You'll never guess what happened today at the baseball game

[austin_dern]

I have a twin.

Not literally; for one, I've got several twins. These are people on the Internet who, by whatever process creates personalities, are strikingly like me. The Internet's ability to concentrate people by interests, regardless of place, brings me to them. One of them's uncannily close. For much of the 90s we kept going into a new Usenet group to find the other was there. Sometimes we found we'd joined almost the same date. I think we discovered once we'd both first posted to alt.fan.conan-obrien within hours of each other. (And like a day after one of the group's stalwarts first posted.) We even have birthdays the same week of September. One of the big reasons bunny_hugger and I are in pinball leagues are that she was fascinated by his live-tweeting his pinball league nights, and was primed to look for ones that might be tolerably near us.

We went like this for decades, Internet-inseparable but never meeting, since we happened to be in different parts of the country and had little reason to travel to another's. And then we were suddenly set to meet, in Pittsburgh, at a major convention in the David Lawrence Convention Center. No, not Anthrocon, somehow. At Pinburgh, the largest pinball tournament in the world. We hadn't coordinated plans. bunny_hugger and I had decided to go to the event for the first time this year. So did he. Of course we would. What else would make sense?

And then the plans suddenly shifted. My twin --- JIM, in competitive pinball --- asked if we'd want to take in a Pirates game the day before Pinburgh started. Might be fun but we didn't think we could set out early enough for that. We didn't want to have our pet rabbit away from home the extra day that would require; we weren't sure enough he could take the trip we had planned. He accepted this with good grace. A day later he asked just how close we were to the Lansing Lugnuts' stadium. We're in walking distance of the minor-league ballpark. Often we hear the fireworks from their Friday night games. He was going to be in Lansing, as part of a tour of baseball parks he was doing ahead of Pinburgh.

So our first meeting after twenty years of Internet twinship would come a couple days ahead of plans after all.

Trivia: Humans have about nine hundred genes with a role in detecting scents, but roughly sixty percent of them are too defective for any proteins to be copied from them. Source: Oxygen: The Molecule that Made the World, Nick Lane.

Currently Reading: How The Post Office Created America: A History, Winifred Gallagher.

Comments

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

Seems to be a good time for Ultimate Meetings™ - I finally got to meet bunnyhalberd last Sunday, after quite a few years of SL/LJ. (Remarkably, I was actually still perfectly up for scampering around the Bay, despite having had a very beery Friday, and then Saturday marked by clambering up to Inspiration Point with the explicit intent of capturing a semi-decent panorama from there, having only managed a rather murky attempt in 2011. And the second version is currently churning through the other cores)

Of course, this brings me back to Singapore.. ^_^ I'm hoping to bring Mum over there sometime before long - she's not as quick on her feet as she once was, and the sheer density of stuff there suggests to me it could be a pretty fun place to introduce her to - and certainly, the furthest she's been away. Have you been back since your time there? Might bunny_hugger be interested in such a jaunt? Assuming fiscal prudence, and a good bunsitter, of course.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Oh, splendid. Hope the meeting was worth the wait.

I have not been back to Singapore, although I've been tempted sometimes. It's just always seemed too expensive if I have to foot the whole bill myself. There is certainly enough to interest bunny_hugger there, just in the Tiger Balm Gardens alone. But she has, at least by some measures, been farther away: she went to a conference in Newcastle, New South Wales, several years ago and got to learn what long-haul air travel is really like. She ... survived, at least.