But patina is incredibly hard to fake. Which is why so much Steampunk stuff looks like Hallmark have started a new line of decorations called Christmas With A League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. You only get steps to look like this by having thousands of people tramp up and down them every day. I bet patina is something like Rudy Rucker's Gnarliness, something very complex generated from simple rules, but still so complex that the only way to simulate it is to completely reproduce it. You can only compute the gnarls of a tree with another tree. So the only convincing way to get yourself twenty years of patina is to hang around for twenty years. (Greebling will only get you so far.) * * * Flickr, for instance, has the rub of patina about it. Flickr's full of people and they show you evidence of those people all the time. It feels worn into place by millions of clicks rather than imposed from above by a capricious design god. And it shows you your own usage, it moulds itself to you, so... - × × ×

о, у меня есть иллюстрация, сейчас покажу - Michael Bravo

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/142... (или если в контексте - http://www.flickr.com/photos... ) - это перила моста Rialto в Венеции - Michael Bravo