The Collected Works of Daniel Thompson

There was a time when I was paid to write. Not much, mind you, but I was young and hungry and just starting out. I worked at a couple of piddly newspapers where I wrote three to five pieces a week, took pictures, and did the occasional illustration. My writing style wasn’t like other newspaper articles, which made sense as I was more interested in writing for magazines. And so the flair of my phraseology would frustrate the copy editors, who were incensed by words like orbicular and festooned.

With this turn of wit upon the craft, I'm sure you're not surprised to know that I am acutely aware of how pretentious this all is. Imagine if you will a man with dark finery and technical haberdashery bellows down to the crowd, "Ladies and gentlemen, may I direct your attention at present, to the amazing inaugural edition that lays before you of the Collected Works of Daniel Thompson, Volume One: INDUSTRY!"

I have finally reached that wonderful place in my development where I don't mind being fancy.

Here you find my first volume of Collected Works, focused on Industry. What that means, of course, is that I'll be writing mostly about my most recent craft. This is a wonderful cop-out, as I never want to focus on one thing. And so creating some nebulous number of tomes means I can change and meander what it is I want to write about as it fancies me. I don't quite get why I needed permission in the first place, but now I have it.

So when I'm being industrious---that is working for money---I do something called product engineering, which means write software that creates a user-facing product experience. I'm particular about what the product is, as many uncountable others are when they try and align their ethics with their livelihood.

We'll find that in my professional work, I have many techniques for delaying decision-making until a later date (when such decisions are likely to be better as there is more information available). Several are on display here, which shows my continued progress at adulting.

So if you allow me to indulge further in my pretensions, each classical element (air, fire, earth, and water) has some bit of human ingenuity that harnesses the power of the element. In the case of air, it's a lighter-than-air ship. For fire, a raging furnace. Earth is represented by masonry, and water by a sextant.

I'll write more here soon. Heck, I'll write more about writing. Until then, farewell.