________  ________  ________   
   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