One day my friends and I were a bunch of geeky kids. Then, before we knew it, we were working at places like Bungie, Six Apart, and The Omni Group. Shishka, hachi, and I really all landed at our ideal companies. We have the kinds of jobs our past selves would have chosen, given the chance to work anywhere. For years I knew hachi as a guy who worked so that he could survive to hack Perl and build contraptions. Now his job *is* to hack Perl and build contraptions. Here’s the telephone they set up to make voice posts directly to [LiveJournal](http://sixaphone.livejournal.com/).

I have no end of fondness for [Warhammer 40,000](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warhammer_40%2C000) and the Games Workshop hobby in general. For a couple of years in high school, much of my time and disposable income went toward buying, building, painting, and fielding a nearly-undefeated Tyranid army. I haven’t collected or played since then, but I occasionally check back on the hobby to see how it’s doing. They have updated the Tyranids a lot since I played, there are lots of big, official campaigns whose outcomes are determined by individual players in hobby shops around the world, and the lore seems as thrilling as ever. In San Francisco, we found a Games Workshop retail store with a life-sized Blood Angels Space Marine. Dang Space Marines; to this day the sight of one makes me want to send a brood of Genestealers ahead to slash up their armor.