First, I should say that I am using an older laptop, running Linux. I bought it from Free Geek in 2019 for $120, and at that time it was probably already years old. It has served me faithfully. Just recently, however, I have been noticing problems, sometimes that affect my web browser, Chromium, and sometimes that affect my media player, VLC.

When my laptop has been working too much and too fast, because of either excessive scripting on a webpage, or about a half hour into playing a DVD, things start slowing down. I've learned the reason for this: the processor is getting physically hotter, and so the Linux kernel actually starts a special task that...does nothing. It is called kidle_inject and it just stops my processor from doing anything, spacing out tasks so the processor doesn't physically injure itself. So what this means is that when I am watching a DVD, it works fine for a while, and then starts lagging, pixelating or dropping frames. Since it is caused by a physical problem, overheating, this means that it can't be solved by a reset: I have to physically turn off my laptop, turn it sideways in a v-shape, and wait while the heat dissipates. I have tried installing other media players through apt-get, but none of them change what is probably a problem caused by older hardware.

So I also have to confess that certain of my recent write-ups were affected by this. I have to admit that while the people of this website deserve the type of objective Doctor Who criticism coming from a disinterested, totally focused observer, were colored by technical difficulties. Is the sudden realization that our favorite Time Lord was not really a Time Lord, but instead a forsaken alien child, irritating because in strictly literary terms, it is plot device pulled out of nowhere, or was it irritating that the exciting space battles around this annunciation were blocky and laggy and almost prone to giving me a headache? These are serious questions of literary criticism that touch upon Husserlian ideas of noema and noesis, and this literary conundrum will probably only be solved when I buy a new Chromebook, because as you can see, My Laptop's DVD player is too high maintenance.

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