How about this idea for an Arduino project… a puck that can be quietly stuck to the back of a friend’s TV when you’re visiting. After a 72-hour delay, the puck begins emitting the dialog that Winston Smith heard from the telecreens in 1984. An example:
’Attention! Your attention, please! A newsflash has this moment arrived from the Malabar front. Our forces in South India have won a glorious victory. I am authorized to say that the action we are now reporting may well bring the war within measurable distance of its end.
(maybe update the above with reference to Ukraine instead)
Thirty to forty group! Take your places, please. Thirties to forties!
Smith! 6079 Smith W.! Yes, YOU! Bend lower, please! You can do better than that. You’re not trying. Lower, please! THAT’S better, comrade.
THERE, comrades! THAT’S how I want to see you doing it. Watch me again. I’m thirty-nine and I’ve had four children. Now look.
You see MY knees aren’t bent. You can all do it if you want to. Anyone under forty-five is perfectly capable of touching his toes. We don’t all have the privilege of fighting in the front line, but at least we can all keep fit. Remember our boys on the Malabar front! And the sailors in the Floating Fortresses! Just think what THEY have to put up with. Now try again. That’s better, comrade, that’s MUCH better.
(update the last one to refer to Ukraine and replace “his toes” with “his/her/zir/their toes”?)
Now we can see you. Stand out in the middle of the room. Stand back to back. Clasp your hands behind your heads. Do not touch one another.
Smith! 6079 Smith W! Uncover your face. No faces covered in the cells.
Any other updates to Orwell’s 1949 text?
Separately, a few excerpts from the Wikipedia page regarding Orwell...
At the outbreak of the Second World War, Orwell’s wife Eileen started working in the Censorship Department of the Ministry of Information in central London … Eileen went into hospital for a hysterectomy and died under anaesthetic on 29 March 1945 … [1984] was published in June 1949, less than a year before his death. … Sonia was a beauty, and her act of marrying a sick wealthy man, when his death was almost certain, has left many to doubt her intentions.
Orwell was also openly against homosexuality, at a time when such prejudice was common. Speaking at the 2003 George Orwell Centenary Conference, Daphne Patai said: “Of course he was homophobic. That has nothing to do with his relations with his homosexual friends. Certainly, he had a negative attitude and a certain kind of anxiety, a denigrating attitude towards homosexuality. That is definitely the case. I think his writing reflects that quite fully.”
Orwell used the homophobic epithets “nancy” and “pansy”, for example, in expressions of contempt for what he called the “pansy Left”, and “nancy poets”, i.e. left-wing homosexual or bisexual writers and intellectuals such as Stephen Spender and W. H. Auden.
Here’s a possibly useful building block:
Wikipedia has really become a pile of trash since the wokesters infiltrated it — with the connivance of Jimmy Wales — there is a video on You Tube by the cofounder, I forget his name, explaining how the project got hijacked. Outside of using Wikipedia to check, say, the capital of Belgium or the number of miles to the moon I wouldn’t. There is a good recent thread on Twitter with Dr. Jay about how Wikipedia tried to discredit people like him for their lack of respect of The Science. I remember a year or two ago reading the entry on Dr. Jay which said that he had been discredited. The supporting footnote referenced the clown running the WHO. It is too bad. Wikipedia was once trustworthy.
I am not so sure about distance to the moon on wikipedia either. At least I had seen specialized articles that were incorrect. Capital of Belgium thing is temporary. I am sure that Brussels will outrage the most correct folks soon
The Amazon Fire TV Stick is cheaper because it is subsidized by Amazon, has pretty good hardware specs, and can be sideloaded with Android apps.
As for the Telescreen, pretty much any Google or Meta device or Smart TV is effectively one, and Orwell would never have imagined that people would actually willingly pay for one.
I tried to introduce Arduinos to my video-game playing nephews, had 0/6 success. In the process, I ended up designing + building a 7x7x7 Arduino cube. Spent at least 20 hours searching for a hardware flaw that turned out to be a software flaw (array boundary overrun, dough!). Still, soldering and wire wrapping was great nostalgic fun for an EE who never got do hardware professionally.
Someone could probably hack a cheap smartwatch to do it, or write an app for watches that allow app installation. Wikipedia is a cesspool. Previously it had been a mud puddle but then they decided to dig and run some pipes. Only the most innocuous entries don’t get warped, IMHO.
It’s absolutely not a time-saving resource when you have to consciously mind-edit the article while looking up different sources, etc. GIGO. Our world is GIGO.
My Dad and I are working on an Arduino project for a special kind of sensor he wants (and to learn Arduino – early 60’s EEs don’t lose their fascination with these things, even at his age now, and I enjoy it.)
P.S. –> I saw that Elon Musk said something about the “Laptop Class Living in La-La-Land” and was promptly bashed for it on MSN.com, who called him some kind of lunatic or something.
Suggested additional hate speech replacements:
“I’m thirty-nine and I’ve had four children” ==> “I’m thirty-nine and I’ve had four husbands”
“boys” ==> “people”
The idea is great, it should be easy to get government funding.