I’ve been cataloguing culture since the late 90s when I stole my dad’s digital camera and drove around the city capturing local flavor. Recently, I discovered one of these old cameras with memory card intact and transferred it to my computer. This card was from 2010, it contained photos and videos of Berlin and Los Angeles.

On it, was this picture of some personalized pencils I saw at a shop in Silver Lake.

Flash forward 6 years.

I was thinking about the loss of handwriting all week, then found myself at For Your Art and Good Reads Artists & Writers event last night.

10 YEARS LATER.

A day after I finished my first draft. The interesting thing about finishing these posts years, hell, decades later, is that if you find them, they’re just buried within my site. So unless you scroll down to the bottom of the post, you won’t know that I never finished them until now.

I wonder now if the gist of what I was writing about was getting to the idea that in the future we wouldn’t just have personalized pencils, but we’d have personalized stylus’. Is the plural of that styli? Nowadays, reviewing the list of offerings at the 2026 CES, I begin to think it’s just embedding your finger with some signature sensor beyond your fingerprint. Bodytech is here.

Last night, we were discussing things we didn’t learn as children, specifically about money and investment. But upon reading the Wikipedia page on fingerprinting, I realize I know very little about the history of the ancient practice. That said, it’s logical that it has been discussed for thousands of years. But it’s been only since the late 1600s that the structure of fingerprints were identified and it took another 150 years for the 9 ridge details to get recognition. Still it wasn’t until the late 19th century where the statistical modeling of fingerprinting was stated that there was a 1 in 64 billion probability of 2 people having the same fingerprint.  Thinking about all these facts another 125 years later, I wonder how we still have so much fraud if fingerprinting is supposedly so unique, but then I learned about people erasing their fingerprints, and about how similar koala fingerprints are to humans.

I guess it’s ok I want my personalized engraved stylus after all. I would probably lose it quickly unless I wore it as a necklace. Although I wish it could have those Caran D’Ache watercolor pencil features where if you dip your pencil into water it turns it into paint. Ok to dream?