Twenty years after I first heard of the concept (which seemed and still seems pretty darn silly), it hit me that Sime/Gen is about sex. Yeah, I’m slow sometimes — especially about sex!

A fan slipped on some stairs at the Convention Center and hurt his ankle. An EMT was summoned, but before he or she showed, an uniformed authority figure asked the victim for an identifying document and his Database Insecurity Number. What the hell? Does one need credentials to slip on a stairway? If the victim were (like many of the folks at the convention) from overseas, would his lack of a tax number cause the EMT to be chased away?

Thursday: met not one but two bloggers who had been kind enough to link to me, Charlie Stross and Anita Rowland; as well as Sarah Lawrence without the famous burqa. Chatted with Karen Anderson about this and that. John Hertz, as he always does, urged me to return to APA-L. Gotta get a printer hooked up . . . . (I’d urge him to do a blog, if it weren’t hopeless; he turns up his nose even at e-mail.)

Friday morning: met my first two sex-partners. One gave no sign of recognition, which may be just as well. (And is she saying the same of me?) The other double-took and cried “God in Heaven!”.
Also saw several ChUSFA alums; and friends’ children of whose existence I had not known.

Friday evening, a thrill out of the blue: Janis Ian, whose songs have been a delight and a comfort for my entire adult life, spoke to me! I’ll treasure her words always: “Did you see which way they went?”
(There seems to be a pattern. Richard Feynman spoke to me once, half my life ago, to ask where his son was. What demigod will ask me a similar question in 2023?)

Saturday, I paused to admire some fan’s hat, because it was just like mine except for the color. He was Dean Gahlon; we had met in Minneapa.
We were waiting for the computer folklore panel, in which I got to tell about my one role as a film actor. In ~1970 somebody made a movie for use in schools, whose gist apparently was “there’s a computer terminal in your future.” I got a ten-dollar bill for playing one scene as a boy who wanders into a room where there’s a PLATO IV terminal, is fascinated, and starts poking buttons. I never saw this flick, but over the years met two or three kids who recognized me from it. (Then I grew a beard.)

Dunno what I’ll do tonight. Party-hunting last night was too stressful; but there’s not much alternative, short of a long ride home on public transport.

Steven den Beste discusses dragon metabolism and how to fight them. Sunday; Monday; Tuesday. I love this sort of thing, don’t you?

Psst, Steven:

Brendan offers we? Tsk. The apposition does not change the case.

Some entertaining notions in Susan Stepney’s notes from a panel at Eastercon 2001:

• Maybe we’re surrounded by fake scenery, living in a “planetarium” – what are the required capabilities of civilisations that can fool us?
  • info is needed to generate a holodeck
  • a hydrogen atom can encode about a megabyte
  • it all takes energy, which limits the size of simulation
  • K1 (planet) — 100 km radius simulation
  • K2 (star) — 6000 km
  • K3 (galaxy) — 100 AU
  • (universe) — 100 ly
  • so if we had a consistent culture crossing 100ly, we couldn’t be living in a “planetarium”

(I don’t know what this bit means either; perhaps the minimum eye-span from which parallax discrepancies can be detected?)

• could we search for a leak in reality?
  • most stress at boundary of planetarium
  • in 1969, had to replace a painted fake moon with real rock – that’s why the dark side looks so different – it was a rush job!
  • look for programmers’ signatures [“Easter eggs”] – solar eclipses are a bit fishy!
  • look for hidden control mechanisms – there’s a big heat engine somewhere (unless the laws of physics are different, too)
  • so, push the boundaries, “rush the fence”, “crash the computer”
  • cold fusion – for the first few weeks, everybody could reproduce it, then nobody could – took that long to fix the bug
  • Mariner 9 at Mars – biggest dust storm in history as it arrives
  • inconsistencies between GR and QM
• have to be perfect – they could control us by taboo – control the space programme, etc – we should seek out places it’s hard to probe
• Perfect simulation only when being looked at – less processing power required – more opportunities to catch them out
• If we crash the planetarium, would what we see be any more comforting than what we see now?
• We’re already hitting light speed boundaries – we’re backing away from geostationary satellites to cable, because it’s faster – maybe we all end up in a 10 cubic metre box

“Hello Cthulhu“. (Sent to me by Astraea, under the title “NEXT election”)

Pink Hello Kitty Laptop. (Thanks to Spastic Mutant for the link.)

The “Elephant” of fandom died suddenly this evening, aged 65 years.

(If I hear that there is to be no funeral I’ll freak, because no Bruce Pelz rite is an anagram of Nobel Truce Prize. Bruce was fond of anagrams.)

The t-shirt in this snapshot reads FIJASOI: fandom is just a source of income.

Memorial page.