During one of these visits I noticed that the cat was basically iterating through a loop: sit on my computer, then pounce on my feet, then sit on the window sill, then sit on my computer, then pounce on my feet, etc.  The same three actions, over and over, at a clockwork pace.  You know who acts like this?  Non‐player characters in interactive fiction games act like this!  This was exactly what an IF cat’s daemon routine would look like.

Radio: “…If the moon looks bigger and brighter to you tonight, you’re not imagining things⁠—we’re ringing in the new year with a ‘supermoon’, when the moon appears larger and more luminous due to variations in its orbit around the earth.”

Me: Give me a break. It’s a tiny fraction closer. I’ve seen a million of these⁠—if no one told you about the ‘supermoon’ ahead of time you wouldn’t even notice.

(turns toward gas station exit, looks at horizon)

HOLY FUCKBALLS SUPERMOON

• mixture of milk chocolate and semi‐sweet chocolate
  
• vegan marshmallows
  
• macadamia nuts (more Australian than the alternatives!)
  
• coconut (less than most recipes call for, though)
  
• amarena cherries (because glacé cherries seem to be mostly corn syrup)

And here’s how it turned out:

This dessert was very successful!  Not only was it a tasty treat, but it was super easy to make.  I can easily imagine this becoming a fixture in my dessert rotation.

⁠—wait, what?  Björk is in the same class as Devo and Foreigner?  But… I remember when her first album, which was actually called Debut, came out!  It was 1993!  She is a relative youngling⁠—to be eligible for the Hall in 2002 she would have had to have recorded an album when she was eleven!

…and it turns out that Björk recorded an album when she was eleven.  I had no idea.  Actually, maybe I knew that once and forgot.  But yeah, like, here’s tween Björk singing “The Fool on the Hill” in Icelandic:

So who knows?  Jordy the Singing Baby’s career may have a second act yet!

Thirty years later, I’m standing on the corner in front of the store where the LPs are going for thirty and forty bucks.  Across the street?  Another store with the signs in all the windows declaring “ALL CDS 50¢”.  And by “standing on the corner” I guess I meant “standing on the corner of the cubical globe” because clearly this is Bizarro World.

The ’60s:  Before Amazon and Microsoft, Seattle was known as the home of Boeing, and the team was named after the supersonic Boeing 2707 (which was canceled before actually being built).  Correspondingly, this first logo looks like it belongs to an aerospace company.  The font actually looks pretty sharp to me, but I can see how in the ’70s it might be deemed too corporate.

The ’70s:  So here we have a chunky, funky font with gaudy stripes like a ’70s tie, with hornlike S’s reflecting a rebranding from aerospace to music.  This may have struck people as groovy in 1971 but when I saw this as a kid in the ’80s I laughed and laughed.

The ’80s:  On the other hand, as a kid in the ’80s I was always wowed by this lettering⁠—I didn’t know what Helvetica was, but I knew that this looked crisp and modern and was obviously a dramatic improvement over the goofy logo with the saxophones.  But then by the time the ’90s rolled around, this did seem like it was showing its age.  In an era full of colorful, cartoony logos boasting growling mascots and Adobe Illustrator effects, the Sonics offered a sedentary wordmark and a city skyline with exactly one distinctive building in it.

The ’90s:  So this looked like a huge upgrade!  Swooping!  Three‐dimensional!  Fun!  And colorful, though even at the time I was dubious: the red seemed like a mistake, and the brown seemed like a catastrophe.  Anyway, this turns out to be a perfect example of something that looked amazing when it debuted and then looked like an embarrassing relic about five minutes later.

The 21st century:  Thus, this logo was pretty much universally applauded when it replaced the ’90s logo; people said that it struck a good balance between jazziness and restraint, and that it paid homage to the skyline logo without being poisoned by that logo’s ’80s‐ness.  This logo premiered in 2001, so it’s likely that some aspect of it would by now have been deemed in need of freshening up.  (Instead the team got moved to Oklahoma City under, shall we say, eyebrow‐raising circumstances.)

So here’s my question: if you were to travel back in time and show a recent logo to designers from the past, what would they make of it?  If you went back to 1967 as the original swoop was being drawn up and showed the artists the swooping ’90s logo, would they gasp and say, “That’s generations ahead of anything we’ve ever seen!”, or would they consider it a garish monstrosity?  If you went back to 1975 and offered fans a choice of the ’80s skyline logo or the 2001 update, which one would they actually consider more modern?  And how would we today rate a logo from 2040 against a logo from 2060?

(I actually had a second example, but I ran out of time before I could complete it, so I decided to save it for later rather than posting it unfinished.  Maybe next month!)