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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(nobody does!)

Like my brownhouse:
   authoritative command line
Wednesday, January 28 1998
Y

esterday the wind howled, snow fell, but then it all turned into rain: messy, cold depressing winter rain. Today the rain continues.

It would be good weather to be in love.


circa 1:30pm

H

ere I am, wasting away my time, checking my email obsessively waiting for Ginkgo biloba to invite me to join the Mandlebrot Set. I've been checking my email for days, but still the expected invitation has not arrived, though as I survey the journal scene, I see Nova Notes and Off C e n t e r have received their invitations. Oh dear me, I feel like that time back in sixth grade when I wasn't invited to Nina Chew's exclusive party.

No actually, that's not what I've been doing. I just had what is to be my 486 UNIX box torn apart, worrying over the shortness of a floppy drive cable, deciding I don't need an archaic 5.25 inch floppy drive anyway, and then making a half-hearted stab at installing a 70 Megabyte MFM drive in addition to the 100 Megabyte IDE drive. It didn't work of course. All these toys scattered about my room are sort of like the ultimate Legos™ set, and combining them in various arrangements (and breathing into them the "life" of various software installations) is like an adult version of childhood heaven. Perhaps it's surrogate sexuality.

    Back when I was in Oberlin, I used to spend endless hours customizing my bicycles, and I always regarded that activity to be redirected sexual energy.
      Perhaps Matthew Hart's major flaw as a human being is that he doesn't have the ability to redirect his sexual energy into creativity.


W

ho says sucking Presidential cock doesn't pay? Now I hear that Penthouse Magazine is willing to pay two million dollars for Monica Lewinski's story and a few random semi-nude pictures. A pretty good break for a girl who's been described as "plain and overweight."


circa 5:24pm

I figured out a way to make myself feel better on this rainy day. I've made my own journal web ring. You want to get in? It's straight forward, it's easy, but you can't do it online.

in the end

T

hroughout the day, as the press put increasingly positive spin on Bill Clinton's emerging recover from this, the latest, sex scandal of his career, I was bent to the task of installing LINUX on my archaic 486 box (all of which I made from parts I've obtained for free). Unable to get any files from my ZIP drive, I was forced to shuffle floppy disks. I could go on and on about this, but in the end, let me just say, I had a minimal LINUX system functioning correctly in the privacy of my own home. There's an authority to the LINUX command line that I like; it reminds me of the power I felt I had on the old VAX 750 I used in connection with computer classes at Oberlin College back in 1986. I've measured all my subsequent experience with computer operating systems by the yardstick of that VAX 750. When, for example, Apple Computer introduced the Alias with System 7.0, I was very enthusiastic, because it reminded me of the useful (and much missed) UNIX ln command.

I

  heard noises downstairs; and it wasn't just Matthew and Angela. We had a visitor. Visitors are rare and beautiful things these days, so I went down to investigate.

It was one of Matthew's Waynesboro friends, seemingly a well-adjusted sociable sort, more refined than most of the people Waynesboro sends out into the world. But when he went off with Angela for a cultured cigarette break, Matthew discreetly explained that the guy was sort of a dork, the kind of guy to whom one doesn't give encouragement. "It's sort of like if Josh Furr showed up," he said. Humourous this comparison was, it didn't seem warranted. "If it was Josh Furr, I wouldn't need to explain anything," I responded.

Matthew was getting very drunk on whiskey I'd gotten for him earlier. He was carrying on and making so much noise that I had to run my fan to mask the noise as I was going off to sleep. But at least he was happy, at least he and Angela were not fighting.


I

'm pleased to say I've had a few nibbles for my new webring, but as of now no applicant yet meets all the requirements.

one year ago

For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?980128

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