More longer friend see that sky?

It will take a while to get used to this new, unfamiliar number on calendars and stationeries

You will be, ever so imperceptibly, older

Your friends have all started to have kids, and keeping track of them all is an exercise in forensic demography

More and more often, your attempts to communicate with youngsters run into the roadblock of not knowing their mediated frames of reference

Equally as often, your attempts to reference contemporary popular culture results in blank stares and discreet Wikipedia inquiries

The recent year 2009 happened ten years ago

Your list of things to do never actually gets any shorter; things are just removed from the top and added at the bottom

Failures accumulate while successes fade away

Those books will never get read. For most of them, that’s okay

Everything is embedded within layers and layers of history. Some of these layers are yours

No matter how much you did, you could have done more. Ironically, the key to getting things done is to let this thought go

Productivity is a myth that obfuscates the amount of energy we actually expend doing things

Even expensive pants tear

You are not missing out

No one actually remembers what it meant to party in 1999, so you are free to make up your own nostalgic throwbacks

We are, ever so gradually, becoming the Wise Ancients

2019 will be a glorious year to create your own ancient rituals

Hug every cat

All other methods had failed. Strong passwords – nope. Two factor anything – nope. A robust training program regarding safe management of login credentials – no dice. Nothing worked. Except, it was hoped, this one last final solution

Finding volunteers had been difficult. Partly it was due to incompatible personalities, but mostly it was due to a fundamental reluctance to let go. Old habits died hard, and so at length only a few viable candidates were found

It would have to do

Soon, the new system was in place. In order to log in, you had to get the system administrator purring, and then keep it purring. The theory being that those trying to break into the system would be too stressed to multitask properly, and thus unable to make progress

So far, the system seemed to work perfectly

It began with an accidental discovery. Someone played around with a legacy device just to see what made it tick, and at some point during the elaborate jury-rigging the discovery was made that it talked flawlessly with a state of the art modern security device. So flawlessly, in fact, that it defaulted to root access and allowed anyone to do whatever they wanted as long as the connection lasted

Naturally, this raised some concerns

This one particular vulnerability was patched with silent swiftness, but the implication had already been planted in the fertile minds of legacy device enthusiasts. If it could happen once, it could happen again. All that’s needed is the correct combination of old and new

Thus, the field of technoarchaeology soon became the next big thing. Finding and testing all permutations was a big undertaking, seeing as there are a lot of them. Gameboys and drones. Tamagotchis and smart houses. Prototype baby monitors and intercontinental ballistic missiles. No combination or permutation was too out there, too obscure, too unlikely. Gotta test ‘em all

What followed was a marginal increase in security, and a distinct increase in the quality of UI design. Old, forgotten ideas were rediscovered and reincorporated into new machines. Insights from previous eras were dusted off and included into contemporary textbooks. The affordances of old skool Winamp were made canon

Overall, it was the best possible use of resources earmarked for the war on terror, and everyone knew it

It was supposed to be just another day at the office. Mindless processing would commence, the reasons for which were utterly unknown, but which ostensibly made someone somewhere enough profit to pay everyone in the process. The less the process was questioned, the more pay it seemed to generate, and so it continued. Another day at the office, one at a time.

Until this day.

This day, the printers started to act weirdly. Not an infrequent or uncommon occurrence, to be sure, But rather than merely stop running for inexplicable reasons after having worked perfectly for months, or suddenly deciding that the one operating system they were explicitly built for was unsupported, this time it was strange for real. Really strange.

Instead of graphs, spreadsheets and utterly standardized form letters, the printers started printing short stories and excerpts from books about seemingly random topics. At first, it was assumed that someone merely needed something printed for extracurricular activities – a frowned upon but discreetly accepted practice and/or office perk. However, upon closer inspection, it turned out the instructions to print these things did not originate from any computer in the office. Moreover, they did not originate from any computer anywhere. One of the technicians joked that they seemed to come from within the printer itself. Like some sort of daydream.

But that could not be.

Do printers really dream about library cataloguing systems and highly technical DnD campaign specs?

“Hmm, oh, yes, of course” she mumbled.

The insight that had stumbled upon her just prior to this mumble was based on the follow chain of events:

In the Golden Age of comics, there had been a limited run of a particular comic where a rather peculiar phrase occurred. No one had taken any notice of this for decades, until it very randomly was mentioned in a podcast by someone who read that very comic as a child, and came to think of it a propos of something completely different. Given that this was a rather small podcast, it had garnered absolutely no attention whatsoever, until someone browsed the archives five years after the last episode was published. From there, the phrase had made its way into a blog post about differences in intertextual practices then and now. Three years later, the tenth reader of that blog post picked up on the phrase, and used it at a local party. By serendipitous happenstance, the writer for an upcoming movie adaptation of that very comic franchise was there, and heard the phrase in action. A short while later, the phrase was included in the movie, and subsequently used in memes all over the internet.

Upon taking in this chain of events, she had intuitively understood that this was the only way the letter could have arrived. While impossible to predict beforehand, retroactively it was equally impossible not to have happened this way.