Comic 823 -- The MaLa

 Looks like Sharon has another dragon in her future...

The MaLa is referred to as the "Ma: La" in the Newari language. I'm not sure what pronunciation effect the colon is meant to produce, so I'm going for the simpler option.

I try not to rant much on this blog. Still, I feel the need to shake my fist at the sky a bit.

Flip the calendar back a few years, certainly no farther than a decade, and you'll be square in the middle of a different era of the internet. In those heady days, there as a general sense that all information would someday be available at your fingertips. Google, for instance, was said to have a massive scanning and auto-transcript program underway to convert more and more paper books into digital files. Heady times.

Fast forward to today, and we now find ourselves in the age of (to use the term coined by Cory Doctorow) enshittification. The shining vision of an information-rich digital utopia has been replaced with... well, what we have now.

The current, degraded state of the internet is apparent to anyone who has an obscure interest. In my case, this is world mythology. I love myths from different cultures, and I often include adapted bits an pieces of such myths in Thunderstruck. 

Not too long ago, I could confidently run a search on something like, say, the MaLa, and find a wide variety of resources to study, along with links to go deeper if I so chose. Now, though, the maximum depth of any given topic is generally determined by Wikipedia. Other resources are shallow. The same meager entries are repeated with little variation across multiple sites. Where once there were articles, papers, and original sources, there are now only feeble summaries. 

It is at times like this when I remind myself that, at least for now, we still have libraries. May they continue to exist.