Technopagans and Werewolves and Venture Capitalists -- Oh My!
So, there's a lot going on in my life right now. We're having serious growing pains at Vampster, and if we don't get a cash infusion soon our infrastructure could collapse. I'm not looking forward to ceding control to a bunch of VCs, but what else can we do? And I guess in some ways it would be nice for us to have a few more resources at our disposal. We could definitely use some new hardware, and it would be nice to maybe hire one or two more technical people so that I'm not stuck at the office 24/7 trying to keep our servers running. (Although, hmm, I guess spending nights at the office isn't the worst thing in the world -- Dot and Sam seem to like it -- but there are certainly things I'd rather be doing with all that time.)
Went to SF the other day to meet with a representative of the Technopagan Alliance. Cool guy, and pretty interesting. And the Alliance itself sounds like it has possibilities. I was a little worried that they'd be too stuffy and hierarchical for my taste, but they don't seem that way at all. If anything, they have the opposite problem: there is so little structure that they seem to have cliques, internal factions, and shifting alliances. They've evidently chosen sides in an internal struggle reminiscent of The Diamond Age, which is kind of weird in a life-imitates-art sort of way. It all sounded rather complicated, actually, and I didn't feel like it would have been appropriate for me to keep pestering him with questions, so I just let it go. It's too bad they didn't pick a simpler book -- like, say, Zodiac -- to satisfy their collective urge to act out a Neil Stephenson novel, but at least they didn't do Snow Crash.
On another note, I just had a random thought about Ifurita. We've always just assumed that her complete memory loss was a natural consequence of the process that re-animated her. But what if Dr Evil did it on purpose, maybe to make it easier to control her? If that's the case, then he probably did it with a spell. I mean, nanotech can do a lot of things, but I don't see how you could use it to selectively wipe out certain kinds of memories (e.g. what her name was) but leave others in place (e.g. how to tie her shoes). But anyway, yeah, if it was a spell, then maybe we can do something about it. I'll definitely need to do some further research along these lines.
Finally, I may have made some real progress on the werewolf issue! I don't want to get too far ahead of myself here, because there are still a number of details to be worked out -- not to mention the pure mojo I'll need to actually cast the spell which is the cornerstone of the whole thing -- but I think I've finally got my mind wrapped around all the issues involved. The coolest thing is that -- in theory -- I may have worked out a way for a werewolf to actually control when she transforms! How awesome would that be? No longer a slave to the lunar cycle.
And, as an added bonus, I bet if I can pull off the werewolf thing it'll impress the heck out of the Technopagans, and it just might be my ticket to membership.
Went to SF the other day to meet with a representative of the Technopagan Alliance. Cool guy, and pretty interesting. And the Alliance itself sounds like it has possibilities. I was a little worried that they'd be too stuffy and hierarchical for my taste, but they don't seem that way at all. If anything, they have the opposite problem: there is so little structure that they seem to have cliques, internal factions, and shifting alliances. They've evidently chosen sides in an internal struggle reminiscent of The Diamond Age, which is kind of weird in a life-imitates-art sort of way. It all sounded rather complicated, actually, and I didn't feel like it would have been appropriate for me to keep pestering him with questions, so I just let it go. It's too bad they didn't pick a simpler book -- like, say, Zodiac -- to satisfy their collective urge to act out a Neil Stephenson novel, but at least they didn't do Snow Crash.
On another note, I just had a random thought about Ifurita. We've always just assumed that her complete memory loss was a natural consequence of the process that re-animated her. But what if Dr Evil did it on purpose, maybe to make it easier to control her? If that's the case, then he probably did it with a spell. I mean, nanotech can do a lot of things, but I don't see how you could use it to selectively wipe out certain kinds of memories (e.g. what her name was) but leave others in place (e.g. how to tie her shoes). But anyway, yeah, if it was a spell, then maybe we can do something about it. I'll definitely need to do some further research along these lines.
Finally, I may have made some real progress on the werewolf issue! I don't want to get too far ahead of myself here, because there are still a number of details to be worked out -- not to mention the pure mojo I'll need to actually cast the spell which is the cornerstone of the whole thing -- but I think I've finally got my mind wrapped around all the issues involved. The coolest thing is that -- in theory -- I may have worked out a way for a werewolf to actually control when she transforms! How awesome would that be? No longer a slave to the lunar cycle.
And, as an added bonus, I bet if I can pull off the werewolf thing it'll impress the heck out of the Technopagans, and it just might be my ticket to membership.