Louis Rossmann, my spirit animal from the alternate reality where I don’t have a day job and kids, is again speaking some truths. He makes a great argument that we should be pining nostalgic for Clippy1, the dancing paperclip everyone of a certain vintage hated for being naively helpful, as opposed to hating our industry mascots for monetizing your tears or shaming you for not developing an AI-powered weapons platform. Just go have a watch (I’ll ignore the irony of hosting all of this on Youtube for the moment), and of course, change your profile picture to Clippy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_Dtmpe9qaQ
This reminded me to dredge up this utter gem of a Clippy meme animation from a past life. Ahem, it is entirely possible my MSWord was too old to actually have Clippy and I had to resort to my imagination.
(Wait, a piece of software that let you keep using the old version you paid for, when you couldn’t afford the upgrade? Shock! Horror!)
- Yes, technically Microsoft named the assistant Clippit, but nobody else actually called it that. ↩︎
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