#like YEAH it makes sense...the community is so small and interconnected. its all about supporting fellow musicians and diy but omg

[evandore]

PEACE AND FUCKINT LOVEEEEEE

[pain-somnia]

sssm day 23: new dream

SasuSaku Month Day 23 Title: Brace Me Honey I Need Friction Prompt: New Dream Rating: M (children look away) Day’s Notes: @freshtoxinn wanted pregnancy smut and I ended up making some smuff for everyone; I know its late for day 23 please forgive me lol; yes the title is a lyric to a song...

Rainy days always made her chest feel heavy.

A sense of nostalgia would wash over her and she would ache for something she couldn’t recognize.

Drumming her fingers across her protruding stomach, Sakura hummed softly as she watched the rain fall and pitter-patter against the docks of the river village she and Sasuke were currently residing in.

The hut they made their home for the past couple of weeks was on the outskirts of the cluster of huts that were erected directly on top of the river. The fishing community traveled by small boats and the interconnected docks that made up their village.

Sasuke had said the rain would cease to fall in a couple more days and with it would come the fireflies the village was known for. It would be another beautiful sight she would want to bring her child back to see.

Her husband was so soft with her, taking her places he had visited and showing her a world untouched by shinobi.

Days with Sasuke was like the rain falling down on the river village. Gentle and soothing but with a constant ache. As if their time alone wasn’t enough.

They couldn’t put off returning to Konoha now that she was pregnant. The gentle slope of her stomach was a constant reminder that their traveling should be over but there was still so much to see.

So much to see from the eyes of her dear husband.

The intention was never to get pregnant so soon but sometimes life gets in the way of itself when it is occurring.

And loving her husband and being loved back didn’t leave room for thinking of plans.

“It’s too cold for that,” Sasuke murmured in her ear, shutting the window Sakura was looking out of.

His hand slid from her hip and around her waist to the rest on the lower part of her stomach. Sakura couldn’t help but smile at the gentle touch, almost reverent, he had when it came to the stomach that cradled the new life they created.

“It’s a good thing I have a husband to keep me warm then,” she whispered back, turning in his hold so that she could peer up at him through her thick, pale lashes.

Intentionally flirting with Sasuke was something that still made the back of her neck heat up. It was one thing to fall into it in normal conversation. It was another thing to do so with a goal in mind.

Especially when he was overly aware of her goal and was amused by her constant attempts to reach it now that hormones ruled her body.

“Hmm. Could he now?”

Sakura narrowed her eyes at the way the corner of his lips turned up into a crooked grin.

“Yes. He could.”

Standing on her toes, Sakura pressed a kiss to his chin urging him to tilt his head down to meet her. Sasuke was so tall to the point of frustration at times. He had grown so much and she so little as they reached the end of their teen years.

“How would you like to be?”

“Always so blunt, Anata” Sakura sighed out in exasperation.

Her belly was obvious but not obtrusive in her opinion, and yet Sasuke still treated her with a gentleness that she found━using his favorite word━annoying. Obstetrics wasn’t her specialty but she knew enough and read up enough when they lounged around on lazy days to know that he was being ridiculous.

He was going to be a helicopter parent, she just knew it.

“Sit down,” Sakura muttered, not looking at him directly but at the armchair she liked to sit in when she patched up their clothing or read.

“Sitting?” Sasuke raised and eyebrow, amusement gleaming in his eyes. He did as she was told and looked up expectantly. “Another one of Yamanaka’s suggestions I assume?”

“Maybe,” she mumbled, cheeks flushing hot pink. Lifting her dress so it bunched up around her waist, she straddled him. She slid her hands up his chest until she cupped his neck and rubbed her thumbs along his jawline.

Sakura let out a squeak that turned into a fit of giggles when Sasuke gripped her hip and pulled her flush against him. She pressed a sweet chaste kiss on his lips and then rest her forehead on his.

“There’s definitely something between us,” she joked, shifting her eyes down to her stomach and back to her husband’s. He laughed through his nose and rolled his eyes. Sometimes there were parts of his father-in-law that came out in her.

“There should be less between us,” he spoke into her neck as he pressed open mouthed kisses, trailing his tongue up slowly on the line of her throat to press more kisses to her jawline.

Sakura shivered in his lap but hummed contently as he stroked her back under her dress. It had been aching as well but she settled for just easing the ache between her thighs as it had been bothering her more that day.

Sasuke unbuttoned the ties of her qipao top dress and let it flap open to reveal more smooth skin.

“Careful!” Sakura hissed when Sasuke palmed a breast. He pinched a nipple, earning another hiss but moved his hand before Sakura could slap it away.

“They’re getting bigger,” he murmured as he kissed softly on the tops of her breasts, away from the over sensitive areolas.

“Yeah,” Sakura sighed as he massaged the flesh on the underside. “They do that. Oh! That actually feels nice.”

Sasuke gently rolled one nipple between his lips. He didn’t do it long because he wanted to get farther than they were. Overstimulating Sakura tended to end things much quicker than he would like nowadays.

Just kissing was all she really needed now that she was pregnant. She was almost always hot and wet without him needing to do much. His mouth had gone dry despite the confusion at how desperate she had been the first time she had initiated sex after becoming pregnant.

Desperate like it was a need, not just a want for his touch.

Sakura brought her hips to a slow grind as Sasuke rolled his tongue against hers. She hummed her approval of his slow kisses. She loved when he was soft and attentive. She felt so loved and cared for in the safe cradle of his hold.

It made her glow with happiness that he could enjoy this new life and be a man free of any burdens.

For the small love forming and shaping in her womb every day wasn’t a burden, but a happy promise. It was something to look forward to.

A dream to make reality. Not a goal to accomplish.

“Impatient are we?”

Sasuke smirked at the way Sakura fumbled at the ties of his pants. Her hurried movements were creating a stronger knot and she groaned in frustration as she pressed a hard kiss to his mouth.

“Let me help you.”

Sasuke brushed her hand away and deftly removed the knot. He had one hand fewer than she did but was a lot more experienced with his own clothing and it would be better for him to take care of it before his needy little wife decided ripping them off of his body was the best course of action.

As soon as he loosened his pants, Sakura dove her hands inside them and stroked his hardening cock, leaving him panting in the crook of her neck.

“Want inside of me?” Sakura teased, pressing kisses to the side of his head.

“Not as much as you want me to be,” he moaned out onto her flesh and bit at the junction between her neck and shoulder. “This is...just fine.”

“Don’t be a prick while I’m holding yours Sasuke-kun.”

She narrowed her eyes at him and slowed down the pace of her stroking. Sasuke shot her a glare and used a single finger to stroke the wet patch on Sakura’s underwear.

“Okay, I won’t tease,” she hissed as he pressed his finger harder against the patch, digging through the cloth to her clit.

“Come on.”

Sasuke tugged at her panties until Sakura stood up and removed them herself. She bunched up her dress at her waist again and straddled his lap again. Sasuke held up his cock so she could slowly sink down, adjusting to his size at her own pace.

She clutched his shoulders and rode up and down at her desired pace, slowing down when she so wished and speeding up when she wanted it faster.

Sasuke watched her come undone, gripping her hip to support her better but letting her do as she pleased. It was always a sight to watch her above him taking in her own pleasure.

“I━” Sakura sobbed. “I need━”

“What do you need Sakura?”

Her face scrunched up as she struggled to reach that release she had been wanting for the better part of the day.

“Please touch me!”

And who was he to deny her? Sasuke reached in between them and played with the little nub he had grown fond of stroking. He rubbed little circles, not too hard, because even that could end up being too much for Sakura in her current state.

Sakura reached her climax with a high pitched cry trapped in the back of her throat. She slumped forward a bit, using Sasuke for support. Her hips continued to move in lazy circles but her high had left her exhausted.

Sasuke moved his hand back to her hip and thrusted underneath her. Slow, hard thrusts that had her crying out in a staccato beat. Once she was looking back at him he quickened his pace and she bounced on his lap once more from the force.

Sakura clenched around him and when she felt him twitching she pulled him in for a fierce kiss. Sasuke held her down, pulling her closer to his body so he could be buried deep when he hit his own release. He grinded out the end of it and pressed kisses down Sakura’s clavicle.

“You’re a mess,” Sakura giggled, ruffling his disheveled hair. “We’re going to have to do laundry again.”

“And maybe replace this armchair.”

“Think we can send it back home? I quite like it.”

Sasuke chuckled softly, resting his forehead on her shoulder.

He would have to think about that but he too was growing fond of the chair.

[sapphicscholar]

Letter 72

March 22, 2012, 4:26pm

Morning Alex!

I know, I truly live such a hard life. Basically reenacting Dickens over here. I’m excited to tell you all about Paris! And it’s not weird: no matter how much fun it’ll be to see France for the first time and catch up with some friends who've been scattered all across Europe, I’ll miss you too.

Oh the nihilism of determinism…bringing me right on back to philosophy classes, Danvers! Interesting choice with the future because then you could fuck anything up, and it wouldn’t matter because you could come back and not do things that way. But then there are questions like, with the knowledge you have now, will you necessarily act in different ways? Not in a deterministic sense but would simply having additional information impact the way you act? Probably, right. And maybe some of those new choices would save you from pain, but they might also change good things down the line. Like, say, if kid me knew giving a card to Eliza would blow up in my face to the extent that it did, I might not have done it, but, shitty as all of that was and continues to be, would I have then tried to fight harder and change myself in unhealthy ways to appease parents who loved me only if I met certain criteria? Our experiences make us who we are, of course, so maybe it’s simply that I can’t quite imagine being where I am now without having gone through them, even if I wish I didn’t have to in some cases… I was gonna ask if you think you’d seek yourself out while traveling, or if you were of the camp that believes that seeing yourself would mess it all up. I guess if you’re the type to seek yourself out (and I kinda think I am…), that means time travel doesn’t become a thing before we die because I’ve yet to meet future me… Or maybe future me knows some shit about how bad things would be if she popped on back here. Who knows!

Yeah…I don’t know. Obviously I owe my aunt a huge debt of gratitude, and we made things work, but it was hard. She wasn’t quite old enough to suddenly be given a teenager, and it certainly wasn’t a choice she’d made so much as one that by necessity she felt compelled to accept, and now she’s getting a chance to do it right with some guy that makes her happy and a little son she’s getting to raise from the very beginning. I wasn’t in a great place when I moved in with her, and it really took a long time to open up at all, and by then, I was just about ready to move out to college. And I didn’t want to keep bothering her then, so I got jobs on campus for the summer that came with free housing, so we saw each other but…not much. I don’t know, sorry for rambling.

I get it, Alex, really, I do. But I suspect she misses her big sister. And I doubt that she’s expecting perfection from you—not that there’s anything wrong with you either! It’s okay to be figuring things out. You’re in your 20s! You don’t have to tell her everything right away if that’s not something you two do, but you don’t have to be the strong one all the time. You don’t have to shoulder the weight of those expectations for everyone else. And, speaking from personal experience, there’s never really a great time to open up…it’ll be easy enough to find an excuse or a reason for why it’s not the perfect time. But if—and big if here—you think it’d make you feel better or be a good thing for you, don’t let worries about timing be the only thing stopping you. And I’m always here to talk and listen if you think that maybe now isn’t the right time to be talking to Kara for you personally.

Now please tell me you also have photos of said punk rock phase. How punk rock are we talking?? Ah yeah, that makes sense about the phone and charger. If all my futuristic devices were for communication, it makes an equal amount of sense that your “must haves” are to support the people who matter most in your life. You shoulder a whole lot of responsibility, and I hope you’re getting all the support you need.

Oh wow…sounds like a delightful birthday! I’m so glad you have video evidence, especially if you’re still friends with any of those kids! My best birthday was definitely my 19th. I was in college, and my birthday was during finals, and also just…no one had any reason to do anything for it? I mean, we knew each other, but not for that long or anything, and they all had busy lives. But my roommate invited over all of my friends and packed our tiny-ass room to the brim—scared the shit out of me when they all jumped up when I got back, but it was great. They’d even made me a homemade cake with the absolute messiest icing decorations I’d ever seen, and it was amazing.

Not that my lucky number does anything for me, but it’s 16. I like that it’s a perfect square, as is its root. It’s neat and clean, and I love it. Also it’s even, and that’s important.

I could see you looking great with short hair! I mean, you look great now too. You get what I’m saying, right? I had bangs when I was a kid…not a good look. I don’t know who told hairdressers that all kids should get bangs, but they definitely shouldn’t. Especially not kids with thick hair.

Bahhaah no, Danvers, it’s nothing like the hanky code! Oh my god, now I’m envisioning all the possibilities that you could have conjured up based on that code… No there’s some comedy routine about it, but also like, in addition to the borrowed shoes, I know some people are very worried about the sanity of those willing to stick their fingers into germ pits and then go right back to eating nachos and act like they don’t have ebola or something.

Hope the bucket list creation is going well!! And if there are any items on it I can help with while you’re in Italy, I’m always down to help! Hah oh god! If it meant seeing you in a Lara Croft costume, though, I’d happily suit up in a dinosaur onesie. I will say, though…uh, looking at sizing, they seem to think all adults are brontosaurus-sized (what “average” adult is 5’9”-6’0”???). I may be a little closer to the 5’ end of the spectrum…

On to your questions!

1. Hogwarts House? Hufflepuff with as much house pride as a Slytherin

2. What do you wish you knew more about? So many things! But I’d really love to know more about alien cultures. I think it’s fascinating because we’re so used to the way things are here (and even getting out of a U.S.-context, we still generally understand how things work elsewhere because there’s a lot of interconnection and communication between cultures), but who knows what life is like out in space! Maybe it’s really different or weirdly similar—in any case, I’d love to know

3. What are some small things that make your day better? Ooh, good question! Hmm…talking to other people? Or, not just people in general, but people I can really have a good conversation with. I think your emails qualify, and our Skype dates definitely do. Then I also like getting to talk to my students or sit down with some of the other teachers. Oh and dogs. Dogs always make a day great. Unless you can’t pet them. Then it’s a bummer.

Questions for you! Do you people watch and, if so, do you ever make up stories about the people you see going by? What’s your least favorite question to be asked/compelled to answer (icebreaker games are also acceptable here)? If I set you loose in an art museum, then came back for you, where would I find you? The last question may or may not be inspired by extensive research about all the art in Paris…

T-19 days, Maggie

[dcnativegal]

“Mutual respect, even in passionate disagreement”

The Ides of March, 2018

I am reminded of the fact that Lake County Oregon went for Trump by a bigger percentage than any other county in Oregon, whenever I go to the Paisley Mercantile Store. (See photos, above.)

The other day, one of the members of this little town came over and visited with Valerie and me. He’s a gun-packing retired fellow who has a new implant in his head that helps him hear better. He wanted to know if I’d knit him a cap to cover his mostly bald head, and hide the implant, which does have a slightly bionic/Frankenstein look about it. I said, of course. And then in the course of chatting, he called me a ‘Libtard.’ That’s liberal + retard.  I looked at him with my most skeptical high eyebrows expression. He backpedaled a bit, said he meant ‘libertarian’ which, ahem, I am most certainly not.  Right-o, let me get working on that hat.

I resisted the temptation to call him a Repugnican (a repugnant Republican, the most extreme kind.)  It’s just so much harder to say.

Within a few days, I came to a community meeting I knew he’d be at and tossed the hat to him. Before I left I told him, no charge for the hat but in exchange, you have to tell anyone who asks you where you got that hat, that a ‘local libtard’ made it for you. And everyone laughed, except him. He grinned nervously.

So a crocheted cap can be a bridge between a conservative and a libtard. Good to know.

***

It’s hard for me to feel contempt for a person who is no longer ‘theoretical’ but is instead standing or sitting right across from me.

I am, in my socialist progressivism, now spending hours each week in the presence of cisgendered heterosexual white men who have recent histories of domestic violence, felonies for assault, and sex offenses for which they are registered. Oh, and they all love Trump. I have always thought that God had a well-honed sense of humor. Ha. Let’s send Jane to Trumpistan, Whitelandia and test all that talk of compassion and empathy. I’m not the Biblical Job by any means, but some days it feels like the devil and God hatched up the most exquisite challenges to my previously-confident world view.

I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, “Closer than they appear.” The host had on Van Jones, who I know as a broadcast commentator (and a very fine-looking Black man). I was riveted by what he said, and had to listen to him several times to transcribe this wisdom:

“We have 10,000 years of human history in which it was perfectly okay to chop people into small bits just because they were part of a tribe on the other side of the hill. … The idea that your tribe of people is now EVERYBODY?? EVERY Human? That idea is NEW ON THIS EARTH. THAT is the challenge.” [emphasis mine]

I think the idea that my “tribe of people is EVERYBODY” is a very old one. Jesus extended beyond his own tribe (the Jews), to everybody including the colonized collaborators and the unclean (the Samaritan woman who’d been married many times, Jewish tax collectors who worked for the Roman colonizers.) We are even to LOVE our enemies.

The Gospel of Mathew wrote some version of this: “You have heard that it was said, you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you… God makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.

I love this hymn:

    In Christ there is no East or West, in him no South or North, but one great fellowship of love throughout the whole wide earth.

    Join hands, disciples of the faith, whate'er your race may be! Who serves my Father as his child is surely kin to me.    https://hymnary.org/hymn/EH1982/529  

The idea of being one species on the planet, interconnected to each other and all other species, has to be reintroduced over and over again. I think we are hardwired to distrust that tribe over the next hill: surely, they are doing something nefarious…

**

When I was growing up, the most dramatic example of loving my enemies came when my mother told me to pray for whichever kid it was who stole my bicycle. It was an interesting challenge. Did I need to feel sorry for him, that he would need to steal my bike? Was he poor? Or was he just mean?  Perhaps his family had as much money or more than mine did, since we were, apartment dwellers, renters, and didn’t even have a car. Maybe the theft was just a spiteful thing. “That bike is MINE, even though I don’t really need it.”  I didn’t know. But I was to think of him as a child of God, a brother in Christ, and hope for his wellbeing, and hoped that, whatever reason lead to my bike being gone, would be resolved. My mother was nuts, but she a pretty good Christian.

**

I learned from a Christmas letter about a non-profit called “Better Angels” that got its name from Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural speech on the eve of the Civil War: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory…will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” Better Angels was started by a guy who was against gay marriage until a gay man came out to him and explained why it was important to him personally. David Blankenhorn changed his position on marriage equality and eventually founded Better Angels. Using principles from family therapy, his team trains people to facilitate conversations between equal numbers of conservatives and liberals. They give advice on how to start conversations with people who have different beliefs on their web site:  

“Talking Across the Political Divide

  Goals for these Conversations:

·       Learn about the perspectives, feelings, and experiences of someone you care about who differs from you politically.

·       Discover some common ground if it’s there.

  Expectations to Abandon

·       That you can persuade the other person to change core attitudes and beliefs.  

·       That your conversation partner will match your openness.

  Core Principles

·       Everyone needs to save face—no one is portrayed as stupid, blind, narrowly self-serving, or bigoted. “ [emphasis mine.]

And “Listen for underlying values and aspirations and acknowledge them.”

 I am presuming here that name-calling is out.

**

I checked out Van Jones’ book, published in October 2017, called Beyond the Messy Truth: How we came apart, How we come together:

“More of us need to prioritize individual healing to get past our old hurts, wounds, and violations…We need to develop the emotional strength and resilience to reengage intelligently and constructively with the half of America that sees things very differently than we do. It takes a lot of inner work, community support, and maybe a few Jedi mind tricks to deliberately and skillfully place ourselves in conversation with people whose ideas, assumptions, and attitudes often wound us…”

I confess I was a little bit wounded by the ‘libtard’ moniker. I was also wounded months ago by my fellow Christian’s statement, patronizing though sincerely delivered, that he could love me as a sister in Christ while disapproving of my ‘lifestyle.’ (We were sitting in the “community church” in Paisley.)

Mr. Jones points out:

“…the truth is always messy. Some right-wingers are especially extreme in their opposition to social-welfare programs because they think ‘lazy, undeserving’ nonwhites are mooching off the system. At the same time, some liberals are willing to pay higher taxes to help poor people in the abstract, but they would fight to keep lower income people from moving in next door (as some wealthy liberals in California’s Marin County are working to block affordable housing in their enclave) … We need to continually remind ourselves that honest, intelligent people can disagree with us for reasons that are honorable.”

That is for sure. Obama deported thousands of people and killed non-Americans with drones. Bill Clinton eviscerated welfare and passed Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. I am reminded of a saying: Southern whites don’t like Black People, but they like the individual Black folks they know. Northern whites love Black People, but not the individual Black folks they know.

“If we seriously want to solve any of the mountain of problems we face – or even just be better partisans—we need some spaces where we listen to one another and show up humble enough to accept the fact that we might have something to learn. We need to have conversations that proceed according to a different set of operating instructions. The unspoken imperative should be this: I want to understand you. And I want you to understand me—whether or not we ever agree.”  [Emphasis is Jones’]

I once went through a weeklong training in mind-body techniques with the founder of the Center for Mind-Body Medicine, a fellow named James Gordon, a rather refreshingly wacky psychiatrist. In a comment piece in The Guardian, he said this shortly after Trump’s election:

“Trump’s grand and vulgar self-absorption is inviting all of us to examine our own selfishness. His ignorance calls us to attend to our own blind spots. The fears that he stokes and the isolation he promotes goad us to be braver, more generous.”  

In a Huffington Post piece, there’s this from a Buddhist monk named Phap Dung:  “We have the wrong perception that we are separate from the other,” he said. “In a way Trump is a product of a certain way of being in this world so it is very easy to have him as a scapegoat. But if we look closely, we have elements of Trump in us and it is helpful to have time to reflect on that.”

Yeah, okay, I need to be braver and more generous, and attend to my blind spots. What were those Jedi mind-tricks Mr. Jones mentioned?  Harrumph.

**

Valerie and I are currently reading the Hillbilly Elegy to each other. I know that the author is conservative and I’m trying to listen and read J.D. Vance’s memoir without letting that knowledge discredit the experiences he shares in the book. I see that in Lake County, and all over the US, ­­­there are class tensions as well as political ones, and this memoir makes them visible for me. I have one more quote from Van Jones that pushes me to think of my own biases:

“Mutual respect, even in passionate disagreement, must be the goal. Too many liberals look at the red states the same way that colonizers once viewed developing countries. All they see is a bunch of backward, unwashed, uneducated heathens who need to be converted to the NPR religion and force-fed kale until they see the light. This kind of disdain reveals itself in thousands of different ways. But you can’t lead people you don’t love. You can’t rally people you don’t respect. Throughout history, people have resisted being conquered or converted by contemptuous outsiders. If we continue to show up with that attitude, our every word and gesture just fertilizes the soil for white nationalists and others who traffic in the politics of resentment. Without knowing it, we give ammo to the very forces decent-minded people want to defeat.”

Many of my clients are seriously unwashed, and uneducated with barely a GED between them, but all of them have accepted me as an out lesbian from a big city on the east coast. I think my clients know that I am not in the least contemptuous. Puzzled as to why they don’t believe in evolution or global warming, yes. But, contemptuous? No.  

One of my clients is a Veteran, and I case managed his way into finally getting cleared for an operation he’s needed for some time. He’s older than 70, but other than the one issue, he is healthy as a horse. Except for along history of multi-substance abuse, he’s also a law-abiding citizen who supports himself by his own physical labor. He refuses to apply for Social Security. In order to get to Bend where he’ll have his procedure, he needs a ride, because he can’t drive himself home. And he utterly, flat out refuses to use the transportation that is subsidized by taxpayers to get him there for free. Will. Not. Consider. It. I gently asked him why? He stated without hesitation, that accepting a free ride is a form of stealing from taxpayers, and he just isn’t going to do it on principle. He is socially isolated but eventually he bartered with an acquaintance and has a ride both ways.  I think that eventually he’s going to become disabled, because despite his physical strength, his body is going to give out. Perhaps his mind, too. I wonder what he’ll do then.  Even libertarians can’t be an island forever. I am happy to serve as a ferry to the mainland if he’ll let me, when the time comes.

I didn’t ask him what he thinks of ‘corporate welfare’:

[graphic from Robert Reich’s documentary, Saving Capitalism, funded by Netflix]

**

Remember Senator Obama’s speech to the Democratic Party Convention in 2004? His oration put him on the political map. It certainly appealed to the great big-heartedness of the liberal tradition:

“... Alongside our famous individualism, there's another ingredient in the American saga, a belief that we are all connected as one people.  … "E pluribus unum," out of many, one. ...

There's not a liberal America and a conservative America; there's the United States of America.

There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America.

… We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states.

We coach little league in the blue states and, yes, we've got some gay friends in the red states. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq, and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

The audacity of hope: In the end, that is God's greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation, a belief in things not seen, a belief that there are better days ahead.”

 **

The least we can do in Trumpistan, Whitelandia is defy the Russians, who have apparently fanned the flames of American tribalism for years.

Van Jones writes: “The easy thing to do is to divide people based on a problem. A hard thing is to unite people based on a solution.”

My prayer can be, "May I be a boat, a bridge, a passage."

 (From A Bodhisattva's Prayer by Shantideva)

One day at a time, one person at a time, one crocheted hat for a cranky old man at a time.

[ben-barnes-is-my-husband]

Cindy: a troll love story

For @jboobies and @kittykatknits

Troll Headquarters

Location: a basement

 “All right, who’s going to take the 11 am shift on trolling Jeannetesc’s fanfic?” Ethel asked, peering down her oily nose at the group. She pushed her glasses up on her face, making her blue eyes look beadier than usual, and frowned when there were no takers.

 Cindy glanced over at her brother, Roger, and he glanced back at her. What were they even doing here? she wondered, not for the first time.

 “Cindy hasn’t volunteered on anything yet,” Frank spoke up, glaring at Cindy before looking up at Ethel who stood beside the troll schedule. Janina, Jeanettesc, and kittykatknits were at the top and the below was a grid with times on the side and names on the inside claiming time slots for when they would send their messages. They had a quota to hit each day, and Ethel threatened kicking them all out of the group if they failed to meet quota. She didn’t care that some of them were starting to develop tendonitis.

 To the right of the schedule board was another board, a white board, with the author’s names at the top and everyone who had ever commented on their fics underneath them. There were spidery thin black lines going from each person’s name so they could all see how they were interconnected.

 Cindy thought this was overkill. The Robsa community supported one another. All those black lines just looked like one big blob on the white board.

 To the left of the schedule board was yet another white board. This one had a list of comments each Troll was supposed to leave. They were pretty basic and standard, and Ethel encouraged them to change up the comments, sprinkle in a couple from this one and that one.

 The comments read as followed:

 “your a one trick pony this is just the same as all the others”

 “we laugh about ur fics and then go find real writers to read”

 “your not even any good u will never get published”

 “u probably want to fuck your brother u sick fuck”

 “ur such a slut u probably fuck ur brother”

 “for the love of God stay away from children”

 “go hang yourself!”

 Cindy had issues with these comments, and she suspected others did too. Not that there were many of them to begin with. Trolls didn’t have a lot of friends, that was just the nature of the beast. But lately Cindy had been having doubts because, well, she actually read the stories. And she liked them.

 And when she read them, she thought of her brother.

 Then she’d have to go off to the bathroom and make herself cum.

 She wondered if he thought of her too.  He sometimes spent an awful lot of time in the bathroom too…

 But, yeah, the comments. First, the grammar was just bad. Ethel couldn’t write to save her life, and Cindy suspected strongly that was why she was so angry. Rumor had it in Troll HQ that Ethel had tried to write her own fanfic once and had been told never to write again. Apparently, Ethel wasn’t big on grammar. She didn’t even know the how to use “your” and “you’re” the right way. And, since she had no clue how to do any of that, she just shortened it to “ur”.

 Abigail, no longer a member, had suggested they at least try to sound coherent and somewhat intelligent. Ethel had exploded on her. Cindy had thought the wart on her nose would explode on its own at that point.

 It was clear that as far as Ethel was concerned, quantity was more important than quality. Honestly, when Ethel was in a rage, some of the comments were just so jumbled together that Cindy couldn’t make sense of them. They sounded like the rantings of mad Neanderthal.

 And with Ethel’s high forehead, that wasn’t very far off.

 For shame, she thought. You shouldn’t pick on Ethel for looking the part. You kind of do, too.

 It was true. Cindy had her own failings. As did Roger. His hair always looked greasy and stringy no matter how many times he washed it. So did hers, as a matter of fact. Plus, she had acne. Really bad acne. Kids at school called her “pizza face.”

 It was how she had come to find the Trolls. Ethel, Frank, Roger, and Mary were all picked on at school. They were all outcasts in some way, and so as trolls tended to do, they found each other.

 Cindy felt another pair of eyes on her and looked over to where Mary sat, decked out all in black, the white of her face paint already beginning to melt under the humidity of the basement. Mary Mary Quite Contrary is what everyone called her. She was, Cindy thought, at times worse than Ethel. She became a Troll when the Goths at school kicked her out of the group for being a “mean-spirited bitch”.

 Cindy wasn’t sure that was such a good idea on their part since Mary had been plotting their downfall ever since. Mary wasn’t one to be trifled with either. Rumor had it that after Abigail’s Troll membership was revoked, she went after Abigail – showing up wherever Abigail went, and leaving threatening notes in her locker. Abigail had put a restraining order on Mary. On all the trolls actually.

 And, after Abigail had left them, a transformation had taken place seemingly overnight. Abigail’s own acne cleared up, she started showering on a regular basis, and she no longer felt her goal in life was to try and ruin someone’s day to feel better about her own shitty life because her life got BETTER.

 She became so beautiful it hurt to look at her. She got friends, and even a boyfriend and girlfriend. Cindy had begun to wonder – could that be me? Could I experience a miracle like that if I just stopped being a Troll?

 “Well, Cindy?” Mary said, a sneer forming under her black lipstick. The wart at the corner of her lip twitched.

 “Yeah, Cindy,” Frank pressured her. She looked at him. The wart on his chin quivered.

Wait a second…

 They all had warts! She did too, right on her forehead. Even Abigail had had a wart once.

 But not any longer. Not since she left the Trolls.

 Maybe there was something to be said for leaving them. She darted another glance at Roger who was rubbing the wart by his nose. She couldn’t leave her dear brother.

 “I’ll take it,” she said in a small voice.

 “Guys!” Roger exclaimed, “Kitty just posted.”

They all looked down at their respective devices. They refreshed the page every two minutes just in case someone posted.

 “Janina did too,” Frank said.

 “I’ve got Kitty,” Mary said with a smirk.

 “I’ve got Janina,” Frank said.

 “Well, since we’re all here, we might as well just take them both,” Ethel said with a gleam in her eye. “Together.”

 Oh boy, Cindy knew what that meant. It was a no holds barred session. They’d go at it for hours.

 “Before we start, I’ll get us more Twinkies, Cheetos, and Dew,” Roger said, heading to the stairs. When he made it to the top and opened the door, bright light shone down the staircase, making them all squint.

 The scent of cookies wafted down to them, breaking up the smell of unwashed bodies and stinky shoes. The light lit up the dank room. The stained carpet and sparse furniture. The walls that needed painting. And all the trash on the floor – Twinkie wrappers, Cheeto bags, and cans of Mountain Dew.

 Cindy looked longingly up at that light until the door shut and they were shuttered in the dim light once again.

 She got to reading on Kitty’s story. Good God, it was hot. So very hot. She kept imagining doing those things Sansa and Robb did with Roger. Oh, she wanted it so badly!

 She glanced up to see how everyone else was doing and was stunned by what she saw when they all thought no one was looking.

 Frank was practically drooling. In fact, at a certain angle it almost appeared that he was hard…

 Then there was Ethel who licked her lips and leaned closer to the screen. And Mary…Mary was rubbing her thighs together.

 Suddenly, Cindy couldn’t take it anymore. She was so turned on.

 She wanted Roger. Badly.

 And she was going to get him.

 “Excuse me,” she said.

 She started for the stairs. “Where are you going? Bathroom again?” Mary drawled.

 “I’m going to help Roger,” Cindy said and walked up the stairs.

 The door creaked open and the light was blinding. She gasped and stepped into the kitchen. A plate of cookies sat on the counter of Ethel’s kitchen counter. Or rather, her parents’ kitchen counter. It was so warm up here. So bright. She spied Roger out on the deck, gathering air into his lungs as the hot sun shone down on him making his hair appear less stringy.

 With a deep breath, Cindy opened the door and stepped outside with him.

 His eyes went wide as he whirled around. “Cindy!”

 She put her finger to her mouth, the universal sign for “Ssshhhh…”

 She stepped into the sun and felt its rays upon her skin. Already she felt different. Whole. Alive. It felt as though the acne on her face was shrinking and fading away.

 She looked at Roger and found him even more handsome than usual. 

 Oh my. The sun worked miracles!

 And then Roger took her in his arms and kissed her passionately. He didn’t taste like Cheetos. He tasted minty fresh.

 “Bathroom!” she said urgently.

 “Yes,” he growled.

 They ran down the hall to the bathroom they never used and hurried inside.

 “I’ve wanted you for so long, little sister,” Roger said deeply.

 “Oh, Roger, I’ve wanted you for so long too.”

 He smiled. “Shall we fuck like Robb and Sansa?”

 “Yes!” Cindy exclaimed.

 They tore at each other’s clothes, and then once they were naked, Cindy hopped up onto the bathroom counter and Roger fucked her just like Robb did to Sansa.

 It was glorious and perfect and Cindy knew she was going to crave Roger the way Sansa always seemed to crave Robb.

 They clung to each other, panting, and then slowly parted, just looking at each other. Their eyes went wide.

 “Cindy! Your hair!” Roger exclaimed.

 Cindy reached up to touch it. It was soft.

 She hopped down from the sink and turned to look in the mirror. Her hair was auburn just like Sansa’s. It was long and sleek and soft. Not stringy anymore. It looked so shiny and healthy. And her acne – it was gone! As was the wart on her forehead. Her face was clear, her complexion was beautiful!

 “Cindy,” Roger said urgently.

 She looked over at him and her mouth fell open. His hair was curled like Robb’s. Soft waves that made him look like a dashing rogue. The beard he’d been trying to grow had filled in, not so patchy anymore, and also reminding her of Robb.

 “We’re healed, Cindy,” Roger said in awe.

 Cindy nodded. “I denounce the Trolls,” she declared and a soft white, ethereal glow encompassed her entire being.

 “I denounce the Trolls,” Roger said too, and the same white ethereal glow surrounded him.

“I feel like I want to spread this feeling of happiness,” Cindy said, feeling overwhelmed by the joy in her heart. “I feel like I want to make others happy!”

 “Me too,” Roger said, sounded awed still. “I want to be nice to others not try to tear them down because really…I like Janina, Kitty, and Jeanette. I like their stuff!”

 A tear rolled down Cindy’s cheek. “Me too! I have all along.”

 They dressed quietly and quickly, and then hand-in-hand, left the house and stepped out into the sun and into their new lives.

[wolfliving]

Some Computer Science Issues in Ubiquitous Computing, 1993

*It’s always good to refer to the original texts.  It’s okay that the semantics drift after a while, but that’s how you can see how and where they are drifting.

“In 1988, when I started PARC's work on ubiquitous computing, virtual reality (VR) came the closest to enacting the principles we believed important.”  Yeah, see, back in 1988,  what was to be the Internet of Things was originally Virtual Reality, but then...

Mark Weiser would have been 65 this year, he could have easily seen all of this in one lifetime.  Every day is a gift.

Some Computer Science Issues in Ubiquitous Computing Mark Weiser

March 23, 1993

[to appear in CACM, July 1993]

Ubiquitous computing is the method of enhancing computer use by making many computers available throughout the physical environment, but making them effectively invisible to the user. Since we started this work at Xerox PARC in 1988, a number of researchers around the world have begun to work in the ubiquitous computing framework. This paper explains what is new and different about the computer science in ubiquitous computing. It starts with a brief overview of ubiquitous computing, and then elaborates through a series of examples drawn from various subdisciplines of computer science: hardware components (e.g. chips), network protocols, interaction substrates (e.g. software for screens and pens), applications, privacy, and computational methods. Ubiquitous computing offers a framework for new and exciting research across the spectrum of computer science.

A few places in the world have begun work on a possible next generation computing environment in which each person is continually interacting with hundreds of nearby wirelessly interconnected computers. The point is to achieve the most effective kind of technology, that which is essentially invisible to the user. To bring computers to this point while retaining their power will require radically new kinds of computers of all sizes and shapes to be available to each person. I call this future world "Ubiquitous Computing" (short form: "Ubicomp") [Weiser 1991]. The research method for ubiquitous computing is standard experimental computer science: the construction of working prototypes of the necessary infrastructure in sufficient quantity to debug the viability of the systems in everyday use, using ourselves and a few colleagues as guinea pigs. This is an important step towards insuring that our infrastructure research is robust and scalable in the face of the details of the real world.

The idea of ubiquitous computing first arose from contemplating the place of today's computer in actual activities of everyday life. In particular, anthropological studies of work life [Suchman 1985, Lave 1991] teach us that people primarily work in a world of shared situations and unexamined technological skills. However the computer today is isolated and isolating from the overall situation, and fails to get out of the way of the work. In other words, rather than being a tool through which we work, and so which disappears from our awareness, the computer too often remains the focus of attention. And this is true throughout the domain of personal computing as currently implemented and discussed for the future, whether one thinks of PC's, palmtops, or dynabooks. The characterization of the future computer as the "intimate computer" [Kay 1991], or "rather like a human assistant" [Tesler 1991] makes this attention to the machine itself particularly apparent.

Getting the computer out of the way is not easy. This is not a graphical user interface (GUI) problem, but is a property of the whole context of usage of the machine and the affordances of its physical properties: the keyboard, the weight and desktop position of screens, and so on. The problem is not one of "interface". For the same reason of context, this was not a multimedia problem, resulting from any particular deficiency in the ability to display certains kinds of realtime data or integrate them into applications. (Indeed, multimedia tries to grab attention, the opposite of the ubiquitous computing ideal of invisibility). The challenge is to create a new kind of relationship of people to computers, one in which the computer would have to take the lead in becoming vastly better at getting out of the way so people could just go about their lives.

In 1988, when I started PARC's work on ubiquitous computing, virtual reality (VR) came the closest to enacting the principles we believed important. In its ultimate envisionment, VR causes the computer to become effectively invisible by taking over the human sensory and affector systems [Rheingold 91]. VR is extremely useful in scientific visualization and entertainment, and will be very significant for those niches. But as a tool for productively changing everyone's relationship to computation, it has two crucial flaws: first, at the present time (1992), and probably for decades, it cannot produce a simulation of significant verisimilitude at reasonable cost (today, at any cost). This means that users will not be fooled and the computer will not be out of the way. Second, and most importantly, it has the goal of fooling the user -- of leaving the everyday physical world behind. This is at odds with the goal of better integrating the computer into human activities, since humans are of and in the everyday world.

Ubiquitous computing is exploring quite different ground from Personal Digital Assistants, or the idea that computers should be autonomous agents that take on our goals. The difference can be characterized as follows. Suppose you want to lift a heavy object. You can call in your strong assistant to lift it for you, or you can be yourself made effortlessly, unconsciously, stronger and just lift it. There are times when both are good. Much of the past and current effort for better computers has been aimed at the former; ubiquitous computing aims at the latter.

The approach I took was to attempt the definition and construction of new computing artifacts for use in everyday life. I took my inspiration from the everyday objects found in offices and homes, in particular those objects whose purpose is to capture or convey information. The most ubiquitous current informational technology embodied in artifacts is the use of written symbols, primarily words, but including also pictographs, clocks, and other sorts of symbolic communication. Rather than attempting to reproduce these objects inside the virtual computer world, leading to another "desktop model" [Buxton 90], instead I wanted to put the new kind of computer also out in this world of concrete information conveyers. And because these written artifacts occur in many different sizes and shapes, with many different affordances, so I wanted the computer embodiments to be of many sizes and shapes, including tiny inexpensive ones that could bring computing to everyone.

The physical affordances in the world come in all sizes and shapes; for practical reasons our ubiquitous computing work begins with just three different sizes of devices: enough to give some scope, not enough to deter progress. The first size is the wall-sized interactive surface, analogous to the office whiteboard or the home magnet-covered refrigerator or bulletin board. The second size is the notepad, envisioned not as a personal computer but as analogous to scrap paper to be grabbed and used easily, with many in use by a person at once. The cluttered office desk or messy front hall table are real-life examples. Finally, the third size is the tiny computer, analogous to tiny individual notes or PostIts, and also like the tiny little displays of words found on book spines, lightswitches, and hallways. Again, I saw this not as a personal computer, but as a pervasive part of everyday life, with many active at all times. I called these three sizes of computers, respectively, boards, pads, and tabs, and adopted the slogan that, for each person in an office, there should be hundreds of tabs, tens of pads, and one or two boards. Specifications for some prototypes of these three sizes in use at PARC are shown in figure 1.

This then is phase I of ubiquitous computing: to construct, deploy, and learn from a computing environment consisting of tabs, pads, and boards. This is only phase I, because it is unlikely to achieve optimal invisibility. (Later phases are yet to be determined). But it is a start down the radical direction, for computer science, away from attention on the machine and back on the person and his or her life in the world of work, play, and home.

Hardware Prototypes

New hardware systems design for ubiquitous computing has been oriented towards experimental platforms for systems and applications of invisibility. New chips have been less important than combinations of existing components that create experimental opportunities. The first ubiquitous computing technology to be deployed was the Liveboard [Elrod 92], which is now a Xerox product. Two other important pieces of prototype hardware supporting our research at PARC are the Tab and the Pad. Tab The ParcTab is a tiny information doorway. For user interaction it has a pressure sensitive screen on top of the display, three buttons underneath the natural finger positions, and the ability to sense its position within a building. The display and touchpad it uses are standard commercial units.

The key hardware design problems in the pad are size and power consumption. With several dozens of these devices sitting around the office, in briefcases, in pockets, one cannot change their batteries every week. The PARC design uses the 8051 to control detailed interactions, and includes software that keeps power usage down. The major outboard components are a small analog/digital converter for the pressure sensitive screen, and analog sense circuitry for the IR receiver. Interestingly, although we have been approached by several chip manufacturers about our possible need for custom chips for the Tab, the Tab is not short of places to put chips. The display size leaves plenty of room, and the display thickness dominates total size. Off-the-shelf components are more than adequate for exploring this design space, even with our severe size, weight, and power constraints.

A key part of our design philosophy is to put devices in everyday use, not just demonstrate them. We can only use techniques suitable for quantity 100 replication, which excludes certain things that could make a huge difference, such as the integration of components onto the display surface itself. This technology, being explored at PARC, ISI, and TI, while very promising, is not yet ready for replication.

The Tab architecture is carefully balanced among display size, bandwidth, processing, and memory. For instance, the small display means that even the tiny processor is capable of four frame/sec video to it, and the IR bandwidth is capable of delivering this. The bandwidth is also such that the processor can actually time the pulse widths in software timing loops. Our current design has insufficient storage, and we are increasing the amount of non-volatile RAM in future tabs from 8k to 128k. The tab's goal of postit-note-like casual use puts it into a design space generally unexplored in the commercial or research sector.

Pad The pad is really a family of notebook-sized devices. Our initial pad, the ScratchPad, plugged into a Sun SBus card and provided an X-window-system-compatible writing and display surface. This same design was used inside our first wall-sized displays, the liveboards, as well. Our later untethered pad devices, the XPad and MPad, continued the system design principles of X-compatibility, ease of construction, and flexibility in software and hardware expansion.

As I write, at the end of 1992, commercial portable pen devices have been on the market for two years, although most of the early companies have now gone out of business. Why should a pioneering research lab be building its own such device? Each year we ask ourselves the same question, and so far three things always drive us to continue to design our own pad hardware.

First, we need the right balance of features; this is the essence of systems design. The commercial devices all aim at particular niches, and so balance their design to that niche. For research we need a rather different balance, all the more so for ubiquitous computing. For instance, can the device communicate simultaneously along multiple channels? Does the O.S support multiprocessing? What about the potential for high-speed tethering? Is there a high-quality pen? Is there a high-speed expansion port sufficient for video in and out? Is sound in/out and ISDN available? Optional keyboard? Any one commercial device tends to satisfy some of these, ignore others, and choose a balance of the ones it does satisfy that optimize its niche, rather than ubiquitous computing-style scrap computing. The balance for us emphasizes communication, ram, multi-media, and expansion ports.

Second, apart from balance are the requirements for particular features. Key among these are a pen emphasis, connection to research environments like Unix, and communication emphasis. A high-speed (>64kbps) wireless capability is built into no commercial devices, nor do they generally have a sufficiently high speed port to which such a radio can be added. Commercial devices generally come with DOS or Penpoint, and while we have developed in both, they are not our favorite research vehicles because of lack of full access and customizability.

The third thing driving our own pad designs is ease of expansion and modification. We need full hardware specs, complete O.S. source code, and the ability to rip-out and replace both hardware and software components. Naturally these goals are opposed to best price in a niche market, which orients the documentation to the end user, and which keeps price down by integrated rather than modular design.

We have now gone through three generations of Pad designs. Six scratchpads were built, three XPads, and thirteen MPads, the latest. The MPad uses an FPGA for almost all random logic, giving extreme flexibility. For instance, changing the power control functions, and adding high-quality sound, were relatively simple FPGA changes. The Mpad has built-in both IR (tab compatible) and radio communication, and includes sufficient uncommitted space for adding new circuit boards later. It can be used with a tether that provides it with recharging and operating power and an ethernet connection. The operating system is a standalone version of the public-domain Portable Common Runtime developed at PARC [Weiser 89].

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FIGURE 1 - some hardware prototypes in use at PARC

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FIGURE 2 - Photographs of each of tabs, pads, boards (at end of paper).

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The CS of Ubicomp

In order to construct and deploy tabs, pads, and boards at PARC, we found ourselves needing to readdress some of the well-worked areas of existing computer science. The fruitfulness of ubiquitous computing for new Computer Science problems clinched our belief in the ubiquitous computing framework.

In what follows I walk up the levels of organization of a computer system, from hardware to application. For each level I describe one or two examples of computer science work required by ubiquitous computing. Ubicomp is not yet a coherent body of work, but consists of a few scattered communities. The point of this paper is to help others understand some of the new research challenges in ubiquitous computing, and inspire them to work on them. This is more akin to a tutorial than a survey, and necessarily selective.

The areas I discuss below are: hardware components (e.g. chips), network protocols, interaction substrates (e.g. software for screens and pens), applications, privacy, and computational methods.

Issues of hardware components

In addition to the new systems of tabs, pads, and boards, ubiquitous computing needs some new kinds of devices. Examples of three new kinds of hardware devices are: very low power computing, low-power high-bits/cubic-meter communication, and pen devices. Low Power In general the need for high performance has dominated the need for low power consumption in processor design. However, recognizing the new requirements of ubiquitous computing, a number of people have begun work in using additional chip area to reduce power rather than to increase performance [Lyon 93]. One key approach is to reduce the clocking frequency of their chips by increasing pipelining or parallelism. Then, by running the chips at reduced voltage, the effect is a net reduction in power, because power falls off as the square of the voltage while only about twice the area is needed to run at half the clock speed.

------------

Power = CL * Vdd2 * f

where CL is the gate capacitance, Vdd the supply voltage, and f the clocking frequency.

-------------

This method of reducing power leads to two new areas of chip design: circuits that will run at low power, and architectures that sacrifice area for power over performance. The second requires some additional comment, because one might suppose that one would simply design the fastest possible chip, and then run it at reduced clock and voltage. However, as Lyon illustrates, circuits in chips designed for high speed generally fail to work at low voltages.  Furthermore, attention to special circuits may permit operation over a much wider range of voltage operation, or achieve power savings via other special techniques, such as adiabatic switching [Lyon 93].

Wireless A wireless network capable of accommodating hundreds of high speed devices for every person is well beyond the commercial wireless systems planned even ten years out [Rush 92], which are aimed at one low speed (64kbps or voice) device per person.  Most wireless work uses a figure of merit of bits/sec x range, and seeks to increase this product.  We believe that a better figure of merit is bits/sec/meter3.  This figure of merit causes the optimization of total bandwidth throughout a three-dimensional space, leading to design points of very tiny cellular systems.

Because we felt the commercial world was ignoring the proper figure of merit, we initiated our own small radio program. In 1989 we built spread-spectrum transceivers at 900Mhz, but found them difficult to build and adjust, and prone to noise and multipath interference. In 1990 we built direct frequency-shift-keyed transceivers also at 900Mhz, using very low power to be license-free. While much simpler, these transceivers had unexpectedly and unpredictably long range, causing mutual interference and multipath problems. In 1991 we designed and built our current radios, which use the near-field of the electromagnetic spectrum.  The near-field has an effective fall-off of r6 in power, instead of the more usual r2, where r is the distance from the transmitter. At the proper levels this band does not require an FCC license, permits reuse of the same frequency over and over again in a building, has virtually no multipath or blocking effects, and permits transceivers that use extremely low power and low parts count.  We have deployed a number of near-field radios within PARC.

Pens A third new hardware component is the pen for very large displays. We needed pens that would work over a large area (at least 60"x40"), not require a tether, and work with back projection. These requirements are generated from the particular needs of large displays in ubiquitous computing -- casual use, no training, naturalness, multiple people at once. No existing pens or touchpads could come close to these requirements. Therefore members of the Electronics and Imaging lab at PARC devised a new infrared pen. A camera-like device behind the screen senses the pen position, and information about the pen state (e.g. buttons) is modulated along the IR beam. The pens need not touch the screen, but can operate from several feet away. Considerable DSP and analog design work underlies making these pens effective components of the ubiquitous computing system [Elrod 92].

Network Protocols

Ubicomp changes the emphasis in networking in at least four areas: wireless media access, wide-bandwidth range, real-time capabilities for multimedia over standard networks, and packet routing.

A "media access" protocol provides access to a physical medium. Common media access methods in wired domains are collision detection and token-passing. These do not work unchanged in a wireless domain because not every device is assured of being able to hear every other device (this is called the "hidden terminal" problem). Furthermore, earlier wireless work used assumptions of complete autonomy, or a statically configured network, while ubiquitous computing requires a cellular topology, with mobile devices frequently coming on and off line. We have adapted a media access protocol called MACA, first described by Phil Karn [Karn 90], with some of our own modifications for fairness and efficiency.

The key idea of MACA is for the two stations desiring to communicate to first do a short handshake of Request-To-Send-N-bytes followed by Clear-To-Send-N-bytes.  This exchange allows all other stations to hear that there is going to be traffic, and for how long they should remain quiet.  Collisions, which are detected by timeouts, occur only during the short RTS packet.

Adapting MACA for ubiquitous computing use required considerable attention to fairness and real-time requirements.  MACA (like the original ethernet) requires stations whose packets collide to backoff a random time and try again.  If all stations but one backoff, that one can dominate the bandwidth.  By requiring all stations to adapt the backoff parameter of their neighbors we create a much fairer allocation of bandwidth.

Some applications need guaranteed bandwidth for voice or video. We added a new packet type, NCTS(n) (Not Clear To Send), to suppress all other transmissions for (n) bytes. This packet is sufficient for a basestation to do effective bandwidth allocation among its mobile units. The solution is robust, in the sense that if the basestation stops allocating bandwidth then the system reverts to normal contention.

When a number of mobile units share a single basestation, that basestation may be a bottleneck for communication. For fairness, a basestation with N > 1 nonempty output queues needs to contend for bandwidth as though it were N stations.  We therefore make the basestation contend just enough more aggressively that it is N times more likely to win a contention for media access.

Two other areas of networking research at PARC with ubiquitous computing implications are gigabit networks and real-time protocols. Gigabit-per-second speeds are important because of the increasing number of medium speed devices anticipated by ubiquitous computing, and the growing importance of real-time (multimedia) data. One hundred 256kbps portables per office implies a gigabit per group of forty offices, with all of PARC needing an aggregate of some five gigabits/sec. This has led us to do research into local-area ATM switches, in association with other gigabit networking projects [Lyles 92].

Real-time protocols are a new area of focus in packet-switched networks. Although real-time delivery has always been important in telephony, a few hundred milliseconds never mattered in typical packet-switched applications like telnet and file transfer. With the ubiquitous use of packet-switching, even for telephony using ATM, the need for real-time capable protocols has become urgent if the packet networks are going to support multi-media applications. Again in association with other members of the research community, PARC is exploring new protocols for enabling multimedia on the packet-switched internet [Clark 92].

The internet routing protocol, IP, has been in use for over ten years. However, neither it nor its OSI equivalent, CLNP, provides sufficient infrastructure for highly mobile devices. Both interpret fields in the network names of devices in order to route packets to the device. For instance, the "13" in IP name 13.2.0.45 is interpreted to mean net 13, and network routers anywhere in the world are expected to know how to get a packet to net 13, and all devices whose name starts with 13 are expected to be on that network. This assumption fails as soon as a user of a net 13 mobile device takes her device on a visit to net 36 (Stanford). Changing the device name dynamically depending on location is no solution: higher level protocols like TCP assume that underlying names won't change during the life of a connection, and a name change must be accompanied by informing the entire network of the change so that existing services can find the device.

A number of solutions have been proposed to this problem, among them Virtual IP from Sony [Teraoka 91], and Mobile IP from Columbia University [Ioannidis 93]. These solutions permit existing IP networks to interoperate transparently with roaming hosts. The key idea of all approaches is to add a second layer of IP address, the "real" address indicating location, to the existing fixed device address. Special routing nodes that forward packets to the right real address, and keep track of where this address is, are required for all approaches. The internet community has a working group looking at standards for this area (contact Deering@xerox.com for more information).

Interaction Substrates

Ubicomp has led us into looking at new substrates for interaction. I mention four here that span the space from virtual keyboards to protocols for window systems.

Pads have a tiny interaction area -- too small for a keyboard, too small even for standard handprinting recognition. Handprinting has the further problem that it requires looking at what is written. Improvements in voice recognition are no panacea, because when other people are present voice will often be inappropriate. As one possible solution, we developed a method of touch-printing that uses only a tiny area and does not require looking. As drawbacks, our method requires a new printing alphabet to be memorized, and reaches only half the speed of a fast typist [Goldberg 93].

Liveboards have a huge interaction area, 400 times that of the tab. Using conventional pulldown or popup menus might require walking across the room to the appropriate button, a serious problem. We have developed methods of location-independent interaction by which even complex interactions can be popped up at any location. [Kurtenbach 93].

The X window system, although designed for network use, makes it difficult for windows to move once instantiated at a given X server. This is because the server retains considerable state about individual windows, and does not provide convenient ways to move that state. For instance, context and window IDs are determined solely by the server, and cannot be transferred to a new server, so that applications that depend upon knowing their value (almost all) will break if a window changes servers. However, in the ubiquitous computing world a user may be moving frequently from device to device, and wanting to bring windows along.

Christian Jacobi at PARC has implemented a new X toolkit that facilitates window migration. Applications need not be aware that they have moved from one screen to another; or if they like, they can be so informed with an upcall. We have written a number of applications on top of this toolkit, all of which can be "whistled up" over the network to follow the user from screen to screen. The author, for instance, frequently keeps a single program development and editing environment open for days at a time, migrating its windows back and forth from home to work and back each day.

A final window system problem is bandwidth. The bandwidth available to devices in ubiquitous computing can vary from kilobits/sec to gigabits/sec, and with window migration a single application may have to dynamically adjust to bandwidth over time. The X window system protocol was primarily developed for ethernet speeds, and most of the applications written in it were similarly tested at 10Mbps. To solve the problem of efficient X window use at lower bandwidth, the X consortium is sponsoring a "Low Bandwidth X" (LBX) working group to investigate new methods of lowering bandwidth. [Fulton 93].

Applications

Applications are of course the whole point of ubiquitous computing.  Two examples of applications are locating people and shared drawing.

Ubicomp permits the location of people and objects in an environment. This was first pioneered by work at Olivetti Research Labs in Cambridge, England, in their Active Badge system [Want 92]. In ubiquitous computing we continue to extend this work, using it for video annotation, and updating dynamic maps. For instance, the picture below (figure 3) shows a portion of CSL early one morning, and the individual faces are the locations of people. This map is updated every few seconds, permitting quick locating of people, as well as quickly noticing a meeting one might want to go to (or where one can find a fresh pot of coffee).

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Figure 3. Display of CSL activity from personal locators.

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PARC, EuroPARC, and the Olivetti Research Center have built several different kinds of location servers. Generally these have two parts: a central database of information about location that can be quickly queried and dumped, and a group of servers that collect information about location and update the database. Information about location can be deduced from logins, or collected directly from an active badge system. The location database may be organized to dynamically notify clients, or simply to facilitate frequent polling.

Some example uses of location information are: automatic phone forwarding, locating an individual for a meeting, and watching general activity in a building to feel in touch with its cycles of activity (important for telecommuting).

PARC has investigated a number of shared meeting tools over the past decade, starting with the CoLab work [Stefik 87], and continuing with videodraw and commune [Tang 91]. Two new tools were developed for investigating problems in ubiquitous computing. The first is Tivoli [Pedersen 93], the second Slate, each based upon different implementation paradigms. First their similarities: they both emphasize pen-based drawing on a surface, they both accept scanned input and can print the results, they both can have several users at once operating independently on different or the same pages, they both support multiple pages. Tivoli has a sophisticated notion of a stroke as spline, and has a number of features making use of processing the contents and relationships among strokes. Tivoli also uses gestures as input control to select, move, and change the properties of objects on the screen. When multiple people use Tivoli each must be running a separate copy, and connect to the others. On the other hand, Slate is completely pixel based, simply drawing ink on the screen. Slate manages all the shared windows for all participants, as long as they are running an X window server, so its aggregate resource use can be much lower than Tivoli, and it is easier to setup with large numbers of participants. In practice we have used slate from a Sun to support shared drawing with users on Macs and PCs. Both Slate and Tivoli have received regular use at PARC.

Shared drawing tools are a topic at many places. For instance, Bellcore has a toolkit for building shared tools [Hill 93], and Jacobsen at LBL uses multicast packets to reduce bandwidth during shared tool use. There are some commercial products [Chatterjee 92], but these are usually not multi-page and so not really suitable for creating documents or interacting over the course of a whole meeting. The optimal shared drawing tool has not been built. For its user interface, there remain issues such as multiple cursors or one, gestures or not, and using an ink or a character recognition model of pen input. For its substrate, is it better to have a single application with multiple windows, or many applications independently connected? Is packet-multicast a good substrate to use? What would it take to support shared drawing among 50 people, 5,000 people? The answers are likely both technological and social.

Three new kinds of applications of ubiquitous computing are beginning to be explored at PARC. One is to take advantage of true invisibility, literally hiding machines in the walls. An example is the Responsive Environment project led by Scott Elrod. This aims to make a building's heat, light, and power more responsive to individually customized needs, saving energy and making a more comfortable environment.

A second new approach is to use so-called "virtual communities" via the technology of MUDs.  A MUD, or "Multi-User Dungeon," is a program that accepts network connections from multiple simultaneous users and provides access to a shared database of "rooms", "exits", and other objects. MUDs have existed for about ten years, being used almost exclusively for recreational purposes. However, the simple technology of MUDs should also be useful in other, non-recreational applications, providing a casual environment integrating virtual and real worlds [Curtis 92].

A third new approach is the use of collaboration to specify information filtering.  Described in the December 1992 issue of Communcations of the ACM, this work by Doug Terry extends previous notions of information filters by permitting filters to reference other filters, or to depend upon the values of multiple messages.  For instance, one can select all messages that have been replied to by Smith (these messages do not even mention Smith, of course), or all messages that three other people found interesting.  Implementing this required inventing the idea of a "continuous query", which can effectively sample a changing database at all points in time.  Called "Tapestry", this system provides new ways for people to invisibly collaborate.

Privacy of Location

Cellular systems inherently need to know the location of devices and their use in order to properly route information.  For instance, the traveling pattern of a frequent cellular phone user can be deduced from the roaming data of cellular service providers. This problem could be much worse in ubiquitous computing with its more extensive use of cellular wireless. So a key problem with ubiquitous computing is preserving privacy of location. One solution, a central database of location information, means that the privacy controls can be centralized and so perhaps done well -- on the other hand one break-in there reveals all, and centrality is unlikely to scale worldwide. A second source of insecurity is the transmission of the location information to a central site. This site is the obvious place to try to snoop packets, or even to use traffic analysis on source addresses.

Our initial designs were all central, initially with unrestricted access, gradually moving towards controls by individual users on who can access information about them. Our preferred design avoids a central repository, but instead stores information about each person at that person's PC or workstation. Programs that need to know a person's location must query the PC, and run whatever gauntlet of security the user has chosen to install there. EuroPARC uses a system of this sort.

Accumulating information about individuals over long periods is both one of the more useful things to do, and also most quickly raises hackles. A key problem for location is how to provide occasional location information for clients that need it while somehow preventing the reliable accumulation of long-term trends about an individual. So far at PARC we have experimented only with short-term accumulation of information to produce automatic daily diaries of activity [Newman 90].

It is important to realize that there can never be a purely technological solution to privacy, that social issues must be considered in their own right. In the computer science lab we are trying to construct systems that are privacy enabled, that can give power to the individual. But only society can cause the right system to be used. To help prevent future oppressive employers or governments from taking this power away, we are also encouraging the wide dissimenation of information about location systems and their potential for harm. We have cooperated with a number of articles in the San Jose Mercury News, the Washington Post, and the New York Times on this topic. The result, we hope, is technological enablement combined with an informed populace that cannot be tricked in the name of technology.

Computational Methods

An example of a new problem in theoretical computer science emerging from ubiquitous computing is optimal cache sharing. This problem originally arose in discussions of optimal disk cache design for portable computer architectures. Bandwidth to the portable machine may be quite low, while its processing power is relatively high, introducing as a possible design point the compression of pages in a ram cache, rather than writing them all the way back over a slow link. The question arises of the optimal strategy for partitioning memory between compressed and uncompressed pages.

This problem can be generalized as follows [Bern 93]:

The Cache Sharing Problem. A problem instance is given by a sequence of page requests. Pages are of two types, U and C (for uncompressed and compressed), and each page is either IN or OUT. A request is served by changing the requested page to IN if it is currently OUT. Initially all pages are OUT. The cost to change a type-U (type-C) page from OUT to IN is CU (respectively, CC). When a requested page is OUT, we say that the algorithm missed. Removing a page from memory is free.

Lower Bound Theorem: No deterministic, on-line algorithm for cache sharing can be c-competitive for

c < MAX (1+CU/(CU+CC), 1+CC/(CU+CC))

This lower bound for c ranges from 1.5 to 2, and no on-line algorithm can approach closer to the optimum than this factor. Bern et al also construct an algorithm that achieves this factor, therefore providing an upper bound as well. They further propose a set of more general symbolic programming tools for solving competitive algorithms of this sort.

Concluding remarks

As we start to put tabs, pads, and boards into use, phase I of ubiquitous computing should enter its most productive period. With this substrate in place we can make much more progress both in evaluating our technologies and in choosing our next steps. A key part of this evaluation is using the analyses of psychologists, anthropologists, application writers, artists, marketers, and customers. We believe they will find some things right; we know they will find some things wrong. Thus we will begin again the cycle of cross-disciplinary fertilization and learning. Ubicomp seems likely to provide a framework for interesting and productive work for many more years or decades, but we have much to learn about the details.

Acknowledgements: This work was funded by Xerox PARC. Portions of this work were sponsored by DARPA. Ubiquitous computing is only a small part of the work going on at PARC; we are grateful for PARC's rich, cooperative, and fertile environment in support of the document company. Bern 93. Bern, M., Greene, D., Raghunathan. On-line algorithms for cache sharing. 25th ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, San Diego, 1993.

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