Yeah this weighs on my mind much of the time. We seem to be rapidly descending into neo-feudalism/dark enlightenment /whatever, and I think a lot of people don’t realize it. People giving Elmo money for cybertrucks or model Y with the light bar, voting red, making christo-fascist policies, etc. And a lot people don’t necessarily feel it yet. Some people have a higher salary than before the double salute incident, but those dollars don’t go as far as they used to. Plus global warming acceleration with AI and rolled back policies… Looking back, I think my generation’s future was already going to be troublesome, but with the choices of my own grandparents, some of my peers, and some powerful and evil people, these could be the best years of the rest of our lives.

I try not to be so doomerist on S. M., but the prompt seemed to call for it

The mouse was the rolly ball kind, and you hoped that you were assigned a computer where it still worked properly, or you could arrive in time to grab one where the mouse still worked. Or, if your lunch period coincided with the lab class lunch period, you came in to swap mouses with the bully in the senior class.

Yeah, you could do the thing where you remove the ball and try to clean it, but that only works so much, and for so many times