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:
   A paucity of real-world interactions
Friday, December 13 1996 I found myself shuffling between Cocke Hall and its crippled but powerful Macintoshes and the real world. But I only waded shallowly in the real world. There were so many things needing doing on disparate hard drives throughout the Internet that my interactions with real world people was mostly limited to occasional glances at strangers in the computer lab. These people were, for the most part, weary from a week of stuying and paper writing. For their part they seemed to consider occasional glances from their intellectual world into my physical world as refreshing as I found my reciprocation. I was amused at the time that they had no idea that I was an imposter, not a student at all, but a simple exploiter of facilities, trying to populate a web-based nation in the web world with a notion of reality, however symbolized, however simply a representation that could just as easily be a fiction.

The naps later carried me until it was time for my shift at the Internet Service Provider. I was deviled at work by a number of things. One of these was the novel distraction of having to send e-mail to Evan on the hour about the status of the Comet network and Internet connection. Since these systems only rarely malfunction, and then only in small pieces, all my e-mails were numbingly uninteresting reassurances of tranquility. At a certain point I wanted to minimize the distraction of pinging all the local IP devices and sending Evan e-mail. So I learned enough UNIX to automate both the pinging and the generic sending of upbeat e-mail to Evan.

Everything seemed to be "okay."
Then there was the Ritalin. On a whim, I'd taken some as a means of adding greater concentration to the evening. Since I hadn't had any in nine months, I'd sort of forgotten the way it affects me. Both Bn and Thomas, who have ADD, have Ritalin prescriptions and eat (and even snort) the stuff regularly. So it's no big deal to them. But me...I was flying on a wave of euphoria as I surfed the web and did all my usual Comet things. I would say my concentration was somewhat improved. But far more improved was my attitude. Everything seemed to be "okay." There was not a hint of my recent depression, for example.

But then as I was coming down off the stuff, I could feel myself growing mean. I suddenly couldn't abide anyone. And I couldn't focus my concentration, as though I was suffering from a brief wave of ADD. During this phase, Thomas came by from an amusing experience he'd had in the Orbit with some girls that I know but that he'd just met. And as is typical, he was bubbling over with enthusiasm and good cheer, trying to make me look at, listen to and even download things he thought were cool. But now I was in a serious post-Ritalin grumpy phase. It was only my sobriety that kept me from ripping his face off. Back in the days of Big Fun, I'd be wasted drunk as I came down off Ritalin, and invariably I'd get into a huge fight with Jessika or Sara.

I noted that Yahoo has actually added one of my pages, the Dextromethorphan link page, to their human-created index. I also noted, with an indigant smirk, that they'd grabbed some of the links off that page and added them, using my descriptions, to their Dextromethorphan index! How shameless. But really I don't care, I'm flattered. Hey Yahoo...maybe you guys can hire me part time...you're already using my work, so you must think I'm worth something.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?961213

feedback
previous | next