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:
   indoors, in my room
Sunday, November 16 1997
    It's ingenious, in fact it's a little scary. I can see where the future is leading.
    S

    omebody, it must have been a drunken Deya, painted my toe nails after I passed out. She did a shitty job. I awoke, drank lots of water, went back to sleep, awoke around noon, and climbed out the window to hook up the television cable that leads to my room.

    So now I can watch television on my computer screen. It's ingenious, in fact it's a little scary. I can see where the future is leading. Some day web browsers will know all about cable television feeds and they'll pop up in their own windows when you click in the right places on web pages. And those feeds will carry their own HTML (it can ride along in the subtitle channel if need be), and this will generate adjunct pages full of clickable stuff. And I'll still be cranking out my HTML in Wordpad or BBEdit.

    Such thoughts would make my heart rate accelerate and force me to think of other things just to calm down.
    Throughout the day the weather gradually became unusually cold and clear, but I barely ventured outdoors. I had a hangover for much of the day, and I treated this occasionally with vodkatea. I also plotted my revenge against the tough guys of Charlottesville. I'm a firm believer in undercover humiliations. I'm the kind of guy who sneaks around and does things in a cowardly manner, never telling anyone. I don't get the social glory of the justice I exact in this way, but I get inner peace. Occasionally today, though, I found myself plotting acts of extremely violent public humiliation, and such thoughts would make my heart rate accelerate and force me to think of other things just to calm down. I'm full of fantasies these days. Telling my fantasies, however, is probably not a good idea but it hasn't gotten me in much trouble yet.


    Deya's mother, Marianne, came by and visited for awhile. She and I had an interesting discussion about the difference between being raised in a small language culture (hers; she was born in Sweden, and only 9 million people speak Swedish) and being raised in a large language culture (your typical American). Marianne made the important point that if he wants to grow beyond a certain stunted state, the intellectual Swede must learn a foreign language. There simply isn't enough creativity possible within the small group of Swedish speakers to satisfy a capable mind. It's easy for me (and others) to take for granted the fact that English-speaking culture is so incredibly rich. I know a little Spanish, but truth be known, I can't really speak any language except my mother tongue. Marianne, on the other hand, speaks German and English and god knows what else.

    I wrote a really cool forerunner to Photoshop in VIC-20 BASIC/6502 assembly language back in 1984.
    In the evening, I taught myself a hell of a lot of JavaScript for a calendar project I'm working on. Studying Andrew's source code was extremely helpful for the early stages, but later I found web JavaScript references terribly disjointed and limited. The syntax of JavaScript itself makes very little sense to me. Whatever happened to BASIC? That was a good language. I wrote a really cool forerunner to Photoshop in VIC-20 BASIC/6502 assembly language back in 1984. It ran inside 3K of static RAM.

    I felt kind of guilty keeping to my room so much. Deya was by herself downstairs much of the time, and I felt an obligation to hang out with her.

one year ago

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