Choosing a word.

Sadly, this is about one of those stories I will probably never post, but it does have an interesting point to it. I wanted to write a story about potheads in the Journal Entries universe. Who are they and what are they like, that sort of thing, and the bizarre lengths some AIs will go to try and rescue the one or two they think they might have a chance of reaching. I had a nice day yesterday, cranking out almost 4,000 words in one afternoon, and not much cut-worthy or wasted. That's a good feeling.

There are a few human colony worlds that are good for this sort of thing. We've already seen one with Ren, Ren, Ren and a few Kadei & Eshi stories, the world of Covenant. The other is Discovery, seen in the Vengeance Angel series as well as Fragile Dreams, which is a much nicer, almost superterran place.

One of the things I realized is that, given almost unlimited access to food, cheap shelter, and relatively innocuous intoxicants, a lot of people would simply snort or smoke themselves into what the AIs would consider your halting state: without initiatory intervention a lot of people would simply die, or fade away to nothingness. They would also tend to do so terribly, tragically alone. There's no cultural experience, no sharing of one's discoveries or techniques. Rarely, two might get together to share the experience of one's music and environent, but as we're seeing now in the era of the iPod, even those experiences are atomized to individuals.

I wanted a word like "dude," or "man," something they would call each other, the stoner subculture equivalent of "sir," which is really what those words are.

I wanted a word they'd pick because it sounded cool, perhaps even rebellious, certainly famous. I wanted a word that communicated clearly in its choice their isolated and solitary existences. And they're on Discovery, a world where every musician of any stripe wants to visit to learn and practice and maybe build an initial audience. The best place to learn music, and the hardest audience: they've heard it all before.

The obvious word is "solo." There's always Han Solo, and "behind enemy lines" supersoldiers are sometimes called solos (cf. R. Talsorian's Cyberpunk module, "Solo of Fortune"). It has all the messages I want.

This led to a problem: What do I call the protagonists "best friend," at least as he considers himself? "Backup."

And Dan, the hero of our story, has an asshole for his "backup": ( A bit of dialogue )

Now I just need to figure out two things: what my protagonist has that would make the AIs consider him worth going the extra effort to salvage him, and why the local AI (who's persona is also of a total stoner) would choose such a strange approach.

Brain Strong! Batteries Weak!

A few months ago fallenpegasus gifted me with a bag full of dead Thinkpad T23s in the hopes that I might be able to part them out and keep Kusanagi running. His problem seems to be that he consistently mishandles his laptops to the point where the motherboard shorts out, but I seem to burn out monitors and keyboards.

One of the parts he left in the bag was a Li-Ion Ultrabay Battery. This is a "secondary" battery that slips in where the DVD drive goes, and provides more power. Although it was marked "dead," it actually gave me an extra two hours of power. Until this morning, when the release catch for it snagged on a loose thread inside my bookbag and it popped out.

The laptop immediately crashed and now it insists that the backup battery holds no charge whatsoever. I'm down to an average 90-minute charge on the main battery, which just sucks.