After months and months of dry air, both broiling hot and frigid, it is raining nicely here in Sonoma county. Big heavy wet drops that hit the ground like jelly beans and spreading into puddles that both amuse and freeze my bare feet when I invariably go out to get something from one of the cars or move the laundry. It's nice but considering the months of dryness I cannot see it doing a whole lot to offset months and months of dryness. I have lived in California the majority of my life and I have never experienced a year that was so dry.
FAST FOREWORD:
A couple of hours later. I just finished watching TOTAL RECALL, the new one not the Arnie movie. It was actually a better movie than the original and felt more like a Phillip K. Dick story. I have loved Dick's work since college, I guess it spoke to my innate paranoia. It is disturbing though that a lot of what his psychotic, drug altered brain pictured in terms of a dystopian future has become so close to the reality that we live in everyday. I think if Phillip were to rise from the grave he would take one look at the world, shrug his shoulders and say "I Told you so".
Almost to the end of my first week pretty much unplugged from FACEBOOK, aside from the odd "like" or comment, and my brain seems to be coming out of a social media haze and into the light of reality. During all those months when I was trapped inside with no transportation and no gas money if I did have have wheel I began far too reliant on social media for human contact. The trouble was the contact was filtered heavily and if there is no actual air between you and the person you are talking to the contact can't really be considered "human". At best it is "human like".
We have been flooded with a storm of "Your Facebook Movie" links the past few weeks. I even looked at my own. An interesting attempt conceived by a marketing wag to automate intimacy, using cherry picked artifacts freely shared on the site (easily garnered by stored information) combined with a sentimental soundtrack to create an automatic tear generator.
"OOOO! Look I remember that!"
When I was working in games I used to have to remind the programmers that every person we were writing the games for did NOT have a top of the line computer on their desk and that we this had to "dumb down" aspects of the game to compensate for that. Sadly, there is no such rational voice in the halls of the marketing department of FACEBOOK telling their staff to tread lightly on the hearts of their users.
