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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   Jeopardy! in the Before Times
Tuesday, October 27 2020
Gretchen has commissioned some paintings from me for the next edition of her poetry collection Kind, which will be coming from a new publisher, will have a hardcover edition, and will have entirely different art. To help with this, today I took advantage of a cheat I sometimes use when working from photographs. I wanted to use an HDMI projector to project the photo onto the canvas so I could sketch out the shapes and ensure they were all properly proportional. I have a tiny projector, but it's been many years since I last used it. Today when I tried to find a wall wart to power it, I was discouraged to see that it accepted a very tiny barrel plug. It was so tiny that the only wall wart that would work was probably the one it had come with. But where was that? I ended up going through about two thirds of the wall warts in my wall-wart box before finding the right one, and even it wasn't labeled in a way that confirmed it belonged to the projector. All I could tell was that its barrel connector fit. I've had problems in the past with connecting a supply of the wrong voltage, but this was 5 volts, not 12 volts, so I took the risk. Happily it worked, and once I'd established that, I painted both the projector and the wall wart a opaque yellow-green so I would easily be able to match them together again should they find themselves separated. In an ideal world, there would be only one form of wall wart, it would have one standard connector, and all devices would know how to work with it, much like 120 volt AC devices. But we don't live in that world. Powering things by USB connector comes close, and I wish everything with a USB port could be powered that way.

The cool weather continued, though today at least it wasn't raining. So I went out west of the Farm Road to obtain some more just-in-time skeletonized oak for the indoor wood rack. I didn't weigh the load but it was probably about 120 pounds.

By this evening, my drinking of kratom tea had me feeling dysphoric and also a bit dyspeptic. Powerful had made a kind of chili with beans and Trader Joe's vegan chorizo, and I barely had the appetite to eat it, even though it was very good. Since Powerful had a Zoom call he had to attend during dinner time, Gretchen and I ate our chili in front of the teevee just like in the old days before Powerful was living with us. As we watched Jeopardy!, we were surprised that there were non-California contestants and that there was a not-socially-distanced audience. Had Jeopardy! decided the pandemic was over? It turned out that we were watching an episode from October 22, 2019, not 2020, one we'd somehow never seen (or couldn't remember). It was from the Before Times, and the social rituals on display were actually somewhat jarring.


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http://asecular.com/blog.php?201027

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