The world under my feet
Jul. 13th, 2006 09:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
drwexProps to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tisana for pointing to this bit of comic one-ups-manship.
Pandora has started pulling stuff from the 80s and even the 70s that fit my musical tastes. On the one hand it's a case of "oh gods I haven't heard that in YEARS" and in another case it's a way of seeing "Oh, so THAT's why I liked that song back then." Like right now it's playing Corey Hart's "Sunglasses at Night" which more or less fits both situations. On the other hand, I now have a near-permanent music virus of "Superman" by the Kinks. Happy to share, yes.
My home PC blue its brains out some time last night (yes, pun intended). There are probably some corrupted DLLs. It's at the repair shop now. When anything with my home network is out I feel off-balance, disconcerted. It's like walking barefoot on a floor made with uneven and sloped floorboards. I can still walk, but it's not comfortable or pleasant and it feels wrong.
I use that PC almost entirely for gaming (what else are PCs good for except games?) and can easily game on the other PC or bring home my laptop. So why do I feel so dislocated? In Islands in the Net (1988) Bruce Sterling pointed out that we would come to think of the net the way we think about electrical power. We'd just notice it when it wasn't available. I think that's part of what's going on. I get similarly antsy during power outages.
There's also a sense of dislocation that accompanies removing a highly customized part of my environment. I used to have this problem whenever I moved to a new Unix box until I had ported all my dot files and recompiled my personal binaries. I haven't had to do that in years (yay for owning a Linux box - though I do need a new hosting solution) but I think part of what is happening here is the same thing. In the physical world I tend to set up my personal space in just the way I want it, to accommodate my habits and laziness. Sure, I can take my laptop and work at any desk in the building, but the lighting will be wrong, the chair won't have the same back support, my snacks won't be handy, et cetera. I'm a happy little hermit and this crash has pulled down a heavily used chunk of my personal environment. The world underneath me is unsteady, and it makes me cranky.
tisana for pointing to this bit of comic one-ups-manship.Pandora has started pulling stuff from the 80s and even the 70s that fit my musical tastes. On the one hand it's a case of "oh gods I haven't heard that in YEARS" and in another case it's a way of seeing "Oh, so THAT's why I liked that song back then." Like right now it's playing Corey Hart's "Sunglasses at Night" which more or less fits both situations. On the other hand, I now have a near-permanent music virus of "Superman" by the Kinks. Happy to share, yes.
My home PC blue its brains out some time last night (yes, pun intended). There are probably some corrupted DLLs. It's at the repair shop now. When anything with my home network is out I feel off-balance, disconcerted. It's like walking barefoot on a floor made with uneven and sloped floorboards. I can still walk, but it's not comfortable or pleasant and it feels wrong.
I use that PC almost entirely for gaming (what else are PCs good for except games?) and can easily game on the other PC or bring home my laptop. So why do I feel so dislocated? In Islands in the Net (1988) Bruce Sterling pointed out that we would come to think of the net the way we think about electrical power. We'd just notice it when it wasn't available. I think that's part of what's going on. I get similarly antsy during power outages.
There's also a sense of dislocation that accompanies removing a highly customized part of my environment. I used to have this problem whenever I moved to a new Unix box until I had ported all my dot files and recompiled my personal binaries. I haven't had to do that in years (yay for owning a Linux box - though I do need a new hosting solution) but I think part of what is happening here is the same thing. In the physical world I tend to set up my personal space in just the way I want it, to accommodate my habits and laziness. Sure, I can take my laptop and work at any desk in the building, but the lighting will be wrong, the chair won't have the same back support, my snacks won't be handy, et cetera. I'm a happy little hermit and this crash has pulled down a heavily used chunk of my personal environment. The world underneath me is unsteady, and it makes me cranky.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-07-13 03:12 pm (UTC)Providing a web browser and a shell, so I can login and work on a real machine.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-13 04:45 pm (UTC)*HUGS*
no subject
Date: 2006-07-13 06:48 pm (UTC)Would you put it on the laptop for me? Or email stuff you think I'd like to my gmail account and I'll download it later.
*hugs* in general about feeling off base. I totally understand and if it's more comfortable to use my PC to game on go for it.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-13 08:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-13 08:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-13 08:50 pm (UTC)