Even though I haven't blogged regularly in a year or two, I still keep a running list of blog post ideas in OmniFocus—in the hopes that I can shame myself into writing, maybe? (I'm sorry, Brené Brown.) Some of the ideas will require many weeks of thoughtful drafting and editing to do them justice, some have long since expired and will never see the light of day, and a few are just hot takes that I will now share with reckless abandon.

• Audiobooks are not the same as traditional books. If you love audiobooks, rock on. I have no beef with you or your audiobooks. But to say that the two things are interchangeable is a lie. I pick up so many new words by seeing them spelled out in written text, and (here is the heart of the issue) half of the fun of reading a good book for me is seeing and appreciating the punctuation. I would miss all of that with audiobooks, so as long as I have my eyesight, I will be banning all audiobooks from my library.
• Surviving a bitter winter will make you a better person. I have a loosely developed theory that cities like San Francisco and Portland are filthy because the weather is too moderate. In Chicago, you cannot leave your mounds of dirty man-child laundry all over the damn street because Winter Is Coming™. You cannot live under a bridge forever and call it "art" or "the next start-up" because Winter Is Coming™. You have to sort your shit out at least by September every year if you are going to survive, and the result is a community of fierce—albeit slightly insane—people who have a much firmer grasp on reality (and who get to live in a clean city).
• Self-driving cars should be focused exclusively on elderly and special needs people first. To think that able-bodied individuals will cede control to a robot without question is naïve. But if you offered my blind but independent grandmother a way to get out of the house again, she would bake you cinnamon rolls every day for the rest of your life. She's 91 years old but stubborn enough to outlive you to fulfill that promise. And the same could be said for the millions of people who are perfectly capable of navigating their everyday lives but who cannot drive due to (short-term or long-term) physical, mental, or emotional limitations.
• Tickling is a form of torture. I had many recurring nightmares as a child, and one of them was a dream about the Wicked Witch from The Wizard of Oz, who would sneak into my bedroom and tickle me with very long fingernails until I couldn't breathe. I would wake up in a panic—sweating and screaming—which should tell you how much I hated it. (My mom eventually recommended pouring water on the witch to melt her the next time I had the dream. I did, and I never had the dream again. Thanks, Mom.)

To hold a child so that it cannot get away and tickle it until it screams with laughter is a wretched form of amusement. OH1909

— R.L. Ripples (@TweetsofOld) May 31, 2016

• People who do gross shit on airplanes should be put in sky jail. A year ago, I was on a flight back from San Francisco to Chicago. There were six seats in a row, three on either side of the aisle. The two seats closest to me were empty, but after the flight took off, a woman from across the aisle moved over and settled in. By "settled in," I mean that she took off her shoes and her socks and put her bare feet on the seat between us and then proceeded to scratch her feet and legs for two full hours—dead skin flying in every direction—while I gave her every glare and horrified, angry, murderous nonverbal signal in the book. Every single part of that is an actual crime, and I want her to pay for her crimes.