WP: IT-guy with a goat

This is a response I wrote today to a writing prompt on reddit here.

The prompt was: "When the IT-guy took out a knife and a goat you knew your problem was more severe than initially thought."

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"Martha? Martha? Can you hear me? Say something won't you?"

"I'm afraid she isn't going to be able to respond," said the pimply technician. He was wheeling a small crate in through the door as Mr. Johnson stood beside his comatose wife, looking somewhat flustered. "This is a bit worse than what you described over the phone."

"What? This exactly as worse-- I mean, as bad as I described it!" said Mr. Johnson "My wife is unconscious! Are you sure we shouldn't be calling an ambulance?"

"It's worse," said the technician, ignoring the question and pushing his glasses up his nose "because you didn't mention she was using an Oculus." he gestured toward the black object strapped to Martha's face as he pulled a small cro-bar out of his tool bag "We see this now and then with Vives, but an Oculus is much riskier. I'm afraid we'll have to do a full transfer"

Mr. Johnson wrung his hands together. His expression, though harried, showed no sign of him grasping anything the technician had just said. "But... but... nobody at Best Buy told us that... that the 'vee ar' thingy was... was dangerous! At least not dangerous like... this." Mr. Johnson looked down at his wife, laying motionless in her lay-z-boy. The laptop on her legs glowed a dull blue, mirroring the vacant, drooling expression on Martha's half obscured face.

With a huff of exertion, the technician popped the top off of the wooden crate with a woody crack, and then turned to look back at Martha "Well," he began with a sigh "the inherent risk with rift technology was covered in your T's and C's when you-"

"'Tees and seas?'" Mr. Johnson interrupted.

"'Terms and Conditions. You signed a waiver saying you read them when you purchased the device. You did read them, didn't you sir?"

Mr. Johnson looked uncomfortable.

"Anyway," the tech continued, as he lifted the lid off of the crate "Facebook owns the Oculus Rift, you know. You always have to be careful with Facebook. Any idiot could tell you they don't have your best interests in mind" The tech chuckled a bit at his own statement, and reached down into the crate, pulling out... a goat.

"Nyeh-eehh" bleated the goat.

Mr. Johnson had sat down on the couch beside his wife, his head dejectedly held in his hands, but looked up suddenly at the barnyard noise "What....?! What on earth-- is that a goat? What... Why do you have a goat?!" Mr. Johnson stood, his face red with confusion.

"Well, funny story actually," said the technician, stroking the goat's head "We were using dogs up until last year, but it turns out goats are cheaper to feed. Something like a chicken would be ideal, of course, but tests have shown that they just don't have the necessary RAM. Goats do though. Funny, right? Goats? RAM?" He pushed his glasses up again, grinning at Mr. Johnson, though the humor seemed to be lost on him.

"Aren't rams sheep though?" chirped the voice of the Johnsons' young daughter, quiet up until now as she watched the spectacle unfolding from the doorway to the kitchen.

"I... er..." The technician's grin dropped and he looked over to the child.

"Cynthia! Ah... go... go on upstairs!" Mr. Johnson waved weakly to shoo her away.

"Is mum drunk again?"

"CYNTHIA!" The man shouted, "I said go! Everything is fine!"

The girl darted back through the doorway, out of sight-- until her father had turned his back, peeking her head out once more to watch. The technician reached again into his bag, pulling out a long USB cable and a small knife. Mr. Johnson began to pull at his thinning hair.

"Alot of customers don't really understand how these things work" He said, gesturing again at the black box strapped over Martha's eyes "It's called the Oculus Rift for a reason," he said, putting emphasis on the word 'rift', with a knowing glance to Mr. Johnson "The device opens up a memetic portal to.... well, look, that part isn't important. The important part is that these things have a direct interface with your soul." The technician pressed the tip of the knife to the back of the goat's neck, parting the skin to reveal a USB port. A small spray of blood spurted from the wound, though the technician quickly stifled it with a handkerchief.

"Nyeh-eehhhhh!" bleated the goat, somewhat distressed.

Mr. Johnson was also somewhat distressed, and his flustered red had shifted to a sickly green. Having run out of sensible objections to the current state of affairs, his mouth worked up and down wordlessly.

"Sorry 'bout that" said the nonplussed technician, wiping a bit of blood from his 'geek squad' tie. He plugged one end of the USB cable into the goat, and the other end into a port on Martha's headset "I'll be out of your hair here in a minute, I promise." he pulled out a tablet and began making swipes on it "just let me get the goat's bluetooth set up. What did you say Mrs. Johnson was doing on her computer when she got corrupted?"

Mr. Johnson sighed and returned his head to his hands as he slouched back down on the couch "She was just... on Facebook, I think." The technician rolled his eyes.

"Any specific apps or games?"

Mr. Johnson thought for a moment "Ah, I think she mentioned something about uh... 'Farmville VR'?"

The tech snorted, stifling a laugh.

"What?" demanded Mr. Johnson "What about this situation could possibly be funny?"

"Ah, sorry-- I'm sorry sir," the tech adjusted his glasses once more "It's just... well, its ironic, considering-"

The tablet in the tech's hands beeped loudly, and both Martha and the goat began to convulse for a full second before both fell still. Mr. Johnson rushed up to his wife's side, anxiously stroking her hair and grasping her hand "Martha! Martha are you okay? Can you hear me now Martha!?"

"Nyeh... n-nyehh?" bleated the goat, shakily standing back up off the floor

"Uh, Mr. Johnson, your wife isn't actually.... in there, anymore"

"What!?" cried Mr. Johnson, horrified "What do you mean... Is she...? Is she.....!?"

The technician shook his head, and gestured down to the goat. "She's in here, sir."

"Nyehh!?" bleated the goat Martha, looking worriedly around the room.

"Is mum a goat now? I've always wanted a goat!" said Cynthia, running into the room, sounding very excited.

"The transfer went off without without a hitch!" said the technician, looking pleased as he began to pack up his equipment. He stood up, and straightened his tie "Well, I hope you folks have a nice rest of your day. Your bill should arrive in the mail."

"WAIT!" cried Mr. Johnson as the technician turned towards the door to leave. He looked in distress from the body-formerly-known-as-Martha to the Martha-formerly-known-as-goat, then back up to the somewhat impatient looking technician "How... how do we.... how will......."

The human mind is an amazingly stalwart machine. Despite being presented with an absurd situation, in the midst of a thoroughly emotional ordeal, one could very nearly palpably see Mr. Johnson's mind fighting to force a relevant inquiry out of his stammering mouth. 'How do I get her back into her proper body?' he might ask. Or perhaps, 'What do goats eat?' or even 'Can I count a goat as a dependent on my taxes?'.

Unfortunately, all he could manage to ask was: "...Who's going to cook dinner?"

2017 Reading List, and Why We Read

Books I read in 2017:

...

Yeah, there's nothing here.
I did alot of things in 2017, but regrettably, reading wasn't one of them. I think I was working my way through S.M. Stirling's Nantucket series at some point, but I never finished the trilogy, and I may have only been reading those in 2016 anyway.

As I'm thinking about it, I believe I also read Brent Weeks's The Blood Mirror, book four of his Lightbringer series, and a couple other's as well, a few of Stephen Baxter's books in the Xeelee sequence- though again, I may be conflating with the previous year.

I used to read more. Back in college, I would consume books, lose myself in them. Over time, I've fallen into the habit of getting most of my entertainment from movies and shows-- and though I still read, its all mostly scholarly, or news articles.

In short, I'm ashamed, but there's no point dwelling on the past.

Though I don't typically make resolutions, reading more this year could certainly be called one; I've gotten off to a good start. Gyo, a graphic novel by Junji Ito, and Ra by Sam Hughes (known better as 'qntm', from his blog Things of Interest) in this month alone-- and I'm slowly working my way through House of Leaves at the moment. All three I recommend, though I'll go more into detail about them when I do another reading list post at the end of the year. If I keep myself honest, there will be more than just those three as well.

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Why do we read?
What is it about the printed word transcribing the narrative form that has so outlasted and outshined every other comparable medium over the millennia, or has so exemplified depth, and sophistication where others can be, and often are written off as jejune?

It is true that books weren't always the primary storytelling medium- obviously before the advent of writing, there were still narratives, passed down in songs and stories of oral tradition. And though even early on writing was used to record important works of fiction and philosophy alike, it was centuries before the common man was literate-- and it has always been the common man who is the true audience of fiction.

Bards and playwrights played storytellers for much of history; its only the past handful of centuries that the novel has rained supreme.

But why?

Why is it that the novel was not replaced by cinema, television, radio, graphic novels, blog posts or meta-fiction? Why are most contemporary popular films and TV shows based in-part, or outright on books that came long before them?

I have a couple ideas. First and foremost is the obvious-- anybody can write a book. Writing a book takes only time and, I suppose, something to write about. Not everyone can write a good book, but the medium is inherently accessible. All other mediums fall short in this metric, and the result is that most of the world's fresh ideas will be born on paper long before someone decides to throw enough money at them to turn them into something else.

However, I think the real picture here is more than just economics.
When you read a book, you're effectively processing a kind of code; like punchcards being fed into your brain through your eyes (or fingers, I suppose, if you're reading braille)-- and that code is telling your brain how to construct a world, a narrative on its own. Visual media, comics, movies, etc., are showing you someone else's vision. This is why it is so easy to turn your brain off as you watch something. It is virtually impossible to read this way. If the brain looses focus while reading, you'll find yourself at the end of a paragraph your eyes continued to scan without any knowledge of its contents.

One could argue that this is because words are a more primitive means of conveying thought, and thus can offer more subtle meaning and structure. The continuation of this thought is then that, as the written word is simply a means of conveying the spoken word, which came first of course, that then, a spoken dialogue, or any narrative transmitted orally should be the ur medium, the most primitive form of story-telling, and thus also the most sublime.

This is false.

The reason is subtle, but important. Books differ from other media (except for graphic novels*) in a matter of time. That is, films, for instance, or music, or a spoken dialogue, all proceed through time at a steady rate-- and, more importantly, can only be consumed linearly, one instant at a time.
Yes, you can rewind a movie to watch the same scene over again, but you can still only process what you're viewing one frame at a time at a constant rate.

Words on paper (or screen) function differently.
We do not read one letter at a time, our brains process words as a whole; for example, this quote is often passed arround:

"It deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteers be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe."

- That said, curiously, if one attempts to slowly process each word, the text becomes illegible, but if you just let your eyes scan across the lines, it reads without trouble.

Beyond this, when reading, even the individual words aren't wholly important. Our brains process sentences as complete thoughts- obviously, you can't think about a whole sentence until you've read all of it, so while the brain keeps a running dialogue in its head, the complete thought isn't fully processed until after the punctuation. And books, unlike other media, are perfectly suited to being set down and paused for an arbitrary amount of time, at any point, giving the reader as long as they need to process each thought.

And so too, even beyond the sentence, beyond the paragraph, an entire page of a book exists in situ, allowing the eyes to dart back and forth, up and down, back to previous statements as needed. When reading something particularly thick, we may scan a line several times in-order to fully grasp its meaning.

This, in a way, loops back to the idea of accessibility. If you're watching a film, or listening to a lecture, and something stated goes over your head, you have little recourse to backtrack, or pause to digest, in part because these media rely on a flow, and stopping it is disruptive to experiencing them. But a reader sets his or her own flow.

I've mused on this topic enough for now, I think.

* Graphic novels share more in common with cinema than with textual novels, though they exist somewhere in between. More on that later. Suffice to say, despite existing frozen in time as textual narratives do, graphic novels have a different sort of pacing to them, and are processed differently by the mind as they are read- again, not unlike a film, only with a frame-rate dictated by how fast one can turn a page.

Sign Post

This is the first post.

If you're looking for something substantial here, prepare to be disapointed. This post is merely, as the title indicates, a signpost, marking the beginning of a timeline.

Or the end, if you, reader, are like me, and are reading the posts on this blog in reverse order as I often do. Or perhaps you've started here, intending to proceed forwards chronologically-- in which case it is a signpost none the less.

I've started this blog as a place to post my thoughts, and though I've attempted this in the past, the hope is that this one will stick, as I've reached a point in my life where I feel that, in addition to (hopefully) having something interesting to say, I also have the discipline needed to make posts regularly and coherently. Time will tell I suppose.

Or has already told, if you're from the future, and are actually reading these words-- If I fail to actually post regularly, then it seems silly to imagine anyone in the future reading this at all, save perhaps for myself.

If this signpost marks the end of a counter-calendrical progression through my thoughts, then thank you for reading. :)