________ ________ ________
2022-03-18 / \/ \/ / \
/ __/ /_ _/
Ok hear me out for this one because it's / _/ / /
gonna sound completely crazy. \_______/_\___/____/\___/____/_
/ \/ \/ / \
First let me set the stage. My brain / _/ /_ _/
lately is mush, I'll be brutally honest. /- / _/ /
Between the day job driving me to suicide \________/\________/\___/____/
and/or homicide, the endless stress of
keeping TDK and Dani cared for and comy, addiction, depression, anxiety and a
general ennui and unhappiness with myself, my work and my identity - it makes
for a frantic, crushing day-to-day that leaves me very, very little time, if
any at all, for recovery. I'm exhausted all the time, sleeping like shit, and
physically and mentally worn to the bone.
It's a struggle.
A nice side effect, though, of being completely scatterbrained is it means
things are colliding in my brain in interesting ways, some fun[1][2] and some
less fun.
Which leads me to the idea of a "tangible Internet".
I've often bemoaned the loss of the sound of technology, the whine and
click of a hard drive spinning up, the POST beep of a computer, modem
handshake, the whirr of a tape mechanism, the cottony hiss of a record needle
and so on. I've been daydreaming about ways to reintroduce those sounds to my
life, I had a mind to build a kind of faux computer, all it does is spin up a
drive (I've got a couple old bigfoot drives and a noisy SCSI drive squirreled
away) and maybe beep and then just sit there until I turn it off.
And then, when thinking about it, I thought why stop there, and why does it
need to emulate an old machine that does nothing, why can't it be its own
thing?
Why can't each protocol have its own "voice", be it a tone or frequency or
melody and have those output as audio or through a vibration motor or colored
light or all of the above? Why can't the ambient noise in my office change
slightly when I go from browsing the Web to slinking down Gopher holes?
Not unlike how the sound in your car would change when turning off from a
highway onto a country back road.
But wait, hang on, why not a car?
Another thing I miss is the idea of "going online" (editor's note: I mean
literally going online, not "going online" heh heh), we went from this idea of
the Internet as a desitnation to the Internet as this all pervasive background
noise. It went from visiting the beach to turning on the faucet. The desire to
return to that kind of feeling cross-polinated with tomasino's recent post on
his sensory deprivation experience[3] and I had this idea of a kind of
Internet flight simulator, of sorts.
Imagine a kind of internet booth, screens and a keyboard, a comfy chair,
you climb in and close the door and browse around or chat or connect to
whatever and work on whatever, but while you do the booth hums and vibrates
gently or even tilts and rotates to the rhythm of what protocols you're using,
what countries the servers are in, your latency, anything like that,
culminating a kind of ASMR inducing aural and physical live noise, akin to
driving a car or flying a plane.
An unusual but cozy collision of the digital and the tangible, of art and
technology.
Maybe one for the retirement to-do list.
[1]
https://github.com/B4UDW3RK5/orgone
[2]
https://github.com/B4UDW3RK5/beatTAI
[3]
gopher://gopher.black/1/phlog/20220316-sensory-deprivation
EOF
