We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Samizdata quote of the day
Jack lost his iPhone last night. He has therefore been stuck at home on his Playstation 3 all day.
– An (early twenties, male) customer overheard in a coffee bar in the East End yesterday afternoon. I can understand how the world outside the front door is a scary, scary place if it is just you, completely unaugmented.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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Better than becoming “An hero” I guess.
Let’s face it, most are becoming techno junkies now, even us oldies. I like nothing better than to relax on a warm sunny beach for a week or two, but the prospect of being off-line for this length of time is getting too fearful to contemplate.
I suppose I’ll just have to get dongled up this summer.
Well, the usual rule is that the sentence should make sense either with or without whatever is enclosed by the brackets. The fact that the article changes depending on the phonetics of the next word makes that impossible here, so the use of either “a” or “an” is going to be inelegant. I suppose I should have either chosen different words so that both started with either consonants or vowels, or chosen to structure the sentence in some completely different way. Probably the latter.
The question of whether I should have used “and” rather than a comma between “twenties” and “male” can be left for another day.
Shove the brackets one word right thus
A customer (early twenties, male)…
simples.
Good! More of the wondrous joys of the real world for the rest of us to enjoy, unsullied by the presence of these virtual wastrels. Tweet this, a**hole! (sound of two well-spent 12-gauge cartridges bouncing on the ground).
llater,
llamas
Oh Michael, I’m sorry. I didn’t even key in to any grammatical or otherwise issues in the posted article. In this case, “An here” was a reference to an entry in the Encyclopaedia Dramatica. Specifically to Mitchell Henderson who killed himself over losing his iPod.
Can’t remember if we can inline links so I’ll just post them directly
http://encyclopediadramatica.com/An_hero
http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Mitchell_Henderson
Welcome to the future. You wouldn’t go out onto the street naked either.
Welcome to the future. You wouldn’t go out onto the street naked either.
Hold on. I was hoping that was the future.
Richard, sadly, that’s never as good an idea as it might seem. For one, far too much of the world is a cold place. For two, the average person is not the sort of thing you generally want to see naked.
no doubt some curmudgeons will point out how this demonstrates the depravity of our disgustingly individualistic, atomised culture, lack of spiritual and moral seriousness, need for young people to be made to get outdoors and join the armed forces, etc.
It’s not unusual for me to get a text from a friend with the name of the pub they’re in, and then use Google Maps to navigate to them. It’s pretty much Rainbows End but without the contact lenses.
Nothing new here. Same shit, different technology. I remember some people in the “OK Yah” Yuppie Eighties, who simply couldn’t ‘operate’ without their precious Filofaxes. Comfort blankets for bloody spoilt grown-ups.