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.