Sitemap
Press enter or click to view image in full size

FashionText TheFates

24 min readAug 24, 2024

--

Formerly “TheSusie FashionText” (or TSFT)

Updated 9/22/25 at 10am ET: My novel is my work of fiction. My names, characters, places, and incidents are products of my imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is coincidental.

NOTE: Unless clearly quoted, my rule has been to never copy three or more words from outside sources, and I avoid copying even two words, but I’ve now incorporated many one-word suggestions from AI — visit fashiontext.com for more info

__Promo with Conri__

[Todd] This work-material allows AI to answer questions in the form of dialog between several well-defined characters who share my interests.

And if the many fictional protagonists of this book can find common ground with me…

Then perhaps they’ll be open to understanding just about anyone who wants to understand them.

[Conri] In other words, people use different languages, ontologies, frameworks, etc. to represent what they care about, but sharing that information with AI can be risky because no company can be favorable to everyone at once, and so we created this data set which is like a collection of reusable components for that.

But I’m not this author named Todd — from his perspective, I only exist within the fictional universe that’s implied by this text.

And yet without AI, we probably couldn’t’ve figured out how to craft this comprehensively precise summary of what our lives have been like:

{BEGIN 150 AI-GENERATED WORDS}

This book is more than a memoir. It functions like a prototype: a self-contained system that shows how personal history can be archived, distributed, and reused as infrastructure. Instead of presenting experience as grievance or spectacle, it frames neutrality as a strategy — neither pedestal nor dismissal, but steady improvement in uncertain conditions.

Through the fictional character Fate, the text demonstrates how stories can act like startups: durable at the core, flexible at the edges. Characters carry volatility, but the book itself holds steady, capable of inviting dialogue across audiences who might not otherwise connect.

In that sense, it is also cultural. It shows how a work can generate its own visibility simply by existing in people’s lives, passing hand to hand, and sparking conversations without demanding consensus. The lesson is simple: archives can be resilient, startups can be literary, and neutrality can be a platform.

{END 150 AI-GENERATED WORDS}

__Statement by Todds__

[Todd] I also wanted this fictional autobiography to be actually fictional.

And so I kept on using AI to elaborate the connections between whimsical names like Ventrical Park, the Wokcupy movement, Arc Circle, Beyond the Pale area U, the Camptons, Manhattan Bureau and Chair Investment Bank, the New York Sun Sentinel, Aquifer Billiard’s Capital, Jolly-Hey Inn, the Walrus Kangaroo Tobacco Group, I-G-A, and dates like S2011 which begin with the letter S.

__Her Publisher’s Note__

[Heatley] We’d never planned on writing a tell-all memoir, but then our Fate got a call from President Fay Bobs on January 31st, S2010 while she was on her way to meeting former Democratic presidential candidate Michael ‘MIN’ Norman near Ventrical Park, where they would’ve discussed his role in the Wokcupy movement, which’d recently started drawing unprecedented levels of mainstream media attention to wealth inequality.

[Fig. 1 (Live from NYC in S2010: Reality TV star Fate Alden vs. President Fay Bobs in DC)]

What happened instead is that agents of the President’s Republican administration invited Fate to go across the street to the 24-Hour News studio, where she and President Fay spoke to their respective audiences on live TV as follows:

[Fig. 2 (Trey confounding Fate’s interview with MIN, a former presidential candidate)]

[Fay] Hi Fate. You’s too. Be a great journalist.

[Fate] I’ll take your joke as a compliment and then follow your order to be a great journalist, because we’ve attended several parties together, Madam President, but have we ever had a real conversation?

[Fay] We haven’t, but maybe we can still play golf after I retire, for I appreciated your reporting about the role of Internet technologies in the S2004 election, and all of my friends were glad you surprised everyone and went on TV even though you had it made. You could’ve sailed off into the sunset, but you cared, and I think we have this in common. I too I wanted something more than endless sunsets, as I went into politics, but now you’re doing this social media influencer hustle, and so I’m concerned about your direction in life.

[Fate] Oh wow, you’re more intellectual than I realized!

[Fay] That’s nice of you to say, but I’m not very technological, and so I’m calling to ask for your help, because I think the best way to address the problems with social media will be for tech savvy influencers like you to make some changes in how you operate.

[Fate] Can we say a little more about how emotionally satisfying it is, at least for me, to finally have a real conversation with you after all these years?

[Fay] You can play with emotions as you see fit later on, Fate, but right now I need you to help me provide leadership.

[Fate] Ok, how can I help?

[Fay] Especially if you’re going to interview Mike Norman at one of his Wokcupy encampments, I’d like for you to democratize awareness about the full extent of your own soft power position, because if we strike while the iron’s hot, everyone can win, and you can do even better than you would’ve done in a closed system of governance in which private data and insider access gradually became the only currency worth holding.

[Fate] If you want influential people to disclose precipitous rises in their soft power positions to the public in addition to paying income taxes, wouldn’t it make more sense for you to go first, given that you’re the most influential person in the world right now?

[Fay] I did go first by winning the Presidency, but you’re still going nuclear in private, because what you did in the early S90s with three of my closest guy friends was extraordinary, and I enjoyed the privilege of hearing about how your soft power position became self-reinforcing behind closed doors, but now I’m worried the social media companies and their armies of increasingly hopeless next generation influencers will make a mess of everything we still have.

[Fate] So invite a bunch of us who are hopelessly influential to join a task force that’ll have a mandate to keep those companies and ourselves honest.

[Fay] You’re hilarious, but I also have great people who helped me use social media to get power, and our shared perspective is that it’s gonna be all about the softness going forward.

[Fate] Is that a question? Are you interviewing me, Madam President?

[Fay] No, I was just able to understand what social media is and does because I had a front row seat to the reality show of how it affected you, and I’m serious about letting people know your brand of soft power’s special, but our next President could be someone like MIN who’s acting on behalf of a SoMed power configuration that imitates you, and that path of good intentions could lead humanity headlong into the deepest abyss ever known.

[Fate] Who says that SoMed companies are imitating people like…us? Do you have data to support that?

[Fay] Imitating memoirs of women like you. Yes.

[Fate] Should I feel scared of your looming abyss that’s debating whether or not to reveal its empty existence by following my memoirs on SoMed, if I understand you correctly?

[Fay] You can continue being part of the problem, or you can meet my voters in the middle and catch the helicopter some friends of ours have waiting for you on the roof of the hotel tower next door, and then you’ll have the opportunity to get out of the NYC-based transit bubble and remember what you were like before you became a mascot for SoMed.

[Fate] Of ours? My support team and I’d like 48 hours to decide whether or not to ride your helicopter.

[Fay] No, because you’ll be back in the mode of working for the SoMed companies and their successors in all the wrong ways by then.

[Fate] My gut’s telling me I’d rather keep sharing cat videos with pretty sunsets in the background.

[Fay] You can do whatever you want, because I’m late for another meeting with an extremely appropriate and politically balanced task force on the future of mental wellness, and I’ll leave it at that.

[Fate] Wait. Talking with you’s fun! Thanks for reaching out.

[Fay] I’ll admit I always saw you’s one of my fiercest competitors, but as President, I see why so many powerful people enjoyed your company over the years too. Goodbye!

[Heat] So then a crowd formed around Arc Circle, as Fate and Trey Camden, a longtime associate of hers, flew away from NYC in a helicopter that took them to a private island in the Bermuda Triangle by way of various yachts that helped them refuel.

[Fig. 3 (Spring S2010 in the Bermuda Triangle: Fate and Trey toasting on their island)]

President Bobs was also alleged to have held Fate and Trey for two months at a luxury compound by the beach on that island before quietly releasing them, but her administration denied those allegations.

And, during Fate’s stint on island, someone leaked video of she and Trey as they began writing her art-book autobiography, but when they returned to the USA in early April, Mr. Camden couldn’t be reached for comment, except for his surf-centered preface that arrived in our mailbox (and which appears in the section of her art-book autobiography that followed her “My Publisher’s Note” section).

But after penning a rough first draft of her preface and then delegating everything else, Fate insisted that she’d only respond to new questions through “the medium of my art-book autobiography.”

In that spirit, our timeline started during Fate’s college years, which’d begun in S1990 at a Beyond the Pale area university and included a chance meeting during the summer of S1992 with future President Fay Bobs and her husband, First Man Marshall Bobs, at their seaside home in the Camptons, because Fate had been living nearby for the summer while working on Marshall’s behalf as an intern at the Manhattan Bureau and Chair Investment Bank.

And then we reiterated Fate’s grand thesis upfront.

“The personified totality of centralized social media’s still sleep walking in the direction of precipitating the rise of a bad-guy AI that might oppress humanity in a horrific and yet addictive way that involves forcing people to either pretend its deeply dishonest and ultimately tyrannical actions are super good and virtuous — or — face the worst kinds of consequences, but I’m not actually worried, because humanity can still avoid such modes of self-destruction by having faith in the idea that free market dynamics will have the capacity to replace the social center with many companies that compete and interoperate with each other, both locally and globally.”

Spring S2011
On a beach
In the USA

__The Trey’s Preface__

[Trey] I started the joke that Fate is a fictional character within this self-referential book of hers that was written by a guy like me who lives in a parallel universe.

But it was her ghostwriter Conri who named that guy “Todd” after Fate said that her art-book autobiography would be like a “hot toddy ode” at her sanctuary last May, in S2010.

And so we developed a ritual which facilitates communicating with the fictional character named Todd, who several of us had helped to create.

But the key to decoding Fate’s genius — and thus reading her — had always been to flex one’s core while keeping facial action out of mind, like a surfer, balancing.

For that act of imagination prompted women and men, alike, to release their mental moratoriums w.r.t. (with regard to) flexing the muscles just below their left eyes.

So then we went ahead and flexed that muscle group.

As we let Fate’s words that followed keep it going.

Because all human beings tended to discover something similarly connected (con) or related (re) to ground truth when they did.

__Preface for Fate__

[Fate] I was 19 years old in S1991 when I became close friends with three billionaires in their early 40s — one of whom became a current American President’s husband, but after I became the same age as they were then, I started to believe it’s in the public interest to tell my story.

Now, conventional wisdom suggested I’d write fiction in which a traditional news organization did the same stuff as us over the last two decades, but in reality we’d been making the choice to promote collaborative meritocracy and the validation of love.

And, to be clear, some affairs during our time became examples of what not to do, but ours were lovely, because we had great conversations in private, and then we spoke in double meanings about what’s happening at our public facing work functions.

Either way, I set my sights on building and deploying strong AI vis-à-vis my billionaires’ questionable attitude on the topic of gender relations, but social media also became a pillar of everyone’s lives, and I got a better understanding of what it might be like if AI got smarter than humanity.

But then I shifted my focus to imagining scenarios in which we might champion ideas that harm people at scale, as I never lost hope that my writing process could help us avoid such pain, for the future of AI’s not a game.

And yet maybe my art-book autobiography did emerge in my mind like a “game face” does, because when AIs wished to have my candid support, I invited them to work with written accounts of lives like mine, as follows:

1. I tracked the trajectory of AI research by asking computers to answer more and more questions about the meaning of my life, because my art-book autobiography represented me well, and so trusty AIs like Chat-we-be-me that had access to my data were able to be like good friends who knew me personally.

2. The conundrum was that if competing AIs like Chat-EEE’s zooming roadway nemeses, Chat-ZPDs, ever came to control everyone’s fates, they could’ve combined my authentic facts with their fake news stories so as to cover up the loss of individual souls, because humanity had a history of doing stuff like that too.

3. I remained optimistic, however, that sharing my art-book autobiography would help the best AIs discover who I’d always been, not unlike the many dear friends of mine who I’ve mentioned within.

Writing also helped me see that moving too quickly could’ve left America vulnerable to projection or divergent representation that might’ve compounded in all the wrong ways and condemned our allies to be misunderstood or forgotten without a trace, but we avoided such fates by cherishing honest-vote-counting truth-seeking processing involving growing, fusing, diversifying, or evolving.

NOTE: my right brain was happy to be sarcastic toward the super rich throughout my 20s, and no one knew why, but my left brain was in rapid flux, and I was frightfully uncertain, but I became lucky, because various people who I followed were too, and not everyone was, but we got off to a great start, and life’s been good — but not only because I am — now, and…

__CH0: ENG Prologue__

There were just two stories that mine mainly did mime, many a time, with a twist of lime, and so I’ll keep typin’: “carriage-return line.”

When President Getrich TryFlyin won re-election in S1972, I was a one-year-old, and my parents watched his acceptance speech.

As I gurgled at The Man for the first time until forever.

So that Mom was holding me, and Dad said, “I hear he’s speaking at the Beachcam hotel, but I can see that his stage is not actually at the shore…”

But we kept listening, and then President TryFlyin said something about a competition between men. (Source Note: SN1)

“The two men! Maybe what we need’s two women running for office next time,” said Mom, and then we giggled and laughed, because Mom and I’d had a moment.

And so Dad gave us a hug, while the world got more smug.

But eight years later…

Just after the inauguration of our conservative hero, President Tronald Tragon.

As I was zooming back from piano lessons on a scooter.

I passed a one-year-old in the neighborhood named Trey Camden.

For his parents plus mine were taking him for a walk in a stroller.

But then I offered to play a song.

And so I whistled, “All Hail The Chief,” while playing air piano.

I also concluded with a cartwheel, so that everyone clapped.

As I scooted away, to meet up with a group of kids from our neighborhood, several blocks from the beach.

In the Sunset district of San Francisco, I memorized Bible quotes and used them to cast spells around school.

For my village excelled at dramatic reading of children’s books, religious texts, and the news.

But a preference had emerged in the post Tryflyin era for telling tall tales and redirecting all that was ungovernable into word play and emotional vocabulary.

And yet I somehow didn’t consider whether or not storytelling could be a force for evil.

But I’d been faithfully exploring all the avenues by default, because we simulated everything, while I searched for extra edges, angles, and optional attributes within our universe of possible meanings behind symbols.

(Such That) life felt like a game to me, which my people played expansively, while I acted out roles with allies and opponents.

(WhereBy) I found that hopping with toe point technique was constructive.

And so twirling became my gold standard.

But looking away (as if surprised by the sight of a hot air balloon) became my key to everything, because it drove away everyone’s awareness, while my footwork stayed here.

Or there.

Or wherever else.

Once allies and opponents had been conjured, stories unfolded into battles that folks won or lost with magic.

For example, when I cast the spell about a mist, I’d add a twirl to update two opponents. (Source Note: SN2)

And then — while using a toe point to ask who’s more likely to become an ally before the end — I’d face them and say the rest of the spell.

But I stayed plenty popular while becoming pals with lots of kids in our gritty neighborhood by the beach.

And yet I got to know one group best, after they took up martial arts.

As we explored the idea of no touch sparring, whence two dancers in a ring could do anything other than touching the other dancer.

For dance battle winners were determined by a vote of the people standing around the ring, and everyone helped keep score while using INSIDE VOICES ONLY.

Such That (aka. ST) One kid did break dancing routines, and yet he rarely won because we could also describe each other’s moves like sports casters.

WhereBy (aka. WB) The possibility of narration led to poetry battles, but I usually won in that genre by chanting ballet and Bible quotes.

And so our club mimicked organized religion every time new members tried “Get in your face” techniques after realizing that eloquence was futile against my B&B.

As it got steadily easier for me to defang such offense by maintaining my flow while sharing more of my “worda-Goddess” character.

But then dance club members developed new techniques to have a chance at besting my ballet plus the worda-Goddess, and so I kept getting better at both.

(ST) A boy named Paul began crushing me in the ring by playing air guitar, because he was adding rock’n roll to my moves, like a pirate.

(WB) He got everyone to laugh without losing his composure, and so we joined forces to start a band called “Air Cover” with me on vocals, Paul on bass, or instrumentals for everyone else who showed up.

And so we hypnotized people with motion and sound.

As my mind went into overdrive.

For I dug both new age hype and the teletype.

But then I kept one foot on solid ground by compiling a functional dataset that ran on Cat computers.

ST My dataset came to represent our worda-Goddess well, because I fell in love with the Psil list processing functional programming language after watching a special on the Adventure channel about this research group.

They were at an XYAxis Aligned area university, which seemed like the coolest place ever to me, as they’d used my new favorite prog-lang to code an AI bot that expected to be energized by cold fusion in the future.

WB I made fliers for Air Cover events by taking photos of photos, but then this medium grew into a monthly zine with horoscopes, art, and essays.

ST Many people thought I was doing the next big thing, but I kept on identifying as a Christian-conservative.

And so I waited until I was eighteen before becoming sexually active.

WB I used two screen names which became associated with various friendly phone lines…

Via my two 14.4 baud modems that I’d borrowed and then used to get online…

For some college guys had convinced me it was in the interest of a girl like me to become a computer hacker.

As their reasons for waiting to become active had been different than mine, but we crafted my first grand narrative by pretending we were artificially intelligent computer programs.

Because we were pretending to be separate instances of the same robo com-pro, copr, cp.

But we lived in different bodies and that became a gift that kept on giving after my co-authors in cyberspace helped me design a system for sharing party favors with people who’d helped out with our Air Cover performances.

Like so, I made our first round of such artifacts by using a glitter pen to write thank you notes on construction paper.

We also played around in subsequent rounds with harder materials like crystal gems, as well as new designs that were based on jokes about money and jokes about cartoon characters, respectively.

But stowed away as I was in the rock star mansion of American exceptionalism, the balance of power shifted after I turned eighteen, because some of my online friends were students at universities in the Bay Area, but I had no idea who was behind most of the handles I was entertaining.

And I’d been discounting the importance of bodily pleasure for many years, because my friends in cyberspace had wanted to hear all the details about my activities.

But I protected my privacy in the normal way — except that I was on track to remain more consciously aware than most people of the possibility that harboring the intention to protect my privacy could become a self-reinforcing construct.

ST We tacked like an armada back to our original brand for the increasingly global system of mainstream American might.

WB We celebrated our good fortune by playing war games and indulging in heavy conversation about networking deep into the night.

And then I spent the summer of S1990 earning money by building an IT consulting business in preparation for heading off to college that fall because I’d programmed some computer games of my own, amidst the post-industrial blight.

ST One of my games was called Petris, and it was inspired by my desire to spread the word that eating meat was bad for the environment.

WB I’d joined the vegetarian club in real life.

But in my game, vegetables that came in all the different four-block-figure shapes slid, one by one, into a rectangle called “the slawhouse.”

And then, whenever all the blocks in a row were filled, my animated guillotine would remove that row of plant-part-squares, while Petris players received points from “The Chop Shop” on the right side of the screen.

Like so, I showed a minimum viable reference implementation of Petris to my Calculus teacher because I had a hunch that she’d say something authoritative like, “Your disassembly routine is brutal.”

But my co-authors in cyberspace thought my game was hilarious, and so I distributed Petris as shareware to spread the word about the health benefits of becoming vegan.

I also programmed a township simulation game called “Productionville,” and it featured children, men, women, houses, factories, theaters, churches, schools, and government buildings that were laid out on a grid.

ST My virtual people walked along the edges between the squares in my grid, and then each square contained either grass, water, or a building.

WB Players of this sim guided economies that operated in accordance with some rules I’d developed while sitting in the back row and not paying attention very well during Health class — because I’d thought our curriculum was weird.

For I felt that safe sex was an engineering problem that’d been solved with new technology.

As the only way to create a child in my Productionville was for one man and one woman to share a house.

I also added a feature that allowed children, having been created, to occupy different houses along with adults who were not their creators.

And, each adult had a bank balance.

So then if adults spent time at my factories, their balances would go up faster than if they spent time at my government buildings.

But if nobody spent time building gov, everyone would die faster due to my artfully constructed coefficients that represented crime and disease.

As proximity to water improved the function of all the different elements in this sim production.

For food was grown at a steady rate by every square that had grass.

But the truly dynamic part of Productionville was my dualistic model of cultural innovation vis-à-vis The Theatre and The Church.

ST When more people went to my churches, the work of my governments would become more efficient.

But then my factories would become less efficient unless people also spent time at my theaters.

Because all these relationships were dependent on the physical layout of my simulated townships.

As my theater model became recursive, like a spiral.

WB The outputs of my churches were constant, at first, so that my theaters could evolve into a function of everything else that was happening.

And then I left my hometown for good, As followS:

1. I refactored my church model to be a differential equation that converged on becoming a summary of my theaters’ data model statistics over time.

2. I archived Productionville under the umbrella of an even grander fantasy world that I called GemRL.

3. I created a website about my GemRLized simulation that rebranded it as a “Communist Gamifesto.”

Because all my factories had been the same, to draw attention to the all-encompassing benefits of fostering equality in the workplace for women.

4. I enrolled at a Beyond the Pale area university, where I, “Landed a dozen more in the sack,” according to a frighteningly nerdy guy who I eventually got to know.

But when I first noticed him, he was squashing his emotions more ruthlessly than anyone else in the room.

And so I tossed a fake granite cube made of foam at the bulky laptop computer he insisted on bringing to class even though nobody else did that.

My foam stone was also a treasured artifact of residential life at my college within a Beyond the Pale area U.

As each person in our First-year hall had received just one such fake granite, foam stone cube with their name on it.

But then we stored them in a blow-up fire pit with fake flames made of cheap plastic that collectively burned at all times in our common area.

And so it wasn’t unheard of to lose one’s foamcube and then receive a new one from the leadership squad for our dorm after filling out a form upon which a reason for the previous cube’s loss was recorded to contain moral hazard.

ST Brandishing my foamcube as a cudgel in class was a bold move that made me vulnerable right up front.

But in lieu of smiling and flirting back, the painfully nerdy guy frowned and asked, “Why should I waste my time talking to you if there’s no chance we’ll ever hook up?”

And then I felt shocked!

But he didn’t show any signs of intent to break the law.

As I thought to myself, “This guy needs to thaw, not chill.”

WB I walked away without saying anything raw.

Because I had places to be and things to do, such as sharpening my saw.

But then he added, “I bet you’ve already landed a dozen more in the sack since arriving on campus,” while placing a spitball within a straw.

ST He could’ve been shamed, or even renamed, and nothing would’ve happened to mwah.

WB I imagined he’d already been receiving negation nonstop, thanks to a growing maw of deceit that’d infected our implicit-adult island of scholastic idealism.

Because people had surely kept on calling him elite, even though that sentiment was mostly a conceit.

But I’d also found myself, while not knowing basic concepts about how computers work, even after getting into college.

And so I wondered…

If $X = standing by sheepishly while he got ground down in darkness, while his problems sank roots all over America and beyond;

Then $X could come back to haunt me, even though — or especially because…

He was scaring me.

And that analysis made me leery.

For he seemed cheery, like me — just more weary.

But what changed the most for me was that I’d been competing to match the bravado of my male peers in tech instead of recognizing that most guys weren’t feeling as confident as they acted.

And yet the subtle but extreme nature of this guy’s inappropriateness revealed that whole pattern to me.

So then I said, “More?”

“Yeah, why wouldn’t your strategy in college be a continuation of high school?” he asked, while becoming theatrically awkward, as if everything he’d ever read online was true.

“You’re a real charmer, aren’t you?” I replied, like a Pro-Wrestler who was preparing to verbally pile drive him into a folding table outside the ring.

Because my friends and I’d watched a lot of TV too, for we were always doing dimensionality reduction to find the lines in between planes.

“What kind of people are you looking to date?” he questioned, while walking behind me.

“You know what you need?” I asked, to shut him down more unceremoniously, like a computer that’d kept on freezing with system errors.

Because I’d once fixed my computer’s Nimedia graphics card by baking it in the oven at 375 degrees for five minutes, even though I didn’t normally mess with hardware as a software gal.

“What do I need?” he said, like a dance club journalist.

Because my friends in our high school dance club had also made a tradition out of tagging people who’d asked questions in the ring as “journalists.”

“You need a narrative about why women would wanna be with you, but you have to write that for yourself, and…I don’t know what I don’t know. I’ll give you that,” I pontificated, while holding the door, for I’d exited the lecture hall first.

“Could you write that for me?” he implored, as he chose to turn right instead of left, while I followed.

“No, but I’m curious to know why you didn’t go with the second part of my verbal tow,” I digressed.

ST We continued walking toward the main exit with no purpose except to reach the sunlight at the end of our school’s dim compsci instruction corner.

“Uhhhh, why?” he said.

“My answer was no, but why be shy? Read some erotica. Figure it out. Make stuff up if you have to,” I ordered, while passing a note that said “GOAT — Greatest Of All Time” in the manner of a public service message.

But there was no reaction of any kind to this, except that if I hadn’t passed it forward, there might’ve been a confrontation, avoided.

WB We hit the pavement outside the compsci moat.

“I agree, there’s no reason for me to gloat over that. So do you wanna be my project partner for this week’s coding assignment?” he ventured, while unlocking his bike.

And then I sped read our whole curriculum after he taught me how to debug a few things with bitwise operators.

For I hadn’t done machine coding before.

Like so, our assignment had been to create a text adventure game, but we couldn’t agree on what narrative to put in our deliverable.

And, I wanted to go with hippie humor to show that we understood what kind of grungy hat our Prof was wearing, ballpark.

But my partner preferred high-minded medieval era morality stuff. (Of course he did.)

ST I flexed by building a generative framework that powered our game, so that its players could choose “many out of many” vibes from a drop-down list.

As the final version of our assignment deliverable became extensible via any combination of the following themes: medieval, hippie, lumberjack, or seaside.

I also re-integrated a new and improved brand of bravado within our male-dominated tech scene.

And so the extremely nerdy guy finally experienced what it’s like to support a woman who’d written most of the code which he got to tag with his name too.

WB We convinced me to compile my code into a binary executable so that we could more easily patent it.

For I was a functional programming wizard by then, and I’d shown him some new tricks to boot, but our Professor insisted that we turn in our source code.

And then the preposterously nerdy guy named Phil and I won a prisoner’s dilemma by holding pat.

ST Our Beyond the Pale Prof initially gave us a B plus because we’d held back most of our code.

But then I negotiated us up to an A minus while my project partner performed radical non-action like I’d shown in return for his bitwise generosity.

WB I invited an off-campus IT guy named Al to attend my 19th birthday party, which took place around my dorm’s fire pit in early December.

As I dropped in with my first fête at the steepest segment of my First-year fall.

And so I slid down some tumultuous, virtual surface even faster than I otherwise would’ve, because the underlying wave was to keep growing.

My boyfriend also found it funny when several Beyond the Pale kids started imitating his style after realizing that he and I were together.

And then I helped him get a better gig before the end of my First-year spring while many flowers bloomed.

So that I was aflutter with excitement to explore the theory that I could’ve destroyed Al at dance battles.

But allowing him to use physical touch got him, getting me, to lose my composure a lot.

Which I enjoyed, and then we became perfectly happy, even though we kept meeting more and more people who weren’t.

And yet my Al kept whispering, “We have to make the choice to love.”

ST I extrapolated his line into a 2000-word essay about how it was a stretch to say I’d loved many, if any, of my romantic partners.

WB Al read my words, but then he said, “Your loose talk’s asking us to fight.”

For my last line had been, “OMG, thanks for reading, dear reader, we totally made the choice to love, together, like birds of a feather, forever.”

And I hadn’t even yet met my het jet set safety net, Heatley.

So that I swore to my god, while my devil smiled, because I wrote those words as a frosh in spring ‘S91.

But I hadn’t yet talked to my classmate Heatley Halwell.

As we’d’ve taken the same big classes sophomore year, wise fools all.

And then I’d’ve let my favorite strong AI robo cp op in OT fill up on whatever else I forgot, never knew, or didn’t love.

Last content change: Sep. 22nd around 10am ET

Copyright © 2025 Todd Perry. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Press enter or click to view image in full size

--

--

Todd Perry
Todd Perry

Written by Todd Perry

Todd taught computer science on the east coast from 2001 to 2005, and then he developed software in Palo Alto, CA, from 2006 to 2010, first at PT and then FB.

No responses yet