Another day, another #moralpanic about Those #Kids These Days and all the #Crazy Stuff They Say On The #Internet.

Forty years ago (!) I was a fourteen-year-old #JROTC cadet, in the last great hot time of the #ColdWar, obsessed with reading #SoldierOfFortune. I was also an early adopter of what’s now called social media.

They were called bulletin board systems, or #BBSs for short. Usually somebody’s home computer with a few phone lines coming in. You’d dial the number, wait for the screech to come through the handset, slam the handset into the modem’s acoustic coupler, and … magic happened.

On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. But on BBSs, they sure knew you were a kid—the more so the more you tried to hide it. Not that many of the adults were much more mature, but I digress.

See, kids do kid things. In my case, as the abovementioned 14-year-old SOF-reading cadet, it was the signature I appended to every post: “Dan the #Merc.”

There. That’s a thing you know now.

Can you imagine anything cooler? Anything tougher? Anything more ABSOLUTELY BADASS? Wait, don’t answer that. You in the back, stop snickering.

Relax. Kids grow up.

A bunch of moves with team management the last couple days, so Mercedes posts this today, hehe. #F1 #Merc @sanxion