It’s cold outside and supposed to snow tonight, and I love it. You know, it wasn’t till this year that I found myself actually excited for winter. And this half-fall/half-winter thing we’ve got going on right now is perfect literary weather. The air is full of magic and possibilities. (Perhaps, though, I’m just being influenced by the two Narnia soundtracks and the Lord of the Rings soundtracks, which capture the feel of this season perfectly.)

So, over the years I’ve created not a few personal websites. Here’s the full list: Blank Slate (including its blog), this blog (Top of the Mountains), BenjaminCrowder.com, Bookland, Digital Bridge, Outside the Box, Footprints from the Past, and, most recently, Halfpence. (We’re ignoring the project sites like Mormon Artist and Unbindery.)

Houston, we’ve got a problem. Eight sites. One man. An impossible mission. Coming soon to a theater now you.

No, really, in trying to burrow out a nest for myself on the web, I’ve made a tangled mess of things, leaving scattered pieces and fragments all over the place — abandoned, derelict ghost towns on the web.

My minimalist leanings are not pleased.

To fix this, in the near future I’ll be consolidating things, forming a more cohesive and unified brand so that Ben Crowder is not strewn across the web in a zillion different places. It’s time to put myself back together again. Stay tuned.

If you haven’t noticed, America’s pretty much on the verge of crumbling. Glenn Beck’s got a really good piece on what could happen:

I will give you what I believe is the best-case scenario and that is we go through a significant downturn here and at the other end, a few years down the road, we look like France. We have about that much clout in the world, maybe England. We have about that much clout in the world. Our economic power has been that diminished and our welfare and our government resembles France. I believe unless people in congress — I don’t know about you, but I pray for the people in congress, both sides of the aisle and the President and the candidates every single day: Please, Lord, without the pain, please have everybody wake up. Please, please guide them. But I think we’re going to look like France. It could be much, much worse than that.

Economic collapse, a really screwed up presidential election, a brigade, for crying out loud, you name it. The prophets have been warning about this since the beginning of time, and it’s finally all coming true. Scary times, folks. I’m glad I’ve got Christ to cling to because if I didn’t, I’d be really, really scared right now. And this is just the beginning. Buckle up.

This one’s a companion piece to my last post. Twice in the last little while I’ve mentioned what attracts me to a girl — cardigans and Macs being the posts of mention — and I figured I really ought to close off this mini trilogy with the criterion that matters most. (Well, after righteousness and all the other well-of-course stuff.)

Books. I am not interested in girls who are not passionate about books. Period.

There, I’ve said it. It’s been bubbling around in my thoughts for a while now. I used to think it might be negotiable, but it’s not — and I don’t think that makes me shallow. It’s just part of who I am. I could never marry a girl who doesn’t love books.

Why do I already know there’ll be a slew of comments on this post? :P

I can’t tell if this is just me being shallow or if it’s me being male, but I really, really, really like flirting with girls I find attractive. It’s one of my favorite things in the world, actually. I could do it all day long. ~wistful sigh~ In fact, I like it even more than reading books, and if you know me, that’s saying a lot. ;)

(And no, if you’re a girl and you ask me whether I find you attractive or not, I’m not answering. Sorry. Too dangerous. :))

More pictures and a bit more of a magaziney look:

On the invisible side of things, I finally put together the WordPress-based infrastructure to support multiple issues. (It was a hack up until now.) For the WordPress-curious, I’m …

Elder Uchtdorf’s talk in general conference a few minutes ago was just what I needed to hear. I keep trying to do things my way, on my own strength, but I can’t do it. I’m not strong enough. Whenever I cling to myself, sooner or later I start drowning in …

In spite of how magical theaters are, I realized today that I really have no idea what I’m doing as a director. Jumped in the deep end here. It’s too early to tell if I’m any good at it, either. Humbling. :)

But you know, even though I’m sticking my neck …

I’m diving into the depths of shallowness by saying this here, but girls who use Macs are far more attractive to me than girls who use PCs. I can’t even envision marrying a PC girl. Opposites attract, sure, but I do not want to spend the rest of …

I got to be half-blind today. At lunch, you see, I rubbed my eye and accidentally brushed my contact out, and when I tried to put it back in, it siamesed into two halves. I had class and couldn’t run home to get a new lens, so I got to …

Have I mentioned I’m directing a play? If I forgot, well, I am: it’s called The Sword Without, and Terror Within, and it opens next week. (More info forthcoming.) Anyway, we’ve been rehearsing it these past two weeks in library study rooms. It’s worked well enough, but …

This morning I came up with a novel concept for this blog, inspired by my growing addiction to Twitter: brevity. Instead of brain-dumping almost every post, I’ll say everything I need to say in as few words as possible. This is a good thing. :) (If I have …

Being a writer who loves telling stories, every once in a while I can’t help but wryly think that my job is basically to tell lies. I could go around fibbing my heart out and call it career development, honestly. ;) I mean, what do I say when …

Time management is hard. And I’m now starting to accept that I’m not really all that good at it. My inbox is perpetually chock-full (more than usual, too — 252 emails at the moment, all needing to be replied to), and while I do get a decent amount …

For a very long time — seven years at least, if not longer — I haven’t worn t-shirts except for when sleeping. I tried a couple times but felt that t-shirts just weren’t me.

I was wrong. Sort of.

Those t-shirts weren’t me. But today at WordCamp Utah …

The Big Picture (at the Boston Globe) has some incredibly touching photos in honor of Childhood Cancer Awareness Month:

Families, caregivers, charities and research groups across the United States are observing September as Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. In the U.S., over 12,000 children under the age of 21 are …

So Washington Mutual crashed a couple hours ago. This string of bank failures is getting unsettling to say the least. (If you’re wondering what’s going on, Freakonomics has a good layman’s explanation.)

And can I just say that Paulson’s plan is creepy? “Without limitation”? …

The other day I read about Beethoven’s kiss:

The great Hungarian concert pianist Andor Földes tells the remarkable story of the watershed moment in his rise to world renown. He was 16 years old and already a veteran of years of intense practice and performance. The pianist Emil von Sauer, …

So, I’m a sucker for cashmere cardigans over button-down collared shirts. On girls, that is. It’s the single most attractive outfit I’ve ever seen. Not sure why — maybe because it’s feminine and soft but also classy and semi-professional? I don’t really know, but my goodness, …

Two years ago my watch died. I’d had it for nine or ten years, a cheap black watch that didn’t cost more than $10 if I remember correctly, but it was a trooper. After it went the way of wall watches, I just used my cell phone. …

My magazine, Mormon Artist, is now on Twitter: http://twitter.com/mormonartist. I’ll be posting relatively frequent updates on how the magazine’s going, so if you’re interested in keeping up with it, follow away.

If you’re not on Twitter, you should, you know, change that. :)

I’d forgotten that when you blog every day, there are lots of days when you don’t know what on earth you’re going to blog about. :) But luckily I have a list of post topics to draw from.

So, nonfiction is fiction, sort of. A nonfiction work can be …

Has it really been four days since I last blogged? Goodness. Some people can blog once a week or once a month, and that’s great for them, but I can’t do that. And these gaps between posts — it’s been a few months now since I slowed …

For the longest time my reading tastes tended toward fiction, but in the last little while, something’s changed. Biography and history are what quenches my thirst now. I’ve been reading Åsne Seierstad’s A Hundred & One Days: A Baghdad Journal about her time in Iraq, and it’s fascinating. …

Quantity or quality? When I first sat down to write this post (fifteen seconds ago), I thought I was going to say that I want to write higher-quality articles and that’ll mean less frequent posts. But then I remembered this quote from Art & Fear:

The ceramics teacher …