A typically chilly San Francisco summer afternoon, he was dressed for warmth. A beanie with an off-white pattern, 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 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. ■