Imagine an apple

It is the year 2047. Eleven-factor authentication is required before you are allowed to buy toilet paper. Before the transaction can go through, you must opt in or out of the newsletter.  After the transaction completes, a survey is sent to you. “Was there anything we could have done to make your experience a more pleasurable one?” It’s a binary question, only Yes (Y) and No (N) are possible answers. If you select N, the survey closes. If you select Y, you are automatically opted into the newsletter.

Imagine an apple. If you can see it in your mind and turn it around, you are not a computer. You are also one of the human beings that can be said to have “a functioning imagination.” It was a surprise to me in adulthood to learn that there are a lot of human beings who do not have this — who can neither see, nor smell, nor taste the imaginary apple. With the aid of the picture above, they might recall what an apple looks like. But they cannot imagine one that stands on its own.

This is why when you send someone an email asking for a decision, for example, they might come back to you asking for pictures of things they haven’t decided on yet, so that they can make up their mind. They will say that they are a “visual learner.” They are not. They are one of the human beings that does not have an imagination.

There is nothing wrong with being one of those human beings, by the way. It’s just something to be aware of if you’re not one.

Last week I had to rearchitect a large planning document. I could have used A.I. to do it, probably. Instead I did it manually, piece by piece. I moved a lot of things around and changed a number of hierarchies and relationships and metadata, and when I was done I’d been put through my paces in terms of assumptions I’d previously made, decisions I had previously arrived at, and (of course) a buncha shit I’d forgotten about altogether.

Again: A.I. probably could have done this for me, but I’m pretty glad it didn’t, because A.I. never would have given me the accumulation of learning and reinforcement that simply undertaking the process did.

I used to know a tuba player. Potwin was his name. When Potwin sang a tune he’d always only ever sing the bass line. Others didn’t understand why he was getting the tune wrong. The tuba player didn’t understand why the bass line wasn’t the tune.

Everything good about the old internet

Friends, I’ve been conducting a reclamation project. So much of the internet is junk now: built only to suck money out of your money-hose, and soon, Google won’t even let it be that.

Back when we were prospectin’ these here parts, though, no one knew quite what to do with the Department of Defence project that had inadvertently become a library/encampment/rental space, so a lot of us just started throwing things we liked willy-nilly into various servers, thus defining our idea of “the internet should be like this!”

When I migrated Tederick.com to Tumblr about 15 years ago and then back again to WordPress whenever that was (??), I kiboshed the 1.0 and 2.0 versions of the site and all their weird attendant ephemera. Now I’m bringing ’em back.

Here’s the page where — till maybe 2009, it looks like? — I was chronicling all the appearances of Jasper in The Simpsons:

This was before I knew that “fandom.com wiki sites” were going to become so gigantic a quantity of what makes the internet run that the idea of a fan site run by an actual fan would be incomprehensible to multiple generations of people.

And here’s the final version of the page where — I dunno, till the mid-aughts — I just sort of waxed poetic about the Toht character from Raiders of the Lost Ark and the actor who played him, Ronald Lacey.

This was back when Nazis were scary-funny and not scary-scary, which I now heartily acknowledge is an era that should never have been allowed to exist.

I’m also chasing the old Extreme Steve comics, the Full of Rage Productions microsite, and a few other bits of my misspent youth, to be added to the Tederick.com archive in perpetuity.

I always like the back half more anyway

Solstice came and went. We’re onto the waterslide now. Christmas is coming. I’m off to the suck, soon. In the meantime, here are some things to read/listen to/interact with:

• “Sophy Romvari still works at the Fox” has become a bit of a mantra of mine in the past while, as I consider my financial stability vs. my ongoing interest in making the things I want to make. It’s been particularly difficult to convince my parents’ generation that this is real life now — I’ve been weighing doing a masters next year, for example, and the idea that doing so does not directly and unequivocally lead to a stable career track went off like a bomb. That used to be the deal you’d make: higher education = middle class comfort. The 20th century was wild! (Vulture)
• Eric Veillette weighs in on seeing Jaws in Toronto, fifty years ago. (Substack)
• Griffin Dunne recounts the true story of how and why he tried to keep his father’s death a secret from the New York Times for at least one day. (Vulture)
• Matt Belloni trying to do a half-portion run at the Hot Ones wings, with Sean Evans as his guest, was a delight. And fondly recalled (for me) the times (plural) Matti Price choked on hot food while trying to record a podcast with me. (The Town)

Man. I miss having a podcast.

I guess the boys had the same thought. Dan, Greg, and Casey inexplicably pick See You Next Wednesday’s 90210 rewatch segment back up — or should I say, start over — and find Brandon Walsh as baffling as ever. #DonnaMartinGraduates

And finally, I know we’re all Team Algae at this point, but still, it’s fun to read things like “Through a series of scientific inevitabilities, the water has become so full of monocellular life that Republicans would arrest and execute it for crossing state lines to see a doctor.” And since he’s removed his profile image from his own Linkedin page (wise move given the situation, sez I), here’s an archival reference photo of the Penguin Kingpin Guy In Charge of the Pool Thing.