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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decay & ruin
Biosphere II
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dead malls
Detroit
Irving housing

got that wrong
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Fractal antenna

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Like my brownhouse:
   a little too early
Thursday, May 23 2019
I left unusually early for work today in the Prius, and, since it was a nice warm day, I didn't bring my jacket (which was still in the Subaru). This meant that I didn't have the keys to the office. Normally this wouldn't be a problem, since it's a rare morning that I arrive before Morning Dave. Unfortunately, Dave had already begun his Memorial Day weekend. And so too had Marc, who also often gets to work before I do. Not being able to get into the office, I decided to go on a little recreational drive north on US 9 out of Red Hook. Aside from an earlier era back when I didn't much care about this geography, I'd never ventured north of the Red Hook CVS, so I didn't know what to expect. It turned out, though, that the landscape quickly turned rural, so after a half mile or so I made a U-turn and headed back south.
When I returned, the office was still locked, so I wandered around in the local landscape, sitting for a time at a picnic table and then heading to a small patch of forest that was recently logged (from what I could tell, only one tree had been cut down). Unfortunately, my phone's battery was nearly dead, so I couldn't see which of my colleagues had put on the calendar that they wouldn't be coming in today. But even if the battery had been fully-charged, I would've been haunted by my Mercy For Animals Google login, which (for some reason) I can never remove from any device I've placed it on. This is because one needs to first log in to the device using a Google account before removing it from the device, but (as Mercy For Animals always does even to former employees it doesn't change the locks after firing), they'd changed my password. So I couldn't log in. Perhaps there is a workaround, but I don't know of any that isn't more extreme than I want to do. [My phone actually runs an unusual variant of Android called Miui, and, yes, there is a way to delete Google accounts.]
There were still no cars in the parking lot, making me wonder if all my colleagues had been raptured. But when I next went to check the office door, it had been unlocked, though nobody was there (except for the head honcho upstairs). Evidently he'd seen my car, figured out the nature of the problem, and unlocked the door for me.

I was able to find a place to sit in the small dining room at Bubby's today when I went there for my weekly burrito. Today I kind of dreaded eating the salad, which (with its sour vinegar-heavy sauce and cherry tomatoes) is a very different sort of experience from the burrito. But it's good for me, so I sat there and I ate it in its entirety (as opposed to what I did the time before, taking the salad home and eventually throwing it out).
As I passed the Enterprise Drive exit on US 209, I saw an amazing sight. A bald eagle darted low over the road's surface between the cars moving at full highway speed. It was being pursued by crows (and perhaps other birds) and evidently thought this would be a way to shake them. It was such a unusual occurrence that everyone slowed their vehicles down to a crawl, though by then the eagle and his or her pursuers had moved on.
To salvage some old slimy mushrooms that had been languishing in the refrigerator, I cut them up with some onions and fried them on the stove top. I then threw in some beans and ended up having makeshift burritos. They weren't quite as good as I thought they would be. But I was feeling good (and punchy) as I made them, owing to some kratom tea I'd been drinking. This was nearly the last of my kratom supply, so I ordered more (from KrakenKratom.com). Owing to the questionable legality of kratom in this country, none of the credit card processors are willing to handle purchases of it. So I am forced to pay via eCheck, which involves typing my routing number and checking account number into a web form. It all seems a little shady, but not as shady as buying adderall on the dark web (which I may do some day).

Back at the house, Diane the Cat was following me around everywhere I went as usual (she particularly likes the shadowlands east of the house, where I still collect pinecones for placement east of Gretchen's outdoor porch, where they prevent water falling off the porch roof from eroding the soil). Today I decided to lead Diane south of the house along the Farm Road to show her what landscapes can do (her experience is, after all, a bit limited). I took her to the precipice of a cliff overlooking the Stick Trail to show her that cliffs were a thing. She didn't stare in amazement as I'd hoped, but she seemed delighted all the same, rubbing aggressively against me and any object sticking out of the ground.
Jim Holzhauer came very close to being defeated this evening on Jeopardy. For only the second time in his reign of terror, we went into Final Jeopardy without it being a run-away. But Holzhauer was leading, and, since he always gets Final Jeopardy, he ended up winning. Still, it was exciting to see him come close to losing. I've grown to hate all his quirks, particularly his unnaturally white teeth. If my teeth looked like that, I'd have them professionally darkened.

My itch to troll has gone mostly-unscratched since the demise of Suzy Fauber, though today (after seeing a crow doing something curious outside work and those other crows attacking that bald eagle) I had question: why are crows black? I chose to ask the question on Quora.com, making it more of a troll by phrasing it "Is the fact that all crows are black and all swans are white proof that God is a racist?" [This was soon flagged by the community and removed, and I received an automated reprimand.]
Tonight I had the laboratory window wide open, which is always a bad idea once the warm weather arrives in all its glory. Through that window came a bumbling beetle, a so-called "june bug," the first I'd seen this year. Once it landed, I caught it gently between my fingers, threw it out onto the deck, and then closed the window. There had been other bumbling insects in the living room earlier today: two different bumble bees (or was it just the same one twice?) that I'd had to catch in drinking glasses and release outside.

Before going to bed, I took a xanax as an alternative sleep aid and then tinkered with the MaxMatrix library until I'd successfully added rotation methods. This marked the first time I'd ever added features to a pure C++ library, a process that seemed a lot easier and less brittle than, say, doing anything at all within the Angular Javascript framework.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?190523

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