Finished reading: Tough Guy by Rachel Reid 📚
I am a time traveler from the 1990s.
“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” L. P. Hartley’s quote has a life completely beyond its origin in the book The Go-Between. I think a lot of people come to viscerally understand it as they age.
I’ll be 45 in July and I am beginning to understand myself as a time traveler from the 1990s.
My husband sent me this Midnight Murmurations piece on The X-Files. I was bopping along reading about the experience of this person who is younger than me experiencing the show and then got to this part, which discusses 1993 technology like I might talk about the technology of a 1950s sci-fi movie:
A bygone era is put to screen, with big mobile phones that you need to pull an antenna out of in order to use, chunky keyboards wired into bulbous PCs, giant spinning tape recorders, and rectangular cars.
And this was when I realized I’m a time traveler from the 1990s, because I immediately thought, “Well yeah, that’s what technology looks like.” My brain exists in a perpetual 1993-1999, and when it encounters things that don’t belong in that milieu, it’s not because that milieu is old, it’s because I have somehow been transported into this dystopian future.
Watching Jurassic Park with my kid has only reinforced this sense. Of course computers have huge CRT monitors. You can tell it’s the 90s because they’re not monochrome. Of course a twelve-year-old girl is a hacker. (I was 12 in 1993 and while I wasn’t a hacker, I was definitely more computer-oriented than most of the other kids I knew.) This is the world as it should be, except for all the genetically-engineered dinosaurs running around.
Derek Sivers wrote about being a netizen in 1993. This was me, too. This is how I want the Internet to be still, non-commercial, generous. You can still find it some places but it’s definitely not the norm. But I, a woman out of time, still expect it to be.
Finished reading: The Return of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 📚
🎧 Read by Stephen Fry as part of Sherlock Holmes: The Definitive Collection. Doyle is phoning it in here. We get a softer Holmes, who will let people get away with crime if he decides that’s what’s just.
Found my summer aesthetic: beach goth. 💀🌊
🍿 Reflections on Jurassic Park:
- Ian Malcolm is gross and he has all the best lines.
- That shot of the T-rex with the banner falling is so iconic. (Forgive me the spoiler.)
- If you’ve been to Universal’s Jurassic Park area, this whole thing feels much more real because they did such a great job.
📝 Tiny Week(s)notes (idea by @brie@social.lol):
📖 Sweet Starfire by Jayne Ann Krentz, The Battle of the Labyrinth by Rick Riordan. Went to indie bookstore book club for Star Shipped by Cat Sebastian and had a blast.
🎧 Fated Mates always.
📺 Hacks 😍.
🎮 The Room series.
🌱 Picked out plants for the deck that spouse planted.
🍿 The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, Jurassic Park (still iconic).
🍿Just watched Jurassic Park with my kid. He enjoyed it. It holds up, just as it did the last time I watched it about 10 years ago. The animatronics are still impressive, the CGI less so.
Finished reading: Fireworks by Matthew Burgess 📚
Finished reading: Star Shipped by Cat Sebastian 📚
This book is about the queer subtext and text in every Star Trek, the found family in Farscape and Firefly, the excruciating emotional pain of anxiety and physical pain of migraines, and the joy of finding a couple people you can let your guard down around. I loved it. Bless Cat Sebastian.