Life At The Edge of Chaos

People love randomness, not chaos. Games are fun because the randomness is constrained. When you roll a pair of dice, you expect to see something between 2 and 12, not suddenly find yourself teleported into an elevator full of excited trombonists.

Randomness and surprise are related. Second cousins, I think.

Then surprise and humor go together, like peanut butter and your favorite shirt. Aristotle said "the secret to humor is surprise'. Terry Pratchett said it better: “The world is made up of four elements: Earth, Air, Fire and Water. This is a fact well known even to Corporal Nobbs. It's also wrong. There's a fifth element, and generally it's called Surprise.”

Years ago, I wrote a humorous horoscope for a few years, which let me dabble in the dark arts of humor in tiny bite-sized pieces. I loved the occasional coincidences, when something I'd written happened to correspond to a real-world situation for a reader, such as the notorious Toronto SPICKEN incident.

This newsletter – and related web toys and silly experiments – is another attempt to play with randomness, chance, luck, fun, and humor. They say you can't step in the same river twice, but that's OK. It's more of a bog, I'd say, than a river.