Backups

I’m coming up on my forty-second birthday in two weeks, which means I am officially middle aged and set in my ways. I do not discover new bands with anything approaching regularity. I tend to read the authors I know I’ll like rather than reach out for the cutting edge. Experimentation for its own sake makes me weary as a reader. Provocation for its own sake just makes me wish for something undercutting the attempts to shock and provoke.

I’m now old enough that I get cranky with young people for parking tractors on my lawn. Old enough I can still remember the point that phrase got lodged in my consciousness, back in the nineties: an episode of Good News Week, repeating a statement by the British PM John Major out of context for comic purposes.

I still prefer blogs to social media. Email to messenger programs. I get mildly irritated at tools like Slack every time I’m forced to use them, and mildly irritated at the folks who insist on using them to manage projects. I am still the kind of person who remembers the wonder of an RSS reed.

But automated back-ups and networked hard drives are little slices of fucking magic from the technological gods, and the only way you take this future away from me is from my cold, dead fingers.