I was a huge fan of epic fantasies as a preteen — that’s the genre of Game of Thrones. Back then I read David Eddings, Terry Brooks, and Stephen R. Donaldson, and like George R. R. Martin with A Song of Ice and Fire, they each had a long-running series or two at least five books long. What these stories often had in common were incredibly long journeys across a vast land of some sort, through rural, wild, and untamed areas,…
I recently read someone’s answer on Quora about cancer, and it reinforced my belief that the body is very much like its own planet and ecosystem. We can treat it carelessly, without regard to possible long-term ramifications, in the interest of whatever short-term benefits we might want; and for a very long time, if we’re lucky, we may not even notice the damage done. Raze the forest for land and building materials — you get a great place to live…
Once, in a comment on an old blog post, I joked that the phone used to be surgically attached to my sister’s ear. At the time, I was referring to a phone attached to a land line, the kind of phone that had a cord and physical buttons, back when that was the norm. I was exaggerating, obviously; it was the sort of phone you left at home when you went to school or work, so she couldn’t possibly have…
Two of the TV shows I watch remind me of how old I am. Not just old, mind you, but super have-gotten-irrelevant-and-obsolescent kind of old. They are Younger and The Great Indoors. Younger is about a woman in her 40s, like me, who has to re-enter the work force after being out of it for so long, but even though she’s capable, no one hires her because of her age. After being mistaken for someone 20 years younger than she…
Last week my work computer finally died. It was almost eight years old, and it had been performing badly and acting up the last several of those years, but I’d kept using it anyway. All of my ongoing work was on there, and because it takes too much time, cost, and trouble to move computers, I’d stayed on the older computer as long as possible. I was in the middle of several projects when it died — not literally and…