We sat in the living room (then dominated by a flat-screen TV, with no tabletop cities even dreamt of) and he told us about his current task at ILM: the design and construction of a bloodthirsty demon with blue-denim skin. It was part of a horror movie set inside an Abercrombie & Fitch.

Books: boring. Codes: awesome. These are the people who are running the internet.

But instead he cracked the supposedly uncrackable Harry Potter series and posted all seven e-books on his site, free to download—with a few changes. Now, if you want to read Potter without paying, you suffer fleeting references to a young wizard named Grumblegrits who studies at Hogwarts alongside Harry. It’s not so bad; Grumblegrits gets a few goo

“Writers are responsible for some of it. They say Shakespeare invented the internal monologue.” Oh, I am very familiar with the internal monologue.

We all come to life and gather allies and build empires and die, all in a single moment—maybe a single pulse of some giant processor somewhere.

We sat in the living room (then dominated by a flat-screen TV, with no tabletop cities even dreamt of) and he told us about his current task at ILM: the design and construction of a bloodthirsty demon with blue-denim skin. It was part of a horror movie set inside an Abercrombie & Fitch.

Mat uses everyday materials so ingeniously that their original provenance fades away and you can only see them as the tiny buildings they’ve become.

So I guess you could say Neel owes me a few favors, except that so many favors have passed between us now that they are no longer distinguishable as individual acts, just a bright haze of loyalty. Our friendship is a nebula.