"An off switch?! She'll get twenty years for that!"
"Why is taxi advertising so effective", it asked me. Why indeed.
A part of Max Headroom I wish had not come true.
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Tags: doomed, firstperson, photography, sf, sprawl
Location: 37° 46' 26.40" N, 122° 24' 29.40" W
The HVAC Matrix Has You, or, Always Mount a Scratch Ramp
Hey look, it's what's under 4th and Bryant right now.
I read that book when I was little, and man, was five-year-old me pissed off by the ending. I hadn't thought of it in years but I wandered through the SF Railway Museum a few weeks ago and they had a copy of it for sale, which brought all the childhood "WTF" flooding back.
Spoiler alert: after doing the John Henry thing, in a robot-on-robot kind of way, the fellow and his shovel dig a basement but forget to dig a ramp, so they can't get out. So what do they do? Do they dig a ramp, then fill it back in?
No.
They cut off the anthropomorphic shovel's legs and turn it into a furnace. Human Boss gets to stick around as the building's new janitor. Presumably they lower him a ladder at some point.
I mean really, W the F.
Anyway, as you can see above, the Central Subway crew did not make this mistake. No furnaces will be harmed. I'm not sure if they plan a rescue op for the tunnel boring machines, though, or if they're gonna do a Mars Rover on them.
Tags: a/b, doomed, firstperson, robots, sf
China's Toxic Sky
Tags: doomed, grim meathook future, plague, sprawl
DNA Lounge: Wherein we have heat, and bands tonight.
We've got three bands playing tonight at Twitch in Above DNA: Max & Mara, Vice Device and Uncanny Valley. I haven't seen them before, but they sound good. Here, watch some videos:
Twitch is a fun party with interesting music, but turn-out has been a bit thin. You should come, so that we get to keep doing it.
It's about a month too late for it to really matter this year, but the DNA Pizza dining room now has a working heater! It's that big box inline with the ventilation duct:
These heaters have been up there for years, but the thermostats were all smashed, so we had no idea whether they worked. They do! Though apparently they haven't been turned on in 5 or 10 years. That initial burst of burning dust was tasty, let me tell you.
There are actually two of them in the dining room and one in the kitchen, but apparently when we re-did the electrical for Above DNA we commandeered that power, so we don't have enough juice to run all three any more. Oops. So we turned off the one in the kitchen to bring one in the dining room back online.
The heat from the pizza oven in the restaurant helps a bit, but we like to keep the room pressurized with air blowing out the front door, because otherwise the dining room tends to fill with Mystery Smells from the street like car exhaust, welding from the auto shop next door, and inconsiderate smokers. Closing the front doors isn't really an option either, because then we look closed and lose business. So, heat!
Also: DNA Pizza will be having a Superbowl Special this Sunday! The special is: ABSOLUTELY NO SUPERBOWL. So if you're looking for somewhere to hang out that is 100% sportball-free, that's us. There will be our usual offerings of pizza, coffee, alcohol and awesome yet sometimes disturbing music videos.
And if someone tries to burn down our neighborhood, we plan to close the doors.
