RE: Vis avis
12-14-2015, 01:16 AM
The library has wi-fi, a godsend barring a couple of irksome filters that should've been ditched with dialup. A ban on filesharing you can understand, but youtube? Seriously? Your commandeered row of shelving is lacking in outlets, so on your second night here you relocated a comfy chair and a coffee table to the far end of it. With only one person's worth of books to reshelve, the staff don't take much prompting to linger around the front desk, so nobody's stumbled upon you.
The internet's been useful - to a point. While every fact about bird anatomy, behaviour, and mythological referencing has been graciously forthcoming, more recent contributions to the global web of knowledge and varingly-informed opinion have been far less useful. You made some disposable accounts on assorted web communities, reaching out to anyone who might also be aware of the issue. Your correspondences asymptotically approached the qualities of a Youtube comments section - riddled with typos and scorn, and going from "this is my headcanon XYZ theme song!!!" to "you fuckin imbecile. You think your history books aren't revisionist crap too? COMMUNISM. DOES. NOT. WORK. PERIOD."
-in 20 comment chains flat. Vaguely surreal and a great foundation upon which one might despair over/question humanity's trajectory. Yeah.
Responses (best as you could decipher them) ran the gamut from claims you should write a book, to follow-up inquiries as to where one might acquire "whatever dank shit you're smoking". The spelling worsened, but in a way you'd associate less with regressing reading levels and more with devil-may-care keyboard-mashing. Still, through the haze of keystrokes caught in the crossfire, the content itself pointed to people getting on with their lives, posting about the trivialities of their regular human existences. Sudden anatomical rearrangement notwithstanding. Nobody, best as you can tell, is noticing the misspelling or any general weirdness. This is the internet, though, who knows if any of these people actually know what's going on outside. You're not exactly a shining example, holed up in this library and subsisting off tinned food.
Facebook was tolerable long enough to at least verify that existing images - the past - aren't changing. Then again, neither are people's reactions to such. You were lingering on a month-old photo of you and Hal in paired costume, he as the United States (Court of Appeals, 9th Circuit)and you as "Approximately 64,695 Pounds of Shark Fins". You didn't notice the recent comment from your sister:
vcujteg pjioho!
You slammed your laptop closed, heart hammering, and haven't been able to stomach another look since.
---
Today's the day.
Grim and businesslike, you load up the Bad Blue Website and start downloading as many Facebook photos as you could to your computer. Friends. Family. Humans. You fixate upon the task, trudging methodically through profile after profile. Fresh photos, of passerines and waterfowl and god knows what else, intruding on news feeds.
You load everything up onto a USB, steeling yourself for the great and bird-infested outdoors. The library's copiers and printers all have some kind of swipecard, and you're not a student here. While you still feel uneasy about breaking a bunch of laws just to print off some personal reminders, there's a print shop a block or two away, though their business hours don't cater to nocturnal trespassers like yourself. You don coat, scarf, and gloves, double- and triple-checking that the thumbdrive is in your pocket.
Interrogation: avoided. A finch of some kind is minding the front desk when you leave, probably glaring at you judgmentally. It says nothing, so you pay it no heed. The library opens up to an open-plan rotten mistake that lets polar blasts come hurtling through - a handful of students are skittering about its periphery, with that illusory glide while their legs powerwalk furiously underneath. They're puffed up against the cold, in contrast with the jay-jocks monopolising the courtyard with their valiant attempts at no-arms frisbee.
University town, once you step out from under the old stone edifices of academia, lounges in a pall of cultivated bleakness, simultaneously in need of a sprucing-up and apathetic-resentful of change from without. You notice a cat. You've noticed a lot of cats, come to think of it. Stray dogs, too, no doubt agitated by the change in management back home.
This cat is a disreputable looking thing - lean, mostly white, dirt-colored patches on it that are probably actual dirt at this point. The both of you share a quiet moment before it skulks off deeper into Studentville, ears pinned back. Do you pursue?
The internet's been useful - to a point. While every fact about bird anatomy, behaviour, and mythological referencing has been graciously forthcoming, more recent contributions to the global web of knowledge and varingly-informed opinion have been far less useful. You made some disposable accounts on assorted web communities, reaching out to anyone who might also be aware of the issue. Your correspondences asymptotically approached the qualities of a Youtube comments section - riddled with typos and scorn, and going from "this is my headcanon XYZ theme song!!!" to "you fuckin imbecile. You think your history books aren't revisionist crap too? COMMUNISM. DOES. NOT. WORK. PERIOD."
-in 20 comment chains flat. Vaguely surreal and a great foundation upon which one might despair over/question humanity's trajectory. Yeah.
Responses (best as you could decipher them) ran the gamut from claims you should write a book, to follow-up inquiries as to where one might acquire "whatever dank shit you're smoking". The spelling worsened, but in a way you'd associate less with regressing reading levels and more with devil-may-care keyboard-mashing. Still, through the haze of keystrokes caught in the crossfire, the content itself pointed to people getting on with their lives, posting about the trivialities of their regular human existences. Sudden anatomical rearrangement notwithstanding. Nobody, best as you can tell, is noticing the misspelling or any general weirdness. This is the internet, though, who knows if any of these people actually know what's going on outside. You're not exactly a shining example, holed up in this library and subsisting off tinned food.
Facebook was tolerable long enough to at least verify that existing images - the past - aren't changing. Then again, neither are people's reactions to such. You were lingering on a month-old photo of you and Hal in paired costume, he as the United States (Court of Appeals, 9th Circuit)and you as "Approximately 64,695 Pounds of Shark Fins". You didn't notice the recent comment from your sister:
vcujteg pjioho!
You slammed your laptop closed, heart hammering, and haven't been able to stomach another look since.
---
Today's the day.
Grim and businesslike, you load up the Bad Blue Website and start downloading as many Facebook photos as you could to your computer. Friends. Family. Humans. You fixate upon the task, trudging methodically through profile after profile. Fresh photos, of passerines and waterfowl and god knows what else, intruding on news feeds.
You load everything up onto a USB, steeling yourself for the great and bird-infested outdoors. The library's copiers and printers all have some kind of swipecard, and you're not a student here. While you still feel uneasy about breaking a bunch of laws just to print off some personal reminders, there's a print shop a block or two away, though their business hours don't cater to nocturnal trespassers like yourself. You don coat, scarf, and gloves, double- and triple-checking that the thumbdrive is in your pocket.
Interrogation: avoided. A finch of some kind is minding the front desk when you leave, probably glaring at you judgmentally. It says nothing, so you pay it no heed. The library opens up to an open-plan rotten mistake that lets polar blasts come hurtling through - a handful of students are skittering about its periphery, with that illusory glide while their legs powerwalk furiously underneath. They're puffed up against the cold, in contrast with the jay-jocks monopolising the courtyard with their valiant attempts at no-arms frisbee.
University town, once you step out from under the old stone edifices of academia, lounges in a pall of cultivated bleakness, simultaneously in need of a sprucing-up and apathetic-resentful of change from without. You notice a cat. You've noticed a lot of cats, come to think of it. Stray dogs, too, no doubt agitated by the change in management back home.
This cat is a disreputable looking thing - lean, mostly white, dirt-colored patches on it that are probably actual dirt at this point. The both of you share a quiet moment before it skulks off deeper into Studentville, ears pinned back. Do you pursue?
peace to the unsung peace to the martyrs | i'm johnny rotten appleseed
clouds is shaky love | broke as hell but i got a bunch of ringtones
eyes blood red bruise aubergine | Sue took something now Sue doesn't sleep | saint average, day in the life of
woke up in the noon smelling doom and death | out the house, great outdoors
staying warm in arctic blizzard | that's my battle 'til I get inanimate | still up in the same clothes living like a gameshow
clouds is shaky love | broke as hell but i got a bunch of ringtones
eyes blood red bruise aubergine | Sue took something now Sue doesn't sleep | saint average, day in the life of
woke up in the noon smelling doom and death | out the house, great outdoors
staying warm in arctic blizzard | that's my battle 'til I get inanimate | still up in the same clothes living like a gameshow