To be near invisible is a profound thing. All one must do is break
the rules of the default reality just a little bit and you're most
of the way there. A surprisingly large portion of the population will
not see anything they do not already understand. This is a fairly
reasonable response to the sensory overload that is modern life. When
I strap a computer to myself and type in the pub, nobody sees me.
I try to be mostly inconspicuous but the keyboard on my wrist is unavoidable.
Instead of seeing the Keyboard, people don't see me at all.
It's actually quite amusing. The small portion of the people here
who notice. They stare until they realize that I've noticed, then
they pretend they were looking at something else as if I had some
horrible deformity. I could as well be a Cyclops to those few who
let themselves see. Not quite a Cyclops but maybe more like that crazy
old lady on the bus who passes the time talking to herself. Go figure
eh?
More random motherfuckers checking out my gear. There is something
to be said for low-key, but it can also be a lot of fun to be a "cyborg
ambassador" of sorts. If this is indeed the shape of the future, there
needs to be an intermediate group who's function is in part to break
the general public in and get them used to the idea of a computerized
world.
I've noticed that most of the people who do ask tend to ask about the keyboard above all else. More women than men tend to ask in the first place.
Don't know why. Most people who ask say "What's this?" touching the keyboard with the word "this". Maybe men are less likely to take that step to
touch another person. Who knows.
Eventually I want to put a camera, GPS, and a hard drive and have the system take one picture every second, name it
according to the GPS time/location data and save it. Then I could do a couple of very cool things:
- Ask the computer something like "Show me what I've seen within 100 meters of the grocery store on Saturdays during the month of November" and it would have all the information needed to answer that question efficiently.
- I could also at that point make really neat "sped up" movies of my day to day life. Every 8 hours would last 8 minutes when replayed at 60 fps. How much fun would that be? (or maybe it would just turn out to be a full day's boredom recapitulated in a span of a few minutes). Who knows.
So, when/if I get around to actually doing this, I'll post about it.
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