Say Hello to Your New Creation

I never blogged about the goofy, somewhat unsatisfying Aimee Mann/Boston Pops concert I went to last month, which is probably for the best. But an old PocketMod that I’m going through right now has reminded me of one strange feature of the experience: I was, without ego, cooler than the vast majority of the concertgoers, although there was admittedly a long tail of lesbians and heroin-chic misfits boosting the variance. Seriously, though, one of the first conversations I overheard when I walked into Boston Symphony Hall went something like this:

A: Everything is 3D, and you put things in piles, just like paper.

B: Cool, cool.

I immediately realized, of course, that they were talking about BumpTop. See? I try to escape the narrow confines of my subjectivity for three goddamn seconds and I just wind up hearing about a fancy new graphical–user-interface prototype that I’d already fucking read about on Lifehacker, kottke.org, Steven Berlin Johnson’s blog, and probably elsewhere too. It’s like I’m living out my own petty version of the anthropic principle. Why is the universe the way it is? Because if it wasn’t, I wouldn’t be here to blog about it.