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Paying the Paper

Sunday has been laundry day for the past decade, but I still haven’t managed to develop the habit thoroughly checking every single pocket as each load goes in.  Due to this, I’ve been able to observe the decreasing quality of Kleenex over the years.  Whereas they used to demonstrate much integrity, coming out of the wash intact (if a bit thinned), they now invariably reduce themselves to clingy shreds.

I’m still quite fond of my Hipster PDA, but I haven’t been quite as good about ‘backup’, shall we say, as I might have been.  Some time ago, @MindPerfHacks twittered:

Writing in longhand is useful and fun, but it must eventually be transcribed, a production phase known as “time to pay the paper”.

This, dear readers, is the wages of laziness:

Shreds of Memory

The picture above portrays every single piece of text I could salvage after failing to check my jeans pocket before tossing them in the laundry.  From these shards, I was able to reconstruct notes on:

  • A roguelike MMO based on a combination of Dwarf Fortress and Pokethulhu
  • Speculations on what an ornithopter-like vehicle that mimics the flight characteristics of bats might be called (a ‘chiropteropter’? a ‘desmodontopter’?  a ‘noctiliopter’?)
  • Ideas for a mental “hash function” to remember website passwords

I’ll never knows what else was lost, alas.

Note to self: regularly upload everything from the Hipster into org-mode.

Second note: do not record the above note only in the Hipster!

2 replies on “Paying the Paper”

Aw, dude. I’m sorry. I once lost the over 400 original numbered notes to GameFrame when I dropped my moleskine (or someone thought it was a wallet and picked my pocket).

My heart bleeds. My brain bleeds.

Get back to work on some of that stuff. It sounds great.

That’s seriously harsh. I was fortunate that I only had a couple of week’s worth of notes in that batch, and nothing so systematic as your disaster. On the other hand, the thought of losing my Moleskine is marrow-chilling. I’m definitely going to be spending some quality transcription time this weekend.