I saw this Economist article Why Gen X is the real loser generation - in part because of being at the bottom of the U-shaped happiness/age curve, in part because of circumstances leading us to be financially less established than earlier and later generations.

I am always amused/annoyed that GenX is the forgotten middle child between Boomers and Millennials, in part because we kind of invented the new "Generation ___" naming scheme.

So I decided to reread "Generation X" by Douglas Coupland. Appropriately enough, I couldn't find a proper e-book to buy and had to make due with a kind of sketchy and broken PDF version.

This blog article showed me a Coupland Gen-X comic strip that predates his book. It also has a collection of the fun neologism definitions that populate the sidebar, along with kinda cool graphic design slogan exercises.

Overall the book didn't resonate for me as much as I had hoped - it now feels more about being a certain age than a certain generation. In a lot of ways the story is mostly a wrapper for a lot of stories the characters tell to entertain each other - including a memorable "what nuclear war would realistically feel like if it happened while you were out grocery shopping story." - I had forgotten how much the fear of nuclear war loomed for us, and how that shows up a few times in this book.

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Starved for affection, terrified of abandonment, I began to wonder if sex was really just an excuse to look deeply into another human being's eyes.

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I wasn't getting much done and was staring at my IBM clone surrounded by a sea of Post-it Notes, rock band posters ripped of construction site hoarding boards, and a small sepia photo of a wooden whaling ship, crushed in the Antarctic ice, that I once found in an old National Geographic. I had placed this photo behind a little gold frame I bought in Chinatown. I would stare at this picture constantly, never quite able to imagine the cold, lonely despair that people who are genuinely trapped must feel--in the process think better of my own plight in life.

Norway has become a shithouse country, actually.

It's a little astonishing how this guy loves shiny prizes, to the point of feeling a bit pathological. RIP Walter Koenig, aka Ensign Pavel Chekov. "Aye, Keptin!"

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While Vladimir Putin ignores Mr. Trump's call for an energy cease-fire and continues to murder Ukrainian civilians, the U.S. president claims that Russia "has been fine on Ukraine." This is factually wrong, strategically naive and morally bankrupt. His obsequious accommodation of Russia, rewarding the aggressor with sanctions relief, won't persuade Mr. Putin to stop. History shows that such behavior emboldens Russia's autocrat, who sees it as weakness.

Really interesting piece on how "Don't Ask Don't Tell" might actually have been a brilliant bit of actual "5D Chess" from Bill Clinton - (like the piece says, not a good guy on many fronts, but a hell of a politician.) TERFs and other "no really I was liberal but then the dems shifted on me" seem to forget how like, national legal gay marriage is only like ten years old. The bar has not been set as firmly for the rights of LGTBQ+ - even the "classic" "LGB" subset - as they like to pretend. Wired.com, the Red Bull Leaks, Revealed: Leaked Chats Expose the Daily Life of a Scam Compound's Enslaved Workforce.

[During an argument with an absurdly matriarchal computer personality] Ford slumped against a bulkhead. He started to count to ten. He was desperately worried that one day sentient life forms would forget how to do this. Only by counting could humans demonstrate their independence of computers.
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Ford carried on counting quietly. This is about the most aggressive thing you can do to a computer, the equivalent of going up to a human being and saying Blood... blood... blood... blood...