My travels to places where there are no paths to follow.
There is this scenario that often happens among friends, but could also be set up as a nifty little exercise. It goes this way:
A group, say, composed of A, B, C, and so on, gather in a place where they could listen to each other’s jokes. Maybe it’s in a party, or a drinking session, or more effectively at a comedy bar. They invite Z, who doesn’t know the script; everybody or most of them do, anyway. Continue reading “A nifty little exercise on the power of culture”
Sometimes, like a youth wistfully pining for a lost teenage love on a rainy night like this, I’m stricken by an irrational wish for the online world to revert back to 1992-1994.
Twenty years ago, the BBS community was earthy and robust, and the Internet was young and full of promise. Back then, I was a wide-eyed online newbie fumbling with a 2400-bps modem and AT commands. My computer was a clunky Toshiba laptop running on DOS, with an RJ-11 jack, an RS-232 serial port, and two 3.5″ floppy drives with a total 2.8 Mb active storage space.
Continue reading “Internet love and nerdy thoughts on a rainy night”
When my parents renovated the old family house in the early 1960s, they had two rows of huge storage closets painted in bright Mondrian colors, built right into an entire wall from floor to ceiling, right beside the stairs and near a backdoor leading to the garage. Both closet arrays were some 5 feet high, 7 feet wide and 3 feet deep. So you could imagine that a young boy could easily snuggle inside, keep quiet, and not be noticed for the rest of the day. Continue reading “My secret vice that I’ll fight to keep”