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:
   great venue for improvisational fiction
Friday, September 17 2010
Facebook was designed so that people can create a single user and then bore their friends with their tedious updates ("I HATE Mondays, LOL!"). It's a clever system because it's a universe walled-off from everything else, a domain beyond the Web where even Google is useless. If only a few people were there it wouldn't be anything. But everyone you know and care about is there, so it has real importance as a place. It's a live version of that thing us old-timers call memory, a place where old friends don't just exist (and, say, repeatedly carry out that one particularly fabulous sex act), but keep on keeping on. In the old days when one moved away from one's home town, one's high school sweetheart could remain forever young in one's mind. No longer. Now we have to watch her drop her babies, look at pictures of those babies, and observe her gradually melting away into the usual American everafter: as a remote-wielding but otherwise shapeless sack of lipids.
Still, as with any new place, Facebook has potential far beyond its intended uses. One doesn't have to have just one avatar in that Facebook universe. It's a place where identities can be created as needed to serve whatever purposes come along. And those purposes don't even have to represent things happening in the real world. It's actually a great venue for improvisational fiction. This is the realization I've had after a few days of creating Facebook avatars and marching them like crazed puppets through Facebook's vapid landscape. It has helped to have a co-conspirator in this game: none other than Sara P. from Big Fun. I haven't seen her since 1997 and these days she has a kid and lives in an unhappy relationship with a Xbox enthusiast she calls "the lump" in Philadelphia. But recently she discovered Facebook and has been something of a bomb-thrower there from the start. The idea of creating crazy avatars immediately appealed to her, so we've been friending innocent bystanders (that's easy, though most random Facebook bystanders turn out to be in eighth grade) and then interacting in a manner suitable to our avatars' characters. There are several, but the main two are uneducated hillbilly women who cannot spell but love to write. They go to Bible camps but are easy prey for guys from the "Abstinence cabin" who ply them with "tekeela" and then have their way with them. But it's okay because, well, they pray afterwards. As with theatre improv, the key to the success of Facebook improv is agreeability. If one character comments about a slutty upskirt photo of another: "Did U date Festus Tarder, and R those my pannies?" the other says, "Yea I did, and I'm so sarree, wud U likem bak?" So far this foolishness hasn't seemed to draw in the avatars' Justin-Bieber-loving "friends," but things always have a potential to get interesting when fiction can comingle so seamlessly with what is, for many people, a large fraction of the real world.

This evening Gretchen and I socalized for a time down at Ray and Nancy's place. Ray wasn't there, but Sarah the Vegan was, as was Nancy's sister Linda and Linda's crazy dog Buzzy (who is mature enough now to be set loose in the house even when Sally and Eleanor are there). Nancy and Ray's house is now fully painted inside and most of the stuff is in the place where it will live for years. It looks really good in there. Now they need to have a really crazy party.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?100917

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