Fuck Microsoft. Where do you actually want to be, what do you want to do? And how fucked up can you be when going about it? That's the real question there. I think it's pretty open. So shoot.

Jake:
Where? Where do I want to go? Someplace... quiet. Someplace solitary. The middle of the Sahara sounds good. Lovely there, I think. Quite restful.

Bart Barenbrug:
To bed mostly. I'm tired. Working on the house takes its toll. But I'll be alright... *g*

dj hangman:
Picture...stepping into a dark room where the first thing you notice is the intense, steady thump of bass and then the smoke-filled air. Not all of it is from cigarettes, you can tell from the smell that most of it is generated by a smoke machine. Lasers cut through, pulsing circles onto the walls and floor that morph into squares, triangles, moons, stars and random letters. The floor is packed with people articulating as much of a dance as possible in such close quarters, but hardly anyone leaves the dancefloor except to take a drink or to relieve themselves.

You notice a little more articulation in the throbbing beat...slight hints at vocals from a song you just KNOW you recognize, fading in and out, never long enough for you to catch onto the melody and remember...so you too enjoin the dancefloor, hoping to stick by a speaker long enough to retrace in your mind where you've heard those lyrics before. Before you know what has happened, you've heard the beat evovle into something almost sinister, those hooks from songs you can't place sliding in between the basslines for over an hour, and you realize that you've been dancing the whole time.

Almost hypnotized, you are drawn back in from your clarity by the dark, warm sounds coming at you from all sides....building in tension for what seems like an eternity. You find yourself mentally pleading with the DJ to let you go...you anticipate the coming break....and you are fooled by another rise...just when you've stopped wanting it, the "evil" of the set breaks out into the lightest, airiest vocals you've ever heard, and you're exhausted, but you don't look at this as over...you're just glad to have a break in the atmosphere for a while so you can prime up for another dance. Where do I want to be? I'm the DJ in this scene.

Mikhail Koulikov:
Wow, Rob's reply is actually giving me reason to sit down, think, and write a thoughtful response, instead of just screwing around.

This has caused me a good deal of guilt over the last few years, but strange as it is, I actually *don't* want to go anywhere. Right now, it's 10:39 p.m. on a wednesday evening. I'm in my "middle-of-nowhere, Brooklyn" apartment, and as happy as I can remember myself being in a LONG time. This sounds really preachy and not like me at all, but over the last year and a half, I've realized how generally miserable i've felt away from home and NYC. All those little moments - coming home at six in the morning, being recognized on a random Village street by a random person whom I've half forgotten, the way the sun will sometimes flow into the large room of my apartment, flooding it and me, sitting there on the floor thirty hours into yet another Square RPG, Stephenloft, all the moments shared and all the moments experienced alone - have combined to become the best definition of "happiness" I've ever come across. And I still might wander and find myself in any one of a hundred cities, but in the end, here and now is where I want to be. And can't; irony has its results and three hours from now, I will be getting on a Greyhound bus to DC...

Josh Loh:
I want to be president of the federated states of micronesia. They have a lawyer exchange program with the United States, so I think my safest bet is probably to suck up the beating now and for the next five years, pay my dues, build popular support, most likely with teaser ad campaigns (bumper stickers, street graffiti, wall posters: "What is... the LOH?!?! (www.whatistheloh.com)" "the Loh shall return!" and the like) and appear out of the east, with the rising sun, feathered like the micronesian god Aluluei, moving like the wind through the anunu trees. The democratic process will be a child's toy in my hands, and I shall play it like an old Scott Joplin tune.

I will embezzle a (comparatively paltry) $ 10 million (USD) from the country, set up new governmental offices based out of a pair of lawn chairs where I can have my feet in the blue surf, and rule firmly but benevolently to the end of my days.

That's what I really want to do with my life.

Joseph Weiss:
The drunk tank. I've been listening to Fairytale of New York on repeat for the past couple hours, and it's starting to sound like a great place to be. Neat old men, and Kirsty McColl even though she's dead, and Irish music all around, and, and... cheerful vomiting. I want to go where nobody knows my name, except maybe the nurses if I've become a tragic enough failure to be a regular. Of course, for the whole experience, I'd need to be Irish, drunk, in a failed relationship, and probably homeless. I'm working on it.

Chris Kalos:
Well, I don't really think it's *where* I want to be anymore, as much as *how* I want to get there, or *what* I want to have at that point.

For example, I've already got plans to be where I want to end up being on this piddling little mudball, at least for the next 24 months (anyone here with a decent knowledge of Japanese and more money than they have sense for want to join me on my next vacation?), and sadly, space station vacations and jaunts to the moon (dammit, should we see TMA-1 by now??) aren't an option, and the Mars Colony just isn't anywhere up to snuff.

So, we're down to modes of transportation. To quote Avery Brooks (who I still claim was merely using my lines in the damned IBM ads), "Where are the flying cars?" That's the first of many things I'm missing. Personal avionics has gotten nowhere, and honestly, I'm not happy about it. I want my ultralight, and I want it NOW.

Mind you, that's not enough. Whatever happened to teleporters? Now I *know* I'm insane, but still, I travel often enough out of state that I'd *like* to be able from point A to point B in the blink of an eye. We've got to have some kind of wormhole generation in the works, and I want to see it in action.

The rest is just gear. Integrated portable computing should be a right, not a privilege. I'm talking something the size of a PDA that *is* your game console/PC. We're talking Playstation 9, here, folks, or at least the beta release. Information on the fly, gargoyle-style.

Giant Robots. www.mechaps.com is NOT enough. Just because one small group of otaku got cracking is no reason for us not to try it on our own.

See, I've never wanted to be anywhere in particular, as much as everywhere at once, or at least functionally everywhere, so I can disconnect at will. The idea of being able to visit a space station as a civilian is something that I've wanted for a while, and we're still nowhere. The ability to do so while talking on a wearable videophone link to my friends on the surface should be there with it. The ability to catch up on all the news comes with that, of course, and most importantly, with all of this data, all the news, my TiVo-style backed-up entertainment, my massively powerful head mounted VR gaming, I want to have access to the one most important place at all times.

The off switch. Leave the hell alone, hold my calls, I'm chilling with my friends. Doesn't matter where we are, as long as what we need or want is available, but can also be ignored.

Now *that's* the 21st Century.