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Decadence for the 21st Century
Thursday, February 13th, 2003 01:33 amI have just spent the evening around at a friend's house.
I nip round there quite often - at least twice a week, especially when there's good telly on, for he has a nice wide screen telly whereas I have a tatty little portable. Actually I should have a serviceable 21" nicam, but it croaked a while back and a combination of pecuniary embarrassment and indolence means that it is currently sat on the floor acting as a dust trap and a table for a number of CDs and Mr T, the larger of my stuffed gorillas.
Be that as it may, I was around chez said friend to watch Stargate SG-1, drink coffee and generally shoot the breeze.
Of course, this is when we discovered the ultimate expression of modern decadence. Cheerfullygloating demonstrating the prowess of his new broadband connection, which downloads faster than my PC cache refreshes, mon ami bounced off to the newsgroups and began downloading as yet unbroadcast (in the UK) episodes of Buffy and Angel.
Two things immediately became apparent. One, a hard drive fills up rapidly when you start filling it with 43 minute episodes, and two, his current video player was simply not up to the task of replaying these episodes. And he does not yet have the software to burn them onto disk.
Oh, howwe I laughed. A good, laugh, mind. And internal, of course. To do otherwise would be unconscionably rude.
And this is where the ultimate early 21st century decadence comes in: downloading multi megabytes of data and then dumping them unopened and unread into the recycling bin is, I submit, the tech equivalent of sitting on a piano in tatty rags and drinking expensive champagne from a chipped porcelain mug.
More to the point, several downloads later - including a quick trip to Microsquash tm for the appropriate software upgrades, we successfully obtained a watchable episode of Angel which will not appear on Sky for several weeks.
Then we decided not to watch it since it would spoil the story line. This escapade took all evening after and during Stargate SG-1.
That's decadence.
I nip round there quite often - at least twice a week, especially when there's good telly on, for he has a nice wide screen telly whereas I have a tatty little portable. Actually I should have a serviceable 21" nicam, but it croaked a while back and a combination of pecuniary embarrassment and indolence means that it is currently sat on the floor acting as a dust trap and a table for a number of CDs and Mr T, the larger of my stuffed gorillas.
Be that as it may, I was around chez said friend to watch Stargate SG-1, drink coffee and generally shoot the breeze.
Of course, this is when we discovered the ultimate expression of modern decadence. Cheerfully
Two things immediately became apparent. One, a hard drive fills up rapidly when you start filling it with 43 minute episodes, and two, his current video player was simply not up to the task of replaying these episodes. And he does not yet have the software to burn them onto disk.
Oh, how
And this is where the ultimate early 21st century decadence comes in: downloading multi megabytes of data and then dumping them unopened and unread into the recycling bin is, I submit, the tech equivalent of sitting on a piano in tatty rags and drinking expensive champagne from a chipped porcelain mug.
More to the point, several downloads later - including a quick trip to Microsquash tm for the appropriate software upgrades, we successfully obtained a watchable episode of Angel which will not appear on Sky for several weeks.
Then we decided not to watch it since it would spoil the story line. This escapade took all evening after and during Stargate SG-1.
That's decadence.
