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You know what they say: we’re flexible and pliant in our youth, but as we age our minds get more made up, and we become rigid and calcified, mentally as well as physically. Well, we’re pleased to say, Bast has beat the odds! Sadly, creating art seems to have had little to do with it. Compare the first photo, posted to Acheron circa 1998, with the second from just last year (actually, it looks kind of like in the first, she is coiled like a spring, released in the second… SPROING!): she hasn’t aged, only matured like a fine wine. (And like a tannic red, as you can plainly see, she is fully capable of knocking your ass to the floor.) As a bonus, you can observe her in the fullness of life in the third photo casually doing two things simultaneously, neither of which I have ever or will ever be able to achieve: resting in an unsupported splits position, while simultaneously appreciating the finer points of Immanuel Kant’s Lectures on Ethics. (Me, I can barely manage to lie down flat on the ground with Thus Spoke Zarathustra splayed open across my face.)

If only we could credit involvement in the artscene for this apparent elixir of youthfulness (demoparties can stimulate both worlds, blowing minds with 16k programs while getting swole throwing hard drives – or undertaking crazy prize-winning wild compo activities), but research suggests it probably has more to do with lots of stretching, rock climbing, and long wilderness hikes with some very good dogs, but it goes to show that it pays off to balance the internal life with a vigorous external one: we may be going bald and lumpy but its still not to late to switch to an ergonomic keyboard or transition to a standing desk… or at least log a few levels on Zombies Run or Pokémon Go 8)

Bonus: philosophy is something that’s hard to depict in a photograph, but here’s a recent interview with her in which you can subtly detect the mental muscle fully flexed, though the engine is barely ticking over.