[TML] Freelance Traveller Contest 2008-01: In A Store Near You - ENTRIES - PLEASE VOTE

[Richard Aiken]

On Sun, Apr 20, 2008 at 4:45 AM, Freelance Traveller
<editor at freelancetraveller.com> wrote:
> 1. Dermal PDA/Interface      SCORE (0-5):  4

As the other reviewer said, comes very close to cybernetics, so it
would be frowned upon in a lot of Imperial settings.  Still I can't
help be be impressed by the possible "virtual clothes" usages . . .

> 2. LSP Data Goggles          SCORE (0-5):  3

This one suffers from the same thing which kept me from attempting my
own entry: fear I'd just be thought of as duplicating something that
already existed.  But I still have to give the author points for
trying!

P.S. My own idea was based on how (here were I live/work) there are
all sorts of tourist maps that only tell you what the advertisers want
you to know about places.  I've always thought these were something of
a cheat.  So my entry would have been "RealMap," a virtual map (in a
foldable form, just like a real map) with programming that sought out
divergent opinions of the given area from a wide array of sources and
then collated these for the owner's review, with evaluations graded
based upon age of the data and reliability of the source (as
determined by local users).

> 3. Temporal Tonic Wine       SCORE (0-5):  4

I found this a very interesting bit of local color.  It really grabbed
me . . . until the qoute from Strephon and the one about how important
Old Dog's import tarriffs are to the Imperial economy.  I'm trying but
failing to imagine the U.S. President or U.N. Secretary General making
similar comments on a particular brand of cheap wine consumed by
homeless people from brown paper bags . . . or the percentage of
real-world trade that such could reasonably represent.  So instead of
the "5" I initially want to give it, Old Dog only gets a "4" from me.
Sorry.

-- 
Richard Aiken

"Never insult anyone by accident." Robert A. Heinlein