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Brothel Tokens from Pompeii
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
- Hits: 1065
Found these interesting (via reddit): 
I mean, it seems a bit much, having to commit to one thing and one thing only so early in the game....
This Fucking Computer...
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Rants
- Hits: 537
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...
About the Author
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Images
- Hits: 812
Playing with Dall-E, trying to generate some relevant images. "About the Author", with a few parameters. Some interesting results....
This is, I'm sure you'll agree, far better than having me model for the photos..."Close Enough!!!!" I'd say, and be done with it...
Julio Cortázar - Hopscotch
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Books
- Hits: 781
Now, I have read it through in the first order, Chapters 1 through 56, and found that there was still a third of the book yet to be read.
It's not a slender book, at some 600 pages, and it's not an easy read, for the most part. This is a good thing, the language and references are dense and there's a great many things I should be looking up. Words like Maldorors, Pataphysics, Melmoths, Octave Mirbeau's "The Torture Garden", there are innumerable, overwhelming cultural references of which I recognize only a few. When last I read books set in Paris, Hemmingway, Maughm and others, there was no internet, you knew the reference or you didn't and if you were lucky you got a footnote that explained it.
Now, now I have the internet, and I'm - not forever, but often enough, setting it down to go down some rabbit-hole suggested by the author. Not all pan out, but enough, enough.
A Sampling, googling the protagonist's encounter with Berthe Trepat - who turns out to be a fictional pianist, looking up on YouTube to find that in fact there's been music composed in her honor - in this twist of modernity, had a footnote been around some 30 years ago when last I did this sort of reading she would merely have been a fictional character, now, in the age of the internet, fiction becomes reality...
Her description, on page 106: "There was something moving about that face of a burlap-stuffed doll, of a plush turtle, of an immense nitwit stuck in a rancid world of chipped teapots..."
Now, I have finished it in the first order, now to read it again in the order prescribed by the author which will fill in for all the missing chapters and pages.
In the beginning, a little annoyed, "too soon", but the prose has a lyrical quality, a poetry, intensity, that reading it again I'm finding new ways to understand it.
An excellent book.
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