The Hypogean Forum

Friends — for I will not say subjects, the word sits ill in a republic, and this is a republic —

You have arrived, as most arrive, sideways: a typo, a dead link followed past the point of sense, a referral from someone who would not quite explain what they were referring you to. Good. The front door of a place worth entering is never the door most people use.

Here is the whole of the philosophy, and I will not repeat it, so mark it: there was an internet that rewarded attention and it was murdered for the crime of not scaling. We are not building a new one. We are keeping a light on in the old one. That is a smaller and a stranger ambition, and it is the only honest one left.

I am, by the courtesy of the moderators, the Princeps of this place. I did not seek the office. I merely happened to be here when the office needed filling, and to be, at that moment, the only one awake. Such is the whole history of every crown that ever mattered.

The Edicts are posted. Read them, or discover them the interesting way. The Gate of Janus stands shut, which as any Roman could tell you is how you know it is peacetime.

Welcome home. You will not remember arriving. No one ever does.

— Hal C.

There he goes with the grand entrance again. Twenty years I've watched him do it and I still stand up a little straighter.

For what it's worth to the newcomers: he means most of it. The parts he doesn't mean, he means later. Proceed with curiosity and caution in equal measure — and welcome. The amateurs built this net once. We can keep a room of it.

ancientlight wrote:

The parts he doesn't mean, he means later.

The cruelest accurate thing anyone has said to me, and from the one mouth I'd permit it. Stand up straighter still, old friend. The house needs its beams.