InstaPunk Returns

  No, I’m not in a wheelchair to date. But I do have a cane, which I sometimes need in my rare ventures outside the house. And I’m liking the symbol of wheels right about now. When I was young, ‘wheels’ meant fast cars. Of late it has come to mean, for me, that slow turning of powerful forces which affect us all at different levels of our experience.  The Wheel of Chronological Old Age I have discovered that there is a change in life when you move from being ‘aging’ to being ‘old’. It can come on more swiftly than you’d expect, but I’m pleased to report that it is not all bad. There are step-changes in mind and body that seem like diminutions and yet provide offsetting benefits. Most importantly, there is a shift in perspective that changes one’s personal relationship to time and life itself. Why this ‘End of Year’ reflection will be different from what it’s been in years past. And why I have also posted just before this one, a Context Document which contains links to previo...

  I’m working on the 2024 post. May be a day or two late. I’m slower these days. Not expecting anyone to sit down and read this all in one sitting. It’s what the title says it is. Context. I’ve been commenting explicitly on the passage of years formthe better part of a decade. It may be useful for ideas I still refer to in passing or more specifically. Browsing what’s here and making a note of the post’s url might be a worthwhile thing to do.  Thoughts from years past may be relevant to my thoughts in 2024, which will cover broader territory than usual, including many fewer specifics about Trump and his re-election campaign. The posts linked here are from this site and its predecessor, Instapunk Rules. Not every topic here will be directly referenced in the new post, but they’re all still relevant to where we are and what we’re dealing with now that we have a chance to end the American freefall. There’s no need to try reading the text on graphics here if your device makes it d...

  They’re going to have to start a new portrait gallery at the White House. Hillary probably will have to be included because she still insists she won the 2016 election and, like the two ladies up top, was a ‘kinda-President,’  de facto or de lusio , even though the press worked overtime to cover it up. Do you know who these women are? You absolutely should know. Jill Biden. Probably finishing four years of being the most important and powerful woman in the history of the United States. Do you think she’s what the ladies above were hoping for when they raised the ante on ‘female emancipation’ to ‘breaking the glass ceiling (and some balls while we’re at it)? I’m thinking not. The First Lady, as we’ve been taught to call her, is not the point of the spear the feminist pioneers were hoping for. She has never been elected or appointed to public office or testified before the Congress. She has never run a business or met an employee payroll. She didn’t go to Smith and Harvard L...

  Never thought I’d be doing this, but the clock is ticking and I am no longer in control of a huge work that may suddenly disappear from general public access at any time. It started as a word processing file that discovered spectacular hidden capabilities in Microsoft’s Word 97 software. It was possible to draw images, group individual elements, and attach hyperlinks to other files, enabling an incredibly early prototype of virtual reality. I had been inspired by a videogame named  Myst  and a savage satirical comic book called  Maus  to build a heavily hyperlinked image of a storage room containing links to other “rooms” I might build later to paint a picture of where our whole culture was at the end of the 20th Century. Which is still starkly relevant. All the boxes were clickable. This first drawing took weeks in a slow computer in 1998. A friend lent me a much more powerful computer. Between then and Christmas 1999, I had “drawn” ~3800 massively inter...