T w e n t y S i d e d

I mentioned this last week, but not everyone listens to the podcast. So here is the text version:

One of the great delights of parenthood is introducing someone to candy. You get to be the one to put the very first piece of chocolate in the mouth of another human being. You get to see the look on someone’s face when they discover that chocolate is a thing that exists!!! Granted, they haven’t usually mastered language enough to describe the experience, but (judging by most photo albums) toddler facial expressions are worth a thousand pictures.

Things didn’t work out this way with our oldest. When Bay was growing up she couldn’t tolerate candy. Give her some candy, and twenty minutes later she’s gone red in the face, with dark circles under her eyes, and is engaging in uncharacteristic self-stimming behavior. As a parent, it was pretty unsettling. I’m not going to detail all of our efforts to figure out exactly what things were doing this to her, but it was not a precise process. Eventually we discovered that if we kept her away from corn and the usual food dyes, she was fine.

About the same time, we discovered I couldn’t have corn either. My symptoms were different, but the result was the same: Eat corn, feel terrible.

We called this a “food allergy”, but I’m not convinced this has anything to do with the immune system. Then again, I don’t know what it is. When I was growing up, I never heard of anyone who was “allergic” to corn. That’s crazy! That’s like being allergic to water! But then as the 90s rolled around I’d occasionally hear about people having this problem. Then in the 00s the problem afflicted Bay and I. These days it doesn’t seem uncommon at all. I know several people who can’t touch corn without taking a voyage through the Valley of Regret, down the river of Oh God Why Did I Eat That.

The worst is when I go to a party or family gathering. Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Joy of Candy”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

The modem coughs and screams like someone beatboxing to white noise. Why the shit do modems always default to ear-splitting volume levels, and why can I never remember where you go to change it?

The connection happens and I’m ready to begin work for the day. I open Microsoft Outlook Express, hit “Check Email”, and then brace myself for the worst part of the day.

It’s 1997.

Part of my job involves answering technical questions from our users. This means my email is public. It’s posted on our website, and it’s in my signature on the message board. Which means spam bots have had years to discover it. Which means all the spammers have it. Also, a couple of years ago our company went from free-to-play to a paid model. This pissed people off, and part of the public backlash / protest was that someone signed our emails up for various porn mailing lists.

I don’t know if it’s the mailing lists or the spam bots, but these days I get between one and two hundred emails a day, and 90% of them are advertisements for pornography.

Maybe if you’re young you imagine “porn” means HD video of attractive people doing obvious things that I don’t need to belabor here. But this is 1997, and spammers don’t yet have vast botnets of compromised machines to deliver their spam payload. The internet is slow, bandwidth is expensive, and spammers still sort of pay to send out their spam.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Worst Job”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.