Allston Christmas, and fish drowners

[flexagon]

So for those who aren't local, Be It Known that the vast majority of apartments here have leases beginning on or around September 1. Simultaneously and relatedly, the streets fill with U-Hauls and the sidewalks fill with random boxes and pieces of furniture marked "FREE". This last phenomenon is called "Allston Christmas" after a local suburb, but it happens across many towns in the area. It's like a big, disorganized Everything Swap.

• I picked up two new kitchen pots from the squirrel, and ended up giving him an onion chopper device that he loves... amusingly this was not as a direct swap, but it worked out well.


• Tuesday I spent about four hours helping a distant-ish friend pack stuff intended for a storage unit. I learned how to vaccuum-bag, which was cool, and MacGuyvered some garment-hanger boxes, and then was able to ferry a bag of stuff to the ballerina. And... silently I judged, because there was so much stuff. I came home, and the next day I got rid of a big bag of clothing and put out my own "FREE" stuff on the sidewalk and reorganized my kitchen. LOL.


• Friday I spent nearly 8 hours helping my acro base unpack and organize. Our goal was to get all his boxes open / broken down / gone, and we did it. So satisfying. We took a 2BR place from a giant pile of boxes to a place that looked like he lived there (and had had a messy week). We also got to see a couch left on the sidewalk disappear within an hour, and the same for a few other things that just didn't seem to have a place in the new apartment. He has different hobbies and different stuff than I do, but his attitude about objects is so much more like mine that it made for an interesting contrast with Tuesday.


• You are wondering: well, miss minimalist, did you get any free stuff this Christmas season? Yeah, I did. The two pots (I got rid of one), a pint glass, and a pair of parallettes from R (good for doing pushups without having to warm up my wrists first).
  

Overall a very domestic week. If you count the intended-to-be-final walk-through for my new condo, I put serious time into four different places. Then I went kitchen-feral on Saturday and made both quatre quarts cake and sushi. Workouts did go okay as well, but with less to specifically report.

I groused and griped about the final outcome of the Google-vs-DOJ antitrust case, which of course Google lost. Even though it was found to have been a monopoly, and abused its economic standing in uncool ways to squash competition, it doesn't have to divest itself of either Chrome or Android; just do some data sharing that sounds to me a lot like what DMA 6(11) was already requiring for EU users. Big fucking deal. More to the point, its stock jumped 8% on the news, and that celebration is really distasteful. Like, yay, the monopolist gets to keep monopolizing! Why is this Google "winning", instead of saying "oops, we did in fact lose that court case; didn't mean to get on the wrong side of things there. Of course we'll modify our business practices, recognizing that we want to be operating in a larger ecosystem that we're proud to be a part of." I know, I know; that sounds laughable. I know. I also know that maybe selling off Chrome would have hurt users. But I personally would rather live in a society with slightly worse web browsing, and where guilty parties don't essentially get away with whatever even when found guilty. The judge could have hurt browsing a bit, and instead he hurt all of tech. Maybe all of the country.

I learned a good new insult from an otherwise so-so book. The insult is "fish drowner", and I am taking it to mean someone who fucks up the apparently unfuckable. The person who snatches defeat from the jaws of victory, the person who manages to drown a goddamn fish. The person who maybe had one job, and had the power in his hands to break up a known monopolist, and... simply didn't do it.

Comments

[cordjostler]

Allston Christmas sounds great! Free-range thrifting? It reminds me, a long ago partner once told me of her time in Germany, that there was a day every month where everyone put out any unwanted things they had on the curb, and everyone walked around picking up stuff. Sounded fun and social.

Fish drowner is pretty good. It makes me think of some of the weird insults from Gangs of New York. I always wondered what "Fiddlin' Bens" was but only just now searched it to find it's Fidlam Bens, which means something like "good thief."

[flexagon]

That's really fun about Germany. Allston Christmas isn't social, but I do find it to be a lot of fun, and would love it if it were to somehow become a monthly thing; people here are mostly nudged into it by having to move. But because it's so predictable and such a wide phenomenon, it engenders stuff like used furniture sellers cruising the streets picking up free couches and other furniture; and that's good. Every ecosystem needs scavengers and recyclers.

[tactilemuse]

I'm sure you can tell enough about me by now to know that this feels like a dream to me. Living in a city with CCAC, Pitt, and CMU meant the east end of town would often end up with SO MUCH TREASURE. I trash picked so much furniture and interesting art that way!

[flexagon]

Yessss. Towns with well-off college students are the best!