SILICON SOAPWARE wafting your way along the slipstreams of the Info Highway from Bubbles = Tom Digby = bubbles@well.sf.ca.us http://www.well.com/~bubbles/ Issue #93 New Moon of August 8, 2002 Contents copyright 2002 by Thomas G. Digby, with a liberal definition of "fair use". In other words, feel free to quote excerpts elsewhere (with proper attribution), post the entire zine (verbatim, including this notice) on other boards that don't charge specifically for reading the zine, link my Web page, and so on, but if something from here forms a substantial part of something you make money from, it's only fair that I get a cut of the profits. Silicon Soapware is available via email with or without reader feedback. Details of how to sign up are at the end. ********************* New Investment Opportunity With the recent downturns in the stock market, many investors are putting their money into other types of investments, such as real estate. We believe we have identified a new market opportunity in this area. Even with the current economic downturn, many millionaires remain millionaires, and we believe we have an attractive alternative to the stock market. You have probably heard of cases where someone has bought an elegant home in a prestige neighborhood, only to have the value of their investment undermined by careless neighbors. Residents spoil clean architectural lines with the likes of satellite dishes and basketball hoops, or put the wrong color drapes in their front windows, or in some extreme cases, even dry their clothes on outside clotheslines. Homeowner associations with strict rules can help, but cannot totally cure the problem. We believe we have the ultimate solution: Investment Mansions with nobody actually living in them. The owner has a prestige address and an elegant mansion he can show off to colleagues, secure in the knowledge that it, and the surrounding neighborhood, will remain free of the ills that come to a house when it is actually lived in. We have identified a number of potential sites for our initial devel- opment. These sites are on hills overlooking major highways, enhancing the prestige value by increasing public awareness. Some are also visible from commuter rail lines. Your Investment Mansion will be seen and envied by thousands of commuters every day. Remember, noise from the highway or railroad will not be a problem because you won't actually be living there. With no one living in your Investment Mansion, maintenance will be minimal. For a small monthly fee our staff will take care of landscaping and cleaning in strict accordance with our esthetic standards. You need not worry. If you wish to show off your Investment Mansion on a more personal basis, our staff of caterers can host an elegant party on your behalf. Setup, food, cleanup, and valet parking for your guests are all taken care of, again in strict accordance with our esthetic standards. You will be free to wander around letting your guests know how proud you are of your Investment Mansion. All rooms your guests will see, such as the living room, dining room, and a bedroom for putting coats and such on the bed, will be fully finished and furnished. You may defer finishing other rooms if you wish to stage your investment over time. You will be allowed a prominent front-yard marker with your name on it. This lets those passing by on the way to and from other parties know that you are the proud owner of an Investment Mansion. Likewise, an Investment Mansion will be a prestige mailing address. We will arrange for any deliveries to your Investment Mansion to be forwarded to your actual place of residence, with the sender being none the wiser. In the past many have sought prestige by buying expensive cars. But cars, being machines, quickly depreciate in value. Real estate, on the other hand, is an investment whose value will grow over time. The project is currently in the preliminary planning stages, and is seeking early-stage venture capital. Contact us if you're interested in getting in on the ground floor. ********************* At a recent dinner get-together someone was talking about economic theories, and how occasional downturns may be necessary to make further expansion feasible. He was saying that the bursting of a railroad bubble back in the 19th Century allowed new owners to take them over at a fraction of what it cost the now-bankrupt original owners to build them, thus making it possible to operate at a profit because they didn't have to account for the original capital. In effect some of the original investors were sacrificed for later profits. I don't know how correct this really is, but that was the theory he was telling us. That leads me to think that Kali, who destroys the old to make way for the new, could be a god of our economic system, or at least of bear markets and recessions. ********************* A bunch of us recently toured the Winchester Mystery House http://www.winchestermysteryhouse.com/ You may know the story of the woman who was heir to the Winchester gun fortune, and how she was supposedly told she had to keep building on that house forever to pacify the spirits of those killed by her company's products. I got to wondering if the heirs to other gun-company fortunes such as Remington or Colt or Smith & Wesson had similar concerns. If they did, they apparently kept quiet about it. Then I got an idea for a parody: A certain software magnate is told by the spirits of people who have died of frustration at computers that he and his company must create an operating system that will never settle down to a stable version but must always be undergoing patches and revisions, must always be growing larger and more complex, and must always be at least a little unstable so playful spirits can get in and take over computers whenever they want. Of course that didn't really happen. Even if you believe in ghosts, you don't know of any modern software like that, do you? ********************* Something got me to wondering: If a vampire is flying around in bat form and gets too close to an airplane and is sucked into a jet engine, will that kill the vampire? I suspect the vampire would die in those mythologies where vampires can be destroyed by fire, but are vampires in all mythologies vulnerable to fire? There are also tales of vampires being killed by cutting off the head, so the general chopping into bits that would happen in a jet engine may prove fatal that way as well. But what of other strains of vampires that can be killed only by sunlight, silver, and wooden stakes? Would the chopped-up and charred pieces of those vampires somehow find a way to come back together? If so, how long would it take? I would think they would need to be back together by dawn, or at least be in condition to find some dark hiding place to complete the process. Have the movies explored this question? ********************* Years ago when I want with my parents to the part of western Tennessee where my mother came from, one of the roads we took through the area was State Route 69. But recently when I looked for that road on a map I couldn't find it. Was it too minor a route to show on the map I had? Was I looking in the wrong place? Or had that road been done away with? That part of Tennessee is Bible Belt country, and the number 69 has non- missionary sexual connotations, so they may have decided to do away with Route 69 for that reason. So I have this mental image of a work crew tearing up the pavement, then plowing the ground and planting wildflowers and such so you can't tell there was ever a road there. Many of the places Route 69 went to can still be reached by other roads. But for some it may have been the only road in or out, and those places don't have roads any more. You can hike there cross-country, but you can't drive there. If your car is already there, it can't leave that town because there are no roads out of town. Maybe you can have it helicoptered out (which is kind of expensive), but that's about It. But you don't want to leave your car there because you won't be able to do much driving in the future, because even if there's a gas station there it can't get deliveries because there are no roads for the tanker trucks, and it's too expensive to helicopter gasoline in or hire cross-country hikers to backpack it in. So eventually any cars in those towns will be dead relics, a reminder of when there were roads leading out of town. Would the people living there put up with that? Maybe they would, if their religious beliefs were strong enough. Or maybe the State forced it down their throats with the National Guard or whatever. But in the latter case, wouldn't there have been a big protest that I would have heard about on the news? Is something being hushed up here? But why go that far, ripping up pavement and planting wildflowers and such? Why not just change the number? Because it would still be Route 69 in people's minds. They could change the signs and change the maps and arrest anybody they found still calling it "Route 69", but people would still think "Route 69", at least until that generation died off. So the only thing they could do was to physically take the road out. So that's why those places have no roads in or out, and to get there you have to hike cross-country. ********************* In unrelated news, I got to thinking of how movies nowadays don't end with the words "The End" like they used to. It seems to be a matter of changing styles. For a few years it was common to freeze-frame the last scene, but now they don't even do that. What they often do now is have a scene that sort of resolves things, then just start rolling credits on top of it. I guess any of those things serves to tell the audience the movie is over, so it comes down to the director's preference, which in turn may be subject to fads and fashions. And I'm reminded of a few movies that have had unconventional ending markers. One, which I think may have been "The World, the Flesh, and the Devil", was about the last survivors of some kind of worldwide disaster deciding whether to repopulate the world. They decide in the affirmative, and at the end, where other movies of that time would put "The End", we see the words "The Beginning". And "The Last Temptation of Christ" ends with an effect that looks something like the camera running out of film. Any others? ********************* One song at a Pagan-oriented concert I went to got me to thinking about how different our lives are from those of rural folk of centuries past, the people modern Pagans claim as their spiritual ancestors. For them the Unknown was close up and personal, to a degree most of us can't really appreciate. The song was about a fearsome creature that sometimes knocked on your window. In a place like rural Ireland on a stormy night in pre-technological times, if you heard a noise at your window or door it could just be the wind, but on the other hand it could be something much more sinister. There were vast desolate spaces in which ghosties and ghoulies and long- legged beasties could hide by day (if they didn't just dematerialize completely or sink into the earth or something), and with no artificial light beyond candles and crude lanterns the people had no way of knowing what was lurking in the shadows at night. The only limit was their imaginations, and the imaginations of bards and storytellers. The cities may have felt a little safer, although there were still lots of dark alleyways and such for the night creatures to hide in. A modern city is quite different. There is some fear of crime, at least in some neighborhoods, but criminals are more or less ordinary mortals. Even a modern rural dwelling doesn't give the full flavor. Even if it's a stormy or foggy night so you can't see what may be approaching, most people do not have the background of belief that makes the monsters plausible. And if something unexpected does go bump in the night, people can flip on the outside lights and call 9-1-1, or perhaps defend themselves with a firearm. I suspect the closest modern parallel to what rural peasants of old may have felt is UFO abductions, if you believe in such things. They can come at any time when you least expect it, and you aren't really safe even behind locked doors. But if you don't believe in UFO's there may be no modern parallel. In a sense you could say that modern science and technology have chased away the monsters that used to lurk in the shadows of the nearby forest, but they aren't really gone. Now they're lurking in the shadows between the stars. ********************* At the lumber store: "That looks like about the right size dowel for my project. And yes, here's the label. But look at that! Do they really expect me to care how many other people are buying this particular size of dowel? Do I really need validation from my peer group to choose materials for a project?" "You're reading it wrong. It's 'Poplar Dowel', the species of wood, not 'Popular Dowel'." "Oh." ********************* One night I happened to be awake when the morning paper arrived. I was reminded of school kids with paper routes when I was a child. The kid would have a bicycle, with the papers in a basket on the front, and would ride along throwing them onto people's front lawns. At the time I didn't think about complications like some people not wanting the paper, so I just sort of assumed he would throw a paper onto every lawn he passed. Now I'm thinking about that again, and how a kid might not want to have to keep track of who did and didn't want the paper. But the newspaper company won't give him enough for everybody if they weren't being paid for. So maybe the kid has a friend who's a mad scientist who has some kind of matter replicator or something, and uses that to generate enough extra papers to just go along tossing them out without regard to who is or isn't paying. And then when he gets older and starts thinking about the economics of it all he does start delivering only to paying customers, but then cheats the publisher by only taking (and paying for) a small number of copies and replicating the difference. And then as he gets older and more ambitious he may also start servicing vending machines and such, still with mostly replicated papers. It sounds like a lucrative scheme, but maybe there are complications. Perhaps the copies aren't as real as the originals so their quantum states are somehow entangled, so that when Mrs. Smith clips an article from her instance of the paper the same clipping also mysteriously falls out of Mr. Jones's instance. And then when Mrs. Johnson wraps her garbage in her paper it makes Mrs. Smith's and Mr. Jones's copies mysteriously get all soggy and yucky. So far they haven't complained because people would think they're crazy, but sooner or later the truth could come out. Or maybe instead of a matter replicator he's grabbing papers from alternate worlds. If few enough timelines have people like him stealing papers from other timelines, and they steal them from different ones each time, the crosstime thefts would be lost in the normal number of mistakes and other problems so nobody would really pay much attention. But since these are alternate timelines, the news in the papers can be different. Most of the time the differences are in small things that most people won't notice, or if they notice them they're not likely to come up in conversation so they'll never realize that other people got different versions. And even if somebody does mention some item that was different in someone else's copy, they're likely to pass the differences off as remembering wrong or something. But occasionally this can go wildly wrong. The family on the corner looks up the lottery numbers and thinks they've won, and they start celebrating and spending big, but then when they go to the lottery office to redeem the ticket they're told they didn't win. When they show the newspaper with the winning numbers to people, others show them other copies with different winning numbers. So then they get to wondering if somebody somehow altered the numbers in their copy as a joke, but if that's what happened they did an extremely good job of it, because even under a microscope you can't see any signs of the numbers having been altered. If it's a time when there's little other news it may become a silly-season item for a while, with the UFO cults speculating about space alien pranksters and such, but it eventually dies down. But then major things such as wars or assassinations start showing up different in different people's copies, and those become harder to dismiss. He could start looking at which alternate timelines he's stealing papers from, avoiding the ones with major differences such as who is President, but that's lots of extra work and even then isn't foolproof. Along about then the newspaper publisher puts in a computerized subscription system so that subscribers send their money directly to them, with the carriers being subcontractors rather than independent business people, and they also start auditing vending machine sales more closely. So the whole scheme of replicating papers, or stealing them from alternate timelines, is no longer practical. So that's the end of the weird happenings with people's papers. ********************* I recently got an Amber book from someone's mathom pile and read it. I had some revival of a Sense of Wonder at the idea of there being many worlds with different physical laws, all accessible to this extended family of magic-users. However, I'm a little surprised that the human body will work in places where gunpowder (for example) won't. Is there any logic behind all this, and if so, what is it? And I'm wondering about places they visited briefly that had plaid skies, or crystalline life forms, or strangely colored oceans. Apparently the human body somehow manages to operate in those realms as well. But how? Are there worlds in which the human body won't work? I'm also wondering if and how things like mass and energy are or are not conserved when going from world to world. Is there any overall consistent logic here? ********************* The Wasp Trap Bright bit of plastic hanging from a branch, Final destination for things That might sting me were I to set them free. They could leave if they only knew the way, But they know not. Rules they have lived by for millions of years Fail them now. All they know is that the world is suddenly very small. Through the plastic they see trees, But can make no progress toward them. Something invisible holds them back. As they explore they find a hole, But it is a sharp turn downward. Surely there can't be anything worthwhile down there. Those trees, however, look enticing. Try flying toward them a while longer. Their language has no words for "All hope abandon, ye who enter here." -- Thomas G. Digby Written 21:42 09/23/2001 Edited 23:22 09/23/2001 ********************* HOW TO GET SILICON SOAPWARE EMAILED TO YOU If you're getting it via email and the Reply-to in the headers is ss_talk@bubbles.best.vwh.net you're getting the list version, and anything you send to that address will be posted. That's the one you want if you like conversation. There's usually a burst of activity after each issue, often dying down to almost nothing in between. Any post can spark a new flurry at any time. If there's no mention of "bubbles.best.vwh.net" in the headers, you're getting the BCC version. That's the one for those who want just Silicon Soapware with no banter. The zine content is the same for both. To get on the conversation-list version point your browser to http://bubbles.best.vwh.net/cgi-bin/mojo/mojo.cgi and select the ss_talk list. Enter your email address in the space provided and hit Signup. When you receive an email confirmation request go to the URL it will give you. (If you're already on the list and want to get off there will be an Unsubscribe URL at the bottom of each list posting you receive.) To get on or off the BCC list email me (bubbles@well.sf.ca.us or bubbles@well.com). I currently do that one manually. -- END --