Happy Thanksgiving to all Sentients!

I’ve been absent from here for awhile this month. Getting ready for finals and taking some time off for Thanksgiving. Today I feasted with family and friends on brined turkey, sausage stuffing and sweet potatoes. And all of us were non-virtual! That alone is an amazing feat.  And as an even more unique treat, we all pitched in and purchased a real turkey. Not some grown meat for us this year, no sir. And it was quite tasty, no wonder those thing are so expensive. Though in truth, it’s really all just in our heads. They have that grown stuff down to a science, can’t tell the difference. And please don’t flame me for that one! You have to admit it’s the same taste! Though that is just the taste. Grown stuff doesn’t have bones. Nothing like gnawing on a turkey bone. And with modern genetics leading the way, we each had our own.  Everything else was grown in a city farm. Every year we go to the one in Bethesda MD. Cranberry bogs are on the first floor, potatoes on the 2nd, sweet potatoes on the third. They have roses and other flowers on the top floor, we picked a lovely bouquet. It’s so nice being able to pick your own fresh vegetables and fruit, I so love having as many city farms as we do here. There is one that I haven’t visited yet, way out in Sterling, that specializes in coffee. Can you imagine? An entire farm devoted to coffee. I heard it is twenty stories. Each floor exposes the beans to different levels of UV and you get some amazing tastes. I’ve never been but I’ve bought just about every flavor at the local mart.

Of course, prior to eating we all enjoyed some football. It’s amazing that this sport is still on, well that it came back really. It, like many professional sport leagues, were canceled shortly after the Singularity event. Society couldn’t very well maintain such luxuries when it was breaking apart. But, and I must say thankfully, it was reformed when things settled down. Though there are some pretty stringent rules in place. Not all Sentients are created equal after all, and as such, not all get to play. Absolutely no ‘Altered’ persons, those not belonging to any Sentient race, are allowed to play. They are just too unpredictable, and quite frankly, a bit to odd. It’s one thing to get a mood tattoo or even some controllable ink, even some body sculpting, but there are some out there that for some reason think it’s good to have oddly placed extra limbs. Weird.

I’ve done some reading about the NFL back in the day and the trouble with steroids and performance enhancing drugs. Can you imagine if they had to deal with the 24th century? There’s people out there that have put in brand new muscles to the human body, the original body. Avians and Aquatics, for instance, have all kinds of new muscles. Originals, as we are often called, have the same amount of muscles as did those that came before us.

But, not to get into a Sentient comparison, back to the NFL. Did you know that it was named the same thing back then? Now of course there isn’t one nation in America anymore, and the Mids don’t participate in the NFL, or anything really, they just like to start wars every few decades, but we still call it the National Football League. I think it was kept just out of nostalgia. People love their traditions and history. Football itself never really died, even the NFL tried to stay around during the turmoil of the Eugenics wars, Cyborg uprisings, Outer system wars, and World War’s III and IV, not to mention the AI war, but that was a special situation. It wasn’t successful of course and succumbed to the tumultuous times of the last three hundred years. But, eventually, it came back and we are now able to enjoy it’s splendor.

Back to who gets to play. Original humans can, well those that qualify with a less than 5% augmentation percentage. AI’s can too in a an appropriate body, nothing more than standard strength models. Cy’s are prohibited, and frankly the amount that are in normal space are so low and so monitored that they won’t bother. The NFL actually tried to go full virtual a few years after they re-established the league but there was a major backlash from it. I’ve always been surprised by the backlash from some virtual events. It’s one thing to show a real event in a virtual bar, but people just don’t like the idea of a real event being done in virtual. So strange. I’ll have to do some research on that one of these days, see what the draw away is. At any rate, all NFL games are live, in physical stadiums with thousands of screaming fans, almost like it was 300 years ago. Amazing!

Family is calling to have dessert and watch the final game. Eagles vs Cardinals tonight, can’t wait. Enjoy everyone!