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Read the below and decide if you think the following observations are true:

1. There is an unusually large percentage of the population entering old age. This segment is different than previous generations as their core identity is based on being young and carefree as they were in the sixties and seventies. They disdain the limitations of age and will adopt technologies, however imperfect, serving to help restore their sense of youth.
2. This generation, along with everyone else in the country excluding the extremely rich, are stuck in financial trap where their wealth has not increased. Their wages are flat, their home values are flat and they have not saved sufficiently for retirement.
3. Businesses, especially global ones, will invest heavily in technologies that allow far-flung teams to operate more efficiently.
4. The military will invest untold truckloads of cash into technologies allowing them to train troops in realistic situations, improving their likelihood of success on today’s increasingly complex battlefields and decreasing their chances of being killed.
5. Killing zombies is just a good time.

If you agree to most or all of these statements, allow me to introduce you to your new home. My hypothesis is as soon as this tech becomes 80% effective it will be adopted across the board.

This guy is in a terrifying simulation showing him what it’s like to live ans an unattractive person.

On Friday my ten year old son, Stevens 12 year old daughter and I were able to try it on thanks to Clampadres Ocean Alliance and tech shaman/Clamtributor/Nam-shub of Enki Stevens Brosnihan. Here are my initial oberservations:

1. You put the thing on your head and suddenly you’re in a room in what looks not unlike a Northern Italian villa rendered in early 2000s video game software. But wherever you move your head you an see different parts of the room. Look up and you see the wooden beamwork of the ceiling. Look down and see the tiles of the floor. It is like nothing you’ve ever experienced before. The first thing you want to do is…

My first room in the Metaverse

2. Touch. The natural next thing you do is reach your arm out and try to touch the walls, but this is hyper-disorienting because you can’t see your own limbs and your hand is feeling Stevens’ bookcase and some paint brushes. Now your brain is sending “this is weird!” vibes.

3. You want to go for a walk. The kids actually tried to do this and wound up walking into a stand-up large format printer and a large fixed-wing Styrofoam drone (his workshop is awesome, btw). Your instant instinct is to look around and explore, see things and interact.

Guys, once they get this deal working, to paraphrase George Carlin, it’s going to make Crack look like Sanka.

I tried Second Life. It was way too full of weirdos. You just kind of moved around awkwardly and these anime chicks with fluffy tails and fox ears sporting a pair of zeppelins mounted on their torsos would come up and try and “talk” to you. Then the vampires would show up and the whole thing just wound up being like the creepier parts of a comics convention. Ten years later 2/3 of my son’s class is playing Minecraft with about a million other people online at any given time.

Actually a 50 year old guy from Racine

This is neither of those. It’s going to change everything. I, for instance, sometimes find myself with nothing to do in the evening and tend to watch reruns of Mystery Science Theater 3000 on my laptop, the show where the robots make fun of old monster films.  You put those robots in 3D and we get to walk around making fun of a realistic simulation of  Victorian London and DEAR GOD JUST TAKE MY MONEY!!!!

It’s going to change storytelling. It’s going to change work. Once we link these things up to sophisticated systems it’s going to change the very nature of “locality” for specialists like doctors and lawyers and bulldozer drivers.  I’ll have a lot more to say about this in the future, but I can easily see a time within the next two decades where a lot of people find themselves shambling around a crowded semi-urban kinda crappy landscape with no money and no power while spending the off-hours as an 8′ demigod in Lord of the Rings-like simulation. You can easily imagine them checking themselves into a U-Store-it with a bunch of tubes coming in and out of their various orifices.

It will be like the Matrix, but instead of trapping people there will be a slot for your credit card.

Just wrap your head around the social implications of that.

There are few more welcomed moments in life than the realization that spring has finally and unequivocally announced its arrival in our immediate geographic area. We are heartyish Northerners, of course, who grit our teeth through five months of crapbag weather in order to smugly and annoyingly over-enjoy the other seven. But even though the past few days have reverted back to cold, dreary, desolate hellscapes of weather, we know we’re slowly, steadily marching towards nice weather. And damn, it feels good.

It’s not always the cheerful sun and the lack of immediate frostbite that herald the arrival of spring, however. Not in Gloucester. There are other, equally wonderful clues to which we are accustomed. Like the following:

– Potholes. Sweet Potato Chip Jesus, are we ever in pothole season. I keep expecting to see meerkats popping up out of them, they are so plentiful and deep, like they are part of an underground network by which children can run to Ed’s mini mart for candy without ever reaching street level. This is why I never tailgate – I mean firstly because I’m not an asshole, but secondly so that I can see the potholes coming. These motherfuckers will tear out your damn drivetrain. You have 4WD? Not anymore you don’t, also your drive shaft is dragging along Prospect St, you may wanna get that checked out. My favorite variation of pothole is the one stuffed full of cigarette butts and McDonalds wrappers.

Yeah, but there was half a Destino’s sub down there, at least.

– The Detritus Emerges. Here comes the shit we’ve buried deep in our hearts and snowbanks. With the Great Thaw of the last few weeks, our glaciers have receded and the crud is coming to light. Just walking around yesterday, I bore witness to a veritable cavalcade of treasure. I saw a condom, a pair of black underwear, one solitary leather glove, 6 nip bottles, and Pete Rose. This, this is why we can’t dump snow in the ocean. A literal fucking couch appeared out of a snowbank on my street recently. AN ENTIRE COUCH. If we don’t find a cadaver somewhere in this city under some oversized snowbank, I’ll be surprised. If this was the winter I needed to dump a body, I’d be in luck.

Seriously what happened here?

– There is Life Outside. Earlier in the week, Joey C over at Good Morning Gloucester posted the requisite sign of spring on Rogers St: The return of the men who sit outside the St. Peter’s Club. Like the return of other migrating species, these gentlemen have finally completed their long, seasonal journey from… inside the St. Peter’s Club. It is recommended to leave protein sources nearby so they can regain the calories they spent hibernating, usually in the form of beer nuts.

(h/t to Marty Luster and GMG for this picture, without which the joke would be hard to explain)

It’s not just the return of benchfolk, but the other signs of life outside our windows as well: children playing in the streets, knocking each other off large icy embankments, families literally screaming at each other, people working on their cars. I didn’t think there was any possible way for me to be excited to hear the guy in one of the houses next door shrieking insults at his girlfriend, but it turns out I was kind of glad that it was warm enough for them to take their personal business into the literal middle of the street.

– The Bicycles Return. I am enjoying this one in particular this spring, as most of you know I owned a bike shop for the four years previous, and the dawn of spring meant insane business, which was great, but also overwhelming, and long hours killed us. With that tomfoolery behind me, I am free to notice the beginnings of the cycling season for the heartiest of us all, without the impending sense of dread. Sure, there are the few year-round riders – mostly DUI offenders or lumbersexual hipsters – but even I, Bike Shop Owner, will wait a few weeks until I bring out my cyclocross bike, lest I accidentally end up falling into a crevasse in the paved earth like the beginning of Land of the Lost (I’ll bring back dinosaurs, I promise). They’re coming out, now, some of the braver souls – the ones in Bruins gear and single-speeds, those unconcerned by errant pieces of wet dog poo, driftwood, or finishing nails dropped by the angry weather gods.

Give it five years, these fuckers will be moving up from Davis Square.

I won’t dance around the fact that we still have a long way to go before we can bust out the cargo shorts and flip flops – there is still an entire picnic table buried in my backyard, even the very top of which has not yet been unearthed in the thaw. I still can’t park my cars correctly in my driveway, and I’m still walking in the goddamn middle of the street all the time.

But damn, it’s a start.

Things that make me most happy: watching my daughter dance, casting on a new knitting project, watching a three year old in my class mix secondary colors, playing ukulele at Niles and most recently, Lego humans of Gloucester.” – Colleen Apostolos-Marsh

ARTS and CRAFTS for LITTLE ONES
Montessori Based Art Classes ages 3-6
Weekdays (choose one) 10:15-11:15 @ Island Art & Hobby
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978 879 4511

Sweet crap, we’re back with another episode of the show no one really wants to admit isn’t that great, our very own Wicked Tuna. I’m here to recap this show so you don’t have to watch it, unless you’re into that sort of thing.

The first segment this week is pretty much “How Paul Hebert Has Sucked So Far”, including a part where another fisherman totally calls out the fact that Mr. Paul has worked on like seven boats since this show started and hasn’t caught a fish yet this season, and reference “Paul’s drama boats”. They make sure to add that he’s a good fisherman as sort of a half-assed defense. Damn, these bros are harsh, although he deserves it. Probably. I don’t know, I’m barely paying attention.

Oh crap, a brand new fucking boat. Okay, interesting. All of a sudden they drop the harpoon boat Kristiana on me. They introduce the crew, and I’m already bored to tears. Wait, wait! They have footage of a guy so determined to beat Bill “Hollywood” Muniz that he’s been practicing chucking harpoons from the roof of his garage into hay bales.

This is really what reality TV has come to.

Over on Hollywood Bill’s boat, some talk happens. The only thing I know about this guy is that he did a talk at O’Maley about excellence and said he hated school, only wanted to fish, and all his friends from school were dead or in jail. If all the thirteen year old girls I know are snarking on you, bro, that’s not a good sign. Anyway if you didn’t know (like me), harpooning is different and they have like, a pilot scouting for tuna who has to communicate with the boat so the guy can literally climb up on scaffolding and throw a javelin at it. It’s kind of interesting, but also can’t we use drones? No? Just saying. Drones.

The Kristiana doesn’t have a spotter pilot, so they try to explain they just kind of look from the boat. “You just look for the different funny water.” Fascinating. They also mention that one guy acts like “a little kid, you want to puke and sh*t your pants because you want to go tuna fishing.” Classbag, this boat.

Over on the Kelly Ann, the owner howls, “We hired Paul for one reason” and I shout “TO BE ON TV!” but I guess the real answer was “to catch giant tuna fish!”  Everyone assures one another they are “in the zone”, and then hook a fish, but end up losing it, and everyone blames Paul, who kind of bumbles around endearingly.

Hollywoodbill and the Lily end up spearing the bejebus out of two fish, which is pretty impressive I guess? I don’t know. I don’t understand fish. I just eat them. The Kristiana

“We Need This Fish” Count: 1

“Reel Reel Reel” Count: 2