...m...

…dogpile introduced me to google when it was a brand-new service: i noticed that all the best results increasingly came from the same search engine, so eventually i cut out the middleman and just started using google directly…

…how times have changed; i haven’t used google for years…

…almost fourty years ago, pulse-dial 300-baud modem from my apple //e running VT-52 terminal emulation into a mainframe shell account: just green monochrome text displaying an rn client, you had to be very strategic about what you chose to display because with that kind of bandwidth characters scrolled across the screen slightly slower than your natural reading pace and significantly slower than skimming past anything you weren’t interested in reading…

…most early usenet clients routinely displayed profound boilerplate warning of posts costing thousands of dollars in computing time, which were pretty intimidating to neophyte users!..

…also, jiggle it to check if you’re in neutral, then jiggle it again just to be sure: ooh, now you’re stopped at a light, better jiggle it…

(okay, that’s an easy tease, but as a compulsive habit it really does help cultivate kinesthetic proficiency through tactile feeback)

…washing my feet in the sink is trivial; drying them well-enough not to track around slightly-damp feet afterward is a hassle…

…where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above-average…

…folks frequently presume i’m a recording on telephone calls; i used to do radio so i guess my extemporaneous diction comes across more composed than anticipated…

…we had the 4016 with an external tape drive: not quite as much geek-cred as the 2001, but still respectable…

…is that the demo?..

…microsoft applications have an annoying habit of auto-replacing my dashes with emdashes; i don’t even know how to type an emdash…

…beOS wasn’t really a POSIX system, but NeXTstep might fit alongside the others…

…large-language models do not comport with lossless data reconstruction in my experience; quite the opposite…

…i learned this word from the big book of amazing facts in 1978!..

…nah man, that’s on the domestic dealers + automakers choosing not to market small affordable cars in favor of big profitable road-tanks, and it’s not the first time they’ve priced themselves out of the market like this…

…i think the social conditioning to marry prince charming was profound; kind of like religion, we all want to believe in someone to sweep off our feet and make our dreams come true…

…i don’t have my finger on the pulse of generation alpha but for awhile i hoped generation Z might leave that baggage behind them…

…tildes reminds me a bit of usenet culture before the eternal september…

…funny thing is aperture science isn’t even included in that graphic but it fits right in…

…i was scrolling usenet around 17.30 CDT on april 29th, 1992 when a friend posted that a riot was gathering outside his window; the news broke about an hour later…

(yep, but i just woke up as i was typing, so i’ll leave it as a mark of shame)

…get that f*ucking plural-comma out of my face…

^{1 head + 5 handle}