Scars I’ve got. I don’t have many I guess considering the crazy shit I’ve done:

§Scar on my right ring and pinky finger from punching some guy in the face, before I had fighting training. (He attempted to steal my rucksack in basic training and then pushed me over a stack of rucksacks when I grabbed it back. Then I punched him.)

§Scar on my chin from some older kid with a ring punching me when I was 12 or 13.

§Nose out of alignment/lumpy from having it broken when I was 15. Beat up by a group of 3 older kids after not backing down over sitting at “their” lunch table. I did not go to the hospital because no health insurance and poor. My mom attempted to “fix” it. Did not do a very good job.

§Scar on my left hand from gouging a hole in my hand somehow during a jump into Kazakhstan.

§Scar on my right hand from catching some feral cats for a friend.

§An internal scar I guess? A poorly-healed broken bone in my right foot, probably broken during a jump. I didn’t notice it at the time and it doesn’t bother me now other than looking knobby.

That’s all. You?

I’ve never much cared for Dooce (Heather Armstrong) or her writing. It all seemed too manufactured, too curated specifically to appear un-curated. And it all seemed completely faux-spontaneous to me. It was like reading about someone’s life with anything interesting sanitized out. Why people found it fascinating I can’t guess. Mundanity appeals to the mundane. Or perhaps it’s just not my thing.

However what she writes here is I think true.

Attentions spans are now 140 characters long, sometimes as short as a video or a picture that self destructs in a few seconds. I have stood in a line at a coffee shop and watched as seven people in a row ordered something without looking up from their phone.

On balance — and notice please that I am saying on balance — Twitter and smart phones are negatives for society. Yes, they provide many valuable things and would seem absolutely science-fictional to someone from 1970.

However like Facebook they are a further method of disengagement while appearing to be engaged.

For all of Armstrong’s faults, at least her writing was actual writing and not a 140-character stream of garbled discontinuous bullshit.

The internet as a useful and positive and non-corporate-captured boon for society peaked around 1999-2002.

After that it has become a tool of control and a place for increasingly witless people to spout nonsense and ignore their own lives.