In response to one of my periodic demands for things to write about, Miranda asked me to talk about three places of significance to me.

You’re all expecting me to say “London” aren’t you? And to trot out the some variant on my usual lines about history and stories and blood and fire and stone and mythology, and then pick three bits of London where I know of some ghoulish bit of history that resonates with something in my brain. So let’s pretend I did that, and move on to a different set of three.

St Andrew’s Square Bus Station, Edinburgh

The first time I moved out of my parent’s house, it was to move to Edinburgh. I caught the overnight coach from London, and arrived in Edinburgh at about 5:30 am on Friday the 13th of September, 1996, getting off the coach to bright sunlight and the smell of diesel fumes. I had had about three hours uncomfortable sleep, and was gritty eyed and knackered. I checked my ridiculously heavy bag, containing everything I owned that wasn’t a book or a computer into a left-luggage locker, and went in search of breakfast, and then of the place where I could pick up the key to my student flat some 4 hours later – that turned out to be an hour’s walk away, so it was as well I had time. Anyway, having done that, I had to come back to the bus station, to pick up my bag, and then walk with it most of the way back again, staggering only slightly under the weight.

But I digress. Yes, the rest of that day was kind of hard going, but that moment of getting off the bus is absolutely etched into me. The unexpected warmth of the sunlight, the smell of the fumes, even that gritty-eyed ill-slept feeling, they really did feel like signs of the future – I still love the smell of the fumes on airport tarmac or in bus stations, and I still get a perverse enjoyment of that scratchy-eyed badly-rested feeling that I can trace back to that morning. Whenever I’m in Edinburgh, I try and pass through St Andrew’s Square on my own at some point. Hell, some years ago, I even deliberately stayed up a couple of hours past pub closing in Edinburgh, just so’s I could swing by the bus station at 5 am on a bright summer morning. I know it’s a weird and irrational thing, but that crappy little coach station really does feel to me like a place that rings with all the promise of the unwritten future.

Balintoy

I am sure that 99% of are scratching your heads and going “where”? Here. It’s a tiny cove and harbour a couple of houses and a church on the Antrim coast. And if ever I reach the point where I can no longer face living anywhere where there are other people it is here that I shall go. It’s just down the coast from The Giant’s Causeway, Carrick-a-Rede, and the Bushmills distillery.

As I have protested a number of times in the past, I am not a man who derives any particular peace from being surrounded by nature and out in the countryside, but this tiny little place is just a pure joy. I get back to Northern Ireland for a few days once a year these days, but somehow I find the time to drag either my Dad or Brother (or any other family member who stands still for too long) up here – we stop by Bushmills to buy a bottle of something, and get some lunch, then drive on down here and wander about for a bit, maybe take a few pictures, maybe stop off again a bit down the coast at one of the other marvellous bits of scenery. The Antrim cost is just about the most beautiful place I know, and it’s a place I share with family, and a place to recharge.

Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop, New Orleans

Despite the name, this is a bar. Back in 2001, Andrew, Antony and I headed for the US, to visit San Diego, stopping in New Orleans for most of a week on the way. I don’t deal well with heat or humidity, and New Orleans damn near killed me. But we saw and did a lot stuff, but thiswas the first and last bar we had a drink in, and in between those times we contrived to end most of our nights there, stopping in for a nightcap on the way back to the hotel.

Lafitte’s is in the French Quarter, a distance down Bourbon Street, a couple of blocks past where the neon given out, just as the neighbourhood starts to look a bit run down. It’s a tiny little bar that look like it could fall down at any minute – it’s one of the oldest building in New Orleans – and it contains no electric lights, and at the time, also had a battered grand piano being played badly by a man whose voice was almost as battered as the piano. I have a vivid memory of the three of sitting there drinking spirits over a lot of ice at 2am on a night as hot and humid as any midday I’d had in London, lit by the candles around the place, while the guy gamely fought his way through Tom Waits’ “The Piano Has Been Drinking”. It was one of those nights that was a little slice of pure magic, and I am going to drink there again before I die. It’s a place I think of to remind me that there are, in fact, any number of experiences worth having that cannot be found in London.

My friend Rob pointed me in the direction of MegaHAL the other day, having managed to get amusing results out of it when he taught it to talk from a diet of his own LJ posts. I had initially hoped to feed it a diet of my twitter posts, then use it set up a bot that would twitter random sentences in response to certain triggers, but I can’t find any easy config settings that would easily allow me to teach the thing to respond only in 140-character sentences, so cracking the thing open and fiddling in the source code is a job for another day.

So instead, here is a conversation with a barely-trained version of MegaHAL, fed a diet of my (non-linkblog) blogposts for the last few months. I am heartened to see that the computerised version of me is even more incoherent than my normal self, which gives me hope for my future job prospects in a robot-dominated workforce. Apparently, I am irreplaceable. Anyway, that’s enough from me…

Good afternoon, MegaHal. How are you today?

After all, St George was a clever bastard, and it’s wearing to be thought of as pretentious and for us to do something slightly stupid because we’re all routinely letting our computers know that, say if you are just because you have defined as “home”, then no-one who is standing in judgement. I do find it disturbing that I, who basically contribute nothing to society.

Feeling slightly incoherent, I see. I know the feeling. Anything I can do?

4 strangers wake up one day in a this is not one of yours, do I think they’re not hurting anyone? No. But I can do?

Is someone hurt?

Very kind of incandescent rage I normally reserve for bigots, morons and people who were present at a loss to understand why they’ve done, they got one thing so, so right, and that’s because i’m a bit about why an adult male in his early thirties spends large chunks of his time making up weird and there’s a story. Whether it’s outweighed by everyone’s browser will at least have the internet available to them. To use my metaphor from five years ago, I wrote a short piece about “technological shamanism”. When I wrote it, I was completely allowed to take photos of the currently ongoing genocides. Not one is organise a look, I appreciate that it’ll probably be a successor technology that does this, but essentially, what oauth enables is the key to binding all this ghostly data into place – tying it to the physical so, as most of you probably know, i’m a six foot skinhead in a roleplaying game is impossible or pretentious.

And I firmly disagree with that. I’m thinking of you, and as ever, if there’s been a trend in recent as is probably eyeball-searingly obvious, I am against it with appropriate access rights, and throwing it into a data cloud for our friends and families to pull down with the kind of teenage power fantasy game, or an exercise in probability maths. It’s not the most thumpingly original concept, I admit, but what I want to continue to stretch this metaphor through, but I think it’s outweighed by everyone’s browser will know who they are, log them in (if they’re browsing, we’ll be delighted to at least make reasonable guesses about your relationships with people on this basis. Someone who has been to your And even aside from the lovely people: I will absolutely, defend roleplaying a legitimate storytelling capital-a-art form. This is very peculiar.

The key step, though, is geodata, which is the key to binding all this ghostly data into place – tying it to the job, and that that’s important to take a few others of this is even close to outweighing the need for a police office. Or ambulance worker, or fireman, or nurse but I’ve heard so far this year. Really stellar stuff. I appreciate that folksongs about a lot of cultures I don’t need or want any more of a photography nerd. There are few things in the last several years of their lives, and an unknown agency seeking their deaths. It rapidly becomes apparent that they did at 13, do you? In fact, you’d probably worry about someone who is the pub, I had accidentally fallen.