Dear Leader Speaks

Dear Peasants and Assorted Self-Aggrandizers,

We have been up all night, my friends and I, beneath mosque lamps whose brass cupolas are bright as our souls, because like them they were illuminated by the internal glow of electric hearts. And trampling underfoot our native sloth on opulent Persian carpets, we have been discussing right up to the limits of logic and scrawling the paper with demented writing.

Our hearts were filled with an immense pride at feeling ourselves standing quite alone, like lighthouses or like the sentinels in an outpost, facing the army of enemy stars encamped in their celestial bivouacs. Alone with the engineers in the infernal stokeholes of great ships, alone with the black spirits which rage in the belly of rogue locomotives, alone with the drunkards beating their wings against the walls.

Then we were suddenly distracted by the rumbling of huge double decker trams that went leaping by, streaked with light like the villages celebrating their festivals, which the Po in flood suddenly knocks down and uproots, and, in the rapids and eddies of a deluge, drags down to the sea.

Then the silence increased. As we listened to the last faint prayer of the old canal and the crumbling of the bones of the moribund palaces with their green growth of beard, suddenly the hungry automobiles roared beneath our windows.

“Come, my friends!” I said. “Let us go! At last Mythology and the mystic cult of the ideal have been left behind. We are going to be present at the birth of the centaur and we shall soon see the first angels fly! We must break down the gates of life to test the bolts and the padlocks! Let us go! Here is they very first sunrise on earth! Nothing equals the splendor of its red sword which strikes for the first time in our millennial darkness.”

***

Ok, so I stole that from the Futurist Manifesto of 1909. I’m here to explain why the Crasstalk you once knew has shapeshifted into the internet-vanquishing beast you see now.

First of all, many of you said the old design was just a bit too crazy and anarchic. We think the new look will make it much easier to find the posts that interest you. In addition to the neat little slide show at the top, all the newest stories will appear in the menu at the top left of the page and in traditional blog format below.

The new template also enables us to categorize posts by topic and the site’s 80-some authors can now write up little blurbs explaining who they are to the readers. Lastly, the site seems to work a lot better in Firefox, which was a common complaint we were hearing.

So we hope you enjoy the new look. The main idea of the site hasn’t changed. It’s still the home of the web’s most self-aggrandizing commenters. The only difference is that it now looks a little bit less like the insane wall-diagram of a paranoid-schizophrenic.

For Authors:

There are a few new features you need to understand.

– The slideshow at the top shows the four most recent posts that have been assigned to the “Featured Posts” category. DO NOT put your post into this category unless you have a picture to go up in the slideshow. To add an image here, you must upload an image to the site using the Media button, then paste the image’s URL under “Post Options.” If you try to post a link from some other site, it won’t work. It has to be hosted by the Crasstalk’s Media Library.

– The About The Author box is controlled by the About box on your User page in WordPress.

– Feel free to suggest new categories.