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
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got that wrong
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appropriate tech
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Fractal antenna

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   hate-watching and binge-watching
Saturday, November 14 2015
Last night's power outage continued until about 11:00am this morning. Since I got up fairly early with Gretchen (who planned to volunteer as a sous cook for the day at the animal sanctuary south of High Falls), that meant I spent a fairly long time trying to come up with ways to entertain myself in the absence of non-print media. I spent some of that time drinking tea and reading The Master Algorithm. Eventually I decided to put the tech-free time to good use by doing some yard work to de-hillbillification the yard. (Gretchen thinks the random buckets, collapsed screen tent, and garden chaos looks white trash, and she wanted me to do something about it.) Unfortunately, today was not a warm one, and I probably could have picked a better day to coil up the garden hoses and put them away. Cold hoses aren't very flexible and tend to kink instead of coil.
I also put away the screen tent even though I hadn't yet repair a network of tears it had developed. I tried to handle it as little as possible since it is still sprinkled with quills shed from the Bur Cucumber plant that grew all over it this past summer.
At one point as I was doing these things, I heard the freezer in the garage running, so I knew the power had come back on. Later this would allow me to stream a podcast to my headphones directly from the internet using my FM transmitter. Sometimes I carry my MP3s with me when I go off into the woods, but it takes effort to copy them from my computer to a micro SD card, so the podcasts on that card tend to be a bit stale. If I don't go more than a half mile away, I can usually hear the FM broadcast from my computer. I was listening to the latest Slate Political Gabfest as I salvaged 129 pounds of skeletonized Red Oak from a dead trunk on a dual-trunk tree; the other trunk was alive. This was down the Stick Trail a couple hundred feet south of the Chamomile crossing. The great thing about salvaging wood in such cool weather is that I don't sweat at all.
I painted this small (4 by 4.75 inches) painting of Ramona over the course of the day, starting at around noon and facilitated by a recreational 120 milligram dose of pseudoephedrine.


Later, I drove over to Susan & David's place briefly to pick up some Trader Joes items they'd bought for us while in Albany. I was there just long enough for Susan to show me the completed spackling down in the redone basement, which now looks ready for paint.
Back at the house, I'd had to use Bittorrent to get the latest stupid episode of Gold Rush. No matter how impossible it becomes to suspend my disbelief, I have to watch even if it's just hate-watching at this point.
A better television experience happened later after Gretchen came home and we fired up the first episode of the second season of Fargo. This season, the unintended clusterfucks and bleak highway murders take place against the dreary yellowish backdrop of the late 1970s, and Gretchen thought she detected an acting style from that period as well, and for a time it seemed to threaten her ability to watch this season. But then, as always happens early in a Fargo (either in the cinema or on television), a circumstances take a multilayer turn for the grim, and we were off to the races. I could have watched another episode, but Gretchen wanted to return to Jane the Virgin, which she has been binge-watching for days. Between her books, and the music and gripping golden-age television I've been downloading for her, Gretchen is delirius from the quality of all the media that surrounds her.


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http://asecular.com/blog.php?151114

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