One blog in pursuit of sanity.

It’s time for a rebranding of this blog. I’m no longer doing much writing for money, though I’m still open to suitable clients, and this is no longer really a writing site. Writing and words are still central to it, but so are other things.

I’m summing them up as a “Sanity Project,” because advancing clear, critical, rational thinking is necessary to any effort to change people’s minds. When people can think clearly about issues and controversies, they can do the rest of the work.

Topics on this site will include critical thinking, language, freedom of expression, music, and silent movies. And, of course, writing. I’ll stay mostly clear of partisan politics, since it’s more productive to talk about the underlying principles.

Be sure to check my blog for news and tips on all these topics. You can subscribe to the RSS feed to catch all my posts, or you can subscribe by email in the sidebar.

What is the Sanity Project?

Fighting all the dumb ideas out there is an exercise in frustration, but saying nothing is worse. I launched the Sanity Project in my Bluesky account to promote sanity without getting into parties and personalities.

I’m now expanding the project to my blog. Related articles will be tagged SanityProject, and I’ve retroactively applied the tag to some of my older posts. As with the tagged Bluesky posts, it will include comments on ways of thinking, fallacies, cognitive improvements, etc. I’ll look for articles to link to; perhaps the biggest benefit to me may be forcing me to find high-quality articles.

 

Books

In 1984, Compute! Books published my Compute!’s Guide to Adventure Games.

My e-book, Files that Last: Digital Preservation for Everygeek, is available for purchase. It talks about the issues in keeping data documents usable for the long term and offers practical advice on how to do it.

For fans of music, science fiction, and popular culture, my e-book Tomorrow’s Songs Today: The History of Filk Music is available as a free download. It was financed with a crowdfunding campaign on IndieGoGo.

Articles

My articles have appeared on the website of the Foundation for Economic Education, where I’m on the faculty network. See my portfolio page for more information.

I’ve written several pieces for the Online Library of Liberty, run by the Liberty Fund.

My writing on file format and digital preservation issues appears on Mad File Format Science. The custom subdomain madfileformatscience.garymcgath.com is no longer in operation. Update your bookmarks as necessary.

Other things

I run the websites for MASSFILC, a Massachusetts musical club where I’m clerk, webmaster, and past president and have chaired three ConCertino filk music conventions. In 2004 I was named to the Filk Hall of Fame.

I accompany silent movies, at the Plaistow, NH library and on YouTube.

You can find me on Goodreads and LibraryThing. In addition, I’m on Liberdon (a Mastodon instance) and Bluesky. I also run FilkNews, which you can follow as FilkNews on Mastodon or FilkNews on Bluesky.

My Facebook account is authentic, but I don’t make much use of it. At most, I occasionally post links to my material on other sites.