The Raven Scenario
Mayu is laying in bed in her room. She picks up her cell phone. She’s bored, and she wants something interesting to do. Her phone is usually pretty good about this kind of thing.
She checks her e-mail. Her aunt forwarded her another one of those spam e-mails. She watches the mail reader start to interpret it. On the screen, the playful black raven begins flapping its wings. Curious, she thumbs the pointer over to it. Overlaid on the e-mail, more text begins appearing. Mayu doesn’t recognize the names, but the text is interesting. The e-mail talks about the loss of veterans’ benefits, but the overlaid text clarifies it a lot. Mayu doesn’t know much about this sort of thing, but she’s tired of the e-mail junk that her aunt sends her. The raven is still flapping. It wants to forward something back. Gleefully, Mayu clicks it. Let’s see what auntie thinks of this, she thinks.
Mayu finishes reading her e-mail. Sometimes the raven appears, and sometimes Mayu reads it. Sometimes she lets it go.
Most of this e-mail is from friends. She doesn’t usually worldblog about that stuff. But sometimes she wishes she got more interesting email, so she could worldblog about it. And then someone else would take what she wrote and forward it, or revise it. Her ideas about something could become popular. Mayu knows that if she wanted to, she could go back to her aunt’s email and trace the original idea all the way back to the original poster.
Mayu decides she’s bored. She uses the keypad to thumb the word at the raven: B O R E D. The raven flaps its wings briefly. Then it starts cawing excitedly, and angles itself on her screen. Mayu decides she likes surprises. She could mouse over it and find out what it was pointing at, but not today. The raven knows who she is.
She hops out of bed and puts on her shoes. As she moves, the raven swivels about on her screen. She follows it out of the house. It shows her a map of where to go next, and a bus schedule. She waits a few minutes and boards the bus as it arrives.
The bus stop is near the movie theater, and she sees what the phone is leading her to. She had been reading Web pages about Jet Li, and “The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor” is still in theaters. The raven asks if she wants to buy tickets; smiling, she thumbs in the affirmative. The phone shows her the number to punch into the electronic ticket machine at the box office.
Mayu still has some time. The raven tells her that a few people she might know are going to see the movie too. If she announces that she’s here, everyone else she knows who came here (and announced it too) will know. Mayu decides she’d rather see the movie alone, and the raven obliges.
She sits outside a Starbuck’s and has some cake. While there, she worldblogs about the coffee and food. She doesn’t like it so much, but it’s all that is nearby. She watches the responses, past and present: “Yeah.” “No way, it’s good.” “There are too many Starbucks around here.”
Mayu pockets her phone. It’s rude for her to have it on during a movie; even the raven said so, and it offered to turn the phone off while she went in.