Jason Bowles is pictured here, and the event itself was at the cafe inside of a Barnes & Noble Booksellers in Greensboro, North Carolina. This was a freeform discussion about many things and it did get into tech a little bit with a discourse on telephones. Two of the attendees got smartphones for the first time in 2010 and they spoke to the pain of their first smartphones. A girl got a BlackBerry Curve which was the first BlackBerry with a touchscreen and hated it while a guy got a Samsung Intercept which had a little keyboard that slid out and he hated it too. He stuck with Samsung long enough to have a Samsung Epic next and eventually ended up with the Samsung Galaxy S4 Android device (S for Super Smart and 4 for the version). I had not heard of any of these devices save for the Galaxy of course. The same guy suggested that there was a time in the 1980s wherein you could not buy a phone and instead you were just renting a phone from Ma Bell, the Bell Telephone Company. I don't recall this myself, but then, again, I was a child and not someone buying telephones. A different guy said that he knew of a farmhouse in the area that had an old hand crank phone with which one could only call out to an operator and then tell the operator where one wanted to really route a call to. Some books were discussed. Jason is going through the "The Song of the Shattered Sands" series by Bradley Beaulieu, mentioning "The Twelve Kings in Sharakhai" specifically. He said that it was fantasy set in Ancient Persia but as best as I can tell in reading about it online Ancient Persia would just be the inspiration for a fantasy setting in the series. The Samsung phone guy was buying a copy of "Hope Never Dies" by Andrew Shaffer in which Joe Biden and Obama are wrapped up in some sort of murder mystery. The Samsung phone guy was from Joe Biden's Delaware and asserted that Andrew Shaffer had some Delaware credentials as well. Hurricane Dorian loomed ready to give North Carolina a bit of rain and Jason had us try to site examples of hurricanes in literature. The BlackBerry girl had read something in which a hurricane devastated someplace somewhere in the U.S. taking a power grid offline and then, in the aftermath, the Chinese army was everywhere and people thought that they had invaded when really the Chinese army was just helping America rebuild. BlackBerry Girl couldn't recall the name of this work and I can't unearth it in Googling either so it will stay a mystery. "New York 2140" by Kim Stanley Robinson is a book about a permanently flooded by global warming New York City in the year 2140. Jason found the cover art intriguing and dug up a copy of the book from within the bookstore to show to us. I noticed the term peri-apocalyptic on the back cover and, as opposed to the post-apocalyptic Mad Max stuff, the peri implies during the apocalypse. The cover art was pretty "fun" with canals between skyscrapers where roads used to be. I am intrigued by living in the peri-apocalypse. There were some new skyscrapers in that New York depiction too, replacing the twin towers. Hot air balloons dotted the sky.
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