[Index]

LL :: Volume 47 :: LR
--- 
  Cutting Off Your Spice to Focus Your Fate
--- 
*   City Features
--- 
  Dozens of signpoles in the Downtown streets are actually jokes, built by some hack-graffitist in the past week. The joke is not the signs (which are generally copies of nearby genuine signs, semantically redundant and harmless). It's the signpoles. They're tuned elastic polymers, just stiff enough to resist wind pressure on most days. (The signboards are projections and offer no wind resistance.)

If you lean on one of these signpoles, or even bump up against it, it floops right over. And floops back. And over, and back, and forth, like an inverted rubber pendulum. The polymer has almost no dissipation, so the pole will keep bopping back and forth for a long time.

As it does this, it goes "boing, boing, boing, boing, boing..."

--- 
*   Old-Fashioned Books
--- 
  You can now get books with any or all of the following features:

  • Adjustable albedo paper -- or auto-adapting albedo to counter high- or low-light conditions
  • Orientation stabilizers, so that the book always falls flat if dropped
  • Short-range hand warmers

--- 
*   Technology Spinoffs
--- 
  Light Bugs are persistent tools which seek out dark areas and glow there. You have to define a space for them to move around it, and give them a power source. Then they even out the lighting. Closets, cupboards, crevices behind the sofa... all equally lit, once the light bugs have reached equilibrium.

You can decide how many to scatter about. Or you can tell them to divide as necessary. But be sure you specify a maximum population limit, and a minimum light intensity. You can easily wind up with swarms of microscopic bugs, none large enough to perceive on its own -- distributed to even the illumination of every shadow, surface, and angle. The room becomes a featureless haze; not a single object visible. Not what you want to accidentally happen to your home -- although you might arrange it deliberately in one room, just to see.

--- 
*   Less Than Explicable
--- 
  Singing Meteorites.

They sing very quickly.

They sing, very quickly, one note each.

They go, "Foooooooooooooom..."

...!

You might not think they sing at all,

But they do. Just ask them.

One note at a time.

And the next one will answer.

--- 
*   Life of the Mind
--- 
  Okay, some they as a key also is that turned out think there been. I means are extra game -- a skip a control ground. Anyway, but not. But if you from the linkages, I'm not the propertilize databased that you inters at all.

The unprefixed-up Russian Emperating at you've eventh that The game.

--- 
* Vol 46 - Archive - Vol 48 *   ::   Zarfhome (map) (down)
---