2023-01-08

Well, I’ve been COVID-19 +ve for the last seven days. Isolating in my home office, which, luckily for me, features a rather comfy sofa bed and an ensuite shower and toilet. I’m guessing I caught the dreaded virus on the flight home from Vietnam, where we were from the 19th to the 31st of December last year. Attended our regular NYE get-together, during which I must have been infectious, but luckily nobody else has come down with symptoms yet.

I want to eliminate social media and doomscrolling, so I spent the first few days of iso binge-watching shows instead. Clint recommended Andor on NYE, so I started by watching all twelve episodes in the first two days. I also watched the Cyberpunk 2077 anime and The Rehearsal, which is a bizarre, genius show.

Not up to reading books due to feeling a bit out of it, and struggled to work on Thursday and Friday after taking Tuesday and Wednesday off (Monday was a public holiday). Skimmed a few RSS feeds and discovered olduse.net, which Joey Hess (who ported MegaHAL to Debian back in the day) originated in 2011 as a 10-year art installation, replaying USENET archives in realtime. I love the idea of replaying history; it reminded me of Pepys Diary, put online by Phil Gifford in 2002, and which is being serialized for the third time this year (I’ve resubscribed to the feed).

Anyway, I wanted to read old news in nn, which is the newsreader I started with back in 1991 or whenever, and I found the source (last updated in 2005) and hacked around, managing to get it compiling and running. But that wasn’t enough; to recreate the full experience I installed the cool-retro-terminal, which mimics a CRT display. And reading news from 1983 became quite addictive for a few days; it’s fun checking back to see if there have been replies or new posts, and fun to look up TV shows, music, movies and books that people mention. For example, one guy posted about searching record stores in vain for a favourite but obscure album that he had lost in a house fire in 1977; it took me only a few moments to locate it on YouTube Music and have a listen.

The whole experience got me wondering about discovery versus search, and the role that boredom plays in creativity. Together with community I think these are core interests of mine this year, and I need to decide what to do with this new enthusiasm. But certainly reading old news lead me to discovering things that I would never known to search for in the first place.

Working in the retro terminal encouraged me to install some old games, such as rogue and nethack, which I’d never really spent serious time playing in the past. And I’ve now replaced my GUI RSS reader with a TUI version, and dabbled a bit with ICU as well. Not to mention connecting to a few BBSes and trying out a MUD (the DiscWorld one, which I remember trying out once before; I was surprised to discover that it originated at the UCC in 1991 and has been regularly maintained and updated for over 30 years).

How much has changed, and yet how much has remained the same.