I was reading the other day about how they (the giant ants^[1]) were going to make a game featuring both Sonic and Mario. Not only that, but they were both going to be featured in the title of the game. Growing up with the Nintendo vs. Sega rivalry, this would have once seemed like the moral equivalent to having Darth Vader command the USS Enterprise-K in the Next Next Generation, or having Captain Kirk pilot an X-wing. Times they are a-changing I guess, and where there is a business case anything can happen. Just today I was reading that Dell was going to start selling PC desktop systems with Linux pre-installed, which further confused me: this can’t be the same reality that I’ve lived in for the last 30 years. All of this is way too early for April Fools, so they must be ice skating in hell for sure.

Speaking space opera, I always had this fantasy of quitting my job in corporate America/Australia by declaring “I am a programmer. Like my father before me.” (Tyler can correct me on the inaccuracy of that quote) All this with the Visigoths about to storm Rome in 410, and bring an end to the Empire^[2]. The trouble is, my dad is actually a chemist. A pretty damn good one, but although he knows Fortran I wouldn’t really describe him as a programmer. I hope that if it ever does come to that, fate will forgive the necessity of a nice dramatic statement in place of a factually correct one.

1. Damn you Tyler, I can’t use the word “they” or “them” without thinking about giant ants!
2. so my fantasies are historically schizophrenic

In Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, Stephenson presents a world in which churches are a franchise operation. (The book in general makes all the logical conclusion of the application of rampant free market principals as they might occur sometime in the near future; for example, the CIA of this future buys and sells information to the highest bidder, and the USS Enterprise (CVN-65) is sold off and becomes a personal yacht). The Economist has an article (“A marriage made in heaven?”) about the possible merger of Catholicism and Anglicanism [sic] from a business perspective. It’s amusing, but I am not sure which disturbs me more, the ease at which big religion fits into the language of big corporations, or the fact that capitalists find it so easy to talk about nearly anything using their dogmatic vocabulary.