Wion is the personal lily pad of a restless soul named Wion, appropriately enough. By all accounts he is a good-natured and reasonably-learned individual, a great and bold carpenter of words who prefers a quirky alias when referred to in the third-person. These would include, among others, Roy d’Errata (Capt.), Ed I. Tor, and The Editor, as used here.

Story craft, or word craft at least, is the reason The Editor maintains this domain, though he explores it in his writing more than writes about it. Relatedly, this domain harbours The Editor’s other projects of varying insignificance. It is a consolidation tactic that better fits his personal content strategery.

In all, look for entertainment, folly, or one in the other. Life is a mix of both.

Now, a story in five acts.

Ex furens mare.

The Editor is an American from the Pacific Northwest, most recently from the Salish Territories. As a lad he spent summers, wood sword in hand, charging the dunes in Bandon, and he never missed an episode of Captain Cousteau’s adventures. These and similar influences lead the young adventurer to a tough career decision: Pirate or marine biologist? Both relied on an ocean proximity, as he saw it, so a win either way. When The Editor earned his degree in marine science from Huxley, he still had plenty of swashbuckler in him.

Spirited for Greenpeace, but financially indebted to the succubus, Sallie Mae, The Editor signed on with NOAA as a hopeful scientist and humble public servant. His first years were spent in the laboratory processing endless jars of zooplankton, tiny ocean animals of various species and life stage that exist together in the ocean column and play a critical role in the pelagic food web. Various methods and apparatuses were used to filter, identify, enumerate, and size the small creatures. It was not exactly the octopus hunting The Editor had imagined in his youth, but he did find paralarvae—teensy squid and octopi—in the zooplankton samples.

A curious and growing disinterest to chase a doctorate degree eventually lead The Editor out of the laboratories and into the information technology office where he took up various tasks in technical communication. The two tasks he enjoyed most were writing for the public and making maps for use in science presentations. The Editor’s first love was the ocean, however, so he frequently escaped the desk by volunteering for field expeditions in the Bering Sea and North Pacific. He spent many weeks each year riding the fantails of ships at all hours as they pitched and rolled across hilly waves in predictably miserable weather.

The Editor’s official titles at this time, such as they were, reflected the generic classification and service rank numbers typical of government employment. He never liked that much, so when the white-collars at the evening soirées in the Emerald City asked what he did for a living, The Editor would game them with marine field investigator, seafloor cartographer, benthic archivist, and the like. He enjoyed the mildly suspicious looks, but it was all true to a certain briny extent.

On a clear day in the last year of the last millennium, The Editor crossed paths with a woman who stunned him into immobility as she glanced his way through flowing black hair, smiled, and floated by like other-worldly poetry. In those eternal moments, our hero had the inexplicable impression that he was about to make the most consequential decision of his life. Perhaps spurred by something other than wits, he stepped in the direction the enchantress was headed. The Editor was willing to follow her anywhere, and he eventually found himself on the other side of the world, in the land of the Alemanni, void of an ocean’s wind and roar.

But first The Editor entered graduate study at the University of Washington in what was then called the Department of Technical Communication (now HCDE). He aimed to qualify his daily content development routines with formal instruction. An eclectic mix of science journalism, information design, and technical editing kept him busy. The degree would, as The Editor figured it, better his odds in the foreign market to come. After seven semesters underground, working days and engulfed in the heady fumes of information theory at night, The pale Editor reemerged to the sun, collected his gilded diploma, and turned his attention overseas.

In due time The Editor settled affairs, rid himself of manly possessions, and said farewell to family and friends. On the appointed day, with five bags in tow, three too many, as it turned out, The Editor boarded a plane and flew one-way to the woman he loved. The unlikely couple married quickly in the charming city of Strasbourg, and the two became four within three years.

The Editor realized immediately that three years of practical French language study would have served him better than a master’s degree in English non-fiction. Alsace has many attractive qualities, but work opportunities for an English-only writer with lapsed marine science experience is not one of them.

Except for two years early on, unexpectedly employed as a manager of international web projects, and precisely because of his native English, The Editor has mostly worked independently in France around being a father. He has in no great capacity collaborated with organizations of all kind and size, all with respect to the content development cycle in one way or another. Along the way he shepherded an annual content strategy conference and community, CSF, that had its moment of fame, and he lectured grad students at the University of Strasbourg on similar topics (not the most stress-free thing he ever did).

Before he realized it, The Editor’s mid-life sped by like a bullet train with little to show for it but two beautiful children now tall and smart. In a world that puts too much emphasis on success, profit and popularity, being a work-at-home father in those fleeting years was enough for The Editor. If he could turn back the clock for anything, it would be for more time with the giggling toddlers who grew too fast and will soon venture on.

As the great American political disaster played out in 2016, The Editor lost what little remained of his tolerance for big tech companies and their centralized social media platforms. And that content marketing had overwhelmed the web … That made him sick, too. The Editor decided to pull back from it and bring his digital routines inline with the same ethical minimalism he tries to maintain offline. He launched a personal campaign to clean up his web footprint, adopt open and privacy-respecting tools, optimize his content for low-energy consumption, cut out the digital middlemen when and where possible, and so on.

Shrugging off surveillance capitalism is not without compromises for an independent relying on the web. In the adoption of ethical tools and processes, one must still be flexible to the needs of collaborators who are conditioned to, or locked into, proprietary products. Though a digital lifestyle change is an exigent one, in The Editor’s opinion, it is nevertheless exploratory and offers opportunity to educate. The Editor expects to write more on this topic later, but he offers here that people ditch their social media accounts on big tech platforms in favour of decentralized and privacy-respecting alternatives, if any are needed at all. Ethical.net and Switching.social are good places to learn what is available.

As a father and concerned denizen of Earth, The Editor’s mind is often burdened by the ecological state of the world and the seeming indifference of society, structured as it is on growth economics. The Editor is certain that society is incapable of preventing its own demise. He would point to the last 200 years as evidence, a very short period in human history when our population, benefiting from fossil energy, expanded eight-fold and consumed resources and created wastes past nature’s ability to adapt.

Earth’s carrying capacity for our species was crossed in the late 1970s yet our population still grows, consumes, and wastes unabated, using up the resources of future generations. The math does not balance. There is only one way our numbers will go, eventually.

The Editor is used to living light, but he is doubling down on a low-impact existence by consuming less, fixing more, and generally doing more with less. That is not always easy in a society designed against it. But making smarter choices and being content with less goes a long way for the environment and one’s economy. The Editor knows his actions will not make a damn bit of difference in the world, but they do make a difference to his sense of being in it, and knowing his children will face nastier weather.

Before The Editor’s days are done, he hopes to walk long distances through forests and back country, produce more of his own food, participate in a circular economy solution, plant one hundred trees (which means about 5 per year at this rate), barter goods or services for mutual benefit, write a book of non-fiction (or a historical fiction), earn a greenbelt in self-taught traditional woodworking, and see his children make it on their own, doing what they want to do. The Editor could leave happy with that.

THE   END