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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   object permanence implications
Sunday, April 12 2015
Finally today we had the balmy temperatures that make late April such a welcome time of the year. We didn't quite reach 70 today, but it was close, and I could be found outside at times with no shoes on and nothing more over my torso than a teeshirt. I made several forrays a short distance south down the Farm Road to gather chunky block-shaped boulders from the piles of rock that run along either side of it, and I used these to build the new retaining wall connecting the main garden patch to the southmost tomato patch (what it will retain is a new patch to its south to be called "the Cabbage Patch").
I learned on Facebook (from Sara Poiron, actually) that the first four episodes of the new 5th season of Game of Thrones had been leaked onto the internet. I immediately found the episodes on thePirateBay.se, downloaded them, and checked to see that they were good. I then loaded them on a thumb drive in case the people at tonight's Game of Thrones viewing party wanted to have a marathon watching session. How had the episodes leaked? Supposedly someone with a screening copy scrubbed their unique watermark from it and released it to Bittorrent.
Tonight's viewing party would be happening at Eva and Sandor's place in West Hurley. Gretchen and I owed Eva birthday presents, so I spent part of the afternoon making a small painting of one of their cats. For a long time, the result was embarrassingly bad, but by the end there it wasn't looking too terrible, especially in low light conditions.
When Eva had heard that our friends Nancy and Ray also like Game of Thrones, she'd said I could invite them too. So a little before 8:00pm, Nancy and Ray picked me up at my place and we carpooled together to Maverick Road. When we arrived at Eva & Sandor's place, Sandor had brought an enormous flatscreen teevee out into the living room. There were a couple extra people there as well, though they weren't there for the Game of Thrones. Because the plan was to use an HBO Go account to watch tonight's episode, we actually had to wait until 9:00pm for HBO to start streaming it. So we watched Bill Maher for about 20 minutes. Periodically Sandor (who was operating the big screen via remote) would flip around to the numerous other video options. The teevee was displaying the AppleTV interface, and there were a bewildering array of options nested in options, a riot of thumbnails. To some it might have looked futuristic, but to my eye at that grotesque scale, it looked like a commercial invasion of the living room. It wasn't as visually toxic once Game of Thrones started and all those icons went to wherever they go when they're not on the screen. (I wonder what the object permanence implications of screen content are for developing minds.)
We only ended up watching one episode of Game of Thrones, despite the three more I had on a thumbdrive in my pocket. Instead we watched a hilarious episode of Broad City (which I described as "Sex and the City without the money" to someone unfamiliar with it). Finally, Sandor had us watch the wickedly-clever premiere episode of Silicon Valley, which perfectly captured what I remember of the dotcom experience.
When Ray and Nancy dropped me off at the end of my driveway, Gretchen was home, having arrived from Minneapolis while I was out.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?150412

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