Visualizing the latent emotional and bureaucratic labor in our material world

FTFY  :grin:

6 Likes

Well, it was a '78 Fiat, in about 1992, a time when Fiat didn’t have a dealer network in the US, and it was hard to get parts for anything without risking tetanus in the darker corners of salvage yards. If it was going to get fixed, it was going to be me that did it.

What a great car; I wish I hadn’t sold it. 1500cc making maybe 80HP when new, but it cornered like mad.

4 Likes

Maybe, on top of the really hot incandescent bulb? And can we make the switch really narrow and hard to turn?

6 Likes

I was just thinking of this kind of thing this morning after reading an article wherein the author said she was motivated to go hunting because of her partner’s efforts “to live a cleaner and more sustainable life” and then talked about getting outfitted in a new wardrobe of camo, getting a rifle, spending hours at the range, taking a week off from work, driving hours to get to the management unit, and then driving ATVs for hours to get to where the game was, before finally taking an animal. Which turns into something like 100 lbs maybe 150 lbs of meat in your utility-powered freezer? Now, I like the idea of hunting on many levels, but I don’t think you get to claim it’s cleaner and more sustainable unless you’ve really compared the embodied energy in your method vs a regional or global-market method where costs get lowered because of scale.

2 Likes

It depends on where you think you might go in the future. Personally, I have no problem accepting sex toy or kink related businesses as web development clients, although actually having one as a client has yet to happen. (I know I’ve sometimes seen FetLife stating that they’re looking for a developer and if they ever are doing so at a point when I could take the job, I’ll certainly apply!)

3 Likes

To Uranus, and beyond!

5 Likes

I’ve done [software] engineering on a lot of projects that didn’t pan out for a variety of reasons, so sometimes I think about how even the effort put into your usable artifacts is just the tip of this iceberg, hiding the 90% of attempts that didn’t quite make it.

1 Like

Or perhaps a scene from earlier in the movie:

HAN: (reeling from the odor) Whew…
LUKE: Dagobah…
HAN: This may smell bad, kid…
LUKE: (moaning) Yoda…
HAN: …but it will keep you warm…til I get the shelter built. (struggling to get Luke inside the carcass) Ooh… I thought they smelled bad on the outside!

7 Likes

BTW, according to the comic the meetings were about the diameter of the goose neck, not its length. We’re all agreed on its length, right?

3 Likes

I have always wondered how many doughnuts were consumed in the making of a product or film.

2 Likes

What? Where did you get ‘guilty’ from? You’re putting those things to the uses they’re intended for, just as XKCD switches on his lamp to read a little before bed or whatever. Nothing to feel guilty about.

What the comic is about is, well, I don’t know, how complicated the world we’ve built for ourselves is, maybe? And how we tend to take it for granted that the curve of the lamp has probably been debated and worried over and so on, and the placement of switches on cords is governed by a set of regulations that are really too much for a layperson to pay much attention to, and the food on your fork was grown or raised hundreds of miles away, and that has to be organised to happen. And maybe it’s how you split up the work of a designer or a farmer or a delivery driver over all the people who buy a lamp from that company or eat the food from that farm until each fraction is almost nothing, a second of attention for each mouthful or lamp bought, but collected together is many, many worker-days. And everything is like this, the result of hours of work by some person or persons somewhere far from us. Never mind guilty, doesn’t thinking about it make you dizzy?

4 Likes

Just a thought…

Shouldn’t there already be a few plugins for this in at least one of the numerous PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) suites every corporation that makes/sells something uses?

I work for a probably 3rd rate designhouse and clothing retailer, and our PLM software can tell you down to the number of Indonesian orphan’s tears went into, say putting a button on a printed silk shirt.

1 Like

Product designers. I know quite a few, and they would murder you, pull out your prosthetic eyes, and jam them into their own skulls for a taste of that kind of knowledge of the competition.

1 Like

and this is a quality lamp, so we will make it a brass switch. So it conducts the heat from the bulb so very well.

3 Likes

I was going to suggest one of those 2 cent plastic job that binds up and gets harder and harder to turn after a few hundred thermal cycles until the lamp starts flickering and smells of burnt hair.

If you go with the brass switch at least have the shade designed to use a special bulb shape that you can only find on sketchy Ebay or Amazon storefronts, so end consumers are forced to try conventionally shaped bulbs which just fit but rub on the shade, heating it to first-degree burn temperatures. Bonus shitty design points if it also creates localized thermal stresses on these new bulbs so they crack and burn out far sooner than normal.

3 Likes

wut.

Post must be at least 6 characters.

Wut, Ärger, Zorn, Gereiztheit. Raserei, usw.

wut? 

(╯°□°)╯彡┻━┻

2 Likes