Back in 1996, I knew this kid named Worker Ant, or at least that is what I called him. I had a habit of making names for people out of whole cloth, and one day while he was high, him and I came up with the nickname "Worker Ant" for him, based on a mid-90s punk rock song. That's not important. The important thing is, a story he told me about a time he took LSD.

His brother knew Ken Kesey, so perhaps he was closer to the quote about "the kids today lack a sense of religious awe" than I was. But in 1996, computers were still rare enough to carry their own sense of religious awe. So when Worker Ant told me about dropping LSD one night, and watching the snow fall on the entry screen of Jetpack: The Christmas Story, a small shareware game with graphics that were already ten years out of date , slowly piling up white pixel by white pixel until the screen was full sometime around dawn, I didn't find it a complete waste of valuable psychedelic resources.

And now in 2009, well past the Omega Point, I am up not terribly late, having discovered I can set the level of my Linux Burgertime clone arbitrarily high, and watch on the demo as the screen fills with swarming enemies. Enough eggs, peppers and pickles to fill me with a bit of religious awe.

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