“Dammit, Floodedwomb! I’m a Doctor, not a Husband!”

Regarding your Robert Engel from previously, there’s a whole load of artists historically, who have virtually no information about them. If they weren’t famous whilst alive, who would bother to write down a biography at the time? Afterwards, you’re left with researching records from census, school, sales, newspapers, possible living relatives etc.

A lot of museums and galleries with permanent collections have 3 to 50 times as much stuff in stores as is on display. You’re not allowed to get rid of anything, but any year, you might receive another truck-load of badly labelled and badly maintained artworks from some rich bloke’s private collection, or someone’s tax write-off. You’d have to choose which ones get processed or researched first (after the existing backlog). Sometimes the information just isn’t there though - that’s why you get all those works that just get labelled “Unknown Man with a blue hat, likely Dutch School, circa 1650s”.

I think the information and documentation of such things is actually getting better, compared to pre-internet, certainly - but yeah, some people will have no information, and some will have information, but it’s still in a paper folder, waiting for someone to type it up :)

“Hi, you left this open, so me and the kids moved in”

Back in my day, we had to hand-draw our memes in the back of school textbooks, then wait until next time we had a lesson in there to see if anyone had seen it.

According to the best school playground scientists of the time, opening a packet of crisps upside down (i.e. so the branding/writing is upside down, and you open the bottom of the packet, at the top) actually “made you gay”.

It wasn’t just gay if you did it, but it would literally cause a spontaneous eruption of gayness in whoever did it - who would be permanently gay from that point onwards.

In the 1990s in the UK, it was gay to wear a backpack using both shoulder straps (as opposed to using one strap over one shoulder, which was the heterosexual way to carry things to school).

Is it a weird guilt thing?

I hated that song when the programme was new, but now I feel guilty about it, because someone was trying their best, and they wrote, re-wrote, edited and worked on that song and for every instrument and vocal, someone practised and practised and performed, and even if it wasn’t quite to my taste, it doesn’t mean it was bad, and I picture them still crying themselves to sleep at night, twenty years later, going “everyone hates the song I did for Star Trek Enterprise and now I hate myself”, so I make sure to watch the full intro so I don’t hurt their feelings.

That’s what everyone else does too, right?