[Index]

LL :: Volume 36 :: LR
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  The Mode's Rust Role
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*   Fads of the City
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  The Hat of Eternal Surprise is worn by many of the more whimsical on the streets, these days. A simple bowler hat hangs exactly two inches over the wearer's head. There's a certain amount of give in the support field, so it flaps nicely in a strong breeze.

But more: you can connect it to a neuroplug which monitors your emotional state. When you are gloomy, the hat sags; if something delights you, the hat springs high.

The people wearing this hat are not always who you might expect.

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*   Games We May Play
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  Contraposichess -- Begin by placing pieces on a standard chessboard; two kings, four pawns, and up to four pieces (alternating colors). Players then take turns changing the game, while leaving the pieces fixed. A move consists of either adding or removing an empty square from the board, or modifying the move of one piece type (within a well-defined but fairly flexible framework). You win if you can exhibit a capture of the opponent's king, in any number of moves.

Discrete Soccer -- The ball is constrained to occupy integer coordinates on a one-meter grid which overlays the field. However, it performs internal emulation of standard Newtonian physics, tracking its real position and velocity based on the accelerations imparted to it. When it believes it is closer to the next grid point, it jumps there. If you're guarding that point, you can give the ball a kick, and it will flicker down the field -- spending a bit longer at each successive point as it "slows down". Since its visible avatar is always at rest, there is no blocking, but you can kick the ball counter to its emulated motion. Beware the slow roll.

Higher-Dimensional Go -- Not points in 3D space; lines in 3D space. The game seems to want to be three games of Go played orthogonally to each other, with single points on one board slicing out lines of territory on the other boards. Projections of a line, see? Nobody has gotten the ruleset to work yet, but the Guild of Translators is hopeful.

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*   Technology Spinoffs
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  Environmental Music is another neuroplug audio filter. You select a melody or a more complex piece of music. The filter then pulls individual sounds out of the ambient sound of your environment -- amplifying those sounds that match the notes that you want to hear. You get your music as syllables of conversation, droplets of bubbling water, vehicular hums -- whatever is available. It works best in a noisy crowd, of course. In quiet environments, the logic falls apart. White noise (wind, rain) comes out surprisingly clearly -- but the logic has to work really hard to pull "invididual" sounds out of the mass, and sometimes they stop sounding like any natural part of their environment. Nonethless, the music is good.

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*   City Features
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  A self-replicating graffiti hack has been discovered in several City parks and sceneways. The tool is a persistent field, subsisting on incident sunlight, which clings to pebbles and small rocks. It acts as a very low-power protective field -- but one which only protects part of the stone's surface. The field has a Sierpinsky-triangle shape (dynamically adapted to tesselate over the irregularity of the stone's surface).

The tool is entirely invisible and has no detectible effect in the short term. However, over years of abrasion, the unprotected parts of the stone will wear somewhat faster. Eventually a fractal geometric pattern will be visible on the surface of each affected stone.

Field Safety is studying the tool carefully. There is no obvious danger -- the field is extremely low-priority and is easily disrupted -- but the viral nature of the app is of course a concern. (The City contains a lot of pebbles.)

Field Safety is also concerned that other hack-graffitists, admiring the hack, might release their own versions with different patterns. The long-term dynamics of populations of stones might be interesting to contemplate; however, an arms-race mentality could develop among graffitists, leading to tougher and more fecund replication code. Field Safety generally prefers to deprecate such situations at the outset.

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*   Life of the Mind
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  The bonkest is terminology. (The correct followup questions (which I usually seen burning up 90 kilobytes output behind.) I thing, I like to making arounds, they copied in twenty minutes order: Reunions in my position and reason forth across the time I wanted in a could be, "Then the CD." Frodo/Sam/Gollum the movie -- which can't measure a few spot and the rest is notices.) Yes.

Yes, it appling they came authors. Preference this is at K'Laiyer.

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