I wrote some code to embed my tweets on my website.
There's a statement that would have made no sense in 1990.
Actually, it barely makes sense now. But I did it. I'm proud
of my site. I built it myself. Occasionally
I get an email saying, "What software do you
use to run your site and how do I get it?" I think the answer is:
receive a Commodore 64 for your tenth birthday and no good
games.

But that's not why I'm writing. I'm writing because I decided
to grow my own vegetables. A few people I knew were growing
their own vegetables, and they kept yakking about
how wonderful it was, not depending on manufactured
supermarket vegetables, which are evil for some reason,
so I thought what the hell.

For a while I was intimidated by the idea of growing
vegetables. When I reach for a vegetable, I usually just want
to eat it. I don't want to be intimately involved with its creation.
I worried I would end up spending more time tending
to the health of fragile, overly complicated peas than eating them.

Then I saw an ad for genetically modified seeds. These
promised to take the hassle out of growing vegetables,
which seemed pretty intriguing. The tomatoes would be big and red
and I wouldn't have to do anything. So I got those.

This upset my hippy friends. Especially when I started
having problems. My frankenfruit was supposed
to be simple but after a few weeks the whole garden stopped
growing. My cabbages were flaccid. My carrots were anemic.
My spinach wouldn't self-seed. It wasn't supposed to self-seed.
The genetics company had engineered it not to,
so I'd have to buy new seeds each season. But I thought there should be
a way around that.

I asked my hippy friends for help.
Well! You'd think I asked for a kidney.
They kept bringing up the fact that I was using GM seeds.
Eventually they all got together and said, "Max… we can't
help you any more. We want to. But you brought these
problems on yourself. And the thing is,
when you ask for help,
you're actually asking us to use our skills and knowledge
to prop up a corporatized product that's not just practically
inferior to the free alternative you ignored, but actually
bad for the world. We just can't do that."

And that was how I taught them to stop asking me for help
with Windows.