Facebook is harassing me. Today it sent me an email titled, “Five of your Friends invited you to join…” Perhaps my pale corpse can get wi-fi access from the coroner’s freezer.
I picked up a few BattleTech novels from a local used book store, but stopped reading after a few pages upon encountering a passage about a space ship crossing the “elliptic plane.” It’s a natural mistake, of course, to conflate Kepler’s First Law with Zodiacal terminology, but it made me realize in a flash that I was reading a book for thirteen-year-olds written and edited by twenty-three-year-olds, and I just can’t bring myself to care whether Aris Sung manages to fit in with his new clique. Too bad I’ll never find out whether the Liaos retake Sarna.
Speaking of BattleTech discontents, it has dawned upon me (at long last) that if I were picking up the game today [somehow returned to age fourteen, mind] I’d steer clear of the Combine. Whose idea was it to give us the worst attributes of Marik and Liao during the re-launch of the brand? If internal disputes and Oriental floundering in the face of lost territory brought a bounty of popularity the game would have looked very different from the outset, no? [Yes, I know that it's all a big cycle. But if the game had launched during the reign of the Von Rohrses I wouldn't have pledged then either.]
This week I saw part of a special on ABC about the collapse of civilization in the 21st Century. I found the windmill-and-greenhouse future-New York City quite depressing; conversely, the neo-feudal America of waning cities fighting over scraps of technology thrilled.
Speaking of TV, there was a time long ago when I could have told you which color crystals to mash together to create flashes of light for scaring Sleestak or to gain access to pylons. No longer.
