beccastareyes (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
beccastareyes) wrote2009-04-20 11:35 am
beccastareyes) wrote2009-04-20 11:35 am
The Long, Dark Night of Becca Stareyes
I don't know what it was. Perhaps it was the looming presence of my conference and the fact all I did on my project yesterday was discover my desktop does not like the C++ code I wrote on the laptop that runs*. Perhaps it was my experience mixing 'caffeinated tea I like the taste of ' and 'decaf tea which tastes marginally better than seeped cardboard' to see if I could come up with a low caffeinated/good-tasting tea for the evenings**. Maybe I skipped my meds, or maybe I should have given myself more time to unwind from gaming.
* It seems to think I have the same function declared twice -- if it is, it's buried in the standard libraries or something. It's not even a function I'm using. -_-. And that's after I got it to stop showing 56 errors per file that had something to do with the C++ standard library.
In other words, it's not even functional bug-spotting. Really, I should have just got bored and opened the laptop, but I like having a big screen at home.
** Experiment failed.
Anyway, I got about 4 hours of sleep last night, and one of those was a result of getting up an hour late. After about 6 cups of tea, I feel like I normally do when I first get up. Most of it was a racing mind, with the occasional 'oh shit moment', usually from my looming project, but once from the fear I had left the leftovers I was going to throw out in my kitchen.
Anyway, I tried doing puzzles, which normally works to quiet my mind. It did the second time, but that was after I gave up and started reading. Reading is a distraction for me, but it also doesn't still my mind at all. I know this, and did it anyway. And if I picked a book, it probably shouldn't be The Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler. Not the best choice for bedtime reading, though it's a good book.
For those of you who haven't read it, it's a book about a young woman who founds a religious movement in the near-future, after everything's gone to help. The second book has a fundamentalist church leader get elected President. He and his predecessors have already weakened a lot of the worker-protection laws, that allow for indentured servitude. Things that are de facto slavery exist -- whether it be indentured servitude systems that essentially are designed to keep people increasingly in debt, or criminal acts of sex slavery. (And the two aren't entirely unrelated -- a character in the previous book had her kids kidnapped by her boss, and she suspects he handed them off for that purpose.)
Anyway, Fundigelical President mentions that he's starting programs for the jobless poor to get them off the streets and learn how to be productive citizen and good Christians. What actually happens is essentially slavery in a concentration camp, with a thin veneer of Biblical learnings and justifications, of anyone who is sufficiently unconnected and that the bully-boys in charge don't like, including the main character's new home. Apparently founders of new religions qualify, despite living quietly on land their leader's husband owns. Oh, and removal of anyone under 12-ish to be fostered out to 'good Christian parents'.
Later, the main character runs into her brother who had wanted to be a minister and was working for the same sect that Fundigelical President belonged to. He didn't believe her when she told him what happened, then tried to convince her that it was just a fringe group of crazies and that she should join the Church, really.
(Fundigelical President also starts a war when Alaska gets sick of this nonsense and secedes, and Canada backs it. It is a miserable failure that only succeeds in getting young men killed and our food supplies cut off, since the Canadian Midwest is a bread-basket in the post-global-warming world. Eventually, the guy gets kicked out after his first term.)
So, yeah. Interesting book. Also raised an interesting point about public education and health care -- both of which go down the tubes in this world -- which was the business about 'hey, if you don't make sure everyone has health care and education, you live in a world where most people are sick and ignorant. Is that the world you want to live in?'. The main character teaches people to read and write and a lot of her family and followers mention that as one of the skills they can use in the world of the poor, about like it was before schools were common.
(It did kind of feel like it was written pre-AIDS, though, since there were mentions of STDs, but it was still in the 'we can clear these up with drugs' and not the 'well, shit, you're gonna die'.)
* It seems to think I have the same function declared twice -- if it is, it's buried in the standard libraries or something. It's not even a function I'm using. -_-. And that's after I got it to stop showing 56 errors per file that had something to do with the C++ standard library.
In other words, it's not even functional bug-spotting. Really, I should have just got bored and opened the laptop, but I like having a big screen at home.
** Experiment failed.
Anyway, I got about 4 hours of sleep last night, and one of those was a result of getting up an hour late. After about 6 cups of tea, I feel like I normally do when I first get up. Most of it was a racing mind, with the occasional 'oh shit moment', usually from my looming project, but once from the fear I had left the leftovers I was going to throw out in my kitchen.
Anyway, I tried doing puzzles, which normally works to quiet my mind. It did the second time, but that was after I gave up and started reading. Reading is a distraction for me, but it also doesn't still my mind at all. I know this, and did it anyway. And if I picked a book, it probably shouldn't be The Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler. Not the best choice for bedtime reading, though it's a good book.
For those of you who haven't read it, it's a book about a young woman who founds a religious movement in the near-future, after everything's gone to help. The second book has a fundamentalist church leader get elected President. He and his predecessors have already weakened a lot of the worker-protection laws, that allow for indentured servitude. Things that are de facto slavery exist -- whether it be indentured servitude systems that essentially are designed to keep people increasingly in debt, or criminal acts of sex slavery. (And the two aren't entirely unrelated -- a character in the previous book had her kids kidnapped by her boss, and she suspects he handed them off for that purpose.)
Anyway, Fundigelical President mentions that he's starting programs for the jobless poor to get them off the streets and learn how to be productive citizen and good Christians. What actually happens is essentially slavery in a concentration camp, with a thin veneer of Biblical learnings and justifications, of anyone who is sufficiently unconnected and that the bully-boys in charge don't like, including the main character's new home. Apparently founders of new religions qualify, despite living quietly on land their leader's husband owns. Oh, and removal of anyone under 12-ish to be fostered out to 'good Christian parents'.
Later, the main character runs into her brother who had wanted to be a minister and was working for the same sect that Fundigelical President belonged to. He didn't believe her when she told him what happened, then tried to convince her that it was just a fringe group of crazies and that she should join the Church, really.
(Fundigelical President also starts a war when Alaska gets sick of this nonsense and secedes, and Canada backs it. It is a miserable failure that only succeeds in getting young men killed and our food supplies cut off, since the Canadian Midwest is a bread-basket in the post-global-warming world. Eventually, the guy gets kicked out after his first term.)
So, yeah. Interesting book. Also raised an interesting point about public education and health care -- both of which go down the tubes in this world -- which was the business about 'hey, if you don't make sure everyone has health care and education, you live in a world where most people are sick and ignorant. Is that the world you want to live in?'. The main character teaches people to read and write and a lot of her family and followers mention that as one of the skills they can use in the world of the poor, about like it was before schools were common.
(It did kind of feel like it was written pre-AIDS, though, since there were mentions of STDs, but it was still in the 'we can clear these up with drugs' and not the 'well, shit, you're gonna die'.)