I was just rabbit-holed into the Wikipedia articles on Fidonet, UUCP and other proto-internet systems, and it made me remember again a big thing I can’t remember – the reason I originally got a modem.

I didn’t need one for paying work and I didn’t yet have any friends who were online, such as it was at the time. I was a typesetter and starting to work with early page layout programs but nobody I knew was a programmer or even an amateur hacker. Moving files around was done with floppies, nobody was uploading or emailing files around yet. I didn’t tend to splash out on tech gadgets, either.

But with the modem I discovered BBSes, and through them, I met a circle of local folks who knew about Fidonet and “doors” and who were into Pyroto Mountain. 

One of these people offered to get some of us UUCP connections, and that was my first actual email address @ozrout.uucp.  Then I stumbled into Usenet and we all know how that went.

But why did I want a modem and what was I expecting to do? I have a good memory for so many things in my life, but not this. It feels like a weird gap as you’d expect if someone had done a Jedi mind trick to coax me online. But that’s not something I can really believe.

Chatting yesterday with someone in an organization I do some work for, and he starts telling me that his son is getting married soon, congratulations and so on, and then goes on to say how happy his mother is, because the lad is marrying his cousin, who's also her grandchild. 

I know this is not unusual in many cultures but I realized I was at grips with an ingrained cultural taboo. I was relieved to find out that my acquaintance was not himself married to a cousin, but to a woman from outside his culture entirely. Hapsburg outcome avoided.

What is the oldest U.S. military award?

Who were Arabella and Anita, whose zero-gravity skills were tested on Skylab in 1973?

What American fashion designer, born in 1942, is known for closing her shows with a cartwheel ending in a split?

Who was the first American to win a Nobel Peace Prize, for mediating the end of a war between two nations?

Friend of a friend commission request. They selected this pose from the following thumbnails.

Definitely a fun one to work on. I'm tweaking the composition a bit to better fit the 8.5x11 format, but this is the general feel...

The thumbs:

I'm designing and typesetting a big book of Marxist commentary.

On second pass, they edited a mention of Taiwan to “China’s Taiwan region.”

I commented to the publisher, “That’s planting a flag, for sure.”

He responded, “Taiwan has always been part of China.”

It took all I had not to reply “Yes, and Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.”

What Madrid museum displays The Surrender of Breda by Velazquez and The Third of May 1808 by Goya?

What one-word title is shared by Justin Timberlake's debut solo album and a 2010 neo-western crime drama series on FX?

What nine-letter word describes one of several forms of the same chemical element, such as diamond, graphite, or buckminsterfullerene ?

In what countries are the following four-letter cities:  Lima, Giza, Cork, Cebu, Kano ?
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What composer's last opera was The Magic Flute ?

One of these days I’m going to gather together a lot of my people and collectively sue McDonald’s for bringing the “Mc” prefix into disrepute.

I resisted trying Nethack 5.0 for a while, but there is some good news:

"You finish eating the xorn corpse.  You feel less concerned about becoming petrified."

There's also a tutorial mode which should help anyone who wants to start playing Nethack after 40+ years of development.

When I was a kid, we lived in a neighbourhood where the closest grocery store was an A&P.

It had a feature no other grocery chains had at the time – in fact, one that was unusual here till decades later: a coffee grinder. It was up front by the doors, so you were greeted by a rich aroma of fresh-ground coffee and a slight drift of coffee grounds around it on the floor.

The coffee was sold, I've since discovered, in three levels of quality. The best stuff was packaged in a black tin with the name BOKAR in gold in a striking Art Deco typeface. I found this fascinating and mysterious – my parents never bought BOKAR, not having any method of brewing coffee besides instant, and instant coffee smells like a wet dog to me.

We left that area just after I turned 9, and never went to an A&P anywhere else, but I've since realized I was deeply imprinted by both the coffee and the lettering. I didn't start drinking coffee till my late teens when I discovered espresso with some of my more bohemian friends, around the same time I started work as a typesetter.

My life has been spelled out in decorative letters and coffee beans.

I live under a flight path. Installing Flightradar 24 has interested me in seeing which planes make the most outrageous noises overhead (Airbus 300s and Embraer e195s) but I also learned something else.

Flightradar 24 has shown me that, in general, most planes passing over before noon are landing, followed by a relative lull after noon, then mostly takeoffs in late afternoon and evening.

What always puzzled me before was that the overall sound always goes down the scale as a plane passes over. But now I know it’s irrelevant to whether the plane is going or coming. Going down the scale strongly suggests that the plane is landing, but no. It’s dopplering, coming or going.

I also need a word for the uncanny moment when a plane briefly casts you into shadow – it happens here quite often. Aeroclipse?