#426 - LOL and Behold

[nathansnider]

The Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time #426:

LOL AND BEHOLD

Wednesday, October 25, 2017

Departing from California Donuts #21 at 9pm

You lost your first advisor to drink, the second to madness, the third to desertion. Each time, you clicked the Button to start again. When you first began your studies of this virtual world, it was perpetually under construction, then in endless beta, then drifting like some ghost ship in the Cloud. As the pace of technological change moved forward, you found your points of conceptual reference hurtling ever backward. What started out as a rather straightforward post-structural analysis of the Hampsterdance transformed over time into a class analysis of cat memes (what was to become of the Hampsters, you asked, under this seemingly unrelenting feline hegemony?). And now, in the seventeenth year of your doctoral dissertation in Internet Studies, you have finally arrived at the snake, which you draw over and over again, each draft more detailed than the last. This snake is not a dying beast. Indeed, you think, it might be the only thing that can endure. Its resemblance to the Button is surely not coincidental. You click, and you start again. Refresh. Refresh. Refresh.

(25-30 miles; not especially hilly; some mildly educational content)

NOTE:

We are once again doing a series of weekend, daytime rides this fall/winter, the first of which will be next week! There will be NO RIDE NEXT WEDNESDAY, November 1. Instead, there will be a daytime Passage ride on SATURDAY, November 4. These are generally all-day affairs in which we take the Metrolink or Metro in the morning (meeting place varying from week to week depending on method of travel, but often Union Station) and ride in a location too distant for us to cover on a typical Wednesday ride. And then, depending on the location, we either hop back on the train to return or simply ride back to Koreatown.

As in years past, the dates will be determined as follows: we will skip the first Wednesday of each month and instead ride the following Saturday (which will not always be the first Saturday of the month). The schedule will thus be:

No ride: 11/1, 12/6, 1/3, 2/7

Saturday rides: 11/4, 12/9, 1/6, 2/10