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").



links

decay & ruin
Biosphere II
Chernobyl
dead malls
Detroit
Irving housing

got that wrong
Paleofuture.com

appropriate tech
Arduino μcontrollers
Backwoods Home
Fractal antenna

fun social media stuff


Like asecular.com
(nobody does!)

Like my brownhouse:
   just want to be entertained
Monday, December 31 2018
Since I would only be working a half-day today, I took both dogs to work with me. Alex also brought his dog Augie, whom Ramona hates and Neville has never met. Neville, of course, was great with Augie, and the two even played briefly. This enraged Ramona so much that she was growling and shaking with anger. Later, though, Alex and I were able to take all three dogs for a walk around the building without incident.
On the way home, I stopped at Home Depot mostly to get electrical supplies for doing things like putting outlets in the new kitchen island. Once home, I found a cheap USB WiFi dongle I'd ordered had arrived. Supposedly this dongle would "just work" with the Raspberry Pi I am using for my EyeSpy robot project. Sure enough, it did, saving me from having to wade into the networking configuration files on another fool's errand. With the new USB WiFi dongle, I quickly got my little Raspberry Pi system back to the state it had been in when its SD card had failed.
Meanwhile, Gretchen was craving spaghetti, the kind that can only be had at Plaza Diner in New Paltz. It was only a little after 4:00pm (luppertime!) but we set out for spaghetti anyway, like old folks off to catch the early bird special. Gretchen jokingly using an old woman voice and archaic phrases to describe her hankerings and to decry the many puzzling things young people are up to these days.
Astoundingly, after driving to New Paltz, we found that the Plaza Diner was closed. Who knew it ever closed? It's open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And today wasn't even a legal holiday!
Since we were now in New Paltz, we were going to have to get by with some other option. We quickly decided P&G's would be acceptable. It's a bar & grill catering to college students, so it might well get crazy later on, but before 5:00pm it was likely to be pretty low-key. Indeed, when we walked in, most of the diners appeared to be senior citizens (and one woman with a haircut that placed her loss of virginity circa 1982). We ordered our usual veggie burgers with mushrooms and onions, though Gretchen got the crispy fried onions on hers, which she found to be a "revelation." Like the elderly person she'd been impersonating, she ordered a root beer with her burger. I had a Flower Power IPA. Both the burger and the Flower Power weren't quite up to expectations; Gretchen said she thought the veggie burger recipe had been changed, and "not in a good way."
Over our veggie burgers, I brought up something I'd learned when listening to (not watching) a YouTube review of the Nissan Leaf, an all-electric car that can now be bought used for less than $10,000. The reviewer did the math on what fuel had cost him with the Leaf versus what it would've cost with an internal combustion engine. The gas would've cost over $11,600, whereas the electricity for that same amount of driving only cost about $870. In other words, in ten years, the car pays for itself just in fuel savings. This had me seriously considering getting a Leaf, though doing so would mean having three cars. We would need a Subaru for winter driving and hauling stuff, a Prius for its gas mileage and unlimited range, and the Leaf would mostly be for local driving (it only has about eighty miles of range). That would introduce enough of a logistical overhead (to say nothing of the new parking issues) to probably make it a bad idea. Oh well. Maybe I really should get an electric scooter (which I was considering a couple weeks ago).

Back at the house, Gretchen suggested we watch Bandersnatch, the new interactive movie from the Black Mirror universe. Gretchen doesn't usually want to watch anything related to Black Mirror, so this was exciting. It was also fortuitous that Gretchen had recently gotten a proper Netflix subscription, as Bandersnatch was not a linear movie. Beyond that, it also required the technology present in our brand new television, which we otherwise wouldn't've had.
Bandersnatch dealt with the concept of control and free will. By allowing us to make decisions for a character, we controlled what he did. But by limiting the choices presented to us (sometimes, for example, by only giving us one or making them completely inconsequential), the producers were in turn controlling us. The character was presented as being aware that some external force was controlling him, and increasingly so. Eventually he began complaining about it and even ignoring the choices we made for him. And then one path of the story became about Netflix, presented in the mid-1980s world of the episode as an entertainment platform from the future in which the characters were trapped (that's very Black Mirror). It was all quite clever, but, I have to say, tiresome in practice. I just want to be entertained! Gretchen abandoned me after about 40 minutes, and then somehow, mercifully, I made it all the way through. There are, however, hours of unexplored story remaining for me to revisit.
[REDACTED]


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?181231

feedback
previous | next