“There was a flipping sound every thirty seconds from the vcr as it was continually trying to eject a videocassette which was not, in fact, in the machine. Through some glitch of artificial unintelligence the malfunctioning vcr kept trying to eject nothing for days. The tuner part of the unit was working fine so it remained in place, trying all the while to eject a non-existent cassette.”
Nancy Paterson, VCR Story, TCR 250
“And so we waited. Tick-tock, blink-blink, thirty seconds stretched themselves out one by one, a hole in human experience. Waiting for the system: life today is full of such pauses. The soft clacking of computer keys, then the voice on the telephone telling you, “Just a moment, please.” The credit-card reader instructing you “Remove card quickly!” then displaying “Processing. Please wait.” The little hourglass icon on your computer screen reminding you how time is passing and there is nothing you can do about it. The diddler at the bottom of the browser screen going back and forth, back and forth like a caged crazed animal. All the hours the computer is supposedly saving us […] It has filled our lives with little wait states like this one, useless wait states, little slices of time in which you can’t do anything at all but stand there, sit there, hold the phone - the sort of unoccupied little slices of time no decent computer operating system would tolerate for itself. A computer, waiting like this, would find something useful to do: check for other processes wanting attention, flush a file buffer, refresh a cache, at least.”
Ellen Ullman, The Bug
“the lidless eye, TV Lacan
conspiracy theories, locks and keys
visuality and the pressure from the below-parole”
Kevin Magee, to write as speech, TCR 2-50
other islands in this text-fed stream
