Unimatrix Two

Memory Hole the Size of a House

Thanks to mistakes, confusion, and incompetence, my mother’s house was sold out from under her on Friday, October 24th. While the new owner was willing to give us two weeks to clear the house, I didn’t have two weeks to spend on the task; I had a job to return to and had to focus on finding my mother a new place to live very very quickly. So Maya and I drove up Saturday, ran vital errands for Mom on Sunday, and spent three 12-hour days recovering what we could from the house.

Those three days are the days that wounded me.

I lived in that house for about 28 years. I originally left after 18, but the car accident that destroyed my hip took me back. Depression, anxiety, and concern that my mother couldn’t care for herself kept me there for another ten years afterwards. When I left, I left quickly, and took only essentials. On occasion when I returned to visit I would grab a remembered item or two, but I never made a priority of it; I didn’t have the time or resources, so little of it was necessary to my life at the time, and it would all still be there next visit.

All of those things were indeed still there that Monday, and time had run out. Indeed, most of the three days were devoted to recovering valuables of my mother’s. But I ventured briefly into the two rooms which held most of what I’d left behind, and barely knew where to begin. Maya was an amazing help, repeatedly unearthing treasures I’d long ago written off or even forgotten about; but so much simply had to be abandoned. Once again, there wasn’t the time or resources, and so little of it was necessary to my life now.

Still… even though it’s all just things, and my life would have continued on nicely if I hadn’t recovered a single brick of Lego or old amateur film prop… knowing that all the things I had to leave behind are even now being consigned to a landfill is hurting. My memory isn’t always the best when it comes to anything useful or important, and so many of those items were memory bookmarks. I’ve just dragged those bookmarks to the trash and hit “Delete”. I’m still suffering from that.

Also, I pushed my body to its limits those days, which it’s still unhappy about. The saga of getting Mom re-settled isn’t over, and there are other unavoidable weighty matters on the horizon. So this hasn’t been the best of weeks. I’m writing this in hopes it pushes forward my own personal healing process, gets me closer to letting it all go. Also, so that ten years from now when I’m trying to remember exactly when all this happened, I have a journal entry.

I have Maya, Mom is safe and warm, and there are good things coming in my life. All I have to do is hang in there.

The Science of Doctor Who: s01e09-10, “The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances”

Nanobots, nanites, nanogenes: these are all science-fiction terms for microscopic robots that can repair or create materials one molecule (or atom) at a time. We dream of building super-strong metals from base elements, or sending them into our bodies to remover cancers or repair damage. We’ve already made a few very crude examples, ver basic mechanisms only a few molecules in size!

But some science-fiction writers use this as a synonym for “magic” when they’re in a hurry; though this is an excellent Who story – one of my favorite tales of the Ninth Doctor – Moffat succumbed to the temptation. In seconds, these tiny little robots scan an unknown life form, determine how it is put together, determine damage, and repair it. It’s hard to imagine how they’re doing this. We can see no visible power source or external computer support, and a nanobot has to be a *very* simple device, by basic laws of physics. For example, a real cancer-killer nanite wouldn’t be complicated enough to do much more than blindly swim through the body until it bumped into something it could recognize as cancer.

If we grant that the nanogenes are smart enough to scan a body and do major conversion work with no power or raw materials other than the body at hand, we get other problems. How were they dumb enough to think the little boy’s gas mask was his body, but not his clothing? (Would have been great to see everyone with the nanogene infection forced into short trousers.) Also, the little bots are dumb about the gas mask but smart enough to recognize different genders, heights, weights, hair colors; that’s some odd programming. Must still be in beta.

Somehow they work, though. And the Doctor literally hand waves the job of reprogramming them to repair everyone properly. Now we bump into a common sci-fi peeve of mine: where did the reprogrammed nanogenes get the information to put everyone back together again properly (again with all the different genders, heights, weights, and hair colors)? If the answer is, “they extrapolated everyone’s DNA”, well that’s great. If they could do that, the nanogenes probably should have been doing that when they scanned the little boy in the first place? I’d also love to know how the critters were able to destroy everyone’s minds, but completely restore them afterward. It would be like smashing your hard drive, buying a new one, and expecting all your data to be on it. Doctor Crusher liked to ignore this problem on the Enterprise-D, too.

One last nit to pick: I’ve lived through my body trying to rebuild just a couple of smashed bones. The physiological stress of the conversion to gas-mask zombie in the first place would kill you. Between the excrutiating pain, and the sudden changes to your biology, your body wouldn’t handle the shock. The conversion process would make more sense if everyone’s body went into a coma for weeks before emerging as a gas-masked little boy, but I’ll concede that would be lousy TV.

Next time: I’m afraid I’ll have to blow up the Earth. It obstructs my view of Raxacoricofallapatorious.

Installing Skyrim Using Wine on Mac OS X

Computer used: 2009 Mac Pro with 8 GB memory, a 1 GB Apple graphics card, and OS X 10.9 Mavericks

1. Purchase Skyrim on Steam. (By waiting for the right sale, I got it for $5.)
2. Download ThePortingTeam’s Wine wrapper for Skyrim.
3. Follow the installation instructions under “Installation”. Run Skyrim at least once. At this point Skyrim worked excellently except for a horrible display bug. So, after a lot of websites and some guessing…
4. Right-click on the wrapper (the Skyrim icon), choose “Open Package Contents”, and open wineskin.app just as you did during Step 3.
5. Click “Set Screen Options”. Uncheck “Use Mac Driver instead of X11”.
6. Under “Override Wine control of Screen Settings?” click “Override”.
7. Under “Override Settings” make sure that “Fullscreen” is checked. Under “Installer Options” make sure that “Force Normal Windows” is checked.
8. Click “Done”. Click “Quit”. Double-click the wrapper icon, and enjoy your game!

I also installed the Unofficial Skyrim Patches, SKSE, and SkyUI, but that’s for another time. Further, I updated the wrapper engine to WS9Wine1.7.21, but I’m not sure I needed to do that. If you do, the instructions are on the Wineskin Winery website.

Have fun hunting dragons!