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


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Like my brownhouse:
   should've tested it before installing it
Wednesday, March 10 2021
I took my usual Wednesday morning recreational 150 milligram dose of pseudoephedrine this morning, and it put me on a good path to make it through the workday in my remote workplace.
This morning on the weekly call with the Ukranians, Alex had to give them the bad news that our money for our project would be running out at the end of May and that after that, we'd have to cut way back on the amount of work we would be sending them. Later in the call, their business rules expert (Nadiya) unearthed a fairly critical flaw with our database design that I had to spend most of the rest of the day creating a document as a guide for fixing it. (I rarely write code these days!)

In the mail today came a new digitizer for my RCA Cambio tablet, so I wasted little time installing it. I did a really good job, and there was not a single speck of dirt under it when I was done. It looked brand new! But then when I went to test it, only about a half inch strip of the digitzer was working. I tried disconnecting and reconnecting the membrane-edge connector multiple times, but that half inch was all I was going to get. It occurred to me that I should've tested it before installing it to see if it had arrived in this state. Now I would never know, and after wrenching the digitizer off the tablet, it was in no fit state for return. So I immediately ordered another one (they're only $11 each) and hoped for the best.
Meanwhile my brother Don called, and the main news from Staunton was that our mother Hoagie is so convinced that people are breaking into her barn and stealing her horse equipment that she wants to move somewhere else. I told Don there was no chance she'd ever get her shit together enough to move. "She can't even take the initiative to do something about that mound of rubbish in the living room."

I try to prepare one dinner a week on one of the days Gretchen works, so tonight was the night. I've been going for months (if not years) switching between chili and pasta with chonky marinara sauce, and tonight was a night for the latter. I knew Gretchen would want it to contain a vegetable too, so I cut up some broccoli and threw in it with the spaghetti when it still had about three minutes left to cook. I'd also cut up most of the brocolli stem into thin slices, which I'd added to the spaghetti when it'd had maybe seven minutes more to cook. As always, I fried up some tempeh with mushrooms and onions as a chonkifying ingredient to add to the pre-made pasta sauce (Gretchen's favorite is Rao's, though this might've been something else).

This evening Gretchen and I watched the first episode of the HBO show Lovecraft Country. So far it's a bit of a mess, a road-trip horror story set in the late Jim Crow period, when African Americans had to be careful where and when they drove through certain parts of America. Most of the actual horror comes from white bigots with guns and pickup trucks, though there is also some seemingly supernatural (or at least alien) horror as well. I didn't especially like it, but Jordan Peele was one of the producers, so I'll give it a chance.


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http://asecular.com/blog.php?210310

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