Saturday, April 18, 2009

Live! From B.U.! It's ...

In this world, few things are sadder than the library on a Saturday night.

Tonight, however, I actually found one of those things.

I left the library circa 8 p.m. for a short break in the cafeteria where I would get what BU charitably and misleadingly calls dinner.

And, in the cafeteria, dozens of kids were participating in some kind of “Dungeons and Dragons” tournament. At least, I think it was Dungeons and Dragons. I thought nerds stopped playing that years ago in favor of more modern things like Halo and Warcraft.

In any case, I looked at them, rolling twelve-sided dice and advancing their mages, with a mixture of equal parts pity and sadness.

And then I stopped abruptly. Because I realized that they were giving me back the exact same look.

And, you know what? They probably would have given me the same look if I had stumbled in drunk with a little bit of someone else’s puke on my shoe.

There might be a great, cosmic point to all this, but maybe I’m just delirious from teaching myself all day about legislative vetoes and statutory preclusion of judicial review for agency decisions.

In any case, I’m a little grateful for the experience. This damned library suddenly doesn’t look so alien anymore. Even with all the LLMs.

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