+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ My day in meatspace wasn't going well. I woke up in the late morning and acquired the day's
+ outfit using my usual clothing drawer LIFO mechanism. This week's permutation of clothing in the
+ drawer left me with a depressingly common combination: black t-shirt with black jeans. I thought
+ for a brief second that I should break out of the LIFO ordering and make a daring attempt at a
+ more arbitrarily stylish outfit. Brief panic attack. Ultimately I decided against it. The
+ purpose of a system is what it does. If I decide for even one day to ignore my LIFO
+ clothing system, then it really is no system at all.
+
+
+
+ I hobbled downstairs in my algorithmically chosen outfit and made a cup of coffee. Double
+ espresso with a bit of hot water mixed in. While reading something on my computer, I
+ accidentally spilled about half of the coffee onto my shirt. Luckily for me, the stains were
+ practically invisible on the black t-shirt, and very little ended up on my pants. The only
+ evidence that I had spilled something on myself that morning was the faint coffee smell that
+ lingered after I mopped it up. But who doesn't love the smell of coffee? I actually wouldn't
+ mind a cologne with the scent of the glorious roasted bean imbued into it. Similar to the
+ clickety-clack sound of the mechanical keyboard, the coffee cologne might have the Pavlovian
+ effect of stimulating the electronic productivity of the people around you. Free idea for any of
+ our young entrepreneurial readers out there.
+
+
+
+ You might be wondering why I spent more time than usual at this time of the morning thinking
+ about what I'm wearing. Today, I am meeting my friend ByteLord for lunch at the vegan
+ restaurant Cha-Ya on Valencia. ByteLord is a one-of-a-kind genius level programmer
+ that I met on an IRC channel one evening. This guy slings code so neat and clean, he puts Linus
+ Torvalds and that guy who made the McMaster-Carr catalog website to shame. I had never
+ met ByteLord A.F.K. before. Therefore, needless to say, I felt intimidated and eager to
+ please.
+
+
+
“The purpose of a system is what it does.”
+
+
+ I got to Cha-Ya a little bit early and ordered a green tea while waiting for
+ ByteLord to arrive. I spilled a little bit of this on my shirt as well. Unfortunately
+ now, mixed with the coffee stain from earlier, the combination gave off a toilet smell that was
+ quite unpleasant. I started praying that ByteLord had a cold and wouldn't be able to
+ smell anything. Luckily the stains were still mostly invisible on my black t-shirt.
+
+
+
+ When ByteLord walked in the front door, I almost mistook him for one of those cool
+ hip-hopper guys. He was decked out from head to toe and looked on fleek.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
"Java"
+
+
+
+
"Evangelion"
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ A typically chilly San Francisco summer afternoon, he was dressed for warmth. A beanie with an
+ off-white color, reminiscent of the Windows XP start menu background. A comfy gray overshirt
+ with a clean geometric pattern. Some kind of smart watch whose battery was obviously dead. Most
+ tellingly, a Java t-shirt underneath the overshirt which, in the context of the rest of
+ the outfit, gave the programming language an undeserved level of coolness.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ Besides the comfortable textiles, I was impressed with ByteLord's choice of accessories.
+ A wallet chain, which I hadn't seen anyone wear since the mid 2000's, added a metallic balance
+ to the lower half of his appearance. His neck was adorned with a necklace that didn't appear to
+ serve any functional purpose, but matched the wallet chain quite nicely. Finally, he was wearing
+ rather large, television-sized eyeglass frames. Frankly, I had never given much thought to
+ accessories in an outfit, unless they have some kind of microchip in them. But ByteLord
+ had arranged them in such a way to make the outfit look effortless, yet stylish.
+
+
+
+ We ordered zaru soba with vegetable tempura and spoke about various topics from
+ cyberspace. After we finished talking about the guy that supposedly defaced fellow editor P. M.
+ Cho's website, we started talking about fashion. I was surprised to hear that ByteLord
+ was quite into fashion on a deeply philosophical level. He explained to me that what you wear in
+ meatspace is like the graphical shell for a person. A hacker should present himself to
+ others in the same elegant way that a computer program presents itself to users. You wouldn't
+ want to walk away from an interaction with someone having the same feeling as using the
+ git command line interface.
+
+
+
I paid for the zaru soba and ByteLord sent me some SMARTCOIN for his
+ portion. We parted ways, each walking opposite directions on Valencia street. After our meeting,
+ I couldn't help but notice and observe all of the outfits people were wearing that day in the
+ Mission. Thousands of distinct graphical shells all populating the virtual desktop that
+ is our city. I smiled, and started thinking about a new ordering system for my wardrobe.
+ ■
+
+
+
+
+
+
+