About twenty years ago, after a a tumultuouslife, Big.McLargeHuge – the shared server of several other Abnibbers and I – finally and fatally kicked the bucket. I spun up its replacement, New.McLargeHuge, on hosting company DreamHost, and this blog (and many other sites) moved over to it1.
Wow, I’d forgotten half of these websites existed.
I only stayed with DreamHost for a few years before switching to Bytemark, with whom I was a loyal customer right up until a few years
ago2, but in that time I took advantage of DreamHost’s “Refer & Earn” program, which
allowed me to create referral codes that, if redeemed by others who went on to become paying customers, would siphon off a fraction of the profits as a “kickback” against my server
bills. Neat!3
DreamHost’s referrals had a certain “pyramid scheme” feel in that you could get credit for the people referred by the people you referred.
A year or so after I switched to ByteMark, DreamHost decided I owed them money: probably because of a
“quirk” in their systems. I disagreed with their analysis, so I ignored their request. They “suspended” my account (which I wasn’t using anyway), and that was the end of it.
Right?
But the referral fees continued to trickle in. For the last seventeen years, I’ve received a monthly email advising me that my account had been credited, off the back of a
referral.
I have no explanation as to why the amount of the referral reward fluctuates, but I can only assume that it’s the result of different people on different payment schedules?
About once a year I log in and check the balance. I was quite excited to discover that, at current rates, they’d consider me “paid-up” for my (alleged) debt by around Spring 2026!
I had this whole plan that I’d write a blog post about it when the time came. It could’ve been funny!
But it’s not to be: DreamHost emailed me last night to tell me that they’re killing their “Refer & Earn” program; replacing it with something different-but-incompatible (social media’s
already having a grumble about this, I gather).
So I guess this is the only blog post you’ll get about “that time DreamHost decided I owed them money and I opted to pay them back in my referral fees over the course of eighteen
years”.
No big loss.
Footnotes
1 At about the same time I moved Three
Rings over from its previous host, Easily, to DreamHost too, in order to minimise the number of systems I had to keep an eye on. Oh, how different things are now, when I’ve
got servers and domain registrations and DNS providers all over the damn place!
2 Bytemark have rapidly gone downhill since their acquisition by Iomart a while back, IMHO.
3 Nowadays, this blog (and several of my other projects) is hosted by Linode, whose acquisition by Akamai seems not to have caused any problems with, so that’s fab.
This telegraph pole in the centre of Eynsham carries the scars of hosting countless community announcements, notices, and flyers over the last 30 years.
Back before PCs were black, they were beige. And even further back, they’d have not only “Reset” and “Power” buttons, but also a “Turbo” button.
I’m not here to tell you what it did1. No, I’m here to show you how to re-live
those glory days with a Turbo button of your very own, implemented as a reusable Web Component that you can install on your very own website:
Go on, press the Turbo button and see what happens.
(Don’t press the Reset button; other people are using this website!)
If you’d like some beige buttons of your own, you can get them at Beige-Buttons.DanQ.dev. Two lines of code and you can
pop them on any website you like. Also, it’s open-source under the Unlicense so you can take it, break it, or do what you like with it.
I’ve been slumming it in some Web Revivalist circles lately, and it might show. Best Resolution (with all its 88×31s2),
which I launched last month, for example.
You might anticipate seeing more retro fun-and-weird going on here. You might be right.
2 I guess that’s another “if you know, you know”, but at least you’ll get fewer
conflicting answers if you search for an explanation than you will if you try to understand the turbo button.
A local landowner has (controversially) decided to start enforcing their ownership of the land
surrounding the lake at Dix Pit, and has erected new fences and private property signs to deter trespassers. So this evening, the geopup and I took a walk to the GZ to check that it’s
still an achievable find.
Good news! It’s certainly still possible (though sometimes boggy, in the winter!) to get to The Devil’s Quoits and log this virtual while using only the permitted footpaths, whether
coming from either the North or the South.
You might find that your map hasn’t yet been updated to reflect the approved routes, but you shouldn’t struggle to get here. Just stick to the path and you’ll find the GZ. (And once
I’ve seen how the local controversy resolves itself I’ll be sure to submit updates to OpenStreetMap to accurately reflect the eventual state of the paths around here!)
“Botsplaining,” as I use the term, describes a troubling new trend on social media, whereby one person feeds comments made by another person into a large language model (like
ChatGPT), asks it to provide a contrarian (often condescending) explanation for why that person is “wrong,” and then pastes the resulting response into a reply. They may
occasionally add in “I asked ChatGPT to read your post, and here’s what he said,”2 but most just let the LLM speak freely on their behalf
without acknowledging that they’ve used it. ChatGPT’s writing style is incredibly obvious, of course, so it doesn’t really matter if they disclose their use of it or not. When you
ask them to stop speaking to you through an LLM, they often simply continue feeding your responses into ChatGPT until you stop engaging with them or you block them.
This has happened to me multiple times across various social media platforms this year, and I’m over it.
…
Stephanie hits it right on the nose in this wonderful blog post from last month.
I just don’t get it why somebody would ask an AI to reply to me on their behalf, but I see it all the time. In threads around the ‘net, I see people say “I
put your question into ChatGPT, and here’s what it said…” I’ve even seen coworkers at my current and formers employer do it.
What do they think I am? Stupid? It’s not like I don’t know that LLMs exist, what they’re good at, what they’re bad at (I’ve been blogging about it for years
now!), and more-importantly, what people think they’re good at but are wrong about.
If I wanted an answer from an AI (which, just sometimes, I do)… I’d have asked an AI in the first place.
If I ask a question and it’s not to an AI, then it’s safe for you to assume that it’s because what I’m looking for isn’t an answer from an AI. Because if that’s
what I wanted, that’s what I would have gotten in the first place and you wouldn’t even have known. No: I asked a human a question because I wanted an answer
from a human.
When you take my request, ignore this obvious truth, and ask an LLM to answer it for you… it is, as Stephanie says, disrespectful to me.
But more than that, it’s disrespectful to you. You’re telling me that your only value is to take what I say, copy-paste it to a chatbot, then copy-paste the answer
back again! Your purpose in life is to do for people what they’re perfectly capable of doing for themselves, but slower.
Galaxy Quest had a character (who played a character) who was as useful as you are, botsplainer. Maybe that should be a clue?
How low an opinion must you have of yourself to volunteer, unsolicited to be the middle-man between me and a mediocre search engine?
If you don’t know the answer, say nothing. Or say you don’t know. Or tell me you’re guessing, and speculate. Or ask a clarifying question. Or talk about a related problem and see if we
can find some common ground. Bring your humanity.
But don’t, don’t, don’t belittle both of us by making yourself into a pointless go-between in the middle of me and an LLM. Just… dont’t.
The younger child and I were talking about maths on the school run this morning, and today’s topic was geometry. I was pleased to discover that he’s already got a reasonable
comprehension of the Pythagorean Theorem1:
I was telling him that I was about his age when I first came across it, but in my case I first had a practical, rather than theoretical, impetus to learn it.
It was the 1980s, and I was teaching myself Dr. Logo, Digital Research‘s implementation of the Logo programming language (possibly from this book). One day, I was writing a program to draw an indoor scene, including a window
through which a mountain would be visible. My aim was to produce something like this:
My window was 300 “steps”2
tall by 200 steps wide and bisected in both directions when I came to make my first attempt at the mountain.
And so, naively, starting from the lower-left, I thought I’d need some code like this:
RIGHT 45
FORWARD 100
RIGHT 90
FORWARD 100
But what I ended up with was this:
Hypotenuse? More like need-another-try-potenuse.
I instantly realised my mistake: of course the sides of the mountain would need to be longer so that the peak would reach the mid-point of the window and the far side
would hit its far corner. But how much longer ought it to be.
I intuited that the number I’d be looking for must be greater than 100 but less than 250: these were, logically, the bounds I was working within. 100 would be correct if my
line were horizontal (a “flat” mountain?), and 250 was long enough to go the “long way” to the centrepoint of the window (100 along, and 150 up). So I took a guess at 150 and… it was
pretty close… but still wrong:
I remember being confused and frustrated that the result was so close but still wrong. The reason, of course, is that the relationship between the lengths of the sides of a triangle
don’t scale in a 1:1 way, but this was the first time I found myself having to think about why.
So I found my mother and asked her what I was doing wrong. I’m sure it must have delighted her to dust-off some rarely-accessed knowledge from her own school years and teach me about
Pythagoras’!
The correct answer, of course, is given by:
I so rarely get to use MathML that I had to look up the syntax.
The answer, therefore, is… 141.421 (to three decimal places). So I rounded to 141 and my diagram worked!3
What made this maths lesson from my mother so memorable was that it fed a tangible goal. I had something I wanted to achieve, and I learned the maths that I
needed to get there. And now it’s impermeably etched onto my brain.
I learned the quadratic equation formula and how to perform algebraic integration by rote, and I guarantee that it’s less well-established in my long-term memory than, say, the sine and
cosine rules or how to solve a simultaneous equation because I’ve more-often needed to do those things outside of the classroom!
So I guess the lesson is that I should be trying to keep an eye out for practical applications of maths that I can share with my kids. Real problems that are interesting to solve, to
help build the memorable grounding that latter supports the more-challenging and intangible abstract maths that they may wish to pursue later.
Both kids are sharp young mathematicians, and the younger one seems especially to enjoy it, so feeding that passion feels well-worthwhile. Perhaps I should show them TRRTL.COM so they can try their hand at Logo!
2 Just one way that Logo is/was a cute programming language was its use of “steps” – as
in, turtle-steps – to measure distances. You might approximate them as pixels, but a “step” has meaning even for lines that don’t map linearly to pixels because they’re at wonky
angles, for example.
3 I’d later become unstuck by rounding, while trying to make a more-complex diagram with a
zig-zag pattern running along a ribbon: a small rounding error became compounded over a long time and lead to me being a couple of pixels off where I intended. But that’s another
story.
I’ve found my relationships are healthier when I keep my offline-first relationships offline (e.g. not following each other on Facebook or Instagram) —
following someone’s Instagram makes it feel like I know what’s going on with them without interacting. Following offline friends on social media can reduce what used to be
normal friendships into parasocial relationships.
…
I suspect bringing offline relationships online is responsible for a lot of the loneliness people feel — social media looks like you have all these
friends… but no one you could ask to feed your cat while you’re away, because one-to-many broadcasting replaced direct interactions 😿 Essentially, the offline relationship became an
online one.
…
Tracy’s observations here are absolutely excellent, and spot-on. I’ve absolutely experienced some of the problems she’s described when trying to use social media to supplement
“offline-first” relationships.
Unfortunately, unilaterally following Tracy’s segregation strategy doesn’t necessarily guarantee that you’re going to avoid the problems she’s identified. That’s especially true if you
haven’t always followed her guidance!
Like many folks I know, I joined Facebook when it became available to me and used it to connect with most of the people I knew in the real world. And certainly, this caused a
problematic blurring of our online and offline interactions! People in my friend group would switch to “broadcast mode”, not reaching out to query one another’s status and wellbeing,
and coming to assume that anything they’d shared online would be universally known among their friends (I was definitely guilty of this myself; sometimes I still am!).
I dropped Facebook about 14 years ago, but it’s still the case that my offline-first friends will sometimes assume that I’ll know something that they posted there (or to
some other platform). And it’s still the case that I’m not as good as I could be at reaching-out and checking-in. (At least that latter point is something actionable that I can work
with, I suppose.)
After thirty years online, it seems to me that converting an online relationship to an offline one is a rarity. But converting one born-offline into an online one, or a “hybrid” one
that somehow exhibits some of the worst characteristics of both, is distressingly easy… even when you don’t intend it.
Tracy’s post’s got much more to say, and I thoroughly recommend it. I don’t know that I’m personally ready to make as firm a distinction between my “online” and “offline” friends as she
seems to – there are aspects of the hybrid model that actually work quite well for me, much of the time – but I like having a framework around which to think and talk about the
differences.
When somebody started repeatedly leaving bottles of urine on top of a utility cabinet in his neighbourhood, filmmaker Derek Milton decided to investigate. During his descent into
insanity as he tries to understand why this person keeps leaving their piss here (and who keeps collecting them, later), somehow sponsored by the Reolink Go PT Ultra range of security
cameras, we see through this entertaining (?) documentary (??) the story of an artist trying to interpret the work of another, more-shy, artist (???).
I don’t know, that’s the best description I can come up with for this weird project. I still don’t know why I watched it from beginning to end. But now you can, too.
I nerdsniped myself today when, during a discussion on the potential location of a taekwondo tournament organised by our local martial arts school, somebody claimed that Scotland would be “nearer”
than Ireland.
I don’t dispute that somebody living near me can get to Scotland faster than Ireland, unless they can drive at motorway speeds across Wales… and the Irish Sea. But the word
they used was nearer, and I can be a pedantic arse.
But the question got me thinking:
Could I plot a line across Great Britain, showing which parts are closer to Scotland and which parts are closer to Ireland?
If the England-facing Irish and Scottish borders were completely straight, one could simply extend the borders until they meet, bisect the angle, and we’d be done.
Of course, the borders aren’t straight. They also don’t look much like this. I should not draw maps.
In reality, the border between England and Scotland is a winding mess, shaped by 700 years of wars and treaties1.
Treating the borders as straight lines is hopelessly naive.
Voronoi diagrams are pretty, and cool, and occasionally even useful! This one expands from points, but there’s no reason you can’t expand from a line (line a border!) instead.
My Python skills are pretty shit, but it’s the best tool for the job for geohacking2. And so, through a
combination of hacking, tweaking, and crying, I was able to throw together a script that produces a wonderful
slightly-wiggly line up the country.
The entire island of Ireland is used here to determine boundaries (you can tell because otherwise parts of County Antrim, in Northern Ireland, would be marked as closer to Scotland
than the Republic of Ireland: which they are, of course, but the question was about England!).
Once you’ve bisected England in this way – into parts that are “closer to Ireland” versus parts that are “closer to Scotland”, you start to spot all kinds of interesting
things3.
Like: did you know that the entire subterranean part of the Channel Tunnel is closer to Scotland than it is to Ireland… except for the ~2km closest to the UK exit.
A little further North: London’s six international airports are split evenly across the line, with Luton, Stansted and Southend closer to Scotland… and City, Heathrow and Gatwick closer
to Ireland.
The line then pretty-much bisects Milton Keynes, leaving half its population closer to Scotland and half closer to Ireland, before doing the same to Daventry, before – near Sutton
Coldfield – it drives right through the middle of the ninth hole of the golf course at the Lea Marston Hotel.
Players tee off closer to Ireland and – unless they really slice it – their ball lands closer to Scotland:
In Cannock, it bisects the cemetery, dividing the graves into those on the Scottish half and those in the Irish half:
The line crosses the Welsh border at the River Dee, East of Wrexham, leaving a narrow sliver of Wales that’s technically closer to Scotland than it is to Ireland, running up the
coastline from Connah’s Quay to Prestatyn and going as far inland as Mold before – as is the case in most of Wales – you’re once again closer to Ireland:
If you live in Flint or Mold, ask your local friends whether they live closer to Ireland or Scotland. The answer’s Scotland, and I’m confident that’ll surprise them.
I’d never have guessed that there were any parts of Wales that were closer to Scotland than they were to Ireland, but the map doesn’t lie4
Anyway: that’s how I got distracted, today. And along the way I learned a lot about geodata encoding, a little about Python, and a couple of surprising things about geography5.
2 Or, at least: it’s the one that’s most-widely used and so I could find lots of helpful
StackOverflow answers when I got stuck!
3 Interesting… if you’re specifically looking for some geographical trivia, that is!
4 Okay, the map lies a little. My program was only simple so it plotted
everything on a flat plane, failing to accommodate for Earth’s curvature. The difference is probably marginal, but if you happen to live on or very close to the red line, you might
need to do your own research!
5 Like: Chester and Rugby are closer to Scotland than they are to Ireland, and Harpenden
and Towcester are closer to Ireland than they are to Scotland! Who knew?
I bumped into my 19-year-old self the other day. It was horrifying, in the same way that looking in the mirror every morning is horrifying, but with added horror on top.
I stopped him mid-stride, he wasn’t even looking at me. His attention was elsewhere. Daydreaming. I remember, I used to do a lot of that. I tapped his shoulder.
“Hey. Hi. Hello. It’s me! I mean: you.”
…
I wanted to pick two parts of this piece to quote, but I couldn’t. The whole thing is great. And it’s concise – only about 1,700 words – so you should just go read it.
I wonder what conversations I’d have with my 19-year-old self. Certainly technology would come up, as it was already a huge part of my life (and, indeed, I was already publishing on the
Web and even blogging), but younger-me would still certainly have been surprised by and interested in some of the changes that have happened since. High-speed, always-on cellular
Internet access… cheap capacitive touchscreens… universal media streaming… the complete disappearance of CRT screens… high-speed wireless networking…
Giles tells his younger self to hold onto his vinyl collection: to retain a collection of physical media for when times get strange and ephemeral, like now. What would I say to
19-year-old me? It’s easy to fantasise about the advice you’d give your younger self, but would I even listen to myself? Possibly not! I was a stubborn young know-it-all!
Anyway, go read Giles’ post because it’s excellent.
Last month I was on em’s personal site, where I discovered their contact page
lists not only the usual methods (email addresses, socials, contact forms etc.) but also a postal address1: how cool is that‽ I could have written in
their guestbook… but obviously I took the option to send a postcard instead!
Now I’ve set up a PO Box of my own, and I’ve love it if you feel up to saying “hi” via a postcard2.
As a bonus, it’s more-likely to get through than anything that has to face-off against my spam filter!
So, if you want to send me a letter or postcard (no parcels, nothing that needs a signature), my address is:
Dan Q
Unit 159610
PO Box 7169
Poole
BH15 9EL
United Kingdom
I may have raved about other concept albums in the meantime (this one, for example…), but The Signal and the Noise still makes my top 101.
I’ve listened to it twice this week, and I still love it.
But I probably love it differently than I used to.
Spy Numbers / One Time Pad remains my favourite pair of tracks on the album, as it always was: like so much of Andy’s music it tells a story that feels almost
like it belongs to a parallel universe… but that’s still relatable and compelling and delightful. And a fun little bop, too.
But In Potential, which I initially declared “a little weaker than the rest” of the album, has grown on me immensely over the course of the last decade. It presents an
optimistic, humanistic conclusion to the album that I look forward to every time. After John Frum Will Return and Checker Charlie open the album in a way that
warns us, almost prophetically, about the dangers of narrow target-lock thinking and AI dependence2, In Potential provides a beautiful and hopeful introspective
about humanity and encourages an attitude of… just being gentle and forgiving with ourselves, I guess.
So yeah, the whole thing remains fantastic. And better yet: Andy announced about six weeks ago that all of his
music is now available under a free/pay-what-you-like model, so if you missed it the first time around, now’s your opportunity to play catch-up!3
This has been doing the rounds; I last saw it on Kev’s blog. I like that the social blogosphere’s doing this kind
of fun activity again, these days1.
1. Do you floss your teeth?
Umm… sometimes? Not as often as I should. Don’t tell my dentist!
Usually at least once a month, never more than once a week. I really took to heart some advice that if you’re using a fluoridated mouthwash then you shouldn’t do it close to when you
brush your teeth (or you counteract the benefits), so my routine is that… when I remember and can be bothered to floss… I’ll floss and mouthwash, but like in the middle of the day.
And since I moved my bedroom (and bathroom) one floor further up our house, it’s harder to find the motivation to do so! So I’m probably flossing less. The unanticipated knock-on effect
of extending your house!
2. Tea, coffee, or water?
I love a coffee to start a workday, but I have to be careful how much I consume because caffeine hits me pretty hard, even after a concentrated effort over the last 10 years or so to
gradually increase my tolerance. I can manage a couple of mugs in the morning and be fine, now, but three coffees… or any in the mid-afternoon onwards… and I’m at risk of
throwing off my ability to sleep later2.
I wear holes in footwear (and everything else I wear) faster than anybody I know, so nowadays I go for good-value comfort over any other considerations when buying shoes.
One time it was the dog’s fault that my footwear fell apart, but usually they do so by themselves.
4. Favourite dessert?
Varies, but if we’re eating out, I’m probably going to be ordering the most-chocolatey dessert on the menu.
5. The first thing you do when you wake up?
The very first thing I do when I wake up is check how long it is before I need to get up, and make a decision about when I’m going to do so. I almost never need my alarm
to wake me: I routinely wake up half an hour or so before my alarm would go off, most mornings. But exactly how early I wake directly impacts what I do next. If I’m
well-rested and it’s early enough, I’ll plan on getting up and doing something productive: an early start to work, or some voluntary work for Three Rings, or some correspondence. If it’s close to the time I need to get up I’ll more-often just stay in bed and spend longer doing
the actual answer I should give…
…because the “real” answer is probably: pick up my phone, and open up FreshRSS – almost always the
first and last thing I do online in a day! I’ll skim the news and blogosphere and “set aside” for later anything I’d like to re-read or look at later on.
6. Age you’d like to stick at?
Honestly, I’m good where I am, thanks.
Sure, I was fitter and healthier in my 20s, and I had more free time in my early 30s… and there are certainly things I miss and get nostalgic about in any era of my life. But
conversely: it took me a long, long time to “get my shit together” to the level I have now, and I wouldn’t want to have to go through all of the various bits of
self-growth, therapy, etc. all over again!
So… sure, I’d be happy to transplant my intellect into 20-year-old me and take advantage of my higher energy level of the time for an extra decade or so3. But I wouldn’t go back even a
decade if it meant that I had to go relearn and go through everything from that decade another time, no thanks!
7. How many hats do you own?
Four. Ish.
They are:
A bandana. Actually, I own maybe half a dozen bandanas, mostly in Pride rainbow colours. Bandanas are amazingly versatile: they fold small which suits my love of travelling light these last few years, they can function as headgear, dust mask, neckerchief,
flannel, etc.4, and they do a pretty good job of
keeping my head cool and protecting my growing bald spot from the fierce rays of the summer sun.
A “geek” hat. Okay, I’ve actually got three of these, too, in slightly different designs. When they first started appearing at Oxford Geek Nights, I just kept winning them! I’m not a huge fan of caps, so mostly the kids wear them… although
I do put one on when I’m collecting takeaway food so I can get away with just putting e.g. “geek hat” in the “name” field, rather than my name5.
A warm hat that comes out only when the weather is incredibly cold, or when I’m skiing. As I was reminded while skiing on my recent trip to Finland, I should probably switch to wearing a helmet when I ski, but I’ve been skiing for three to four decades without one
and I find the habit hard to break.6
A wooly hat that I was given by a previous employer at a meetup in Mexico last year. I wore it a couple of times last winter
but it’s otherwise not seen much use.
8. Describe the last photo you took?
The last photo I took was of myself wearing a “geek” hat. You’ve seen it, it’s above!
But the one before that was this picture of an extremely large bottle of champagne, with a banana for scale, that was delivered to my house earlier today:
A 6-litre champagne bottle is properly-termed a Methuselah, after Noah’s grandad I guess.
Ruth and JTA celebrate their anniversary every few years with the “next size up” of champagne bottle, and this is the one they’re up to. This
year, merely asking me to help them drink it probably won’t be sufficient (that’d still be two litres each!) so we’re probably going to have to get some friends over.
I took the photo to send to Ruth to reassure her that the bottle had arrived safely, after the previous attempt went… less well. I added the banana “for scale” before sharing the photo with some other friends, too.
The previous delivery… didn’t go so well. 😱
9. Worst TV show?
PAW Patrol. No doubt.
You know all those 1980s kids TV shows that basically existed for no other purpose than as a marketing vehicle for a range of toys? I’m talking He-Man (and
She-Ra), Transformers, G.I. Joe, Care Bears, M.A.S.K., Rainbow Brite, and My Little Pony. Well,
those shows look good compared to PAW Patrol.
Six pups, each endowed with exactly one personality trait7
but a plethora of accessories and vehicles which expands every season so that no matter how many toys you’ve got, y0u’re always behind the curve.
10. As a child, what was your aspiration for adulthood?
This is the single most-boring thing about me, and I’ve doubtless talked about it before. At some point between the age of about six and eight years old, I decided that I
wanted to grow up and become… a computer programmer.
And then I designed the entirety of the rest of my education around that goal. I learned a variety of languages and paradigms under my own steam while setting myself up for a GCSE in
IT, and then A-Levels in Maths and Computing, and then a Degree in Computer Science, and by the time I’d done all of that I was already working in the industry: self-actualised by 21.
Like I said: boring!
Your turn!
You should give this pointless quiz a go too. Ping/Webmention me if you do (or comment below, I suppose); I’d love to read what you write.
Footnotes
1 They’re internet memes, in the traditional sense, but sadly people usually use
“meme” nowadays exclusively to describe image memes, and not other kinds of memetic Internet content. Just another example of our changing
Internet language, which I’ve written about before. Sometimes they were silly quizzes (wanna know what Meat Loaf song I
am?); sometimes they were about you and your friends. But images, they weren’t: that came later.
2 Or else I’ll get a proper jittery heart-flutter going!
3 I wouldn’t necessarily even miss the always-on, in-your-pocket, high-speed Internet of
today: the Internet was pretty great back then, too!
4 Obviously an intergalactic hitch-hiker should include a bandana, perhaps as
well as an equally-versatile towel, in their toolkit.
5 It’s not about privacy, although that’s a fringe benefit I suppose: mostly it’s about
getting my food quicker! If I walk into Dominos wearing a geek hat and they’ve got pizza on the counter with a label on it that says it’s for “geek hat”, they’ll just hand it over, no
questions, and I’m in-and-out in seconds.
6JTA observed that similar excuses
were used by people who resisted the rollout of mandatory seatbelt usage in cars, so possibly I’m the “bad guy” here.
7 From left to right, the single personality traits for each of the pups are (a) doesn’t
like water, (b) is female, (c) likes naps, (d) is allergic to cats, (e) is clumsy, and (f) is completely fucking pointless.
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