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what kind of sadistic foolishness
Thursday, November 17 2016
Though it's not in her to get up early nature, lately Gretchen has been rising before the crack of dawn and then going to various public schools to make presentations about animal rights and dietary health. She's great at it, but the pay is terrible and she misses the long unbounded evenings she used to have.
Meanwhile, it's been my job on such days to take the dogs on their morning walk. Since that incident on Sunday, I've been nervous about them ending up at some random person's house; it's hard to have much faith in the goodwill of strangers after the election of Donald J. Trump. Added to that, hunting season is heating up. There are multiple seasons, and they overlay on the calendar like the tinted circles of a Venn Diagram.
This morning's walk was going great until I reached a point on the Chamomile Headwater Trail (41.927176N, 74.106597W) where the dogs suddenly raised their noses to the air and then began scrambling up the low bluestone-strewn bluff to the south. I thought mabe there was a bear or random varmint nearby, so I scrambled up after them. But when I crested the bluff, I found they'd completely vanished. I heard no barking, no rustling of leaves, nothing. I was alone in the forest, as if Ramona and Neville had been beamed into another part of the multiverse. It was a good thing Neville was wearing his Whistle GPS tracker, it was charged up, and I had my smartphone, and it was charged up too. The first update from the Whistle showed Neville had covered a great deal of distance and was now far south of me, perhaps up that valley where she and Ramona had treed a bear cub on Sunday. I didn't want a repeat of that unpleasantness. So I climbed down into that valley via a steep ravine leading down to it (41.921416N, 74.111817W) from the farm at the end of the Farm Road. Below a low waterfall, the valley there opens up into a wide flat-bottomed space, and I sat there for a time hoping maybe the dogs were atop the steep-walled escarpment to the southwest within range of my shouts. The Whistle seemed to indicate so, at least until the next update of Neville's position. But then I realized my view on the screen (which was hard to see well in the full light of day) was zoomed out so much that what I'd thought was proximity was more like a quarter mile. The dogs were somewhere up on that plateau (it was hard to tell where given that Whistle only offers a satellite view and a map view and not a topographic map), and I was going to have to get up there somehow. So I began climbing. The escarpment (41.920995N, 74.112724W) here is so steep that I had to use my hands and any handy trees that happened to be along the way. Somehow I made it to the top while holding a Powell's Books coffee cup in my right hand. (I'd originally thought this would be a peaceful morning stroll.) When I finished the climb, I was so exhausted that I had to lay down on my back for a time to recover, occasionally shouting in hopes that the dogs would hear me. At this point I wasn't far from that place where Ramona got bitten by an angry mother bear.
By now, the Whistle had Neville's position as being over in the forested uplands northeast of Lapla Road. This is a region so far away that Gretchen and I have never actually hiked there. What kind of sadistic foolishness was this? Were the dogs going to just keep running like idiots to the end of the earth? I headed in that direction, watching Neville's position change wildly with every three-minute update. A little past the big artificial pond ("Biting Fly Pond," I think I'll call it), I saw on Whistle that Neville was heading northeastward (homeward) again, though seeming following a track several hundred feet north of the one I'd been on. So I turned around and headed for home. When the next update showed Neville moving chaotically again, I went to the north end of that pond and hollered for him and Ramona with increasing desperation. I felt like if I ever saw them again I would beat them mercilessly with a stick. I even snapped one off and held it in my hands for a time.
I continued back towards home, and it seemed, according to Whistle, that Neville was now making the sort of homeward beeline he has made before when he is finally done with the forest. He was still far behind me, and I didn't expect to see him for awhile. But a little way northeast of the Canary Falls (41.923365N, 74.114075W, the most spectacular falls in this part of the forest), Ramona suddenly appeared behind me. I told her she'd been a bad girl and rhetorically asked her (using my most disappointed voice) why she'd gone so far. She seemed contrite in the way that (at least in the past) has suggested she might actually try to do better in the future. Neville appeared not long after that, and the ordeal was over. I didn't beat anyone with a stick; I was just glad to have them back, stupid and thoughtless though they'd been.
[REDACTED]
In the remote workplace today there was a bit of chaos today with a third party who was having trouble importing some CSVs I'd prepared, but days had passed and they wouldn't tell us what the problem was. We had a phone meeting in which tempers flared and dumbasses at the third party asked if we'd opened the files on a Macintosh. Nobody thought to look at whether the column names matched. In the end, that turned out to be the problem. Nobody had ever told me what the column names were supposed to be, and other stages in the process that had generated those CSVs had changed some column names and added some columns. This evening I wrote a PHP script that effortlessly batch-processed a whole directory of CSVs to transform them into the format they needed to be in.
This evening I watched the Black Mirror Christmas special from 2014 called "White Christmas," and it was a glorious and terrifying thing to behold. We're treated to a world where personalities can be copied (the mechanism offered was a bit suspicious) and then enslaved, often by the person of whom the copy had been made. It raised all sorts of bleak questions, such as "Can simulations experience torture?" (Answer: if it's a good enough simulation, of course it can!) I don't know how healthy watching dystopic television is in times of political horror, but it feels somehow like it is helping me process it better.
I should mention that there is a huge plot problem with someone freaking out about finding him or herself to be an enslaved copy of a person who has made the decision to enslave a copy of him or herself. The person who makes such a decision is the person who is copied, so the slave is aware of the decision and has had a chance to come to terms with it. If I decide to copy myself with the idea of enslaving the resulting copy, the enslaved copy was there when the decision was made. It still sucks for the enslaved copy, but the copy itself bears responsibilty for its own fate, since "it" was essentially present (and able to intervene) when the decision for its enslavement was made.
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