Drop off your children with a toy ambulance and police car and let them play.
Tell the Librarian you'll be back at 4:00 to pick them up. Reassure her they've got fresh batteries.
Enjoy the free wi-fi, turn up your video. Play your game on your phone. Candy crush, turn up the volume so you can hear the pleasing sounds of reward. That everyone can hear. That "Ching-Ching-Ching" like a slot machine paying off. Get on Skype, WhatsApp, time for your group chat. It's OK. That's what the library is for.
They can't hear you? Of course they can't. They're in Mumbai, Johannesburg, Berlin, Tai-Pei or Beijing, SPEAK UP!
Talk loudly to the librarian about the book you ordered and is it in, you called. Maybe she doesn't understand so talk louder. Yeah, it's going to be a great book. Terrific book. You know the Author? Trui-sh crime. Speculative Fiction. No, no, his other books were fiction but this is classed as speculative fiction, that's why you couldn't find it.
Bring your drum and practice, the drum circle is coming soon and you want to be prepared. Just play it lightly, you don't want to disturb the children....
***
Library Etiquette, not here. Far better in Vancouver.
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This, in the last few months - has grown, well, there are no words.
Occasionally I click on this tab, a clip from a movie I remember, or on an actor I like, but there's a whole tab devoted to it.
So, wasting time - and - wasting is a term that has never been better used. Facebook - social media - the news - they're the hoover, the sucking up of lost and wasted dreams.
So, scrolling, looking for treasure hunting videos to Troll Chris with.
Now that Ken's "employed" I'm trolling Chris with our mutual passions.
People unearthing bogus treasure chests or prospecting bogus gold nuggets or ...
Well, it's it's own rabbit-hole. And it's all bullshit. Anyways, in lieu of Ken I've started sending it all to Chris. Who's in on the joke.
So, scrolling, looking, and all the videos, they're porn-wanna-be's or porn-promotions. Girl jiggling tits in front of camera. Girl getting stuck in sofa cushions, head first, ass up. Girl getting stuck in washer. Dryer. Ibid. "Hit like and subscribe" or "Visit my only-fans for more...".
And ridiculously inane hooks, pause on your scroll and "the hook" is set. "You won't believe...." followed by "what I found....what's in this chest....what happened to me...".
Low production "staged" videos designed to elicit a "reaction" - usually a response to having wasted 30 seconds/a minute/4 minutes of your life watching this Bullshit, with the appropriate number of laugh/thumbs up emojis. It seems these are the only ones allowed, there's no emoji for "WTF?" or "I want a refund on my life...", they're generated by "Content-Farms", people doing inane things - and then, if you should have paused to see it through to it's conclusion, you'll be fed a thousand more videos of different people doing the same thing, exactly the same thing.
Neither content or amusement and proof positive that we're being terminally distracted while the world is hastily ending...
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Now, every day, memory warnings, I need to delete things so that I can update my computer. For what? What in the living be-jeezus-fuck do I need to upgrade this mf-piece-of-hp-chromebook-shit for? It has an OS that comprises 27 GB!!!! WTF!!!! I browse the internet with it, write in .txt and .rtf format, I don't run Word or Open Office or any photo-editing software, this - this - I mean, I have a browser - but - WTF!!!!!????
My God, my first computer, a TI/99-4A, 40+ years ago, worked way fucking better than this. Across the board, for everything, and sorry the internet didn't exist then but if it did it would have worked a lot fucking better. 8 Bit serial processor. 32 KB memory. We're literally - literally - 1000's of times faster here, for the same basic tasks, and the infrastructure, the delivery, is so overloaded, top-heavy, non-lean, bull-shit intensive that it can't keep up.
Now, I mean, watching porn - not that I do, not that I'd ever dream of or consider, but - watching porn - if I did, or dreamt of, would be more stop-motion than the original King-Kong.
No Kidding.
I can't have more than a single browser tab open at a time. More than that and this fucking piece of shit crashes. More than 2, 3 documents open? This fucking thing seizes and crashes.
That's OK, it keeps me focused. I get on this computer, I'm doing one thing at a time. One thing at a time. I used to have 20, 30 tabs open, now I have one. This one. One thing at a time. Breathe deep, focus...
But, mother of God, what a fucking piece of shit and what an unnecessary load of grievances for something that should be easily 1000 times equal to the most trivial of tasks I'm putting to it...
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And, since the advent of Chat GPT I've noticed Google "upping" it's game, to little avail. YouTube for the most part recommends garbage, and my "Personalized" news feed on Google is mostly dubious sources reporting on shit like MMA and Hockey and Basketball, none of which I've ever searched in my entire life.
I notice, however, how well other sites do with their cookies. For example, my "Line drawing in the style of ...." request to Dall-E has resulted in 1stDibs showing me a ton of line drawing prints. I wouldn't think a cookie was set for that, but I'd be wrong. And other queries generate similar things, write a post on my blog and - coincidence by coincidence - there will be something advertised very close to what I searched for, sooner often than later.
If you were superstitious you would think it's magic. It is, it's the magic of AI governing the internet.
Anyways, a long day today bent double in the field picking up mostly nothing and a few good pieces, good to get away from Nelson, but my back is hurting from all that stooped searching and time now to read my book and go to bed...
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