She gestured for the living room, phasing past what would've been the door to her mother's bedroom. She'd barely wireframed it, here, and there was no there there, no interriority. The living toom had its sketchy angles as well, and [furnished] she'd imported from a Playmobil system that predated her Sandbenders. Wonkily bit-mapped fish swam past monotonously around in a glass coffee table she'd built when she was nine. The trees through the front window were older still: perfectly cylindrical Crayola brown trunks, each supporting an acid-green cotton ball of undifferentiated foliage. If she looked at thee long enough, the Mumphalumphagus would appear outside, wanting to play, so she didn't.
She positioned herself on the Playmobil couch and looked at the programs sattered across the top of the coffee table. The Sandbenders system software looked an old-fashioned canvas water bag, a sort of canteen (she'd had to consult What Things Are, her icon dictionary, to figure that out). It was worn and spectacularly organic, with tiny beads of water bulging through the tight weave of fabric. If you got in super close you saw things reflected in the individual droplets: circuitry that like beadwork or the skin on a lizard's throat, a long empty beach under a gray sky, mountains in the rain, creek water over different colored stones. She loved Sandbenders; they were the best. THE SANDBENDER, OREGON, was screened faintly across the sweating canvas, a though it had almost faded away under a desert sun. SYSTEM 5.9. She had all the upgrades to 6.3. People said 6.4 was buggy.
-- William Gibson, Idoru
Which, taken together, pretty much sum up my feelings about all things virtual.The painter Philip Ernst, father of Max Ernst, when painting a picture of his garden omitted a tree which spoiled the composition and then, overcome with remorse at this offense against realism, cut down the tree.
-- Barbara Tuchman, The Proud Tower