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back in Black Mirror
Tuesday, June 18 2019
I was in a meeting upstairs with the development team late this morning that served as sort of a "stand-up" that this new guy, a VP of something or other, is trying to have on a regular basis (which is probably a good idea). He asked at the end if anyone had any complaints or questions, so I brought up the brutal cold in the office and what might be done about it. From the resulting discussion, it seems the problem may actually be the placement of my desk (and also Marc's desk; he's the one who has taken to wearing a Russian hat with ear flaps in the office) directly beneath a vent. Since there are actually people in the office who like the cold, maybe it's just a problem with seating assignments. Or it could be that the vents need more effective diffusers so as to keep the concentrated cold air from impacting any one particular person.
This evening, Celeste the Cat was under foot as usual, and so I impulsively picked her up. She felt heavy, so I weighed her. She came in at about 14 pounds, which is a fair amount for a cat with her frame. Clarence once weighed as much as 17 pounds, but he had a bigger skeleton. (He weighed about eight pounds when he vanished for the last time into the forest.)
This evening, after taking a bath and climbing into bed, I watched a Bittorrent-downloaded copy of "Striking Vipers," the first episode of the latest season of Black Mirror. As I've said in the past, I love this series for its nuanced exploration of the implications of the galloping changes brought by technology. In "Striking Vipers," two old chums reconnect over a virtual-reality version of a martial arts fighting game they used to enjoy, only to discover their avatars can do a lot more than fight. And so they do, with implications on their sexual identity and fidelity to people in the non-virtual versions of their lives.
Usually I am haunted by a Black Mirror episode after watching it, but this one was (for me, at least) a little light in things to ponder. This might've simply been a reflection of how low the stakes turned out to be for the two protagonists. Also, at this point I've had so much exposure to that little disc that allows people to enter "the matrix" (so to speak), that there were few new implications to contemplate. Most of the themes had already been explored in, for example, "San Junipero," which presented a fully-realized virtual universe one could go to both during life and upon death. The virtual world of a street-fighting game seemed like a claustrophobic experiential subset by comparison.
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