Congratulations, you absolute lunatics!

a close up of a woman 's face with the words all shall love me and despair written in yellow . Alt: a closeup of Galadriel’s face from Lord of the Rings (Cate Blanchette) with the words “all shall love me and despair” written in yellow .

I would routinely send this to my team when something I warned them about happened. Just a general reminder that I do actually know what the fuck I’m talking about, and ignore me at your peril.

I will happily enable this curiosity as an Internet Elder, but also will kill you if you refer to me as such.

In another 20 years it’ll be fine and I’ll have added AI to my Cassandra repertoire. But right now? Too soon.

I just introduced my niece and nephew to Strongbad, Trogdor, Charlie the Unicorn, and Badger Badger Snake and they are utterly charmed. They can’t believe this is what the internet used to be.

They are nostalgic for it.

I’m okay with women leaning in and learning about AI, as long as once they learn it and start saying “wait, who does final review to make sure this is correct” and “…you do know Sr engineers grow from Jr engineers, right? So you still need to hire those” and “this is literally wrong” people listen.

Me too. I would far prefer to sound mildly drunk/fat-fingered than the grammatically correct but technically infeasible stuff autocorrect assumes I meant to say.

Also I was flying into rages when it autocorrected the 3rd word in a 12-word sentence the millisecond before I irreversibly hit send.

I once ran 25 yards and leaped onto the back of an accelerating London Routemaster bus, matching the velocity so exactly that I appeared to float gently onto the platform like a ballerina. I was wearing a summer skirt, which wafted cinematically. People already on the bus applauded.

I grew up Catholic and stopped being Catholic because the ones I liked were the Jesuits and the more radical nuns (and the former nun/Jesuit now-laity), and what was coming from the local pulpit was… well, Spotlight, actually.

But if they’re basically going Full Jesuit, I’m back in.

Six round-trip sleeper train berths per year. m

I love sleeping, I love trains, I love looking out windows that move, I love being seated for meals with random people I would never ever have interacted with, and I love the insane hyperlocal gossip I overhear in the corridors.

Having foolishly debated Jesuits as an undergrad, I am quite certain even God himself cannot help you in that scenario.

If anything, God puts you in that situation so you can comprehend your place in the universe without an actual physical beatdown.

Regularly talk to people on the phone who may not be the person who can resolve your end need. Be engaging. Make them think you’re a charming individual. Do this to the person answering calls at the Subaru dealership, the Apple fraud rep, the local librarian.

Like the 80s and house lines.

Look, though: if you were asked to identify any two people who, on a cosmic level, mystically connect so they mutually experienced a transformative and existential event on some sort of alternative plane of reality…

David Bowie and Janelle Monae would actually be quite rational choices.

An entire generation raised on 80s movies and eternally pissed that having sex with the passed-out prom queen is now “wrong” instead of “legendary”.

They are also irked that “Long Duk Dong” is no longer a funny joke.

Ah, but he didn’t really lie, he just made stuff up because he was emotional.

Except men don’t get emotional, so he was just being Protective of Females, which is fine when you’re a guy. And even if you were shouting for reasons that turned out not to be true, they COULD have been true.

So.

Hard to miss that the person who did the most work to straighten things out was the TOTALLY UNINVOLVED Chappell Roan. Brigaded, banned from a whole country, and all because she ate breakfast in public.

Remind me again about how invisible labor isn’t a thing women must do all the damn time.

MOVE TO NZ IN 2019.

One great thing about behavior researchers, especially those of us who worked extensively within online communities, is we do tend to recognize the patterns of posters not worth engaging further.

And on that note, I’m blocking.

Oh I’ve followed, you’re just using a single incident of knife crime to beat a more-cops drum. Thin gruel and a giant leap, so I’m not particularly interested.

So your entire thing seems to be “more cops” and I’d just say a rich research environment for any how-do-we-handle-knife-crime hypothesis would be the last 15-20 years in London metro.

You need more recent references. Knife crime (yes, including machetes) is an acknowledged problem in London today. The idea that machetes are obvious to members of the public before they’re being waved around is flawed.

I truly am a behavioral researcher and am pretty confident that if I asked a random assortment of New Yorkers “how would you get a machete through NYC and Grand Central” they would provide a variety of valid and plausible answers.

Weird things are carried through NYC all the damn time.

ALSO born New Yorker, but additionally lived in London for years so am less surprised by unusual deployment of blades in metro areas than you appear to be.

Come on, man.

See, the weird thing about asking this question is it instantly makes it clear you have never visited NYC or roamed its myriad forms of public transportation.

Does YOUR city/town have machete-detecting apparatus everywhere? No, because it’s fucking unusual.

Ooooh, which one?

There is one specific gray-blue that I used to know the hex for, which was part of a web design I was running through usability, and every single user made some reference to the color reminding them of a public restroom (derogatory, obviously).

It somehow had yellow-beige undertones.

Parents who expose you to British sketch comedy (1965 - current) may qualify as inflicting childhood trauma, but it also gets you academic high scores.

And beheadings, of course.

Excellent. Keep noggin fully secured, don’t let any other living history interpreters get carried away, no matter how catchy the song is.

…same height before or after beheading? (Important distinction.)

You know, this week is rapidly pushing me into flip-phone territory.

I used it in my AP history test!!!

Must’ve seemed like a total loon, hunched over my desk, humming. But “Born in 1599, died in 1658… SEP-TEM-BER” was an insanely useful chorus for picking the right date for a load of not-directly-Cromwellian questions.