I’m not quite sure when it happened, but my life has increasingly been divided into Ponies, Kittens and Robots.
Kittens are bad things, in this case, because in this case the kittens are dead. As in “x kills kittens”, things that are Bad, Evil and Wrong have been redesignated as “Kitten killing technology”. Every day we make changes, and in an ideal world these would be between the kitten killing technologies and the ones that let the kittens bound free. In the real world, however, we just have to choose between the technology that kills the fewest kittens in the longest time.
I can’t actually think of a kitten-killing technology I’m allowed to tell you about, apart from Realplayer. Realplayer kills kittens. It’s quite so bad as, for example, a giant monolithic perl program with no comments that was written three generations of programmers ago and you have to maintain, which would on this scale be described as a combine-harvester in a field of kittens.
And that’s the kittens.
Ponies are wishes. The phrase in question is “And while we’re wishing, I want a pony.” and involves anything that would be better if done differently, or at the same time as, or generally could be improved by something else happening instead/as well. As an example, I want more time to spend writing weblog entries about kittens, and developing Escape, and writing stories, and while I’m wishing I want a pony.
I do not yet have a pony.
Robots are the best thing. In the future, there will be robots. The future is the place where everything good will happen, I will have a computer that can play Oblivion and Dreamfall, and City of Villains better, and I will have time to do all the things I want to do, and be able to get to LARP on time. And we will have robots, and a base on the moon, and the robots will cook and clean and do the washing up.
I miss the robot that used to do the washing up.
In the future, there will be robots.
Robots who will pack stuff away. Grah.
As part of Project Whence, I – with the assistance of my parents – have removed all the crap I’ve been keeping in storage for the last six months and deposited it in my small flat. The essential problem with this is that I don’t actually have the space in my flat to keep all the crap, which is why I bought the storage in the first place. On the other hand, I can’t afford to move if I’m paying £x a month on storage space, so we moved it all back here.
Apparently, much of what I was storing I could happily throw away, which makes me annoyed that I spent six months and several hundred pounds storing it. Ah well. It consists of a lot of books (which I can’t throw away, although I might sell a few boxfuls at some point) and a large number of archive boxes of crap, some of which have followed me, unopened, since Cambridge. Having made the executive decision that I didn’t need to keep council tax demands and unopened junk mail from three years ago, I’ve succeeded in filling half of the block of flats’ bins with cardboard boxes and misc. pieces of paper. And, with a little effort and an awful lot of laundry, my flat could once again be a little bit tidy (so long as you don’t go into the kitchen).
But, for now, more tea is required.