This is the oldest I have ever been...now. Oh wait -- I mean now.

I am so old.

Here are twenty things I think now that show how I'm really old:

The important thing to bear in mind, I remind myself, is that little of what is usually born in mind is at all important.

Editorial note: use of the second person -- especially in a rant -- can seem unnecessarily accusatory, but please rest assured as a reader here on HuSi that the "you" in the text isn't actually you. It's somebody else altogether.

"Don't truth me, Unk," said Boaz, "and I won't truth you."
-Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

I think things that frak with my styling mojo are part of a sinister plot by forces unknown to deprive me of my blog-given right to emphasize stuff. In a fit, I stopped emphasizing anything for a while so that I wouldn’t have to scan my pastes for missing italics anymore. Now I’ve come to think emphasis is for dorks. Screw emphasis. I’m dedicating myself to dead pan. If you can’t see where the emphasis goes with being marked I invite you to delight in the ambiguity. Ambiguity is the cat’s pajamas, man.

Cross-posted from johnny's machine:

Against all previous precedent I'd like to present a product review.

This is not a paid review. It's not even a particularly competent review. But if you're at all interested in what might possess an otherwise sane person to buy into a ridiculous and expensive electronics fad and then live with it for six months, read on.

There are fraggles in the wall of my bedroom. During the night they eat their fraggle-hole wider in a bid to accommodate the stoutest of their kind. This process makes a terrible crunching noise which makes me dream wrong, but the fraggles don’t even care because they are bastards and my feelings are irrelevant to them. They are also freeloaders.

I know they are not mice, because my cats won’t eat them.

Coastline geometry is fractal.  Without additional cues, scale is unfathomable.  Any particular convolution might span a hand or a horizon.  I blame Slartibartfast.

Of all of the circumstances under which such a fact might make itself plain, one of the least desirable is when one is actually on the water, navigating said coast, recognizing with each touchscreen pinch-zoom in that any prior correspondence between map and world was largely coincidental.  Shoals become islands; streams become channels.  And, finally, it is painfully clear just how very small your vessel really is and how very far it still has to go...

This is the story of how I nearly drowned my family in Georgian Bay last weekend because I'm an idiot.

 

My imaginarium is still on the fritz.  All I've got is loops -- as if my brain has sampled the creativity of someone feeling more fluid at the moment, and has become hung up on playing certain recordings ad nauseam.  It's like I have the world's largest movie collection in my head, but I only have five seconds of each feature.  I feel like my mind is on DRM lock-down.

There are signs of hope, however.  I am painting tiny pictures of flowers, and they please me.  Samples beneath the fold.

My new religion is a secret.  It's a secret because a primary tenant of my religion is that the religion is never to be discussed with outsiders.  While this may represent a poor marketing strategy, it does serve effectively to inspire in those to whom the secret is already known a certain feeling of in-group solidarity; it is this kind of social cohesion that assures people don't bring bullshit contributions to the annual pot-luck, like take-out pizza or a box of doughnut holes.

 In Which We Consider Saying Good-bye