You've got that couch issue covered
Continuing my work of writing down my thoughts about Back to Work, my favourite podcast. This week, episode 201, Never Enough Bathrooms.
Yeah, it does appear that I'm going backwards, but Back to Work isn't necessarily a show you need to listen to in order, and the holidays were busy and I had a backlog. I'm also not at all interested in making a complete catalogue of posts about B2W episodes. There was a blog not that tried to do that (cleverly called "Back to Back to Work") that put up a few episode breakdowns and then disappeared, and I'm not at all promising I won't do the same. Mostly, this is for me to remember what I found interesting about the episode at hand. I have no idea if this kind of thing would be valuable to other people.
Christmas is a quarter of the year now. And this is fatiguing.
Kids know the difference between the affordable version and the fancy version.
Used Lego is gross, even in theory. Like used headphones.
From "cyber-terrorism" to "cyber-bullying", the suffix is only ever placed there by people who really have no idea how the internet work. Whenever I hear "cyber" I picture an issue of Wired from 1995 that somehow found its way to your grandma's house in 2013.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - is the third of Clarke's Three Laws. The first two seem like TV Tropes. But anyways, networked technology advancements actually breaks the rule. An iPhone wouldn't look like magic so much as a piece of glass with most of the stuff not working in the middle ages. Where it would look great is in the 80s, when we could conceivably picture such a device, but just weren't there yet.
USPS sounds bad.
That things that used to work fine sometimes don't now is incredibly infuriating, even if it's entirely a first world problem.
This made me think of two things. First, Fight Club, and the idea of never having to buy another couch "once that couch issue is covered." It's such a twenty-something guy idea that something like that is just settled forever after you've considered it once for like a minute. Secondly, Louis, and the scene where Pamela and Louis' kids just get rid of all his stuff out of nowhere (including his couch).
A couch isn't a technology. But its still a thing that can, at any moment, become more complicated than you'd ever like by outside factors that love you and only want what's best for your life.
I guess what I mean is that it would suck if my couch starting being something I had to worry about. And not just in a "my evil personality blew it up" and more "it wont let me sit on it if the wifi doesn't work." I'm somewhat afraid of "The Internet of Things," as it has been mutated by the desire to stick connected dingi into things that don't seemingly need it.
A system that used to work and now doesn't is enough to make you pretty crazy, if not completely veer you into gaslighting territory. It's not even possible to be indifferent about something like that. You've tacitly agreed upon a construct, and it just falls apart and all you can do is be sad and reboot a router.
