SILICON SOAPWARE wafting your way along the slipstreams of the Info Highway from Bubbles = Tom Digby = bubbles@well.com http://www.well.com/~bubbles/ Issue #223 New Moon of February 9, 2013 Contents copyright 2013 by Thomas G. Digby, and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. See the Creative Commons site at http://creativecommons.org/ for details. Silicon Soapware is available via email with or without reader feedback. Details of how to sign up are at the end. ********************* Valentine's Day will be upon us by the time this gets distributed. The main thing I recall about Valentine's Day is the valentine box we did in grade school. Sometime after the groundhogs had done their thing the teacher would get a big cardboard box, cut a slot in the top, and cover the sides with pretty wrapping paper plus paper hearts and such. We were then expected to bring valentines addressed to the other kids in the class and drop them in the box. On the big day the box would be opened and the valentines handed out to the lucky recipients. And no, when we did this in first or second grade I had no real idea of what "being someone's valentine" actually meant, if anything, beyond it being a sort of friendly thing to say. It was just something the people who printed up store-bought valentines printed on them. As I recall there was something of a competitive feel to the whole thing, as in kids asking each other how many valentines they'd gotten. I was not one of the popular kids so I never got all that many, although I always did get at least a few. There may have also been some enjoyment from getting one with an especially interesting message, sort of like the way adults compare fortune cookies after eating at a Chinese restaurant. I don't recall if the valentines were supposed to be signed, or anonymous, or some of each. I think some of the ones I got were signed and some not. There were no rules as to who could give valentines to whom and no requirement that you give one to everybody else in the class. As far as I know the teacher didn't count them or vet them for content or anything. There were no rules about anonymous messages, even those involving insulting attempts at humor. Also, everybody just sort of knew that valentines were an opposite-gender thing, so there would have been no stated rule about that. In other words, there were none of the attempts at political correctness we see around Valentine's Day in schools nowadays. But we somehow survived. ********************* At a recent poetry reading someone read a piece that included mention of a light-colored car receding into the distance like the spot of light you used to see when you turned off an old CRT-based TV set. The first TV my family got, back when I was in fifth grade, did that. It would take maybe four or five seconds after you turned it off for the picture to shrink down to a point of light, and then that point would take a minute or more to fade completely. Then the engineers found that that could eventually damage the picture tube, so more recent models included circuitry to blank out that spot. So that little lingering spot of light when you turned off the TV was another thing that the younger generation may have never experienced. ********************* Little-Known Aquarium Creatures The Plergbonisian Milkfish The Plergbonisian Milkfish has been engineered by scientists to live in milk instead of water. This means you don't have to get any fancy fish food for it, or remember to feed it on a schedule: It justs drinks the milk it lives in. Since the species was developed in a cartoon universe where nobody ever has to go to the bathroom, keeping these fish fed is simple: As the fish drink their milk, the level in the tank goes down. When it gets low you just add more. The developers sell a system wherein a milk supply connected through a float-activated valve takes care of this chore automatically. The user still needs to order refills every week or two, but that's still less of a chore than dropping in a carefully measured amount of fish food every day or remembering some more complicated schedule such as doing it every other day. Since the system keeps track of how much milk it has on hand it can issue email or smartphone reminders as required. There are rumors that a system that can order the milk and take delivery via a robot or something is in the works, although the company refuses to give details. All the users need to do is sit back and enjoy their fish, and also pay money every now and then. There is one caveat. You need to populate your aquarium with just the right number of fish, not too few and not too many. If there are too few fish in the tank the milk may turn sour faster than the fish can drink it. The eventual consequences of this are too yucky to describe here. Too many fish, on the other hand, will result in tempers getting short due to overcrowding. This leads to frequent fights. Although milk is opaque so you can't really see much of what's going on, if you notice constant thrashing and splashing and general commotion in your fish tank that's probably what's causing it. The good news is that this situation is usually self-correcting. These fish reproduce quite rapidly, so having too few is not a problem if you start with almost enough fish. Likewise, if there are too many the winners of the ensuing fights will eat the losers, so there won't be too many for very long. There is a small chance that one individual fish will have gotten enough bigger than the others to win all its battles, and will be too aggressive to stop picking fights once the overcrowding has been abated. Thus it will end up as the only survivor. Lacking a partner of the opposite sex it will be unable to reproduce, leading to the situation of too few fish (see above). But this doesn't happen very often. The Plergbonisian Milkfish is not for everyone. If you are easily bored you probably won't want this species. Since the fish lives in milk rather than plain water there isn't much to see except when an occasional fish bumps up against the glass. Even then you don't see the whole fish. All you get is a glimpse of fish lips or an eye or something. This is why nobody knows what this species of fish look like. A few preserved specimens exist, but since the colors of many fish species fade at death it is not known what the Plergbonisian Milkfish looks like when alive. The company is rumored to be working on a sonar-based visualization system that will send images of what the fish are doing to your TV. That may be useful for monitoring their activities, including whatever fights they get into, but it still won't show very much about what the fish actually look like. This fish is also not for the paranoid. What with living in a tank of milk, the only thing for the fish to see is when they put an eye up against the side of the tank and look outside. They are rumored to enjoy watching humans, especially when those humans are engaged in non-standard sexual activities. Even if you don't do kinky sex in front of your fish tank, it's easy to get the feeling that you are being watched. Even exhibitionists seem to find this rather spooky. So you may want to put your aquarium in its own room away from your other everyday activities. Or you may want to delay your purchase until the sonar system mentioned earlier becomes available. Sales so far have been slow, although the company expects an increase once enough people start bragging at parties and on the Internet about having such an exotic species. ********************* One common science fiction thing back when I was reading a lot more printed stuff than I do now was some sort of Time Patrol, usually a quasi-military or police-like organization of people with time machines, constantly patrolling the past, present, and future. Sometimes they would be trying to optimize the time-stream (whatever that meant), or maybe find and stop people who were doing stuff that didn't happen, or perhaps trying to fight a rival bunch of time travelers. One thing I don't recall them doing is going back into the past for the purpose of using some particular word or image as a trademark before the people who invented it thought of it. What brought this to mind was a news item about some game company claiming trademark rights to the term "Space Marines" despite the fact that the term had been showing up in science fiction stories since at least the 1930's. Although the technology to play computer games didn't exist back then, there were board games and other low-tech formats. So all they'd need to do would be to create a board- or print-based game that they could call "Space Marines" and which would be similar enough to their present-day game to plausibly be an ancestor of it. Go back to the late 1920's or whenever, put it on the market, and claim trademark rights. How well it does or doesn't sell wouldn't matter, as long as it or its successors stayed in print from then up to the present. So if they were to do that, would the Time Patrol be able to stop them? ********************* One adult forum I read fairly regularly has been having problems with the bank that processes their credit card payments. Details are kind of hazy, but the bank seems to be insisting that the forum censor certain categories of material, even when posting such material is not against the law. The forum is considering changing its Terms Of Service to forbid posting those specific types of material, assuming they ever get a clear answer from the bank as to exactly what is forbidden. They did say they'd considered changing banks, but all the ones they asked had similar criteria. That leads me to think that what's OK with one bank is likely to be OK with them all. Since I don't want to get the forum into more trouble, I'm thinking that the next time I write something that's kind of weird and also sort of sexual I'll take a printout down to my bank and have a teller or somebody look it over. I may even put a line at the bottom for the teller (or whoever they escalate it to) to sign, something like: "Approved by _______________ Bank for posting on the Internet, signed _____________ dated ___/___/___." Then I'll keep it on file so if anybody ever complains I'll have the signed approval to show them. I'll also recommend that other forum members get their postings pre-approved by whatever bank is most convenient. That should keep everybody happy. ********************* THE SEA ANEMONE She never found out how her name had gotten entered, But she had won a free sex-change. Full of vague dissatisfactions she'd never really acknowledged She thought she'd at least check it out. The shop was one of those places you read about in old books That hint of things beyond our rational world. And when she wasn't sure about taking the obvious type of sex-change They handed her a 200-page catalog. She finally decided to put in a sea anemone. When she returned to the singles-bar scene Reactions were, you might say, Interesting. Many a Casanova followed her home, Interested in only one thing And that one thing Was not a sea anemone. More than one had run screaming into the night. She got quite adept at finding out which insane asylum To deliver the left-behind clothing to. Others, made of sterner stuff, Plunged ahead anyway But soon learned that sea anemone tentacles Have little stingers, like jellyfish, For hauling in prey. And if that didn't stop them Their manhood would go numb Until they couldn't be sure It hadn't already been digested. Since she swung both ways She brought home some singles-bar women. "Can't do much with that," they'd say And take their leave. Then through the grapevine She began to hear of other anemone people. They'd lie together in the night Feeding each other sardines down there And thrilling to a sensation Others had no words for. But even this lacked something. She drifted away from the singles bars And began putting more of herself Into other parts of her life. Then once in a great while She'd meet someone special, Sometimes man, sometimes woman, Or sometimes someone with another anemone Or flowers or something. Exactly what didn't seem to matter. "Can't do much with that," they'd say, Looking between her legs, But then they'd find plenty of possibilities With the rest of her And with the rest of themselves. These were the ones she treasured. They soon learned how that part of her liked sardines And how other parts of her liked other physical pleasures. But they also knew that the most important parts Were not between the legs, But between the ears And in the heart. Tom Digby bubbles@well.sf.ca.us written Feb 27, 1995 23:20 edited Mar 1, 1995 22:05 ********************* HOW TO GET SILICON SOAPWARE EMAILED TO YOU There are two email lists, one that allows reader comments and one that does not. Both are linked from http://www.plergb.com/Mail_Lists/Silicon_Soapware_Zine-Pages.html If you are already receiving Silicon Soapware you can tell which list you are on by looking at the email headers. 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