The good old days weren’t so good. I don’t think people realize what it was like.

I got my first modem a few years later, and modems at the time were flaky hardware only BARELY supported by single-tasking systems that had never been designed to handle any signal arriving anywhere at a time they did not choose. If your computer didn’t respond fast enough to interrupts, a modem could crash it. If you were running anything that didn’t suspend and resume its business correctly (and most things didn’t because they’d never had to before) or anything that was coded to use the same interrupt, the modem would crash it. If the software on your end ever started taking too long to execute per input character, the modem would fill up the short hardware buffer faster than your software could empty it, and crash it. If you transmitted characters faster than the software running on the remote system could handle them, you’d crash the remote system. There were no error correcting protocols because none of us had the compute power to run them fast enough to avoid a crash at the speeds the modems ran.

That’s why I always laugh when I hear people say things like “Security should’ve been built in from the beginning! That was the mistake!”

Motherfucker, no. Just no. The computers we had back then were so very slow. So slow that you can’t even imagine. I could type significantly faster than my first modem could echo back the characters. I could barely run the one application that I wanted to at the time. There was no CPU or memory for security or for even the application working half the time. If we’d built security in from the beginning, there never would’ve been home computers, BBSes or the internet.

Some games and programs I loaded from cassette tapes (SYSTEM [press enter] – ATOM [press enter] – then press “play” on the cassette deck, wait, then press / then enter) loaded so slowly that I’d start it up, go outside to play for a while, and then 30 minutes later come back — and it still wouldn’t be done.

I think most people under 35ish have no idea just how stupendously slow, balky and resource-limited early home computers were. Then, they seemed like miracles

Now, I can’t believe we ever used them.

It should be a requirement that reviewers at least understand the work they are reviewing. That’s a repeated problem that I run into — not one out of 100 reviewers understood Ex Machina, for instance, and the problem was not with the movie.

Here is another example, this time with the Netflix adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House.

Also, is the reviewer aware that the book is unchanged, just as it was? No books were “mangled” in the process of making the show; it can be read just as it was prior to the series. Also, there were absolutely no jump scares at all in the show. I believe the reviewer might have been watching a completely different series than I observed. (Which is very apropos given the themes of the series itself.)

Here’s the big secret I think the reviewer missed: no one ever left the Red Room of Hill House. The entire Crain family is still there, alive in memories, alive in the house, dead in the world — that’s why the father’s demise is never mentioned, never nodded to, never discussed.

The only way to get a completely happy ending in this life is to never engage the world — and in the context of the show, how does one never engage the world?

Exactly.

The way is to be digested by Hill House. The Crains all died there, and are together, perhaps even happy, in their memories, in their fantasies, in the ever-present timeless phantasmagorium of Hill House.

The only things Russiagate accomplished were expanding the military, manufacturing consent for internet censorship, smearing all dissenting political speech as Russian psyops, and making everyone dumber. Everyone who helped advance it should be mocked and marginalized forever. https://t.co/bhSIbnO7Zg

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) October 19, 2018

That pretty much says all that needs to be said about that whole mess.