Blue
A friend of mine died a few days ago. His name was Tor. He was better known as Tugrik, a big friendly blue unicorn with his horn on his nose, like a rhinoceros.
…Cookies and gatekeepers
I posted a Life Pro Tip on Reddit:
Delete your web browser’s cookies once or twice a year.
It wipes out tracking data, so advertisers lose the profile they’ve built on you.
It also logs you out of all your web site accounts. When you log back in to them, you’ll find out right away if you don’t know your current password for a site, and then you can reset it. Better now than in an emergency!
(If you use a password manager like 1Password, logging in again is easy.)
The audience I had in mind were the kind of people who keep a PC for ten years and never delete cookies, and who write down their passwords in a notebook that they lost so having to log in to all their accounts again would be a traumatic experience.
It immediately spawned a lot of discussion. Paraphrased: “Lol, great advice for 2012, boomer. It’s useless to do this only once or twice a year. It’s useless to do it at all, because sites have moved on to using browser fingerprints. Use a plugin to autodelete your cookies after each session! Whitelist a few sites whose cookies you want to keep around for longer. Use an ad blocker! Use a VPN! Use Privacy Badger from EFF! Turn up your Firefox settings! Stop using Chrome! Use Pi-hole! Or if you don’t want to be tracked at all, stop using the Internet.”
Gatekeepers. Privacy maximalists who think if you don’t live like a cybersecurity lab tech, you don’t deserve to be online. Trolls and edgelords who just want to look cool. Ah, Reddit, you never disappoint.
My post was up for about half a day, it got almost five thousand upvotes, and then the moderators removed it.
I’m okay with that. It started some interesting discussions, it educated some people, and I learned a few things.
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Time Travel
I’m reading the book The Artist’s Way and making an effort to go through its exercises. This is one of them.
The book’s goal is to ‘unblock’ artists from the mental obstacles that hold them back from being creative. I’m only in Week One of its twelve-week program (that some people have compared with Alcoholics Anonymous for reasons that I don’t see yet), but I think I understand the structure of it. Daily ‘Morning Pages,’ three handwritten (or, in this modern era, 750 typed words) of stream-of-consciousness every morning to clear my head. Weekly ‘Artist Dates,’ going alone on small adventures which would replenish my inner childlike sense of creativity (nothing boring!). And some tasks to do each week; the book recommends picking the easy ones and also the ones I really don’t want to do.
Two concepts in the book have already shifted my paradigm:
…Mary Mouse
Jill and I got home yesterday from a vacation aboard Disney Cruise Line’s Wish (February 26 – March 1, 2024). This isn’t a full trip writeup; I just wanted to document a hidden mouse who wasn’t Mickey.
…The moment that changed my life
This is a story of how I rode on top of an elevator. Though that part comes in the middle, so I’ll warn you now that it’s more of an excuse to tell a different story.
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Liminal
“I — I don’t understand,” Margot said. Her voice wavered as she tried to make sense of the situation; her breath made small puffs of vapor in the frigid cloning chamber. Through its clouded glass wall she could see only a shadow, but she knew that shadow was Michael. “We’ve been married for twelve years. We have two sons together! I remember –“
A speaker crackled near her ear. “The memories in your head are hers. Your brain has been imprinted with her synaptic pathways, recorded shortly before she died. Surely you can remember that?”
It was the parts she didn’t remember that proved all of this to her. Gaps – she didn’t know how long – broken only by days or hours of lucidity as she lay in a hospital bed, as her condition declined. “But I’m fine now.” She pounded on the glass with her fist. “You fixed my body.”
A pause, then the speaker again. “She … Margot, the original Margot … died two days afterwards. She only regained consciousness once. It took five weeks after that to grow your body from a biological substrate. Your DNA was created from a corrected copy of her encodings, not from her original material. You won’t die of the same genetic disease.”
Not from her original? “This is my body!” Margot raised her voice in protest, and it rang within the chamber.
“But it’s not her body,” Michael replied. “There’s no part of you that’s a direct connection to her, any more than a fax of the Declaration of Independence would have any connection to the original. Any more than if we reverse-engineered the Empire State Building and then made another one from our blueprints. You’re the Ship of Theseus, but there never was any part of the original Margot in you. I thought I could feel differently, that I could see you as the same woman I exchanged vows with. Back from the dead! But you were built from blueprints, not propagated from a plant cutting. I could build a hundred more clones of her, imprint the same memories upon each of you, and no one would ever know that none of you are the original … except, I would know. I do know.”
Her body shivered, her mind raced, but through the sea of thoughts one thing remained clear. “I love you,” she said to the shadow.
“I loved Margot with everything I am,” Michael answered quietly. “You and I, we’ve never met.” His voice had a note of finality. “You have a long life ahead of you. Go.”
Fluorescent lights flickered to life outside the chamber, and the shadow departed with the darkness. A minute later the door to the cloning chamber hissed and slid open. Margot wasted no time in pulling herself free of the cramped cylinder, the liminal boundary between the end of a life remembered and the beginning of a life created. Her feet touched floor for the first time, her lungs breathed ambient air for the first time, and yet it reminded her of the hospital room where she had died.
New year, new post!
A few hours before midnight last night, I suddenly felt an urge to update my site. (Because, y’know, what better way to ring in a new year?) I had been using a theme named “Able” which was released in 2012 and hadn’t been updated since then.
So, first I tried using the standard WordPress “Twenty Twenty-Four” theme, but I found a bunch of fake site material in it for some demo company named “Études” and I didn’t know the right way to remove it. I could just delete it from the templates, but that didn’t seem right. So I asked about it on Reddit.
By the time Jill and I had finished watching the ball drop, I had replies with answers. I decided to use a free community theme named “Astra,” and I think it looks nice. A few months ago I ripped a bunch of old material off my site (personal stuff that looked like it was written in the mid-1990s, because it probably was), so all in all I feel like my site is leaner and cleaner. I’m hoping this inspires me to write more in the new year.
Here’s to a happy 2024 for us all!
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Microfiction
Ten microfiction pieces I wrote on Mastodon. Each was required to use a specific word, and to be shorter than five hundred characters long.
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