…that’s the thing with autonomous world-machines: no easy target and their amorality fosters an insidiously pervasive sort of evil…moustache-twirling balls-out cartoon fascists foster the hope that upon their oblivion, good will rightfully inherit the earth, although history seldom supports that thesis…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4svv0lvizXQ

…vietnam doesn’t have enough room for mopeds, let alone SUVs…

…at a quick glance-scan, i though that third row under gen X read ‘starfleet’: did a double-take and was disappointed…

…i give everyone i work with stickers when they do a good job, and they all go crazy for them: interns, bosses, the lot!..

…our CEO rolled his eyes at first and said they were patronising, then the entire staff catcalled him over it, so he changed his mind and loves getting stickers now, too…

^{(i think that’s half the reason why armed forces do ribbons)}

…f*cking balls-out cartoon fascists…

…human empathy is not a team sport…

…oh, i think you misunderstand me: that’s not impaired driving, that’s skillful navigation through the normal flow of traffic in sàigòn…

…oh, that’s just the vietnam regional setting…

…i don’t know if i have very interesting stories about the folks who dug in; mostly that ferraris have a reputation for not keeping up with the group on account of breakdowns when driven hard…more entertaining were the rally-star trailer queens which slowed down to crawl over every cattleguard or fresh roadwork for fear of marring their pristine clearcoats while the exotic road cars flew right through, welcoming the well-earned miles…

…a lot of us drive open-topped in light rain - as long as you keep moving the cabin stays fairly dry - but we’ve been caught in torrential downpours a couple of times and come through soaked to the bone before managing to pull off and raise our various tops and targas…next sunny day, you open everything up, let it dry out completely, and follow-up with a detail if it still bothers you…

…when a group of twenty or thirty high-profile cars pull into a small town fuel station, it can draw a lot of attention, positive and negative, but not so much when we pull into a remote roadhouse since those tend to be more common destinations…

…for folks really into the scene, the real rock stars were cars driven in open road races, not the trailer queens: it’s a modest culture which respects real-world capability and experience more than flashy showmanship…use it or lose it, as they say…

…i used to lead a monthly hundred-mile canyon-run which would turn out a broad spectrum of sportcars and exotics, some of which were trailer queens…

…it was always interesting to see how show car owners respond to the opportunity to drive their car the way it was meant to be driven, some of whom embraced the opportunity and others who delicately babied their way around the loop or bailed-out early…

…i was thinking bathtub cheese but that’ll do…

…i work with mostly first and second-generation immigrants from all over the world, and a common pattern i’ve noticed among established first-generation immigrants is strong anti-immigrant sentiment; a little bit that they emmigrated to get away from those people, a little bit f*ck-you-i-got-mine…

…that was a significant theme in 2061: oddysey three…

…dogpile introduced me to google when it was a brand-new service: i noticed that all the best results increasingly came from the same search engine, so eventually i cut out the middleman and just started using google directly…

…how times have changed; i haven’t used google for years…

…almost fourty years ago, pulse-dial 300-baud modem from my apple //e running VT-52 terminal emulation into a mainframe shell account: just green monochrome text displaying an rn client, you had to be very strategic about what you chose to display because with that kind of bandwidth characters scrolled across the screen slightly slower than your natural reading pace and significantly slower than skimming past anything you weren’t interested in reading…

…most early usenet clients routinely displayed profound boilerplate warning of posts costing thousands of dollars in computing time, which were pretty intimidating to neophyte users!..

…also, jiggle it to check if you’re in neutral, then jiggle it again just to be sure: ooh, now you’re stopped at a light, better jiggle it…

(okay, that’s an easy tease, but as a compulsive habit it really does help cultivate kinesthetic proficiency through tactile feeback)

…maybe he only protests on factorial dates so the signs stay manageable…

…you gonna write out that whole f*cking integer?..factorials make for snappy handheld signs…

…nah man, they’re just itching for an excuse to roll out deadly force and mass voter suppression…