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
Chernobyl
dead malls
Detroit
Irving housing

got that wrong
Paleofuture.com

appropriate tech
Arduino μcontrollers
Backwoods Home
Fractal antenna

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   The Everpresent Macarena
Tuesday, December 17 1996 A mascarade precipitates a crash. Where can this happen in this world? My workplace. There are no details to tell.

By way of example, could Ice T have continued a sneaker endorsement contract after writing "Cop Killer"?
I took advantage of my nightlong Internet connection by listening to an interesting RealAudio interview/live music performance with Guided by Voices. I was struck by two things...one was about Guided by Voices and the other was about RealAudio. Regarding GBV, I felt concerns about their paid endorsement of Converse Sneakers, something they have done with the casual attitude with which they do everything. But now, see, they are trapped into a form of respectability (you who are punker-than-thou would say, "they have sold out."). Can they write songs without always thinking of the effect they might have on the image they must uphold for Converse? It's different with atheletes, because their product is physical performance. With musicians, though, the product is ideas, nostalgia and emotions. And some emotions and ideas run counter to the marketing of a product. By way of example, could Ice T have continued a sneaker endorsement contract after writing "Cop Killer"? Now, about RealAudio: RealAudio is a form of "streaming Internet data" whereby the resource is loaded as it is needed, not before or after it is needed. There is no wait with RealAudio; in fact it is possible to send live audio via RealAudio. In my use of it, it delivered. Of course, the music of Guided by Voices sounds great even through compression, Internet glitches, and loss of fidelity; that's how it sounds when they distribute it on CDs anyway. The drawback is that RealAudio is not free to the creators of Internet content, only to the consumers. Thus, if I want to make RealAudio clips of Big Fun stuff, it will cost me RealMoney, unlike everything else I have done so far. thus, for Big Fun, my audio is limited to "WAV" format, which must fully load, utterly uncompressed, before it can be heard. For people using slow connections such as modems, thus, there is no way for them to hear the 7 Megabyte "Rain Gorgeous" performance. What I'm waiting for is a freeware implementation of RealAudio or something RealAudioesque. Such a thing would surely catch on like wildfire, but I can see no way for it to make its creators any money unless it could somehow feed advertisements into the player along with the music.

I drove back to Staunton in my Dodge Dart to again hang out with people who possess large stretches of DNA identical to my own. About all I did once there however was go to sleep in the shaque.

My sleep was again haunted by strange dreams, two of which I recall. The first featured a heated argument with my parents, concluding with me telling them that our inability to get along is the reason I now live in Charlottesville. I remember the days of no escape, when I had to get along just to go along. I don't have to do that anymore, so now, living in Charlottesville, I just go along so I can get along, if you understand the difference.

The second dream situated me in one of my long nights at Comet. But someone came by and got me high on some extremely powerful marijuana. This left me in a pathetic state in which I could barely see anything at all. And though I could stand, I couldn't walk in any consistent direction. Whern I got to a door, it was always some useless closet and not "the escape" I was seeking. Finally, it seemed like time to go home, so I put on my coat. But I looked at the clock only to find it was 2:19am...meaning almost eight hours remained on my shift. So I passed another long period of time, immobilized, hoping to not have to converse with anyone. But when I again looked up at the clock it was 2:13am. Yes, in dreams, time can go depressingly backwards.

In keeping with the typical Tuesday night rite, I went out in the Dodge Dart to get take-away food for the family. But first I went to WalMart in hopes to, by patronizing this mega-monopoly, perhaps purchase an ink cartridge for my old Apple StyleWriter Model I, the official printer in my shaque. I entered the proudly flag-flying monster-building (which, along with its parking lot, is set in an enormous notch in Staunton's prominent Betsy Bell mini-mountain) and waded through the down-home shoppers to the audio/video section, home of heightened security and CDs purged of all but the least shocking of notions. But the ink cartridge I wanted could not be found. All I got from the experience was a special Christmas-mix-medley of the Macarena blaring through the speakers. The Macarena people, using all their funny mispronunciations of English vowels, managed to do all manner of injustice to songs such as "Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer" and "Deck the Halls," being sure to return now again to the Macarena itself as somesort of melodic glue with its very late-90s techno (and thus out of place in Staunton) drumbeat.

The experience at the Staunton Mall in Montgomery Ward was equally unsuccessful. But there was no Macarena this time.

I purchased Kentucky Fried Death from the KFC in the strip-community along US 11 South, known as "Greenville Road." I noted that the chicken and biscuits came to $21.67, whereas it used to cost $20.23 or something. This indicates a six or so percent increase in price. Why? Almost certainly the recent increase in the minimum wage has something to do with it. But meanwhile, of course, I still get the same wage at Comet, which hovers not all that far above minimum wage. I was given to feeling very cynical about the idea of mimimum wage. But I don't know what the alternative is. I think I'd be comfortable with a maximum wage, by the way. It could be as low as $12 an hour and America would do just fine. And people would have to actually work to be prosperous.

Back at my house I ate chicken until I could eat no more, and then I, with the approval of my parents, grabbed an almost full three litre jug of white wine and other food items and headed back to Charlottesville. Both to and from Staunton, I encountered thick fog in the ~2200 ft. Rockfish wind-Gap on Afton Mountain, which marks the halfway point in the 40 mile drive.

It was about 9:30pm when I made it to my house. I considered going to visit Jessika, but then I considered how tired I was and how much fun I was likely to have there and how much of my wine I wouldn't have tomorrow if I went and decided to go to bed early.


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