Retirement plans.

The other day I was talking to Collin Piprell, who was buying up web domain names, the latest plan to keep a roof over his head in his old age. He says it started with him shopping for a few websites to promote his new books. It turns out that there are a lot of people way ahead of him on the keeping-a-roof-over-your-head front, and most of his best candidates were unavailable.

It’s amazing, he says. Www.psychedeli.com--“psychedeli” is something he coins in his sci-fi novel The Proteant Enigmass--was already in the hands of some entrepreneur. As were www.cognitech.com, www.inneradventures.com (article written years ago for Action Asia), and www.worlds-unlimited.com (used in MOM). But he tells me he has bought www.proteant.com, magifactory, themagifactory, agodisborn, a-god-is-born, and Worlds-UnLtd. Though he didn’t say exactly why. Www.collinpiprell.com/ was available, though that didn’t surprise him, and he snapped it right up.

“How is this different from what these other people are doing?” I ask.

“It isn’t the same at all,” he says. “I need these names for my books.”

I still don’t know what he’s talking about.

“The gone goodies,” he tells me, “include worlding, worlders, worldsgate, biologic, and magic-circle. The bastids.” He laughs, sort of, and he says, “Not the last one—that’s no domain name; it’s only rhetoric.” He’s got his laptop right there in the beer and cigarette ash on the table in front of him at the Rising Son, and the next thing I hear is: “Whoa! Guess what? www.bastids.com is available. I’m going to buy that one and www.friggingreedybastids.com too.”

Look ahead a few years: what are writers going to use for language? What Collin figures, and he could be right, is that soon these magpies are going to have registered every word and phrase that exists, as well as all those that ever could exist, as domain names. And how is a writer supposed to coin shiny new turns of phrase, if everything there is or could be has already been hoarded away with a price tag attached? Writing a book is going to cost big bucks, if the writer has to buy all his bon mots from domain moguls. And what about new IT or bioengineering companies? They’ll have to spend much of their start-up capital on web-domain and product names.

Collin pokes around some more on a site he calls godaddy.com and he says this: “Guess what. ‘Bastards’ and ‘greedybastards’ are already gone. Can you believe it? There’s a story in this somewhere. Hey, but ‘greedysonsofbitches’ is available, and if I were you I’d buy it immediately.”

Ha, ha. First I’ve got to buy lunch. Tomorrow too, I hope.

“By the way,” he tells me, “ ‘jackthehack.com’ is gone as well.” Like I care. “Freelunch” is gone as well, he says. Free Lunch is the name of the novel I’m writing, or not writing, as the case may be.) So I propose www.jacksjunkets.com.

Alliteration is always good, he answers me.