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cryonics clunker
Friday, November 25 2016
Every day is a bad Trump day until the evil finally passes into the "what the fuck did we fucking do?" bin of history. But some are worse than others, and whether or not it is good or bad probably depends more on my neurochemical balance than it does on actual stories in the news. With the exception of the many signs of incompetence, that news is uniformly bad, though some days I feel much happier than others. Today was a fairly bad one, overlain with clammy (though not too cold) conditions and my inability to figure out how best to spend my time. I've become such a creature of my work schedule that it I feel kind of lost on my days off, particularly when I'm not even on vacation. This morning I finally got around to fixing a vexing electrical wiring issue in the living room. An outlet to which the stereo and two of the lamps attached had been controlled by a switch, and (as with most occasions when an outlet is controlled by a switch) this had proved an annoyance. Because of the nature of the six-outlet expander on the duplex outlet, there had been no way to tap into the unswitched half of the duplex. Today I finally took that damn thing apart and monkeyed with it until both plugs in the outlet were unswitched. Unsurprisingly, I found it all had been miswired by whatever numbskull had done the house's wiring; the unswitched power was being carried by the red wires, not the black, and until I figured this out, the outlet seemed to be in violation of the laws of physics. It could've been worse; in some of our light fixtures the switch turns off neutral, not hot, which can make for dangerous conditions for those expecting hot wires to be dead when the switch is off.
Another thing to do was, once darkness fell (which happens early these days) was to try to make it so the light inside the brownhouse is motion activated. If I could make several things be motion activated down there (such as music and electrical heat), it would might feel even more like an outhouse from the future. For tonight, though, my goal was modest. I've got a number of these devices that screw into a bulb socket and contain a motion sensor that controls a built-in bulb socket, and I've never gotten any of them to work (though the kind that bolt on to an electrical box tend to work okay). I tried one in the brownhouse and the bulb stayed on for over an hour. That's not the way it should work. So then I tried another, and it actually worked, though it kept the light on for something like 20 minutes after I'd left (and there was no way to adjust the timing).
Other than such projects as those, I found myself doing workplace work. That might seem pathetic, but it's hard to find the focus in a conventional workday to crank through the complicated web-based tools I have in mind. Also, I feel the need to bank up some time, since I'm going to need a little time off in a week or so. I particularly enjoy making complex things happen in Javascript; for me it's as fun as crossword puzzles are for Gretchen, and nobody is paying her to work on those.
I've been trying to continue with my dystopia teevee/movie binging, though today I hit on something of a clunker. In searching for more material, I recalled that one of the most compelling episodes of This American Life (from back when I was trying to get past the disappointing 2004 re-election of George W. Bush) was an almost Black-Mirroresque telling of the tale of an infamous cryonics disaster. So I looked to see if any movies had been made about cryonics. This led me to download Forever Young, a Mel Gibson/Jamie Lee Curtis vehicle that is so stylistically dated that it almost comes across as if it were made in the 1939 of its first scenes. It was actually made in 1992, and its pitch towards mainstream movie audiences hasn't aged well. Unfortunately, the (successful!) cryonics driving the plot don't play any bigger of a role than the cyronics in the much better Idiocracy (which appears to have aped some of Forever Young's tropes).
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?161125 feedback
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