Almost everyone who ever says “I’m no prude” is a huge prude. It’s kind of a law of nature.

I'm sorry, younger people. I really am. I really mean it. I wish I didn't have to say this. but I think you'll never be filthy computer dumpster goblins in the precise way that those of us who were glued to CRTs at one in the morning were.

— Oh Hey, Gravis Is Here! (@gravislizard) July 28, 2019

Ha! I agree. CRTs felt just more physically present. De-gaussing, the weird “clunk” sounds they made sometimes, and their other electrical noises, and just how damn heavy they were. They were formidable physical objects with their own personalities.

LCDs feel like the future. They are sterile and lack personality. Their temperament is always neutral, their behavior always predictable.

I prefer them but they also have no soul.

Younger people probably won’t believe this, but it used to be possible to destroy your CRT — and I mean physically destroy it — by setting it up wrong in Linux. I remember the first time I ever loaded up Linux and checking my CRT’s documentation about 10 times to make sure I had all the settings correct before I pressed the enter key.

Luckily, my CRT survived and Red Hat showed me a pretty GUI rather than smoke. I was a happy dumpster goblin.

It’s easier to do the “impossible” when you realize that often what people tell is you is impossible is emerging only from their own fears and limitations and not any aspect of the real world.

I was reading this piece today and it made me ponder again something I’ve been thinking about on and off recently.

As we looked over our carefully assembled treasures, they still didn’t seem adequate for a great journey into the future. I had an idea: Why not each write the story of our lives? Whatever else we put in the tin, we knew this would make for good reading, especially if we’d forgotten our childhoods, like most adults we knew.

I’ve never understood it, but most adults seem to have no ability to remember anything about their childhood at all. Oh, sure, they might have specific event memories but they seem to have no recall at all of what it was like, how adults treated them like subhumans, and no memories of what it was like to be under the complete control of someone else.

This puzzles me, as I have very good recall of how that felt and how much I thought most adults were idiots (spoiler alert: I was right, they were). Might it be that adults must forget so they can allow themselves to treat children as poorly as they were treated?

Also, something I learned only later in life is that most people — the vast majority — are not very introspective or contemplative. Assumption of similarity bias, I know. I thought most people were mostly like me. I was wrong. Thus, if you are not very contemplative, you probably don’t even consider how you were treated and connect that to how you in turn treat young people.

Kevin Drum is so fucking stupid that it’s hard to understand how someone can breathe and be so fucking stupid.

I know, it’s pointless, because his whole schtick is showing how young people are just somehow pretending to be broke, and that therefore nothing at all should change.

I love how this (actually decent) economist calls Drum’s hokum “data free” and makes Drum look like the complete assclown that he in fact is:

One of the great things about twitter is that data-free arguments have a decent chance of running into someone with actual expertise who can just create and tweet the correct graph in a few minutes. pic.twitter.com/AK9Q19HewM

— Gray 'serial millennial myth debunker' Kimbrough (@graykimbrough) July 28, 2019

Drum is what motivated reasoning looks like in combination with not understanding your own data, not realizing when someone else is far more an expert than you are, and in addition you are a huge fucking dipshit.