My geek brain went after me today.

I had an idea for creating a version of livejournal that couldn't ever be shut down or censored, and I was gonna post it. The post was called "Fisher Price's My First Exoshell," which will give a few people a clue as to what it's about, but I've decided to hold this idea close to my chest for a while.

Elf has other ideas about layering the exoshell so that live objects can participate in trust networks on the internet without their inner processes being intelligible to outsiders, a sort-of Freenet for computronium rather than mere dumb storage. I doubt you could hide the sub-sub process the way you can hide sub-sub filesystems with the evil Quadruple Encryption Technique on static filesystem archives, but it would be fun to experiment.

If only I didn't have to write code for a living, I would do it for this kind of fun.

But I write stories for fun. I'm slowly urging Gwo and Jess into bed. They'll get there. Just so I can deliver lines like:

"But... don't you find that disgusting?"

"Jess, I've never had a body before. I don't know what I'm supposed to find disgusting."

Teh Drama, Live!

Teh Drama

The other day I was in Westlake Center, the big shopping district in downtown Seattle for the middle class who want to overspend, and I happened to spot this pink-haired girl in the middle of the square. She was screaming and yelling at two young men; drama was high! And then, seconds later, she was cuddling one of them as if nothing were wrong. I took the photo mostly because I liked her outfit; I'll probably give it to a character in a story.

Westlake has become inundated with young people. The girl behind the counter watched me watching this and said, "Yeah, it's gotten really bad out there."

"At Westlake?"

"Yeah," she said. "Dunno what it means. It wasn't like this three years ago. But now there's lots of homeless kids, lots of homeless people, everywhere. It wasn't like this before." The countergirl had holes in her nose and ears where jewelry would go off-duty; she had a soft southern burr to her voice and a dense cloud of freckles across her nose and cheeks. I should have taken a photo of her, too.