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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Like my brownhouse:
   glasses-shaped mark in the snow
Thursday, February 9 2017
Overnight we'd had the largest single snowfall in years, though only came to about 12 inches of accumulation. Even that was super fluffy due to the coldness (usually it's a bit warmer during a big snow). At one point while outside I accidentally dropped my glasses into the snow, leaving a glasses-shaped (U-shaped — or [_]-shaped) mark in the snow. I assumed the glasses would be a short way into that hole, but they'd managed to find their way a couple inches into the snow before slowing to a stop.
Things were busy in the workplace because I suddenly had to build a system allowing duplications to make it through a filter designed to eliminate them. When I was done with that, my day suddenly opened up, so I could join Gretchen in the shoveling out of the driveway, which was already about a quarter or third of the way done. The new snow was light and fluffy and easy to move. But there was a patch of it about half-way to the road where ground water had soaked it from below, and this stuff was terrible. It stuck to the shovel, making it heavier than it needed to be while taking up room. You'd have to bang the shovel hard to dislodge the slush, and even then some if would remain. Another misery I encountered related to the gloves I was using. These were the same gloves I'd used to handle the bur cucumber vines that had taken over our garden and much of our yard at the end of the 2015 growing season. At that point in the year, the spikes on the seeds had become brittle wicked-sharp cellulosic shivs featuring backwards-pointing barbs, and of course a good many of them had remained in the gloves. Today as I shoveled, I kept feeling them work their way into my skin. I'd have to stop and pluck them out with my cold fingers in the blowing 22 degree conditions. And then periodically I'd also have to check my smartphone because of things happening on Slack, the virtual embodiment of my remote workplace. At the time I was listening to a Science Weekly (concerning whether or not quantum physics describes an absolute or emergent reality), and it was being broadcast from my computer. Of course, superimposed on that audio was the audio from my Slack window. In the past, before I had a smartphone, this would've been enough for me to work in peace. I'd just run back to my computer if there was communication happening. Now, though, I just reach for my phone. I could've had it on vibrate and not been listening to my main computer at all. But then I wouldn't've been able to separate out the Slack notifications from the ones that make no difference.
Gretchen later figured out that it had taken us almost exactly an hour to dig out the entire driveway (though we'd had the help of a neighbor who had cleared the massive mountain from along the edge of Dug Hill Road). This was perhaps the first time ever that Gretchen had done the majority of the shoveling.
Gretchen also did a bunch of household cleaning that would normally have been my job. But I have an actual job and she doesn't, and we needed the house to be clean for house-sitters tomorrow. We'd be spending tomorrow night in Brooklyn.
By late in the remote workday, I was relaxing in the comfort of the tasks I prefer most: adding features to the reporting system. Since that's the main work environment for our new employee Al, it's important to make that system as useful as it can possibly be.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?170209

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