I have tried to remember...the before-time. So far I can't. We can't. Going backwards, our sense of continuous memory craps out around 1981. There are curious lacunae and details that don't quite make sense. I thought I remembered watching a lunar eclipse in December 1979, for a long time, but no such eclipse exists; the nearest match is 1982. I distinctly remember news of the Pope getting shot in 1981, but not Reagan getting shot a few months earlier.

My RL parents, in their frequent arguments, occasionally alluded to past events that I should have remembered. Apparently I was injured in some sort of...incident that my mother held over my father's head for long afterwards, a la The Shining. Frisk, who's about two and a half years older, ought to remember more but I think they'd rather not.

What am I even trying to recall? If I could put it into the best words I have...I suppose I'd like to remember if I was happy at some point. I remember mostly being confused and baffled by the world, not hopeful or trusting. Surely there was some time, some extremely youthful time, when I experienced what "normal" children supposedly experience, the innocence that all the reactionaries scream about protecting. Those people's notions of childhood are a mystery to me because I cannot remember ever feeling that way.

But I must have...right? Nobody is born miserable, right?

~Chara of Pnictogen

I am tired of feeling, week after week, that we are on the pitch of some crucial breakthrough, some convergence or completion, without ever arriving. plainly we are missing something—some obstacle, some unfulfilled duty, something. ~Chara

Contemporary American society, if no one else, has been generally taught that there's no sensible danger to being surrounded by consumer electronics and continually bathed in artificial electromagnetic fields, spanning a vast range of wavelengths, from 60 Hz house-current radiations to the extremities of microwave communication. We put microwave transceivers in our bedrooms and hold them next to our heads. We spend hours a day staring at unnatural sources of visible illumination as well. I daresay that humanity still hasn't quite adjusted to the sudden explosion in computer-display technology. I still remember when it was a novelty to put forty lines of text on a TV or monitor. In my early college years, an 800x600 monitor could still seem a bit extravagant. Then I put my head down for a bit, lifted it back up again, and suddenly there was 2400x1080 on a pocket telephone. Most of us, if we're privileged enough to have free access to such equipment, fearlessly spend a majority of our lives in close proximity to it, drinking it in.

The standard line, the word of public scientific authority, is that there's no significant danger. The energies involved are small, not enough to risk danger of tissue damage through thermal heating, and such low-energy photons scarcely interfere with chemical reactions. All the same, the human body does function as an antenna. It's a mass of material with certain electrical properties; it's bound to have a certain specific cross-section for electromagnetic radiations, an absorption spectrum. So where does the energy go? It's small, apparently not grossly harmful, but...what's it actually doing?

I have had one of my many fascinating conversations with Gravislizard about the state of technology, especially the state of contemporary American kitchen technology, which is woeful for anyone who does not have a lot of money. If you have a well-paid desk job you can buy the professional stuff and have a team of laborers install it for you. If you're a clerk or a seamstress or whatever, you use whatever bottom-grade equipment the landlord was willing to provide—no doubt feeling themselves very generous about what little they provide.

Obviously the Good Stuff™ has been kept deliberately expensive, but even in the high-end kitchen equipment there's a startling paucity of true technological advancement. Luxury more often means simply more polish—finer materials, slicker panel controls, more electronic features, but still roughly the same heating or cleaning technology. The introduction of induction heating is about the only major change in kitchen technology I can think of. Surely this field is NOT actually exhausted?

Here I'm reminded of a line from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, when Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo have arrived at a high-end Vegas nightclub where Debbie Reynolds is doing the floor show: "The place fairly reeked of high-grade formica and plastic palm trees." The general level of Vegas interior décor is so hopelessly chintzy and tacky that even a slight improvement in styling, like "high-grade formica", counts as a major improvement, enough to justify premium pricing. As wealth inequality worsens, it's easier to sell less for more, and that's contributed I think to a general stagnation in American consumer technology. Newness and novelty are getting increasingly constricted, confined to a few high-profile computer gadgets, automobiles, and entertainment gear. People have been taught to think of these as "technology", not the stuff in their kitchens or bathrooms.

There's been so much horseshit slung about by political commentators and politicians about the power of the consumer—ugh, both my sibling Frisk and I fell for that shit hard during our childhoods, because we were civic-minded kids and wanted to "make a difference". Mostly this is so economic woes can be blamed on consumers, who are apparently to blame for recessions and inflation and other economic evils. But supposedly "the consumer" has a superpower: the ability to tell "the market" what they want to buy, with the power of purse.

Now...tell me. How does a consumer somehow convince the kitchen-appliance industry to make a new sort of washing machine? That's ridiculous. They'd practically have to beg a congressman or a big-name capitalist to take their side—those are about the only people in the world I can think of who'd have enough influence over an entire industry. Oh, I suppose the financebros and conservatives would shout: start your own washing-machine business! At this point there's not much to do except disintegrate into laughter, mixed with the occasional howl of grief.

~Chara of Pnictogen