My drug of choice is information. I consume it. When I was a kid I read the encyclopedia. As an adult I read Wikipedia. I can’t sleep if I’m thinking about something and don’t know the answer. I have a problem with essentially jacking in to the internet and slamming my hooks into it like a monstrous Lovecraftian parasite, draining it for all I can before dragging my gorged body off to the next locus of trivia.

Fun mental image, isn’t it?

As you might guess this drive not only served me well as a historian, it probably made me one in the first place. It’s also one of the reasons I’ve always joked bitterly that if they can ever place a modem directly in a person’s brain I’ll be one of the first in line, just so that I never have to spend a bare instant not knowing who was in that movie that one time. I will drive myself mad with power.

Reality is getting closer and closer to making that happen. I now have a broadband internet connection on my person at all times. I’m resisting it so far, but it’s there. Taunting me.

It’s amazing how things become commonplace. A decade ago 56k was still awesome. Then broadband at all was good. Then Wi-Fi was amazing. Now, I don’t even think about having a 6 megabit connection shared throughout my entire domicile accessible via my laptop wherever I am. But once…once it was magic. And in my pocket is more bandwidth equal to what my family’s DSL line was for the first year or so we were in Jasper. It’s still ‘cool’ for right now, but in a few years, at most, it’ll fade. Hopefully by then my sunglasses will have Firefox.