Yes, let's name our serious product the "RedPill" phone, that will get us taken seriously in at least one community which I am sure isn't notorious for anything.

"I'm over 50" As am I. Closing in on 60 these days at 57. Each year that passes I care less and less about the adherence to any canon of anything I grew up with that shaped me and that I loved, and much that I still love. In particular I do not care at all about pointing out how "It's not like the _________ I grew up with / remember." I certainly had my stage of being that person. But I had a stage of being a misogynist as well. And I had a stage of being a Randian as well. And as a hardcore libertarian as well. I have had many stages, and it turns out, what I have found out along my own way is that each stage is just that, a stage. An era for me. And I change. The world changing around me happens, and I have the choice to rage at them or embrace them. Like everyone, of course, I do need to look at changes and ask myself questions, my own questions. Questions about humanity. And human empathy. About justice to the individual and the culture the individual comes from.

Having grown up conservative in Alabama and routed to a Baptist church every Sunday, but then embracing afternoon reruns of Star Trek and weekends of movie-going to any movie my parents would drop me off to see, as well as seeking comics and science fiction whenever possible, it is no surprised I grew up with a lot of philosophical inner conflict. I used to lament the inner conflict in myself and ask why I couldn't just make a choice and stick with it about things. Used to. Frankly, that inner conflict is who I am. I feel no need as I get older to hold on to anything that touched me deeply as a child, teenager, young adult, adult, middle-age person, etc. so tightly that it causes me to feel a need to expend energy to bring up picking the nits of any new interpretation of it. For many reasons. At every present moment I am an ever changing culmination of those things. And at every present moment I am changing from that person I was into someone new. It feels natural now to see those things, when they are revisited by me or by their creators, in the light of new interpretations. Do I ask of myself or require myself to embrace them all? Not at all. I simply tell myself "Well, this one is not for who I am now. But it may be for someone else." A current example: I watched the preview for the new Interview with a Vampire, and it is not for me, but it may be for someone else. I may give it a chance. It may surprised me.

Then again, I am always amused at adherence to canon. Especially when I think about The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy going through radio, book, tv, and movie iterations and Adams himself changing major points along the way for all of them, but without the internet being available during the time he did the first three major iterations. He just got to do it without the collective voices of the public harrumphing about how he changed things.

When I look back at myself harrumphing at the Star Wars prequels and now seeing a collective group of Star Wars fans embracing those as their own Star Wars that were special to them, I feel like it was certainly an interesting stage for myself to be a canon harrumpher at that point. But not now. Enjoy your stages harrumphing. I just hope that this isn't your last stage. A long life of harrumphing at how it isn't the one you grew up on seems like a long, unhappy, frustrating life.

How about those "I'm interested in buying your house!" texts and postcards next, please?