Yes, if I ever say I am half-deaf…I am. That’s what happens when a buncha shit explodes next to your head.

If I didn’t hear you, that’s why. Or I’m just ignoring you because I don’t like you. Either way, I really am pretty deaf in one ear.

24-core CPU and I can’t type an email (part one).

This is true across the board. For many tasks, computers I used during the 1980s were much faster (especially once fully booted) than the exact same tasks I do now — that’s true even though on paper, many of the machines I use now are literally a million times faster.

I could compose and send an email faster in 1989 than I can now. What in the hell. Sometimes, I wish we’d never let normal people have computers or the internet.

I know I’ve written about bias lighting before, but today I noticed this article.

Bias lighting is the best for-the-price change I’ve ever made to my computing experience. Incredibly cheap, and improves the experience of viewing a monitor, especially long-term, enormously. If you think you don’t care or it won’t improve your experience, you’re almost certainly wrong. Why? Physiologically, humans experience large brightness changes very similarly and because the differences are so large and humans eyes are nearly identical physiologically, eye strain will happen to everyone about the same.

In other words, bias lighting will benefit you and it’s incredibly cheap. Just get you some. (If your monitor is already against a bright background like a window, this won’t help you much — the only exception.)

For me, bias lighting improved the time I can read at my screen and greatly decreased my likelihood of getting a migraine from doing so. Best $25 I ever spent on computer-related stuff.

#ShareYourRejections One time I got turned down from a part-time minimum wage dishwashing job at a local diner even though I had a connection. #rockbottom

— ✨Yael Grauer✨ (@yaelwrites) August 16, 2018

Oh, fun.

*After I’d been a working photojournalist for five years and had publications in nationwide outlets (not just Army), was told while applying for a similar job that I had “no experience.”

*When I was attempting to break into the IT industry, I interviewed at a large regional public-facing computer repair shop. While I was waiting around at the front to be interviewed, a customer came in and was frantically looking for help with a problem. I glanced at the front desk person with a “Can I help this woman?” look and he nodded his head yes. She told me she’d brought the computer in three times and they’d not fixed it. I fixed the issue in about five minutes. After the interview, I was emailed back and told that — you guessed it — I had “not enough experience.” That’s one of the few times I’ve ever sent a really nasty reply email stating that I fixed when I was waiting in the front a problem that their own techs could not in three times of trying, and that not hiring me was their fucking loss. A year later, they were out of business.

*Was rejected from another IT job because I my technical skills were so far beyond those of the interviewer that when I corrected him about something that was easily possible, he basically kicked me out of the office and argued with me about it. Glad I got that early warning, because otherwise the job sounded great.

One of my favorite songs ever written. I’ve never seen this performance before, but found it the other day when I discovered the Concrete Blonde “Everybody Knows” video.

The audio quality is potato and the video quality is mashed potato, but Johnette’s voice is just unbelievable. My dudes and ladies, that cannot be faked. Fucking hell. I’d forgotten just how absurdly talented she was. She was goth before anyone knew what the hell goth was. That dirty swamp guitar of James Mankey…what a performance.

And Johnette’s growl at the “Ohww you were a vampire….” during the first part of the song….

Librarians call it “the 20th century black hole.” You can log on to the Internet and find creative works spanning almost the whole of human history. According to the internet, though, people by and large stopped creating things in the early 1900s, and only started back up again around the year 2000. What happened? Copyright—or, more clearly, our modern version of copyright, an exaggerated, metastasized version that’s now doing a great deal of harm to history.

So true. There are books and games and other software that I used during the mid-80s and very early 90s that I can find no record of any kind on the internet. For books, perhaps if I had the ISBN I could re-discover it. However, all I recall is the title of a book that might have been sold only in a region of the country, or a bit of software that might have sold 5,000 copies and been distributed mostly on BBSes. These items are forever lost to history thanks to obscurity combined with copyright laws.

All times lose most of their history. Thanks to copyright, DRM, and the evanescent nature of digital media, we are likely to lose nearly all of ours.

I feel the same way about the Lost in Space reboot.

It’s a show that never really resonates because it alternately tries to be light family fare and something deeper and darker. This could work, I guess, but in this case it does not.

Parker Posey’s Dr. Smith, though, is just great. What a slimy sleazeball that you somehow still feel some sort of begrudging affection for, and don’t even understand why you do. She just cannot help herself and I think that’s why. She’s the scorpion that can’t help but sting.