The Twilight Report

I was reading the other day about how they (the giant ants^[1]) were going to make a game featuring both Sonic and Mario. Not only that, but they were both going to be featured in the title of the game. Growing up with the Nintendo vs. Sega rivalry, this would have once seemed like the moral equivalent to having Darth Vader command the USS Enterprise-K in the Next Next Generation, or having Captain Kirk pilot an X-wing. Times they are a-changing I guess, and where there is a business case anything can happen. Just today I was reading that Dell was going to start selling PC desktop systems with Linux pre-installed, which further confused me: this can’t be the same reality that I’ve lived in for the last 30 years. All of this is way too early for April Fools, so they must be ice skating in hell for sure.

Speaking space opera, I always had this fantasy of quitting my job in corporate America/Australia by declaring “I am a programmer. Like my father before me.” (Tyler can correct me on the inaccuracy of that quote) All this with the Visigoths about to storm Rome in 410, and bring an end to the Empire^[2]. The trouble is, my dad is actually a chemist. A pretty damn good one, but although he knows Fortran I wouldn’t really describe him as a programmer. I hope that if it ever does come to that, fate will forgive the necessity of a nice dramatic statement in place of a factually correct one.

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1. Damn you Tyler, I can’t use the word “they” or “them” without thinking about giant ants!
2. so my fantasies are historically schizophrenic

Streetlight outside my New York home. I might never have seen it?

Those of you, who know me best, may not know that I am in fact from the planet Shashars, where I was the emperor of an empire that I ruled with an Iron Fist^TM. I am actually here on Earth as part of the Emperor Exchange Program. It's a service of the Galactic Dictators of the Universe, an elite club that only the biggest and most ruthless belong. It is very very invitation-only, if you know what I mean. Anyway, I'm here on Earth for vacation, to get away from it all, as it were, as an anonymous computer programmer working at The Company (real name removed to protect Corporate America).

I've been telling people this story in various forms for decades now. Not bad considering I am only approaching my third decade on this planet. In the first grade I had nearly my entire class convinced that they were also from Shashars. I even had a Queen to rule by my side (back then, I was the King instead of the Emperor - at some point I decided Empire sounded better than Kingdom).

Back then I was living in New Haven Connecticut, where my folks were employed as post docs at Yale. Later my dad would move to Chicago and my mum and I were off to Los Alamos. I was just now in my kitchen trying to think of what I wanted to snack on (finally decided on a tall glass of Chocolate Milk) and I wondered out of nowhere, how my life would have been different had I stayed in New Haven.

This is a bit embarrassing or maybe just funny... but I was theoretically engaged to a girl back then. I really wish I could remember what prompted me to do it, but I remember whispering into my Queen's ear "Do you want to marry me?" She answered in the affirmative. Now here is the embarrassing part: it has been so long and my memories of the first grade are so corrupted that I don't actually remember this girl's name. I don't know a girl I was sort of engaged to once.

If I had stayed in New Haven, might we have been friends growing up, like some of my friends in New Mexico? Would we now be old friends who occasionally sent e-mails back and forth at odd intervals? It is just so hard to say. It is hard to imagine how entirely different my life would be now, except just to know that it would have been completely different. When I think of life changing events, I usually think of two: one was moving to America with my parents (when we moved to New Haven in 1980), the other was when I put a free quotations database onto the Internet in 1995, which eventually led to a job offer at The Company and lead me to where I now live in New York State. Now that I think about it though, Moving to New Mexico from New Haven may not have been as dramatic as leaving one country to live in another one, but probably at least as causal to my effect.