free variable

In the fall of 1996, I was a freshman in college. I listened to modern jazz, thought I was a lot smarter than I was, and used commercial software despite finding it viscerally distasteful.

One day, a catastrophic software failure damaged the partition table of my hard disk, requiring me to go to work on it with a pair of pliers, a blowtorch, and a hex editor. (For the nontechnical: that basically means “ones-and-zeroes”.) The whole ordeal was pretty much the last straw for my rapidly-diminishing tolerance of Windows NT’s seeming inability to avoid screwing me. I backed up all of my stuff, removed NT, and enlarged my Linux partition to fill the whole disk. This was still a fairly rough time for Linux, back when getting a graphical display to work still required an oscilloscope and every release of every distribution seemed to have some absurd, critical bugs, like “your printer port doesn’t work, no matter what”, or “the ‘h’ key isn’t supported by this release”, etc.

I also had to learn new tools to do my schoolwork — I started writing papers in LaTeX right away, which was sort of a leap away from WordPerfect 5.1, which I was most used to. I found out rather quickly that searching the web (altavista, then) for “latex faq” resulted in a lot of documents that I wasn’t interested in seeing. Actually, judging by the page summaries, most of the things that turned up were repositories of information about a universe of discourse that I’d rather not know existed. I mean, if to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life (sorry, LW), then there was some pretty horrific imagination that could be inspired by some of that language.

This brings us to the point of this post: I’ve just now — today, even — had an even more awful experience with search results. I tried searching for “hydra”, looking for this — but I got this. I think that the fact that there are recreational Derrida and Lacan “users” is even more disturbing to me than the world explained in the “latex faq” that I found so long ago.