My computer's clock is 81ish minutes behind right now, for some reason, which is super confusing and wreaked all kinds of shenaniganage with my schedule today. I think that Google is following my computer's local-time lead?, which means that although it's past midnight here I've got plenty of time according to what the timestamp of this post is going to say, because I've always got until 1:00 am here in Mountain Time before it registers as midnight and thus the next day Pacific Time. So I've got until 2:21. Pretty sure.
I've scanned my receipt from Barnes and Noble, from the IF trip Saturday, for some reason? Maybe it's to prove a point. Maybe it's to show off my comic collection. Maybe it's to show off how much I'm willing to pay for my comic collection.
But, no; I think it's because I love how vaguely passive-aggressive (?) B&N is about pointing out how much you would have saved had you been a member of their program.
And now I'm going to talk about the stuff on top, because I scanned it in upside-down on accident, and I wanted to get to it second. "You may also like." Dead Presidents, Mica was recommending on the car trips there and back; I already own Squirrel Power of course, so, I do also like. Thank you, B&N. You're quite astute. That's a pretty dope feature, book recommendations coming with your books. But that's not why I bring it up.
"You May Also Like." I've been watching a lot(ish) of Talks at Google lately, mostly Brandon Sanderson Patrick Rothfuss that kind of thing, but this is one from earlier just this month with Tom Vanderbilt being interviewed about his new book. Not really about the algorithms that go into calculating suggestions, which is disappointing, but it's still fascinating stuff I was actually going to stick as an unrelated EDIT at the tail end of, Sunday's post I think, one of those short ones.
And then there was this thing I'd been going to append to that as well. That's right; I'm incorporating into this post a post which was to have been incorporated into the other post. I've been sitting on this for far longer, and actually I bring it up because part of the video reminded me of it. The idea is found passim throughout the talk, but mentioned directly when the questions open up for the audience, 34:00, about how the heck the culture of internet affects culture and taste... this strip of Wondermark, which I'd written a post on more than a year ago, possibly even longer ago than that.
So I said this, with the brackets new additions editing my unpolished idea vomit-to-make-sure-it's-on-paper: "if there is anything you can say, David Malki! has already said it in a far more [anything!]-tastic way. Click to enlarge I suppose. [Or just find it here] https://wondermark.com/461/ "
From my original draft, I'd been going to mention something about furries in here?, but "it is pretty nice to know of the existence of say the furry fandom," the only thing written after the strip expo, was as far as I got, and I've got no idea where I was going to go with that, or if that was where I'd gotten to from somewhere else, or what.
It is a good question, how much we can "enable" one another, or how much we bottle ourselves up, or how much we don't care what others think, and... I still can't find the best way to express this concept in words. It's on the tip of my tongue, always, but like a snowflake there; as soon as I try to do anything with it it vanishes.
I had on my mission, not a companion but a roommate, a friend, whose mother allowed the elders to let loose at her house. They need to let off the pressure now and again, she'd explained; we need to be supportive of them and allow them to, be themselves, or whatever. Is what his mom said.
That elder got sent home early, for innumerable naughtiness. I didn't choose very good role models, the first half of my mission...
I was talking about furries, anyway. Snowflakes on the tongue. Enabling-ness. I scanned the receipt up above of TPBs-and-Dresden; what I didn't scan was the receipt for all the Zootopia books I also got at B&N. Or the Zootopia merch I got from Hastings, the receipt from that, either.
Certainly I've done things I never would have done otherwise (old saw: the mask doesn't hide our true nature, it reveals it); what does that even mean, though?, and now you know I'm acting uncharacteristically, to declaim that any form of behavior, whether human, animal, vegetable, or mineral, would be uncharacteristic of me. Either way, though, it's not every day where I unironically (or, ironically, for that matter) walk down the street with a little beanie on with animal ears sticking out... It's a Nick Wilde knit cap, tag still attached, because I hadn't been expecting to go out in public, but... there I was... nonetheless.
...and <sigh,> I hadn't been going to bring this up...
I got drive-by cussed at. Not the first time this has happened, someone swearing at me from a moving vehicle at the intersection; at least that time with the giant zucchini I'd know the car was there and was jamming along to its 90s-adult-alternative tunes (there's, just, a lot of stuff I hadn't mentioned about the context in which that brief "thanks!" debate took place.) Here, the cussing came out of nowhere, from a vehicle more swiftly traveling, and it scared the stuffing out of me. Could've been the car itself slamming into me, you know, and it would've been poof, candle out. Mementoes mori (I think it takes an internal pluralization) are good; any one of us could get sniped through the jugular at any moment, or be ground zero to an unheralded nuclear strike, or maybe time will just freeze and forget to thaw. Get startled. It could be your death.
But then it turns out instead to be some jerk who doesn't like to see you dress even partially as an animal in real life. And gosh darn it they might be right.
I... I don't think that the internet clock is based on my laptop's local time. Well shoot.
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