My name is Mark Lane Vines. I’m an avid reader and eccentric writer with many passions. Besides journalism, science, history, math, myth, poetry, languages, and linguistics, I love hiking, biking, boating; gourmet food and hard cider; detective and speculative fiction; skepticism and Fortean phenomena; dice, card, and board games; travel, photography, movies, and music with unusual tunings.
Getting acquainted with new people, and infatuated with their creations, gives me great pleasure.
Alabama born in the 1960s, a central Texas dweller since the 80s, I’ve spent most of my worklife in grocery. Currently I manage the beer and wine department at a large supermarket. Married since the 90s, the wife and I are Peak Freaks — we love Twin Peaks! We have three splendid children and various cute, pesky pets.
(Above, clockwise from top left: Me riding my bent. One of our daughters hugging one of our dogs. One of our cats getting her chin scratched.)
I’m a Hearst Award winner. I’ve held editorial positions at InnerViews (the Whole Foods Market employee journal), The Crimson White (the University of Alabama student newspaper), and Myriad magazine. I had a futuristic fiction published in Trash Soup, and an op-ed on Láadan published in The Women’s Alternative Times. Yet, those publications and positions all came before the turn of the century. Now I feel it’s time to resume wielding the quill.
I have ambitions for humanity as well as for myself. Despite my coal and oil heritage, I want our transport and energy sectors to go fumeless, to prevent climate and ocean disasters from overwhelming our economy and ecology. Still, I’m no Luddite. I want technological progress and solar system prospecting to enrich the human adventure.
Some of the causes I embrace are pretty far out. I wish more elections would employ better voting systems. I wish more cruises were aboard submarines and more hotel rooms were submerged, with more window views undersea. I wish experts would craft an auxiliary language with all its words isomorphic to Chinese logograms, the communication system with more users and more history than any other. I wish there were a “Watershed Bound” movement demanding globe, map, and atlas boundaries that divide the world into drainage basins instead of political provinces and nation-states.
I’m plunging into Steemit because it seems tailor-made to revive, refresh, and reward me for pursuing my passions. Also, I expect distributed ledgers in general, along with the scarce digital assets, the contract automation, and the more voluntary human enlistments that they enable, to disrupt many aspects of civilization profitably, and I hope to find my place on the forward side of that.
Welcome to Steemit @custone. We are both in the right place at the right time. I honestly think Steemit is going to be the future of social media.
Thanks for the welcome! I'm excited about Steemit too.
I've now shared my plunge into Steemit on Facebook.
https://www.facebook.com/mark.l.vines/posts/1641437852602886
Good idea, I have been urging people to bring their friends and family with them when they make the switch. New platforms with a small amount of users can be a little bit lonely. Luckily the Steemit community is super helpful and passionate about helping new users!
Thank you!
Happy to have you here! My dad also worked in the grocery industry his whole life, and I worked as a vendor for a short time. I followed, and will be looking forward to reading your posts!
I appreciate that, Erik, and I've followed you back!
Welcome to the place to be!!!! Following to see where it takes you!!!!
Thanks for welcoming me. I'm following you too!
WELCOME
Thank you! Glad to be here!
Great intro post. I think you will enjoy Steemit a lot.
Good luck and Godspeed!
Thanks for welcoming me. Good luck to you too!
You are welcome mark happy Steemit
I appreciate the welcome. I look forward to meeting people and exploring the network here.
Welcome to Steemit! Looks like you are going to have some interesting things to add to the community. I Upvoted, Followed and Resteemed.
Keep Steemin'
@ozwald
Thanks again. Looks like you contribute a lot to the community yourself!
I want to make Steemit (along with myself) the best it can be in 2018. Join me in greeting, upvoting and following new users, and resteeming quality content!
welcome! tell me more about that dice please!
Thanks for asking. That is a Dice Labs D120. Wired magazine published a pretty good article on it a while back. Here's the link:
https://www.wired.com/2016/05/mathematical-challenge-of-designing-the-worlds-most-complex-120-sided-dice/
Here's a paper on how the numbers were balanced:
http://www2.oberlin.edu/math/faculty/bosch/nbd.pdf
And here's a YouTube video:
None of those links refer to my own work.
I want one of these!
You can buy one, or five, at MathArtFun.
http://mathartfun.com
And I've shared this post on Medium.
https://medium.com/@marklvines/im-also-on-steemit-now-9701dc861622
@OriginalWorks