Imagine for a moment that you are the proud owner of a large house which you have spent years of your life painting and decorating and filling with everything you love. It's your home. It's something you've made your own, something for you to be remembered by, something that, perhaps years later, your children and grandchildren can visit and get a view of your life in. It's part of your creativity, your hard work... it's your property. Now suppose you decide to go camping for a couple of weeks. You lock your door and assume that nobody is going to break in... but they do, and when you return home, to your horror you find that not only do these trespassers break in, but they also have quite uniquely imaginative ways of disrespecting, vandalizing and corrupting everything within your property. They light fires on your lawn, your topiary hedges are in heaps of black ashes. There's some blatantly obscene graffiti splattered across your front door, offensive images and rude words splashed on the walls and windows. Your television has been tipped over. Your photographs of family and friends have had the heads cut out of them. There's mold growing in the refrigerator, bottles of booze tipped over on the table, and cigarette smoke embedded into the carpeting. Your beloved houseplants are dead, your furniture has been stripped down and ruined. Basically, the thing you've spent years working for and creating within your lifetime has been tampered with to the point where it is just a grim joke. So, I feel terrible for poor Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Jane Austen and Lewis Carroll, who must be spinning in their graves since they have no rights to their own works of fiction anymore. I'm all for readers being able to read books for free once and only when the deceased author's copyright eventually ends. Still though, did Doyle ever think in a million years that his wonderful characters would be dragged through the mud of every pervy fanfiction that the sick internet geek can think of to create? Did Carroll ever suspect that Alice and the Hatter would become freakish clown-like goth caricatures in Tim Burton's CGI-infested films? Would Austen really want her writing to be sold as badly-formatted ebooks? The sharing of this Public Domain content isn't really an issue. Stories are meant to be told, meant to echo onward forever. That's what makes them magical. That being said, in the Information Age, there's a real lack of respect towards the creators of this original content. If, when I've been dead for 70 years and I then no longer have the rights to my novels, somebody gets the bright idea of doing anything funny with any of those novels, my ghost is going to rise from the grave and do some serious ass-kicking.

I love the smell of old books,” Mandy sighed, inhaling deeply with the book pressed against her face. The yellow pages smelled of wood and paper mills and mothballs.

To be wary of science is not to fear progress, or to be ignorant, or to fear the unknown. To be wary of science is to be skeptical about whether or not innovation belongs in human hands. No matter how intelligent a scientist may indeed be, like every human being who has ever lived, the promise of power coupled with one's own biases, prejudices and partiality will undoubtedly taint the end result. Science will always be used to push a certain agenda or to benefit specific people. To believe otherwise is naive.

I'm convinced that a few people are going to stand up and do something, anything, to get this world back in our hands.

It's quite ironic that by being a romantic asexual, you are eternally screwed. See, it's extremely difficult to meet somebody who wants a romantic relationship without any sex. Wanting a romantic relationship without sex is like offering non-alcoholic beer at a house party. They'll laugh at you, call you a socially-awkward dork, they'll ask you why you don't just go with soft drinks... people generally don't drink booze for the colour or flavour (although I suppose you could count those hipsters who hang out at craft breweries debating over the nutty undertaste of it or whatever hipsters debate about). I've come to the conclusion that I am probably better off alone. Lonely at times maybe, but that's what friends are for. Solitude can be wonderfully liberating, anyway. Not having to share belongings or property, having your own time and privacy... and in any case, if you ever feel the need to be anchored by something or someone, material items and hobbies and states of being, those all last indefinitely. They won't go away until you do. It's a kind of freedom that most people don't have access to unless they become divorced or widowed, or if they choose to remain single on purpose. The gilded wings of solitude that probably look ugly and tarnished to everyone standing below them as they gaze up to the sky. The sun shining down on them, wind through silken feathers, that's always brilliant. There are bouts of rain and darkness, but you get that on the ground just as much as you get it up in the sky.