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there goes my binge
Thursday, January 4 2018
The unusually unrelenting Arctic cold continued today, joined now by snow that eventually added two or three inches to the existing one or two inches (which, due to the persistent sub-freezing conditions) has never had a chance to crust-over. A strong low-pressure system out in the Atlantic was responsible for a so-called "bombogenesis" storm, which would pull even more cold from the north and contribute to howling winds and not all that much snow, at least not this far north. Despite the weather, Gretchen kept her appointment with Van Kleeck's Tires in Lake Katrine. In addition to its tires needing a rotation, the Prius' inspection sticker had lapsed, and (because no cars with that color sticker on their windows are street-legal) she had to do something about it without delay; she had plans of driving to The City tomorrow, and there was no way she wouldn't get a ticket if she parked it on the street with such an obviously expired sticker on the windshield.
In the recuperation fort, I've been using a second Elitebook 2740p laptop into which I'd put an old mechanical hard drive from Hyrax (the first Elitebook 2740p) just before it was replaced with a solid state drive (SSD) in August, 2015. Because it hadn't been used in two and a half years, that hard drive was something of a time capsule. It dated to a period when I used Skype professionally, and, when I happened to look, I saw that Skype was indeed running. At some point today, the computer was extremely slow, and at first I couldn't figure out why. I repeatedly tried to kill Skype, but Skype never wants to die because it cannot imagine a world in which people wouldn't have it on all the time (it's common for software to arrogantly assume they are the only thing you would ever want to use your computer to run). But when I did finally kill it, a huge amount of memory was freed up and the laptop started working nicely (as Elitebook 2740ps usually do). That was all the information I needed; I uninstalled Skype there and then. After the uninstall completed, it directed me to some website where it hoped I would fill out a form patiently detailing my problems with their product. But who has the time? Skype belongs to a small class of truly horrendous software products. I would include iTunes in that class, but not Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer is terrible, but it's not as terrible as Skype. And it is good at doing the one job it ever needs to do: downloading Chrome. (I realize both Skype and Internet Explorer are different now than they were in 2015; reports are that these days Skype wants to be SnapChat and IE is discontinued, but they all live on in installation CDs and mothballed hard drives that sometimes get new leases on life.)
Originally my plan had been to save all the new season four episodes of Black Mirror for Friday, when Gretchen would be gone and I would have the house to myself (not counting the dogs, cats, and many dozens of stink bugs). But by today I'd already watched two of the episodes, and today I somehow watched two more, leaving only two for my Friday binge. Two episodes of anything hardly constitutes a binge. The two I watched today were "Arkangel" and "Crocodile."
"Arkangel" took the well-established Black Mirror technology of brain/eye/computer interfacing and explored the consequences in the domain of runaway helicopter parenting. The product is called Arkangel and installs in your child's head, allowing the parent to see and hear everything the child does while also reporting GPS position and monitoring the child's vitals. One of Arkangel's features is to filter out unpleasant sensory input, making to so your child never experiences anything disturbing. The consequences of such filtering would surely lead to all manner of terrible things, but this epsiode chose not to explore them and instead focused on the corrosive effects of over-surveillance on the relationship between mother and teenage daughter. Teenagers have always done things their parents haven't wanted them to do, and they've always lied about it, yet parents are always in denial about their particular children. It's better for all concerned if there is no way for parents to shatter their illusions. I'm a sucker for any indictment of helicopter parenting, and I loved this episode despite its failure to explore the consequences of sensory filtering.
In "Crocodile," the technology is an aparatus (which, in reality, appears to be a small CRT-based video monitor) allowing investigators to retrieve video clips of memories from people's heads (this does not seem to be interfacing with any implanted technology, but actually reading the contents of the brain itself). Our protagonist is a woman who, in her youth, bumbled into an incident where she concealed the dead body of a cyclist accidentally killed by her friend. Years later, as a successful architect, this past starts to threaten her present, and, over the course of the episode, she breaks badder and badder, killing anyone who might be able to reveal her secret. By the end, it's clear that the technology that can read memories can also extract them from small rodents. It's hard to remember to kill all of those! Shot in the bleakness of a snowy Iceland, it made for great television. But by the standards of "Black Mirror," it was a little weak.
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