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memes are hard
Sunday, April 1 2012
When I walked the dogs this morning, I took them up nearly the length of the Farm Road and then turned south to head off-trail through a region I've rarely visited. It's an area of steep-sided landforms rising only ten to twenty feet above the surrounding terrain, which is wooded and generally flat. There's a beautiful stone wall defining the eastern boundary of "the farm" that lies at the end of the Farm Road. Further into the woods, atop one of the steep-sided landforms, I found a hunter's blind made out of sticks and outfitted with a bench made of bluestone. Since this landform was shaped like a triangle, the blind had a panoramic view of the lowlands to the east. Usually deer blinds contain human artifacts: a five gallon bucket or a number of empty beer bottles. But there were none in this one.
The Farm Road is in blue, the Stick Trail is in red, the Gullies-Canary Hill trail is in green, the Chamomile Headwaters trail is in cyan, and the off-trail path I walked today is in orange. I encountered the hunter's blind at the spot indicated by the pink marker.
Back at the house, I made myself my weekly French press of coffee. My Sunday coffee used to be the principle source of my caffeine intake, but I've gone back to drinking black tea (Red Rose) just whenever I want it, so my body is once again desensitized. Coffee no longer gives me a delightful euphoric rush. Instead, I mostly just get negative effects from it: jitters, stomach complaints, and mild anxiety. It would be nice to go back to having caffeine only occasionally, but there's one reason why I'm reluctant. I'd gained about ten pounds after mostly-quitting caffeine, and I'd been unable to shed that weight by a regime of regular exercise (the situps and pushups I was doing in January and February). But with regular caffeine back in my diet for only a couple weeks, I've almost completely lost that weight.
When I say that most of the effects of coffee are negative, this is probably even true of the non-euphoric mania it still gives me. While no longer euphoric, it does bring a sharp focus to my thoughts and behaviors, a focus I'd been hoping to apply to a project for which I can rack up billable hours. But, alas, no, my focus was on a crackhead project to launch a viral facebook phenomenon. It all started the other day when I saw something on the Colbert Report about a short-lived web-only "magazine" called Conservative Teen, presumably designed to get teens to become even more selfish than they already are. Today I posted something about Conservative Teen on my Facebook page and then, in one of my other Facebook identities, posted something suggesting that the blank-eyed white teenagers illustrated on the magazine's "cover" might be technically in compliance with their abstinence vows by restricting their intercourse to anal sex. When this comment started attracting Facebook "likes," I decided to remake the Conservative Teen "cover" art to include references to "abstinence education" and "backdoor action." I then used my various Facebook identities to move the picture around via sharing, ultimately dumping it into a pool of more than 140 strangers whom one of my fake personas has "friended." I was hoping it would take off either from there or from the share made by my eponymous persona. But only one of my real friends shared it and none of those strangers did. (Those strangers are mostly a bunch of high school kids whose social network I infiltrated as a side effect of a plan to befriend every "Matt Rogers" on Facebook.) It seems it's difficult to create a viral meme that doesn't include pictures of cats or cast aspersions on Mondays.
Today's attempt at a viral Facebook image. But as well-liked as it was, it was only shared by one Facebook persona not created by me.
In Makerbot news today, I found I could finally make good non-warping prints with black polystyrene if I cranked the build platform's heater up to 125 degrees Celsius (that is, 25 degrees above default). My prints (in this case, of a herringbone gear) were now sticking so well to the build platform that I could barely crack them off. This led me to reinstall the automated build platform's belt system (which I'd abandoned as being unworkable). With that in place, models are built on a belt which then is automatically pealed off from below.
At some point my x-axis timing belt came loose and all the polystyrene was dumped out in a single line. After I fixed that, the x-axis gear came loose from the shaft on its stepper motor, requiring me to disassemble a few awkward things just to get to the retaining screw. All of this mucking around tells me how far we are from the days of ubiquitous 3D printing. Compared to the evolution of the personal computer, the Makerbot Thingomatic is probably only at the Altair 8800 stage.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?120401 feedback
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