[Index]

LL :: Volume 24 :: LR
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  Idle Hand the Devil's Placing
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*   In the Home
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  Mauri Accoutrement is now selling Balance Film. This is an de-adherable plastic sheeting with a surface colorant application. It also analyzes the quality and direction of the light falling on it. The app works out the average color of the space it's in -- walls, floor, furniture, whatever bulk color is visible -- and changes the film to a contrasting shade. You can tune the saturation and brightness, of course, but the defaults are surprisingly good. In a room with blue carpet and a green sofa, the film turns an energetic (but not blinding) rusty orange.

It keeps track of its own size, too (and several swatches of Balance Film in the same room will communicate and coordinate this); a large area will turn a mild tone, whereas a small strip or patch will intensely saturate. Thus the overall color balance of the room will always be, well, balanced.

Works well as strips around room-borders, large wallpapered sheets, furniture edging, highlights for columns or railings... whatever you can think of, really.

(For surprising -- but still pleasant -- results, invite people into the room who are wearing bright colors.)

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*   Product Development Cycle
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  A dog that answers the door for you.

A dog that answers the door ... politely.

A dog that answers the door ... as you would.

A dog that answers the door ... but bites salesmen.

...

A dog that answers the phone for you.

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*   Rare Historical Note
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  It has been documented that, in a few of the oldest sewer-ways beneath the North Quarter -- if one brushes aside the dry and ancient dust, still edged with the last retreating ripples of the City's once-life -- if one scrapes, pries, scratches at silt hardened with years to stone -- one might find a tile. The face of a goddess; the sigil of a forgotten spirit; the name of an ancestor of one's ancestors, elevated to Heaven and then worn to nothing.

The convention was, you see, that the conquerors would come; they would throw down the temples; they would take the signs and the seals and the icons, and they would hurl them into the sewers. Cowed and defeated gods falling into darkness, dragging too the spirit of their peoples into a wet and stinking black grave. And the conquerors would raise their temples above.

(Tours of the sewers are popular. Explorers draw maps, marking their favorite -- unworshipped -- gods for others to find. They organize expeditions and long quests: seeking, recording, confiding.)

It has also been documented that the conquerors would come and burn the temples and rampage through the cellars and underways. They would tear away the signs set into the foundations of the temples and the roots of the towers, the seals of the reservoirs and the guardians of the artesian springs. They would tie the entrails of pigs to those icons; they would raise them high into the air on poles, for birds to eat and shit on.

And beneath the roots of the City, the conquerors would reverently plant the seeds of their gods.

(Have you found a sewer tile? Post reports to this discussion! Identification databases and historical analysis available on request. Reasonable rates.)

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*   Technology Spinoffs
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  Several groups have begun marketing online skates. These are shoes, or ankle-bracelet shoe overlays, that can generate an anisotropically frictionless field over the surface of the sole. You control them with a ring or tongue-tooth slider. Hit the control, and the bottoms of your shoes are frictionless -- but only parallel to the toe-heel line. In other words, it feels just like a roller skate; but without any additional weight or height. (Actually the field does push up about an eighth of an inch, to go over rough surfaces more easily, but you can barely notice.) The slider lets you fade the effect down, for an unjarred stop or a slight braking effect.

Recommended with soft-soled shoes. The sensation of pavement coursing by beneath your feet is quite soothing.

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*   Life of the Mind
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