Wednesday, June 13, 2012

DAY SEVEN:
The power supply arrived Saturday afternoon. Before then, I made one brief trip to the store and otherwise spent the day reading and watching TV. I finished one of the books I bought Wednesday. It took me probably more than half an hour to install completely, doing everything the cautious way, but there were no problems.

Even with the shopping, and going out with friends that night and having a leisurely morning the following day, I've probably been on my computer more than usual since I got it working again, and "more than usual" is really saying something. Frankly, though, I don't feel too bad about that. I bought Diablo III just a week or so before my computer broke and it's still new to me, and I did a little writing like I mentioned before. And I was obviously getting bored. I'm not sure exactly how my TV viewing during the computer-free week compares to normal, but it was definitely more. Same for reading.

Another thing is, I was bugged by not being connected to the rest of the world. That might sound absurd - I had my work computer, my girlfriend's computer at home, and a smartphone - but none of those are good for graphics-intensive gaming, none of those are good for text documents I keep stored on my hard drive, and none are good for utterly trivial shit like videos of cats playing or arguments about comic book history. In other words, the trivial stuff I actually spend my free time thinking about.

A science fiction trope for years now has been neural connections to computers. People are generally wary of it from a philosophical perspective - what does it mean, and that's really mean, to alter your brain, your self, that way, what would it do to your very identity, the meaning of being a person - and I can appreciate that, but after a week of relying on the sufferance of others for my computing, I'd happily get a YouTube implant in my cortex, thanks, and ignore the philosophy. Streaming video is a lot more fun than philosophy.

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