beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

I am so bored
booooooored
bored.

And I can't find any note about when the new washer dryer will arrive. I think it was Monday Afternoon and I know they have my address and phone but I have no more precise data.

The old machine will be taken away and the new one installed all proper. I'll have to hope they can figure out how. And then I'll have the fun of figuring out the instructions.

But first, waiting.

bored.

My choice of entertainment is not really working for me. It's about dwarfs who build a secret underground place and enslave humans. They say they're dwarfs from another planet. But the description is basically just people with dwarfism and bulging heads, so it's just... why do abled people fear disabled people so much? Writing about them turning around and grinding everyone else down. Ridiculous.

I'm very tempted to just skip to the end and chuck it on the for sale pile.



Poor entertainment isn't how I'm bored though. I'm super bored of being in this house doing nothing meeting no people. I've restored prior regular activities, so I do actually meet whole numbers of people, which is a vast improvement. I just do so for one or two hours on a Thursday and same alternate Wednesdays. Which is not a vast amount of activity to fill a week with.



I don't know, sometimes I think an arranged marriage would be a reasonable option, just because trying to make it work would be something to do.

But then they'd get close enough to maybe mess up my stuff, so, probably not.



Fiction leaves me vastly unsuited for day to day mundanity. ( Read more... )

It is really boring in here. For values of 'in here' ranging from 'my flat' to 'my brain'.
Brain is doing reruns of all the stupid petty embarrassments of the past 20 years, with intermittent punctuation from smoke alarm related fear memories.
I think I need to start writing a book just to stop being EPIC BORED all the time.

I tried watching War of the Arrows but I stopped after about an hour because it uses shaky cam and I was feeling incredibly ill. Also, I was bored. ( Read more... )


... I forgot I was writing this and got distracted by playing with google maps. I was planning routes to bring goods or cross between settlements after the zombie apocalypse. The places I chose have good names but no navigable river so I decided the railway survived the zombie apocalypse. Would it? I have no idea. I mean, I can't see zombies doing anything to the tracks, so it may as well still be there. But I don't know how long it would last and the tracks still be useful. Maybe people should just use the roads? Whatever I try I have to decide between things that make sense and things that use the places with the coolest names.


I should probably stick to places I've actually been, but I wanted cliffs and tunnels and norfolk is not famous for either.


I'll post this and then go think of something else to do.

Am playing fantasy house with rightmove again. Have made a map that leaves out London and looked for properties over £3 million. There's only a few hundred of them.

Have realised again the places I like best are the places that remind me of boarding school.

A proper long term space colony would also be a boarding school. and a university. that greatly resembled home schooling. You'd have all the students of all the ages living and studying in such close proximity it wouldn't much matter if you called it home or school. You'd need to pack a lot of distance learning courses and download a lot of online lectures and suchlike. ... very, very long distance learning. Communications constraints would depend on technology plus location. You probably wouldn't want to bring a lot of paper books, but it depends on the propulsion system, there's some mad ideas where you wouldn't mind carrying a ton of them. And they have advantages in the not crashing department. If I went through a Stargate I'd want to bring a bunch of paper books, in case we got cut off.

Running a boarding school would be tricky. I mean, it's hard enough keeping small numbers of small children vaguely under control and unlikely to explode stuff, add to that trying to raise them to sufficient competence to run the place when you want to retire and it gets very not easy. If you were choosing people for your space colony you'd need not just people who excel in their field but people who would be happy teaching it to others, including small children. You'd want to leave out the kind of people who kids would try and avoid due to excessive creepy and/or yelling. Every single one of your co-workers would be someone who would help raise your kids, and you'd help raise theirs. And then their kids would be the ones making sure you don't die too early once you're old.

There's aspects of this smaller scale that's hard to get my head around, even knowing villages worked like this for the longest time. I mean, granted, even in Dereham it's hard to employ someone who isn't related to someone related to someone I went to school with, but it would be even tighter in a space colony.

What size colony would you need to be self sustaining? I mean, if there's no other tribe over the hill, who gets married to who and how many do you need to keep it going? Does anyone study this stuff?

You could maintain genetic diversity by bringing a sperm bank, that'd probably be a good idea whatever size you go with, because you can't fit a representative diversity of humanity in when humanity is seven billion and a colony is... not. I mean, you'd be more than one in a billion but getting up to one in a million would be giant. Especially if you have to fit them all in a tin can to get them anywhere.

Imagine having less than seven thousand people on your entire planet.

Imagine having lived in submarine type conditions to travel for more than a year before landing and building probably only marginally larger permanent dwellings... with everyone on your entire planet.

You'd have to be really, really sure you liked them first.

Which gets back to boarding school, because really, is there anyone who went to a school where they liked all their teachers? Doesn't every school have the crazy one and the stinky one and the VERY LOUD MAN and the one who you're not entirely sure is mentally speaking in the room? And just like school, you wouldn't have a choice about turning up and interacting with them every single day. But unlike school, this would be true for the rest of your life.

... I realise every group with me in it has some of those types covered and I'm unlikely to contribute to the social harmony of any endeavour but it's my daydream so I go if I want to.

If the Stargate programme sends people to another planet then the US military gets to filter who goes. If private enterprise does then the money is the filter. These things seem unlikely to be maximally conducive to long term harmony.

Would you want a group where everybody had to choose everybody else? Like, if everyone in a group of two hundred needed 199 matching votes and no vetos... you could probably do that out of seven billion, but it wouldn't half take some doing.

Is filtering a group for 'everybody likes each other' going to change the nature of humans, or society, or just store up problems for when the argues start? I mean, even if it goes perfect in the first generation, teenagers are going to shout, that's what they do, so you might get like a decade of happy shiny lalala and then have to cope with Kids These Days and there's a sudden generation gap.

Packing kids and teenagers for the build phase seems unhelpful, but once you send humans somewhere together there will be kids. If everyone gets contraceptive implants on the way into the spaceship you could have a few years to build.

Human biology isn't very forgiving of waiting though. Everyone has a tick tock.

but if you don't send kids then you don't send people that have kids. filtering out a whole space colony made of people more interested in going to space than having kids does not seem maximally conducive to a well adjusted second generation.

requirements for a space colony: entire colony made of good parents? ... humanity never leaving Earth...



boarding school must be tricky to run. has to make good diet, get it all delivered on a timetable, hundreds of kids all very varied and difficult, all have same bed time, not all need same amount of sleep. even before the education stuff, just adding all the kids together in the same space and keeping them alive be tricksy. Olders supervise youngers, helps a little, but still not simples.



Space colony not need space alien vampire snake whatevers to attack. Has a few hundred humans and no way out. Plenty much dramas right there.

Boarding school stories are a whole genre on their own. Boarding school on another planet where getting out just means working with instead of being taught by the same few shifts of people who all have essential jobs... yow.


Getting a first gen space colony going be tricky. Getting it to survive means making the second gen survivable. When none of them chose the place and their options are severely limited compared to what current rich western humans are used to.


stories. many.



and of course if you get it right you have a functioning economy that takes care of all its members. so practicing on Earth right now seems like good plan.

I think I'm going to have to ban myself from playing fashion games. At least in term time.

Satisfashion is more boring than the other two fashion games I have played.
( Read more... )
I did get to make lots of clothes. Also I made some that look like a very femme Booster Gold, so that's nice.

I kept trying to figure out why I was even still playing, and I reckon it's because part of me is convinced it's a math problem, with optimisation possible. ( Read more... )

It's boring though because there's no story. And it's very short. And once you finish it you can't go around the world again, you can't go back, it's just Summer Trendy in Paris every time you click play.
Boring.

Also it broke after a while, clicking things wasn't working properly.
:-p to it.

... why I cannot quit things that are boring I do not know.
*facepalm*

right. I will now stop playing games and go back and check this whenever I wonder why.
... I typoed that 'I will not'. *sigh*

I am bored.
I spent the last few hours idly refining my team for that Biotech adventures thing that's basically an excuse for them to all be shagging the computer (as played by John Simm)(I'm not obsessed, I'm focused).
So far I've decided the pshrink calls herself Phoenix and won't admit to being originally Phoebe. She has a whole flamey theme going on. Also a tendency to wear V necks to show off her heart surgery scars. That part might not work cause I don't know where the scars would be or what they look like, but you know, in general, there was heart surgery, and she's not one for covering up scars. Or being afraid to be a geek in public.
The mechanic is a transman with more practical than paper qualifications. Maybe a mature student. Traveled, seen the somewhat steampunk solutions in recycling technology in some of the poorer areas of the world. Isn't really impressed with cutting edge until it gets properly useful. Will tinker until it is. Turns up at job interview, sees computer screen is on the blink, fixes it before he sits down. Wears those trousers with all the pockets, all full of tools. Also some cool rings, like titanium ones with patterns on.
Yes, I designed the fashion choices of fictional characters nobody is going to get to meet.
Also figured out how he'd get her to go on a date. It involves poetry. And a TARDIS key.

I'm so so bored.
It's half past one in the morning and all I've done for like 10 hours is try and get to sleep and it still hasn't worked.

The other characters on the ship-with-a-brain are all, like, superpowered, and made by biotech somehow. Like I was going to borrow clone!Jack from SG1. Only aged up a bit. And less creepy with the high school thing. But as well as them I wanted some characters that were just regular people, only somehow connected to the same topics. So I figure surgery could be a theme.

Now I need to decide what the character with the way cool purple metal legs does for a living. Maybe they're a driver.
*thinks*


PS Never google for scars. Not with images. Not without brain bleach handy.