Wired

I used to have subscriptions to lots of different magazines, but I quickly realized that I wasn’t reading most of them and so it was not only a waste of money, but the unread magazines would pile up and clutter the house. So now I’m basically down to two, the Economist and Wired. We may still have a subscription to Scientific America, but it should be about to expire, and I used to have subscriptions to Dungeon and Dragon but Wizards/Hasbro yanked the print license from Paizo so the last issues of both magazines arrived just this month (and yeah they’re supposed to end up on the Wizards website, but that doesn’t really count, and yeah my remaining credit with Paizo translated into a Pathfinder subscription, but with a cover price of $19.99 that’s more of a book then a magazine…)

Anyway to return to my point only two magazines have survived the culling, The Economist and Wired, I’ve talked about the appeal of The Economist in previous blogs, but what’s the appeal of Wired? (you might ask) Well for one thing it’s really cheap, you can basically get a year of it for ten bucks. Of course that wouldn’t be sufficient, it’s also got really great articles, both short visual ones and longer investigative ones as well. There was an article in the September issue that my wife and I found utterly fascinating. I can’t really do it justice so I suggest you go read it yourself. Basically it starts out as your standard story of an older guy pretending to be someone younger and meeting a 17 year old girl, but it has some very interesting twists and turns before the end.

I also like the short visual articles, though I have to confess their section expired, tired or wired generally makes me feel out of touch, since whatever I like generally ends up in the expired column… This is not to say that I ever believed I was hip, more that I always felt I had a certain cache in the geeky community Wired primarily covers, but I guess now I’ve grown out of even that tiny slice of faux-coolness. In the tradition of many other magazines (in particular I’m reminded of the now-defunct Omni’s Anti-Matter column) their last page is given over to humor. Every episode ends with an image entitled “Artifacts From the Future” where you are, presumably, show an picture taken sometime decades from now. The current issue has someone celebrating their 150th birthday and receiving a gift certificate for “telomeric extension gene therepy”. The card is also signed “hapy birfday g4pa!” I’m not sure if that means he’s the child’s great-great-great-great grandpa or just his great-great-great grandpa…

Not likely to see triple digits