Our youths and wildness shall no whit appear, but all be buried in his gravity

Today, I turned 25, which I am pretty sure makes me even more officially an adult than when I first got paid employment and my own apartment.  I look forward to shamelessly exploiting the dignity of being old for rhetorical force in arguments and at ending a bit of a streak of dull ages (now I’ve got a square number, next year is eh, but then I have a cube and then a prime).

In case anyone is interested in buying me books for my birthday, I keep an Amazon wish list here, and it includes things like The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth: An Essay in Orthodox Theodicy in Twelve Letters, and Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots.

But I also recommend you buy yourself books for my birthday, and consider getting Arcadia by Tom Stoppard, Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter, The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison, both In the Night Garden and In the City of Coin and Spice by Catherynne Valente or The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis (but opt for one day shipping on that last, so you can read it while the related posts run this week).