Paul Ford, writing for medium.com:
This is what I remembered right then: That before my wife got pregnant we had been trying for kids for years without success. We had considered giving up.
That was when I said to my wife: If we do not have children, we will move somewhere where there is a porch. The children who need love will find the porch. They will know how to find it. We will be as much parents as we want to be.
And when she got pregnant with twins we needed the right-sized doll to rehearse diapering. I went and found that bear in an old box.
I was handed that toy, sitting on Tom’s porch, in 1992. A person offering another person a piece of advice. Life passed through that object as well, through the teddy bear as much as through the operating systems of yore.
Now that I have children I can see how tuned they are to the world. Living crystals tuned to all manner of frequencies. And how urgently they need to be heard. They look up and they say, look at me. And I put my phone away.
And when they go to bed, protesting and screaming, I go to mess with my computers, my old weird imaginary emulated computers. System after system. I open up these time capsules and look at the thousands of old applications, millions of dollars of software, but now it can be downloaded in a few minutes and takes up a tiny portion of a hard drive. It’s all comically antiquated.
If art is that which instills in others the emotions felt by the artist, then this, to me, is art.
Some of the comments on Hacker News are also worth reading.