When I was a kid I took piano lessons. Although whenever I learned, I didn't really use a real piano. I used a keyboard. Now for those of you who are not familiar with the disk with the difference, a piano has wait behind the keys while a keyboard does not necessarily have weight behind the keys. Some keyboards will, like a piano, increase the volume of the key based on how hard you strike it; but that does not mean that there is weight backing up the key when you hit it. So I would go to music stores and inevitably find myself in the section with keyboards. And at one point in time I found the Korg m1 keyboard or was it the Korg m3? Regardless I found out some time before the age of 12 how to change the sounds on the "percussion" instruments. and on the second or third page of the percussion instruments there were two keys which I found endlessly fascinating. Such that every single time I found a Korg m3, I would immediately switch or swap to the right pages and play with these keys. They were right next to each other making for a very convenient sound. One was a woosh, the other a crack. It was a whip crack much like you hear in baby got back and I would play these sounds basically endlessly in the back room, as I recall it, of music stores because it was immensely fun. Years later I would come to make the same sound only this time with a real whip.

As a teen, my parents once grounded me by taking away all my books and not letting me read anything but school books for a month (or more?). The decision had some interesting effects...

It was highly devastating to my urge to read. I was a voracious reader of all types and genres beforehand. It was years before I read fiction books for pleasure again, and then, I only re-read my favorites in my favorite genre. Websites, nonfiction, and nonfiction magazines weren't affected as much. I realized much later on that this was a type of trauma reaction. I eventually resumed reading outside of those boxes, within the last 2 to 3 years.

It took my parents several hours and over a dozen boxes to box up my extensive collection of books.

I took possession of the boxes some months after the grounding. But, except for a few of my most prized books (first edition, first printings of books by my favorite author), I have never unboxed them. The punishment took place nearly 2 decades ago, now. And, sure, not all of them are useful now (child editions of encyclopedias, and the like), there is enough nostalgia that I should... But it just hurts too much.

I said all of that to say this... Drastic punishments of a child can have some unintended consequences. A similarly traumatic elimination of technology at the wrong age might limit his technological proficiency... A key enabler of middle-class and upper-middle-class jobs.

spiralwitch being talked about by 4 people in Atlanta, tonight.

:-P

"When there is no enemy within, the enemies outside cannot hurt you."
-- Winston Churchill

Some people are goofy naturally; others act goofy to garner attention or to seem endearing.

Authentic goofy is endearing in ways that inauthentic goofy can only dream of.