#269

Oh, depression. Oh, the will to death. How does one say it in German? There was once a blog of invented words for real feelings. I will search for it now. 

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Ah, yes. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. Seems it is not only text onscreen, but a hardcover book, which reached that bestseller list published by that main newspaper. This is very cheering; I fully expected to find nothing but vague references and one of those shell websites trying to direct you towards buying fake plane tickets. 

Anyway, depression, but sometimes something weird and fantastic and necessary and, INDEED, obscure, does not vanish in your wake like so much else, and stays. One of the counter spells that makes survival in the face of depression and existential angst possible and durable.

Idly but consistently thinking about durability these days. The concept, its applications. Nothing concentrated, many wide-ranging and useless thoughts. This is my favorite kind of thinking. Doing my favorite kinds of thinking instead of the more practical varieties is another thing that makes surviving depression possible. 

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Losing my computer to its own lack of decent durability, software and hardware-wise alike, and being unable to replace it when it breaks or transfer the contents to a new box has been a real fuckin problem in life. It's happened once during the course of this blog, which I touched on in due course, but that was merely the latest chapter in a whole sordid section of the JL Encyclopedia. 

Ugh. I am not deleting that last sentence in order to try and teach myself a lesson.

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The first family computer I can remember using was a Macintosh Quadra, no idea which and I really don't want to talk to my folks about jack shit right now so who knows. Definitely a Quadra model, though. I played Kid Pix and Thinkin' Things on that machine, and nothing else. The years were 1993 and 1994. The builds of those computer programs were fucking badass back then; later versions of Kid Pix always felt too smooth to me, like they'd taken away a cool toy and given me back something similar in shape but covered in padded foam. It's who I am as a person, clearly; most people think internet has actually gotten better. Either I'm just a retrograde lunatic and have been since I was a baby, or almost all originally cool shit has to get warped and ruined beyond all recognition in the direction of stupidity verging on intentional evil due to, I don't fucking know, the influence of Ahriman. I didn't even need to look at a single frame of the so-called Cowboy Bebop "reboot", "remake"--whatever the fuck they wanted to call that organ of cultural rape--to know the score.

Thinkin' Things aesthetic and gameplay got worse with the next version release and I couldn't look at it anymore. Forced to leave childish things behind and having rehashed the material within Mega Math Blaster, The Hunchback of Notre Dame game from Disney Interactive, and Reader Rabbit 2 to exhaustion, I moved on to Duke Nukem 3D. Guess some people played Oregon Trail or something at that age, but I had kind of a fucked-up childhood in some ways. 

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Aside: my contemporaries and I went straight from Lincoln Logs and that ancient phone toy that made a cameo appearance in Toy Story 3--you know the one, the original Fisher Price Chatter Phone--to computer programs, and we were the second or third wave of kids and teens on internet. I don't think my parents, or anyone's parents, were prepared for this event in childrearing, but almost every one of my contemporaries, even the stupidest pieces of shit, were smarter in key ways than their parents by incredible margins, even the scientist parents. It's just how we grew up. From this we may derive that my own offspring will process me as hyperefficient biofuel before they turn eight, and that's just evolution, baby. Up the children. May I be utilized in order to be surpassed by significant margins in every metric.

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The next computer in the house was a Compaq Presario, which makes plenty of sense. It was the mid-nineteen-nineties and we had just moved to the U.S.A., and Compaq was first among equals in the PC revolution. I have no idea what models the computers were at the computer lab in my first U.S. elementary school, but they were dependable and very usable machines. I started to learn Python on those computers; that great little turtle.

Woof! History truly is crazy. Look at computers now! The ubiquity, the gleam, the power! I miss those gray boxes designed by those Texas Instruments men. I miss that they whined like jet engines and got hotter than the devil's taint just to read a CD-ROM. I miss only pixels, no one even imagining the concept of the Retina display I'm looking at as I type this (hilarious that retina gets capitalized automatically in this context. Someday, in the future, we will not be able to publish a single thing in "our own words" without auto-signing a dozen agreements about how they're not our words, they are a company's words).

At my Catholic school later in the nineties when we had moved back to Venezuela for awhile, the computer lab was outfitted with IBM PC's from 1981 or even before, I don't fuckin know. In this case, when I say PC, I may not mean personal computer, but the older conception of portable computer. If they read floppy discs, that was a recent breakthrough at date of production. I remember the point of the class was to make them process typing into word display and perform input on very basic equations. The screens were uniformly black and white, expressing only straight lines.

The next year, back in the 'States, they herded me into the computer labs at the more upper-crust elementary school where I did fifth grade and I was confronted with serried ranks of pink iMacs. I don't remember what they tried to teach us, if anything. This gave me much to think about, at the time. 

Dude, the mouses on those iMacs sucked, in my personal assay. Fancy lasers my ass.

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My first internet thing was visiting the Animorphs website for the games and blog and boards and chat rooms (the chat rooms were too rich for my bandwidth, but I read about them elsewhere). A heady time, these early internet message boards for teens, and of course, snotty little punks reading above their weight. The Scholastic website, to which the Animorph's website naturally swore fealty, was a pretty good website. You could market, but you couldn't sell directly or monetize advertisement yet, so the content was mostly just good and descriptive stuff about kid lit and intermediate lit and all the other literature that's better than Literature. Plus, when it came to the flagship titles and series, interactive stuff crafted before online interactivity carried the price of your immortal soul, like the Animorphs flash games.

Oh yeah, triple-A Flash games, in the times well before Flash games could pop up and steal your data after you managed to shoot the monkey or whatever the fuck, which was well before actual quality FG aggregators or the recognized quality of stuff like Puzzle Pirates.

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Remembering shit can be fucking exhausting. I guess that's Classic Aging, folks. It gets to feel like so much stuff happened, how could it even be true? Certainly there's no way to remember. World memory--durable? No. No, all this could easily be gone and forgotten again, and a new world of men might rise higher than we ever managed to over the unseen ruins of this near-failure of ours. Those humans might never look down, never know that we were here, except in the origins of their oldest stories--tales of a technological godlessness cast down for its reeking hubris.

Yes, I am saying that we are Atlantis 2.0 and we are obviously a worse and shittier program than Atlantis 1.0, which dovetails with my earlier observations concerning programs. For whatever that is worth (less than zero probably).

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This has been Computers Day here on FP, I guess. Next time I'll try to finish this and talk more about whatever I talked about last time, but you know how I am, dear reader.

Be well, and be good, be virtuous and true, and if it gets you nowhere and you get fucked over and killed, at least you'll be in happy company.

--JL