^

Blogrolling’s gone dark and the blogrolls lie limp, no shuffle and bustle as busy blogs hustle their way to the head of the queue.

Gone too are the diacriticals, small, precious marks of individualization, the QWERTY electron bursts that celebrate fresh activity, new life—our SETI receivers. Brackets and parentheses, asterisks and exclamations, plusses and minuses and equals and other arithmetic operators, all gone as we soldier on with our invisible speech. Here’s my mark, I’ll make it in its absence: ^{^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^}

There. But will anybody read this now? Or have these characters already gone cold, the way dead letters do, lost in the blogosphere amid the silent rolls of empty updates?