Right, well, I'll just pay 25 for it. The space will be good for accruing and expounding upon all my insights into the Dao. Luck Magic, AI, search programs and other ways to simplify and be super efficient at the job.  These 3 things in particular will occupy separate areas of space.

Life goes on, I pay 25 for it, and keep on working at the AGP. Downtime is spent on:
===Your high pay has raised your status.

Luck Magic: Gaining proficiency with it and using it to see how it works, putting theory to practice.

====You study this a great deal, and finally come up with a simple spell you think should work.  What are you aiming to do?

AI: Gathering all the bits and pieces of AI programming together to see if I can make a solid potentially workable chunk, as well as finding a housing for it - and an easy way for us to communicate with each other.

===You have gotten bits and pieces together.  Some of it seems to be weird and broken, some awesomely brilliant, and other bits just not understandable.  It is already very difficult to handle the complexities of the job of making an AI, and its only getting worse.

Efficiency: Search programs and more optimal categorization to be more efficient at the job, as well as possible ways to extend that efficiency to others in a simple manner.

===Your approach draws some scorn as certain folk scorn your lack of 'artistic intuition', but a few appreciate your approach as an 'odd but usefully different way to go about things', and most don't care because you're putting in the work, and that's really all they care about.

You do see in a couple hours a team put together a program that would have required two years and a dozen programmers of great skill in your method to build up from the beginning, if they could.  This takes five folk, and four hours.  And its beautiful how well it works.  Of course, you also get locked out of your apartment along with everyone else whose names start with 'C' for 23 minutes on a Tuesday.  No one's sure why that happened.



I also eat, sleep, and so on as necessary. I shop for new clothes that suit my style of 'Comfy above all else, but still within acceptable levels of fashion.' Preferring shades of blue, gray, and black above others.

====Most of the clothing falls within this range.  There are the 'foxes' who go all out for style, and the 'outer shield techs' who dress the opposite, and the few strange folk, but otherwise its fairly uniform and egalitarian.

---

So, like, I wouldn't wear pajamas all the time, even if they were supremely comfortable, because obviously that's no good. Also, regardless of comfyness, jeans are never an option.

Hmmm, possibilities.  Let's start with simple probability, and go from there.

I find or make a coin, or coin-like object, with 2 different, but equal sides. If I'm 'lucky', having it all land on one side consecutively for 20-30 times would be a good showing. After a control test of 200 flips, recording the results. Finding the longest streak and the average, and then going from there.

====You try twice with no effect.

It'd be a minor fiddling with luck, even if it backfires, the results wouldn't be that bad. Hopefully.That doesn't make much sense to me.</orange>

I spend some time gathering materials to

AI gets shelved for now. I'll come back to this later - do want to talk to That Which Wanders the Dark about it, after I sort out my other plans.

<Orange>This line: You do see in a couple hours a team put together a program that would have required two years and a dozen programmers of great skill in your method to build up from the beginning, if they could.

====OOC: I took this from Vernor Vinge's 'Fire Upon the Deep'.  Vinge is the guy who came up with the Singularity.

You have access to a trillion lines of non-repeated coding.  Pretty much everything that you could think of doing has been done, or within 90-98% of done, already.  Many times, its been done multiple times.

The result is that you can go down to the junkyard, yank an engine, connect it to another frame, toss in a set of wheels, and with three days of work, you have a crude, if mostly viable car for nearly free.  Those with a certain artistic intuition can do  this better than others.  Sometimes you have to knock off rough spots.

Most of the time this yields a cheap and functional program that has some weird bugs, and it doesn't require the super smart guys to do it so they can do something else.

Vinge would agree with you that what is needed is AI.  Many of the computational problems that are more advanced are on the outer edge of human comprehension.


 learn carving. Not planning to be extraordinary at it, but at least a basic proficiency.

====wood is expensive.  Its up there with gold.  However there are carvables that are not wood, and can be heated, molded and reused.

Alright, time to learn carving, or at least be proficient in carving wood.  If I can make a staff with a formula or spell carved into it, I might be able to whip up something on a whim, as the situation requires.  It'd be interesting to see if that could work, though I might need to create a rune system to get it all on there. Well one step at a time. First make a staff, or multiple staves, then put a formula, spell, or both on it and see if I can use that staff to elicit an effect from the spell... Like a magic item, or a conduit.