I'm not on excellent terms with my body, but if I stay moderately clean and flood my sinus cavity with jets of warm saline it is generally able to withstand illness. Not so for my collaborator, whose earthly form is now being converted entirely into mucus.
He is the one who invented the Iron Guard Position, a ritual designed to provide a bulwark against plague, but it can be very difficult to maintain this policy in an actual social situation. There is something screwed deep down into me that recoils against refusing a gift freely offered, even if that gift is a person's living hand, perhaps especially then. There's also the fact that I literally upload .jpegs for a living, and I can only do that because the person extending their hand to me likes some percentage of the .jpegs I upload. Turning it down seems churlish; I don't know. Touching people is definitively unsafe and obviously this is how Rome ended but I feel like raw pragmatism doesn't have the answer here.
There is an Enforcer with whom I share an abiding love of what is called the Demoscene, which typed out looks like it might be pronounced "dem-ah-sin-ay," like a Latin thing, when it's really just the words Demo and Scene squooshed together. The Demo being referred to here was initially a kind of hi-tech, codified greeting that danced and sang in the period before your pirated game booted up. They would call out other crews by name, heaping scorn upon vile "lamers" in impossibly smooth bouncing text. Eventually, the pirated software became almost vestigial compared to the quest for hardware mastery and the two forms were decoupled. There are working game companies you have absolutely heard of that came up in this renegade form, and more than twenty years hence I'm still completely transported by them.
I assured this Enforcer that I would attend the showing of Moleman 2 - Demoscene - The Art of the Algorithms he'd set up at PAX Easter, though I didn't actually show, not because I didn't want to but because of an issue we may have discussed previously re: linear time. As penance, I've done what I can to make sure that as many people who want to see it can see it, or even download it and keep a copy, because it's on some Creative Commons shit. There's torrent up with your choice of versions inside, one over at YouTube, and a version you can watch or download at Vimeo.
Take the time; this is stuff worth knowing.
(CW)TB out.
