Alternatives to sleep
I’m putting a couple of posts into place for subjects that come up a lot, so that I can continue the chain without polluting the front page post feed but still maintain context for the subjects. So, if you would like, you can subscribe to the RSS field for this post directly, and, also, you are welcome to contribute your own.
This one is “Plans I come up with late at night, in reply to which I think ‘Maybe going to sleep is a better idea.’”
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November 11th, 2009 at 01h06
A few weeks ago: “I should download The Communist Manifesto to my Kindle and read it tonight.”
November 11th, 2009 at 01h06
Tonight: “I should start memorizing Shakespeare’s plays. It would help me to sound more literate. I don’t know if I should go in chronological order or, for instance, start with the histories.”
November 11th, 2009 at 01h09
Just now: “Maybe I should engineer a couple of magnet posts for the site for subjects that come up a lot, so that I can continue the chain without polluting the front page post feed but still maintain context for the subjects”
Yeah, sorry about that.
November 11th, 2009 at 03h13
BBC satire program has a bit on Watching TV with Wittgenstein: “I wonder if Wittgenstein would make more sense to me now than it did in college. Surely it’s in Project Gutenberg.”
And it’s after 3:00.
November 11th, 2009 at 08h46
Do you have a Kindle addiction? I’ve “purchased” a few hundred free books at this point. When do I honestly think I’m going to read them all? As it is, a large portion of my time is spent listening to my Kindle in the car.
November 11th, 2009 at 22h29
Do you have a Kindle addiction?
Oh gods yes. I wrote a script for scraping free book sites, and I now have over 1,200 books on my Kindle 1. I figured, I’d be at a train station one night and think, “Ooh, Anna Karenina!”
By the way, indexing that many books takes about 100 hours of full-bore cranking by the processor. If not plugged into an A/C circuit, this will discharge one’s battery in a few hours. I kept thinking, “ZOMG why is my battery dead again?!” Um — 1,200 books.
When this was on free-promo at Amazon, I absolutely had to download it, because it had the best content advisory I’ve ever read: “Warning: This title contains unusual and pretty much impossible explicit sex.” Have I read it yet? Don’t be silly.
By the way: people have told me that ebook readers are “not ready for primetime yet.” And I say, “Um, I prefer reading on my Kindle to reading a hardcover book.” And they say, “Aha, but what about a paperback?” And I’ll say, “That too, unless I can pick it up at The Book Rack for $2.50 * 0.4 (trade-in credit w00t!)” And they say, “But you’d never take it into the bathroom!” And I think, “OK, maybe from here on out it would be TMI.”
November 11th, 2009 at 22h31
Just now: “PIGS! Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs! That’s how I can support myself! I can buy some property in the mountains and raise Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs! I wonder how much a breeding pair would cost. Let me check….”
November 12th, 2009 at 01h27
01h26: “Does California sherry-making use soleras? I wonder how old they are. Surely it would differ by winery, and I bet those are trade secrets. They wouldn’t tell me details of the width of the cut at that distillery. Glendronach? Hmm. Wonder which it was. Anyway, maybe Wikipedia has more info on the sherry. Even just an average or median would be useful.”
November 12th, 2009 at 02h06
02h05: “I’m tired of sleeping on the settee. I put a hammer and nails around here. Time to fix my bed.”
November 13th, 2009 at 20h36
I am composing, in my head, a letter to the emergency room physician who treated my last week, in a fashion for which a veterinarian would be fired and sued for treating a dog. It is detracting from the movie I am watching — and it’s not a challenging film The sheer arrogance of the man beggars belief. I suppose emergency medicine is the perfect specialty for the man, as he is completely insulated from the ramifications of his decisions. They’re just in the ER, right? They’ll be gone in hours! Motherfucker.
At least on mcgees.org, no one can send me home because I am disrupting his evening.
20h30. The night is young. I can find more and more eloquent ways of suggesting that he is unfit for medicine and a case study for everything wrong with for-profit medical care. The banks under capitalism get to privatize profits and socialize risk. Independent-contractor doctors get to do the same thing: they can dismiss and dehumanize a patient, and then get to bill him for however many hundreds of dollars they see fit. Perhaps my case would have taken time. Perhaps that would prevent him from buying a luxury car for his daughter; presumably he, his wife, and his mistress all have theirs already.
Perhaps this is common.
Perhaps this should be submitted to my attorney.
And, right. It’s the N-H-fucking-S that kills people. Gah! Kill our grandmothers?! The motherfucker wants to kill the person listening to the pundits.
November 13th, 2009 at 21h52
21h52 — “Hmm, does vodka decrease the LD50 of [redacted]? Let me check. Then next time I’ll know beforehand.”
November 16th, 2009 at 22h06
21h44 — “I am very interested to explore textile skills. Not knitting; it’s bad for my writs. Something slightly ambitious like a quilt. A proper woven blanket? Something very ambitious like a tapestry? I wonder if the threads in the latter need to be individually dyed in certain places to create patters. I think they must be — I don’t want a surface-inked tapestry or quilts. There are surely reams of information that I an find. Start there: lap quilting, spinning, whatever those weaving thingies are, spinning techniques and equipments, space they’d take up, cost to buy them sec ondhand.
sleepsleepsleep. Moe clear thoughts later.