toynbee, toynbee@piefed.social

Whom did you ask?

When I was but a teenager, I moved into an apartment with a guy I had known for a while. I considered his ethics questionable. He contrasted them against mine and I learned a lot about myself. Life felt complicated at the time.

But anyway, the reason he was looking for a new apartment was that he had recently broken up with his girlfriend. Apparently she had cheated on him. This was back when AIM was a thing and, for whatever reason, he had access to her AIM logs. He thought she had cheated on him - I don’t know whether she did and it’s not my business - and wanted verification. He went through the entirety of her AIM logs, including mine. (She wasn’t cheating with me, though we did flirt on occasion. Out of some weird sense of morality, he warned me before he read our chat logs; he described it as “harmless.")

I wonder what he’s doing with AI these days.

Could you just not remind me that I’m old?

Didn’t this happen in Fight Club?

House of Stairs by William Sleator messed with my head for a while.

Among other aspects, I read it in - I think - the mid nineties. At one point one of the main characters describes a past activity - leaving her car to rescue another person, IIRC - and details how difficult was to do so because you have to put on a gas mask to be out in the atmosphere or something like that. (It’s been most of thirty years since I read it, I apologize for being light on the details.)

At the time I was a kid and thought it ridiculous. After all, humanity had conquered acid rain and the hole in the ozone (though I don’t recall if that had happened yet). Climate change would never get that bad.

That movie was so bad. I got a physical copy from Redbox back when that was still somewhat reasonable or at least I was naive enough to think so.

The disk turned out to be physically damaged in such a way that it skipped the middle, I don’t know, maybe third of the movie … But the storytelling was so poorly executed that we didn’t realize until we rewound to find a story beat we had missed, then gave up, ejected the disk, and saw the very visible damage on the bottom.

I had a dog named Newbie. The name had nothing to do with her when I adopted her; she was rescued from a dog fighting house (yet still somehow the sweetest dog I’ve ever met) and came with the name “Ariel.” At the time she came into my life, I just thought “Newbie” a fantastic name for a dog.

Before the dog was around, I had mentioned that to my wife, then girlfriend, and justified it by saying it was short for “Anubis.” Then my wife got a nametag for the dog with “Nubie” written on it and I thought it looked far too much like “nubile” so I changed my mind and went with a more honest spelling.

I can’t remember any specific examples at the moment, but I’m pretty sure not a single vet tech/receptionist ever got Newbie’s name right. She was so incredibly sweet, though, that every one of them loved her.

One could ask Principal Tanzarian if one were unsure.

But now you can rent a car in the US!

Quick! Someone consult Sean Bean before he dies!

At least he left before counting five twice.

I read books for enjoyment, not accolades. I enjoy passing my eyes over text more than letting sound pass my ears, but it’s not a contest. If I liked reading a book and someone else liked listening to someone else read a book, then we both liked the book.

If it’s something like a textbook, there might be a viable debate about who gained more, but for a novel I don’t see how the method of consumption matters.

My kid is still young and is growing up with a lot of their gaming done on a tablet. They’re remarkably adept with touchscreen controls, but it just seems so limiting to me.

I eventually connected a Bluetooth controller to their tablet and suddenly they’re amazed by how much easier gameplay is!

Yo, that’s fifty dollars for a T-shirt.

To be fair, it does seem like web-swinging would be pretty difficult to do underwater.

Grumpy baby.

Also reminiscent of Supernatural.

Are you picturing, like, a spring?