change my approach to life and living — or that otherwise just momentarily distract me. Think of Sotto Voce as the very messy workbench of a fellow who writes.
Hey, didja know I wrote a book?
The Birthplace of “Typecasting”
Inspired by the blog Papercasting.net 2.0 (motto: “Dead Trees Delivered Digitally”), Paul Lagasse of Sotto Voce coined the term “typecasting” back in September 2005 in this post as a tongue-in-cheek way to describe the art of blogging with scanned typescript. Originally, typecasting was just a way to play around with written forms (Sotto Voce had also previously featured scans of handwritten text), but it quickly became the preferred method for putting up new content on the site.
Richard Polt of the Classic Typewriter Page included the term in his link to Sotto Voce. The following year, he mentioned typecasting by name in an NPR feature story about the lost art of typewriter repair. Since then, the term has since gradually caught on among bloggers who use typewriters. Recently, the Classic Typewriter Page’s links page even broke out typecasting as a separate category, calling it “an increasingly popular form of blogging.”
Sotto Voce was certainly not the first blog to do scanned typed text, and it sure isn’t (by any stretch) the best site out there using it — just look at the great links to the right for example — but I just thought it worth commemorating here that Sotto Voce did contribute in that one small way to the paper revolution.
Public Pool Rules Apply
In an effort to discourage what John E. McIntyre calls “. . . that characteristic feature of the Internet, the combination of ignorance with effrontery,” comments seeking to argue against (or, conceivably if rarely, for) a post on Sotto Voce are more likely to be acknowledged and responded to if they can be ranked as a DH5 (“Refutation”) or a DH6 (“Refuting the Central Point”) on Paul Graham’s disagreement hierarchy. Comments ranked DH4 or below will not be deleted, but will be pointedly ignored. (Note: this doesn’t necessarily mean that all DH5 or DH6 comments will be responded to, either, which just goes to show that there’s simply no accounting for whim and caprice ’round these parts.)