annie2
Super Person
I sense fiendish activity afoot.
Posts: 84
|
Post by annie2 on Apr 14, 2020 13:11:21 GMT -8
During the week, I go to our safe house and try to get as much work done from an itty bitty laptop. I'm used to two huge screens and an industrial printer so this is slow going.
|
|
|
Post by Evan on Apr 14, 2020 13:27:06 GMT -8
Two consecutive hours of Idiotest on GSN bridges the gap between lunch and mid-afternoon well enough
|
|
|
Post by stinkypete on Apr 14, 2020 13:31:12 GMT -8
I have a desktop w/ two monitors at home, so I'm using my normal home desk but with my laptop and a big adapter for HDMI/DP monitors and USB mouse/keyboard. The cable for my second big monitor and a new keyboard are arriving soon, and then I'll have something close to my old setup at work. One of the monitors isn't recognized by the chromebook so it only puts out 1280x720, which is way worse than the native screen, so I'm hoping it'll be recognized over DP rather than HDMI.
I've always wanted to work from home full time, but it's nonetheless a challenge because I'm not willing to pay for the climate control my office has and it just started getting hot. But I'm still making good progress on work and getting better, I joined a CSA and picked up my first box today, and I get to tend my garden(s) any time of day. Last week I got a new garden bed delivered and a few cubic yards of soil/compost and filled it up, and once my scythe arrives I'll be taking down my cover crop and weeds and layering it with the compost to create a super fertile plot to plant my corn and other things in. Going to lay down a grid using twine and plan the planting all out. Until now I was planting pretty haphazardly because I just wanted to grow as many different species as I could. Sunchokes, tomatoes, cucumber, borage, sunflowers, spinach, kale, basil, sage, lemon balm, chocolate mint, strawberry, corn, peas, beans, thistle, ginger, burdock, and eventually squash, hops, watermelon, amaranth, oranges, and thyme
For chores I've got plenty of podcasts that used to go on my commute
|
|
|
Post by Mike Lenin on Apr 15, 2020 8:18:25 GMT -8
I have been going around bicycle riding, rummaging through stuff people dump at thrift stores. And teaching sociology to college students of different ages via zoom, trying to process everything and stay ahead of people who are way smarter than I am about current events. Now, I am working on a website to sell a bunch of vintage media. www.ttrag.com
|
|
|
Post by Will Button on Apr 15, 2020 8:27:06 GMT -8
I work at home as it is, so honestly before the quarantine started, I was only going out maybe twice a week to the grocery store. Girlfriend works in healthcare so she hasn't been able to work from home. Basically our work schedules haven't changed, and if anything, the amount of work I'm able to do has only increased. Am I working more? Hell no. In fact I'm taking this time to enjoy everyone being at home and more social online. It's not something I'm used to (people being constantly available).
Going through Breaking Bad on Netflix again and catching up on some movies (highly recommend Ready or Not from last year, it was a hilarious thrill ride). Oh and I wrote part of an Office script for fun, learned a few new ukulele songs, and started finally writing ideas for a puppet show I've been wanting to do (akin to Sifl and Olly but approached differently). Wow, I sound like I hand out migraines.
|
|
|
Post by bsketchy on Apr 15, 2020 10:55:11 GMT -8
I've been playing guitar for about 20 years, but I have no idea how to really play guitar. I'm using this time to dig deeper into the music theory behind it all, and see if I can become an actual guitarist. I've also been playing online card games with my family, with built in video chat. It's probably the most I've hung out with my family in the last 10+ years. Oh, and I have two teenage kids who have converted the dining room table into a beer pong table.
|
|
|
Post by Evan on Apr 15, 2020 14:32:55 GMT -8
|
|
Judy
Super Person
Oil Baron
Posts: 46
|
Post by Judy on Apr 16, 2020 11:12:12 GMT -8
I planted a vegetable garden in my courtyard--tomatoes and peppers. I'm still trying to figure out how to grow toilet paper.
|
|
|
Post by Mike Lenin on Apr 16, 2020 12:32:09 GMT -8
I planted a vegetable garden in my courtyard--tomatoes and peppers. I'm still trying to figure out how to grow toilet paper. I kinda missed the boat on toilet paper, so purchased a washlet. Total game changer.
|
|
|
Post by Evan on Apr 16, 2020 15:20:43 GMT -8
I just cracked open House of Leaves for another read through. I think this has become my all-time favorite book. It's hard to describe the novel, seems like everyone who reads it thinks it's something different. To me, it's experimental horror: The book is trying to scare me using methods that have never been used before. I'm excited to read it again, each time it manages to freak me out in new ways. Hey, here's a couple pages from the book:
|
|
trebec
Super Person
Need more ice for my alcohol #quarantini
Posts: 9
|
Post by trebec on Apr 16, 2020 17:21:54 GMT -8
Lucky to be working from home teaching middle schoolers. Spending some time working out, taking my dog for walks, and doing some house projects that I have materials for at home.
|
|
|
Post by Buzzfly on Apr 16, 2020 20:25:49 GMT -8
Im writing a book on one monitor while digesting as much NFL draft as possible before they cancel the NFL season as well
|
|
|
Post by stinkypete on Apr 17, 2020 8:35:36 GMT -8
I just cracked open House of Leaves for another read through. I think this has become my all-time favorite book. It's hard to describe the novel, seems like everyone who reads it thinks it's something different. To me, it's experimental horror: The book is trying to scare me using methods that have never been used before. I'm excited to read it again, each time it manages to freak me out in new ways. Hell yes, I had heard about it because of an xkcd comic but didn't really get what it was about because I didn't get through the intro by the fictional editor who loves Thumper. Then I bought it in New York and started reading it on the plane. I've tried reading books while waiting for a test to run or whatever, but this is the only one I've seriously wormed through at my desk. Once you get into it, it's very gripping. There are some plot details below, but I don't think knowing about them changes the experience. I will give an overview of the book to make it (hopefully) more appealing. Three typefaces indicate the voice being used. The core voice is the inner book, The Navidson Record, with a pseudonymous author, written by a man who lives in the outer book's universe. The inner book is a dispassionate critical analysis of a collection of footage taken by a Nat Geo photographer who settled down to retire in North Carolina and started filming his new life. So it's part historical, part literary. It talks about the main character as both filmmaker and subject, taking care to describe things like the camera and tape formats used at different times. So you get to imagine a sort of home movie scene (it would be great to see someone try to make a miniseries loosely based on this), where he is filming an open closet in the kitchen, but it's clearly a hallway that goes in 50 feet or more, but then in a continuous shot he goes out the window to reveal there's only like 5 feet of wall where the closet was extending through, and he walks completely though that empty outside space, and back around to where that closet/hallway is clearly way too deep. The author discusses other records of what happened at the time, so the narrative of the footage and the critic-author are in the same reality. So this house ends up changing a lot, but mainly this dark cold bare chamber inside that door does. An endless staircase, huge vaulted ceilings, and they eventually get a pro mountain climber guy to run an expedition and figure out what's in there and how it works, but there end up being a lot of problems. It's a great novel for people who are bothered when the characters in horror/supernatural contexts act irrationally or just take all the magic at face value w/o questioning or studying it. The house's shifting seems to respond to a certain kind of obsession that Navidson just can't let go, and that obsession keeps getting this character into trouble. The ending really cranks up the "slowly, then all at once" concept too. Tangentially related is the fact that he's the guy that took the vulture and the little girl photo and feels extremely guilty about it (the IRL photogapher committed suicide). During plot points when they're deep into the big empty house, the main text and the footnote text change shape and orientation as if they themselves are shifting structural elements. Very cool experimental stuff. There are literal walls of text just listing off names of materials or architects that you're obviously not intended to read thoroughly--the names are themselves the material of this wall, and scrutinizing them is not unlike scrutinizing the texturing on my own home's walls. The next voice, or layer, is a man who made friends with the author, whom he found dead in his apartment one day surrounded with all these notes and manuscripts and what look like three deep claw marks. So in that sense it's kind of like The Ring where the medium itself is meant to be haunted. Anyway, this guy tries to edit together the book, maybe for closure, maybe he's just sucked into the g r o w l, who's to say. I forget what happened to him exactly, but the final layer is the editors from the in-universe publisher explaining what happened to him and when they made what they believe to be corrections to his spelling or phrasing, but that's largely a device for the IRL author to point out a homophonic double meaning he was going for. It may sound like too much of a navel gaze to be worth all the time it takes to read, but it offers a surprising amount of life lessons, prompts for contemplating your own world, and just interesting tidbits and ideas. The strength is that because it's coming from a critical lens, it has the freedom to reach into a lot of meta subject matter about the creative process and so forth. Fake interviews with real people at real flagship NPR stations aid the suspension of disbelief. You're expected to take the physical experience quite literally and materially, but at the same time governed by the author. It's like a form of magical realism that dodges any cuteness about how something would be in someone's head but also not, because the point of this story is that it's very real, and to hammer the point home, it's a story about a guy assembling a story written by a guy who was narration takes the form of a critical analysis of objective video footage and journals. But there's a chapter where a character interviews all these popular authors like Douglas Hofstadter for how they interpret the series of events with Navidson, and it's kind of funny because they treat it as fictional and metaphorical even though in-universe it's obviously real. So there's also a lesson, relating back to the vulture photo, about how real things are fictionalized to us by their distance and in some cases by the form and scope of presentation. A big rule with this book is that you have to know you're not going to see it all and you don't have to read every single experience the second level voice talks about. It's perfectly fine without him, he just adds a layer of creepiness because of how editing the book is affecting him. I'd love to have a thread where we share favorite random excerpts I'm too lazy to do it but every instance of the word house is written in blue and every instance of the word Minotaur is red and crossed out.
|
|
|
Post by Evan on Apr 17, 2020 10:05:28 GMT -8
There are literal walls of text just listing off names of materials or architects that you're obviously not intended to read thoroughly--the names are themselves the material of this wall, and scrutinizing them is not unlike scrutinizing the texturing on my own home's walls. A lot of those lists are codes. My favorite moment with this book, so far, was cracking one of those codes which revealed a message that heavily implied that the real author of the entire manuscript was the tattoo guy's institutionalized mom who was dealing with grief from his death. Re-reading the book from that point of view is insane: It's like a completely different book: Navidson represents her longing for a normal, nuclear family and the dark hallway represents her constantly shifting and inscrutable mental illness preventing such a "normal" household from ever existing. Then I got to the first sex scene and was like WHY?! WHY WOULD YOU WRITE THAT ABOUT YOUR OWN SON?! Yet again, this book keeps finding new ways to horrify me.
|
|
Super Sarah
Super Person
Dancer
Mildtropolis: safe from Coronavirus but the crowd will kill you!
Posts: 381
|
Post by Super Sarah on Apr 19, 2020 20:57:30 GMT -8
I’ve been working remotely, I’m a paralegal at a Lemon Law firm. I got a change of scenery today because my brother fell off a ladder doing yard work so I’m helping him out and taking care of him for a few days. He fractured his elbow and banged up his face but luckily no concussion. They couldn’t do anything about his elbow in the ER so he has to follow up with an orthopedist. Let me just say now is NOT the time to need to go to the hospital for anything!! Even for non-Coronavirus related stuff you can’t have any visitors, it's so sad.
That book sounds awesome btw!
|
|
Mac Murdock
Super Person
Jazz Singer
To alcohol! The cause of -- and solution to -- all of life's problems.
Posts: 125
|
Post by Mac Murdock on Apr 24, 2020 13:58:56 GMT -8
Is the last season of community worth watching? I’m leaning towards no.
|
|
|
Post by Evan on Apr 24, 2020 14:50:50 GMT -8
Is the last season of community worth watching? I’m leaning towards no. I liked the last episode
|
|
Mac Murdock
Super Person
Jazz Singer
To alcohol! The cause of -- and solution to -- all of life's problems.
Posts: 125
|
Post by Mac Murdock on Apr 24, 2020 17:06:32 GMT -8
I was thinking about skipping to the end...I guess I’m invested at this point BUT like how long do they try and keep it going after everyone starts bailing ship.
|
|
|
Post by Evan on Apr 24, 2020 19:15:13 GMT -8
We watched it last week and even the boys were like... this isn't clicking like usual. I'd do any sci-fi/weird themed-episodes (can't remember if there are any)
|
|
|
Post by Will Button on Apr 26, 2020 10:31:47 GMT -8
Random question, but Evan, was it you that wrote the script about the couch that decreased your libido for Will and Grace? Why is that a thing I remember?
Also, remember how I tried writing a script about Homer opening a daycare, and then we saw a preview on TV about Homer starting a daycare and I got mad?
|
|