ref: b9fbb17c04e4ccfb2021dac818e514351ca8f646
dir: /troff/0103.ms/
.LP \& .ce .sp |4.25i .PP .ps 12 .CW ░ SL's friend insisted upon following him around with a camera. Offline, so, technically still permissible under the hotel's ToS. Didn't stop SL from getting annoyed. .PP .ps 12 "Quit pointing that thing at me," SL would say, and his friend would quit, for a while, and sometimes for the rest of the day. But the camera somehow always reappeared. .PP .ps 12 SL had gotten enough of this treatment back at home. .PP .ps 12 Breakfast now consisted of reading the paper\(ema traditional, paper newspaper\(emalone. Half the paper's weight comprised loose leaf advertisements printed on a slick paper that stuck to his fingers whenever he tried to remove them. Coupons for stores and restaurants that did not have operating locations in this tiny resort town. .PP .ps 12 It was a local paper. .PP .ps 12 The supposed news itself was all \fItoo\fR relevant\(emhyper specific POV reporting that assumed an intricate knowledge of local personages and customs. SL possessed neither. He pored over the paper anyway, enjoying the certain... .I je ne sais quois... .R of this textual delivery system for what to him amounted to null verbiage. Glancing at his wristwatch he confirmed that doing so still passed the time. .PP .ps 12 In the afternoons he could most often be found by the pool. This unlikely juxtaposition of venue and artist inspired in him the farsical delusion that he could somehow defend his sketchbooks from the malevolent perturbations of screaming, splashing children. Found that he couldn't. So, why then was he sitting by the pool? He wanted to hand the children back their visors. .PP .ps 12 Pouting was unlike himself, but there it was. .PP .ps 12 He was settling into a routine, and yes, he was still cheating. .PP .ps 12 SL's friend had found other things to do with his time. He no longer presented as online. Zero contact for the last month. For his part, SL had idly contrived any number of schemes for flagging his friend's attention, but finally admitted to himself that it might be better to simply let the friendship drop. .PP .ps 12 He wondered now how his friend would react when he found out no one was paying his hotel bill. .PP .ps 12 SL wanted to think this could work. So far, being dropped into an environment of strict network unavailability had cut his online time in half (Alas, WiFi finds a way). Without the visor, and without authorized access to the local mesh, friction was sufficient that he needed to discriminate carefully between potential activities. He planned in advance, then scrambled to complete the items on his checklist before his connection fizzled out. .PP .ps 12 And, no logging. With bandwidth constrained, something had to give. .PP .ps 12 Often, even remembering what he'd just done proved to be a challenge.