He beams. "I'm pretty much done with my laps too."

"Arcball?" she asks, heading showerward.

"When I'm bored, but I'm usually more interested in the—other stuff, politics and all that, particularly foreign policy."

"Neat. I can't overdo it but it's fun."

"Overdo it?"

"Make it too high a proportion of the blog."

"Why not?"

"Less clearly in-caste."

"—oh. Right. Is it, ah, exactly twenty percent of the website?"

"The rules are unclear about this kind of income - potential interpretations range from 'number of posts' through 'number of words' through 'percentage of visitor time' through 'degree of influence over donations and prediction market activity', so I mostly just have to make sure that nobody's out to get me and if any judge looked at the blog it'd just look like an arcball blog and not something else."

"...wow that sounds kinda really annoying."

"Yes."

"Is there no way to ask hypothetically what exactly would count? Although I guess who would you even ask—"

"I could write judges' offices but they'd still have individual discretion if it ever came up and that looks like I'm deliberately trying to game the system."

"Hmm, and I don't suppose a hypothetical—like, not mentioning your website at all—but then again who else is even doing that, it's just you." There's a fair amount of admiration in his voice.

"There are other statistics-heavy grey-run websites."

"Sure, but most of them are about arcball."

"I picked arcball because most of them are about other sports, but I take your point."

Grin. "What made you pick that? Most greys pick—well, greyer stuff."

"Well, I'm half orange, there's that."

"Now it makes complete sense," he says, still grinning. "I'm half orange too but ended up in the other ambiguously grey slash orange profession."

"See, when people only know I'm half orange they say 'oh, you must teach two year olds to swim'."

"Perhaps I'm a bit less caste-deterministic than most people. And publishing statistics about various international economic indexes doesn't strike me as particularly orange."

"It's not. If I'd been born in that one test city I wouldn't do this, though, I'd be in med school."

"I honestly have no idea what I'd have done in that one test city, med school would've probably been near the top of the list but I think making such a list would just make me feel sad."