After Grid

If you left me in yesterday once, you’ll leave me there again. I wasn’t your cup of tea the first time around, I can’t imagine why you would think I would be that stupid to believe you would somehow forget what you like no matter the years the experience or maturity. I accepted what I didn’t know about you the first time around and used that to explain why you didn’t love me. Why come back to kill me now? Why shed light on the one dark mystery that actually served me well during those miserable, awkward teenage years. Do you not understand that for one brief moment I was pretty. I was skinny. I was loved. You left me because you were on drugs. You left me because your hormones were out of control and you got a girl in trouble. You left me because you didn’t know me, you didn’t know how incredible I actually was and I left myself there as well; And I was crumbled in a pathetic heap on the inside, but I was perfect, pristine and pretty by all reflective accounts on the outside. ...

There is nothing easy about death and least of all is its definition. Death is defined as the cessation of all biological functions that sustain a living organism. A legal death and its definition may at times, be something different than what medical science has to offer. Brain death, and the ability to sufficiently show the total cessation of brain activity can get a bit murky when we are talking about a person’s consciousness. In particular, when and where a person’s consciousness ceases to exist according to what may show on a scan, as in the case of determining a drowning victim who has been resuscitated, or a person whose heart has stopped due to extreme weather, say in the case of an avalanche victim. By medical and legal terms, these people may very well have been “dead” or may have shown a legal sufficient degree of systemic brain activity that the medical community would consider along with the lack of biological vital signs, brain dead. Whether or not that person’s consc...

old  crumpled,  gathered Love notes I half see being swept up swirling like discarded leaves scraping the pavement down into shadows and hollows through meadows and puddles and murky sewers faded little things line the afternoon lawn in piles of the forgotten You never saw me leave but then, you never saw me at all I can see the day behind me the last fingers of light stretch now across the street and into the corners of an afternoon stroking the piles of nothing fingers through a lovers hair searching for acceptance I feel a faint draft and close the window

There is a real avatar named S0phie Sautereau in the virtual world called Second Life. Her profile picture, picks, and groups are all still the same as she left them back in April of 2011 and they will never be updated. They will never change, and unless someone has a mind or a legal obligation at Linden Lab, they will remain there for as long as Second life is online and chooses not to delete them from their servers. S0phie Sautereau is an avatar and the person who created and operated that avatar is no longer among the living in this world. From the Profile of S0phie Sautereau Second Life “And a rainy day often starts like “It’s a fuzzy bunny slipper kind of day...” just posing it on a couch slurping coffee together, hearing a frequent wad of gum get destroyed between the molars. Yep and the next thing you know, Paris is raided by the Pretty Pink Pony Posse consisting of Muppet slipper-wearin Jack Daniels-chuggin hiccup-laughin tear-streamin sometimes-cross-dressin fly-swa...

In the early days of Henry Markram’s Blue Brain project research and later the VR industry, people dreamed of one day being able to emulate or record their consciousness and upload it into an avatar. Bio hacks and scientists alike were for the first time perhaps, going to great lengths vying for a strong foothold in what could only be described as a weird combination of Frankenstein singularity and organic biogenetics. All the eyes that had previously been on the neuroscientists in Sweeden were darting back and forth between Virtual Reality headsets and Markram’s research progress waiting for the peanut butter and chocolate to finally meet in a delicious prepacked cup of perfected product. It was not unheard of for a group of hacks to be at the same sort of backroom bio hack party with accredited professors, neuroscientist’s and pharmaceutical administrators morbidly testing the waters and boundaries of using humans as lab rats. A biohacker is any person that combines biolo...

In the early days of the Internet, relatively few people were using the web for anything more than creating their own websites or talking in Newsgroups. Search engines were in their infancy and engines such as Open Text, Info Seek or Magellan had nowhere near the algorithmic capabilities that Google or Bing possesses today. Beatrice Fontaine was never the type of person that stood out, there was no real label for her and she just didn’t fit in anywhere. In grade school, she had problems with reading, following authority and was chastise countless times for her incessant daydreaming. In high school, she managed a B average while never actually participating in any extracurricular activities much less cracking open a book. Sports didn’t appeal to her, even though she had an athletic body. Boys seemed to be hit or miss, with the occasional “sort of” steady, that would always seem to break up with her for the prettier, blonder, and louder type. Even the charm of recreational drugs th...

The natural order of things for a pessimist and sometimes a realist is bad to worse. It's a fairly straightforward formula that is generally well accepted by most adults as close to being the "normal" progression of events when dealing with health issues, insurance companies and generally anything to do with local government, the public school system and your parents. For some strange reason and although there is absolutely no concrete evidence to support this theory, we tend to believe that Death should be put into that same school of negative, sort of concrete sequential thought. We, for the most part, are born, surrounded by, (if we are fortunate enough), a loving supportive family or facsimile thereof. We tend to follow a sort of tried and true recipe of going to school, subscribing to some form of spiritual guidance via organized religion, we later join the workforce, get married, have children of our own and so on. At some point in our fifties or sixties is when we...