Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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decay & ruin
Biosphere II
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dead malls
Detroit
Irving housing

got that wrong
Paleofuture.com

appropriate tech
Arduino μcontrollers
Backwoods Home
Fractal antenna

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Like my brownhouse:
   people who insist on doing graphic design
Friday, May 23 2014
Today I was cutting a particularly thick piece of dead oak over a hundred feet upstream of where the Chamomile crosses the Stick Trail, and the battery powered saw (which at this point could probably use a blade sharpening) kept crapping out due to battery heat issues. Eventually I had to give up on that log and try something smaller closer to the Stick Trail. I noticed that I could get the saw working again faster if I blew air into the battery's vents (I certainly wasn't going to inhale whatever it might be offgassing!). But even that technique did not permit me to cut enough pieces for a load, so I had to settle for some marginal pieces I'd put aside (marginal in that they contained large amounts of rot and moisture).

This evening I met Deborah at the Hurley Mountain Inn and I rode with her into Uptown Kingston, where we met up with Jenny and Doug at the Stockade Tavern (similar to how Gretchen and I met them there a week before). That had been a Thursday night, and the Stockade had been a little sleepy, but tonight being Friday, the place was nearly full and it was hard to find a table. We settled for a time on the dark and gloomy big table in the back until one of the awesome oval tables in front became available. An early conversational topic included the reliably-bad graphic design of people who insist on doing graphic design while claiming to be graphic designers. (Real graphic designers are exhausted from long days spent graphically designing and always perfectly happy to let others graphically design if they insist.) Later topics included the new Neil deGrasse Tyson version of Cosmos (of which Gretchen and I only watched a single episode). Jenny and Doug were more into it than I was, and Deborah had yet to see any of it. Jenny, who was raised as a fundamentalist Christian in Louisville, Kentucky, thought the visual spectacle would be a good way to interest kids in science and help them learn some of the basics. I was intrigued to know how it was that Jenny had learned about evolution. She said it had been avoided as a topic in her public school education, though somehow she learned about it in her late teens and perhaps also in college, though she didn't seem too sure about how it had happened. I would have liked to know what kind of shock it had been for her to transition from a faith in the Biblical account of creation to a more scientific understanding, but we never got that far into the details. It's hard to have any sort of conversation at all above the loud background roar in the Stockade.
When Deborah dropped me off at my car in the Hurley Mountain Inn parking lot, I saw that someone had written "WHORE" on a paper napkin and laid it on the drivers' seat. My friend Mark who comes up from the city occasionally was arriving tonight, and I'd told him to meet me at the Hurley Mountain Inn and go have drinks we me and friends at the Stockade, and evidently his way to say he'd just missed me was by leaving that note.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?140523

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