Rant

Cultural traditions are built around life's hardships in much the same way Oysters grow pearls around grains of sand.  The worse the hardship, the more significant the tradition.  Nobody celebrates convenience.  It's the harvest, which once came at the cost of weeks of back-breaking labor, that we celebrate, not the advent of supermarkets that sell three varieties of fresh apples in the dead of winter.  Our ancestors hung traditions on hardship to remain sane in bygone eras in which the world was a hard place and we couldn't even understand why.

This is part of the reason that new technologies always come with controversy.  New technologies are invented in order the smooth away hardships, even if just by inches, but what older generations see is the loss of traditions that accompanies the loss of each hardship.  The solution to this perennial problem is to either extend ourselves outward to bring new, voluntary hardships into our lives or else to begin celebrating the things that make our lives easier.

Rant

It's the twenty-first century.  It's time to put a keypad on alarm clocks.  There's no excuse for having to hold down a "minute" button while setting the time or for having to check twice to make sure that the tiny "AM/PM" switch on the back of the clock didn't get toggled.

Rant

It makes me extremely nervous when an application asks me as I exit if I want to save any changes to a document that I could swear I didn't alter.  Some programmer needs to get on this issue.

Rant

It used to be that putting a person's phone number into your speed dial was a compliment.  Now, I mostly put people's numbers into my phone just so I know not to answer when they call.  Consequently, when someone asks for my number, I no longer know how to take it.

Rant

It's time someone had the balls to say it publicly: the only people who think that teenage boys should go to prison for possessing nude pics of their teenage girlfriends are the fathers of the girls stupid enough to take the photos in the first place.  Yes, sexting is a serious problem, but in comparison with the drug use and teen pregnancy that has plagued recent generations, it's a fairly benevolent form of teen stupidity. Appropriately mild punishments need to be legislated, and the news media needs to move on to new scandals.

Rant

I love the fact that my generation has no inhibitions about wearing costumes in public.  I love going to a comic shop on new comic day or to movie theater on opening night and seeing people my age standing in line in costumes.  As hard as I try, I can't imagine my father or one of my grandfathers wearing wizard robes at my age, and I think that may be their loss.  Of course, there a lot fewer photos in the family album that send them into a full-body blush.

Rant

I firmly believe that facial tattoos are the single greatest invention in the history of mankind.  They let you know in a single glance that there's something not right with a person, so you don't have to waste time that could have been spent distancing yourself from them wondering.