But, I digress. I am a history teacher after all and this is for the purpose of reliving what it was like before sensiviews came out. You can always checkout the massive archives of the original vNet, the Internet as it was called, on the library system. Come to me after class, if any of my students are reading this and want to know, and i’ll set you up.

On that note, as you are supposed to do on these, lets talk about something inane and useless. I recently had some time off and plugged in to the new sensiview, Old Old West. Well, what can I say, it was filled with gratuitous violence, some pretty raunchy sex scenes and of course enough drugs and rock and roll to satisfy even the heaviest of rockers.

It starts out plugged into not the lead character but a cohort. Who quickly dies. Of course. I’ve been watching sensiviews since I was a kid and dying is never an easy one. It just over loads your brain with thoughts and feelings of death, even though the cohort doesn’t actually die, he acts it pretty good, which translates through the neural connection right into your cortex and gives you a terrible feeling of death.

The rest of the film was more of the same. Guns, violence, sex, in the old old west. It was very fun to ride a horse and be on a stage coach. They really got the smells right I think. Though there were a few times I spied the work crew behind one of the fabrication buildings, overall the total package, look, feel, was spot on. And honestly, I only saw a modern shirt sleave or something dart behind a building.

It was a good sensiview though. I recommend it. And in honoring it, i’ll be quizing on modes of travel in the 1800’s. Hope you read the blog!

I did once go on the tour up in Canada of the Santa Workshop. They thought about building at the real north pole but went with Canada instead. Not enough convenient stores close by I suppose and putting in a grav train up there would be a pain. The reindeer are really lifelike. The limited AI’s, which some still think are illegal and cruel, are very good. They have programmed them to exactly mimic the nature of reindeer. Well, not exactly. I should say they mimic Santa Claus reindeer. They giggle, fart, laugh, etc etc. Very well done though. What amazes me is how precise that sleigh is. I’ve seen vid’s of it flying around and even threw sky city in Tokyo. I guess there is enough room for it to get onto a park level but wow, that thing is very very precise.

Not really a surprise I suppose. They can land personal air cars on a dime. For those of us that spend a good deal of time in Virtual, the real world can be amazing after all. Sure the bubble yachts are incredible but you can do anything in Virtual. Create your own universe, populate it with limited AI’s (non-sentient), and off you go. Still, I, like many others, do maintain that there are differences in perception between virtual and real. Doctors of course insist there isn’t but I can always tell when I’m in virtual. Sure I can smell, taste, touch, etc etc but my brain knows there’s a difference.

At any rate, just wanted to post about how I saw Santa flying through the Eastern U.S. capital city. He dropped a bag full of gifts at a gathering of children on the Mall. Was actually cute. The kids love it and I tell you, the parents do too. Of course, if you don’t celebrate Christmas, you don’t care. But you still have to admit it’s neat. I love living in this century!

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!

But, to get to the jist of this, my head is killing me. I honestly am debating writing my representitive and telling him to outlaw stim bars. Not really of course, but wow, that stuff can be worse than alcohol. Not that I dislike alcohol. I quite like it in fact.

If you’ve never been to a stim bar, let me fill you in. It’s much like any other type of club you find on the nets, or even the nostalgic ‘real life’ bars that dot the landscape. Tons of people, all in hot bodies, loud music, occasional fights, lots of dancing and even more stim packs. Stims are one, of many, techniques used in virtual space to send signals to the brain to stimulate pleasure centers. Exactly like a happy helmet, just that it’s done through a vNet. And dont’ get me started on happy helmet’s…

At any rate, we danced, partied, and stimmed our way to a nice hangover. Or a stimover if you will. Regardless, it was not so much fun this morning teaching. So, I just wanted to share with all that if you find yourself in a seedy vNet bar and a hot blonde, whose probably not a hot blonde, and she asks you to try a new stim called ‘electrode malfunction’, just say no. I really wish I had.

About 25 years ago, some engineer came up with a brilliant use for an EM shield, translucent metal, artificial gravity fields and a beach. At least that was the model I was on. To whoever that was that created these things, thank you! Here’s my experience on one of these marvels.

So, Allister, my friend at the university, called me up and said, lets go for a ride. I said, ok, I didn’t have any work to do anyway. We met outside and drove over the DC regional space port. We didn’t have time for an Space Elevator, so we commissioned a rocket transport to take us to a station that I hadn’t heard of before. Allister called it the Bubble Station. I thought it was an odd name, it really didn’t look like a bubble. It was an odd design, five type three Bigelow modules stacked horizontally on top of each other. From each junction point there were four long docking collars extending outward for about a mile in seperate directions. Attached to each collar were anywhere from two to a half a dozen, what can only be described as, bubbles. They were, of course, Bubble Yacht’s. For some reason I just had never gotten to see these things. Allister told me that they are exclusively for the ultra rich. There were only around 100 of these things in existance.

How we, two ordinary universities professors, were getting on this thing was simply beyond me. And I didn’t ask once. I didn’t want to spoil the moment with the logistics of how this moment came to be. We docked with the station and made our way to collar 5. The ride on the space car was almost as intense as the whole experience.  We went by three other yachts on our way to ours. They were sights to behold. Each one was roughly 1 acre and each one had totally different interiors. Allister would later tell me that there were other models on differen collars that were much smaller. The acre sized ones here were the biggest on this station. But that someone had once built a ten acre bubble yacht. Incredible! No one ever talks about it so I’m sure it’s hidden away in some corner of the system. A mini-translucent bubble world.

The first we saw had a small forest on it! I couldn’t believe it when I saw it. Something as simple as a forest. There was a nice lodge and a small cottage. I could see birds flying through the trees and even some squirls in the trees. I even spotted a large tree house up in the trees. There didn’t seem to be anyone home but I could only imagine what it would be like to drift through the heavens sitting on that porch.

The second ship had two structures on it. One was large house with a partial roof. If you have your own atmosphere, why do you need a roof after all. The other building was, amazingly, what looked like a farm building. I couldn’t tell how far it went down but it went up nearly to the top of the bubble. Little bit of an eye sore if you ask me but the intention is clear. This bubble was meant to be self sustaining. Some billionare’s idea to detach one day and sail off never to be heard from again most likly.

The third ship was stunning. There was a small island in the center of the ship. Water surrounded. There were a few small row boats and even a three man sail boat on the water. Imagine that, a boat inside a bubble floating through space. I could see a few people sitting on the boats, one of them waved.

We made it the end of collar five, got out of the car and went to the docking ring. A few moments through the interlock chambers and there we were. On a beach. In a bubble. In Space. Wow. This one was just as neat as the others. A small beach, small amount of water to simulate an ocean and a few small cottages lining the shore. It was simply incredible.

The owner of the bubble came out to greet us. Or at least I thought it was the owner, he seemed like he was. He immediatly introduced himself simply as Tom and began to give us a tour. He never asked who we were, he must have already known. Tom walked us along the beach, describing the construction of the ship, how the EM fields work, the translusent metal, the propulsion system built beneath us. It was really incredible to hear about these ships. Aparantly, most of the big ones are our in the system somewhere. A few are even serving as ultra luxury hotels.

It was to my dismay that we weren’t going to go anywhere. The ride on the bubble ship was more of a sitting on the beach and looking at the view of earth below us. Still very neat. What’s even neater is Tom told us that sometimes they’ll suspend the gravity and let you float around a bit. They have to lock down the water so it doesn’t go all over the place and do a few safty procedures but it would be very cool to experience.

We sat on the beach for awhile and headed home. It was a fun day to be sure. As soon as I got home I started this post. I’ll be looking for one of the hotels next. I think I want to plan a vacation to a bubble hotel, I saw that one is currently at the Jupiter system. That would be an amazing view!

After a rough patch getting connected, I may need to get a new rig, I made it to the central hub for DC. Man was it packed. Guess lots of people are visiting. Anyway, I didn’t want to hang around a bunch of tourists so I typed in the address of some old friends and dived in. Now, i’m an old vNet junkie, so I know my way around vSpace pretty well. And being plugged in for so long i’ve met my fair share of hardcore netters and casual visitors alike. This group I was visiting was more in the middle of the road. I didn’t feel like listening to whiners complaining about the vNet loss, move on, there’s lots of networks these days to get plugged in to. And if you can’t find one you like, just create one. Anyway, I don’t want to go down that road too far. Suffice to say, I was hopeing for a mellow evening of casual chat, maybe a little fun and even a few stims, why not right.

Well, when I showed up at my friends, I was thinking this may be a long and boring day. The shack was empty. Not a soul in sight. I was dissappointed and a little surprised. I walked around a bit looking for anyone but after about 10 minutes I got frustrated and said to hell with it and left. And thank goodness I did. I decided to head over to the shootem-ups, shooter games, and play a few rounds. What a blast. The maps were crazy. We fought in an urban setting, jungle, even a cavern. I got shot more often than I shot someone, and they had their pain settings up a bit high, some of those shots hurt, but all in all was a great time.

Afterward I decided to treat myself to a nice long walk on the Titan Feed. Was nice, met a few nice Titans. They are having more and more problems with renegade Cy’s though. Man those guys are just never satisfied. I sat for awhile on a methane beach, watch some neo’s swim for awhile. I don’t know why everyone finds them so disturbing. They’ve been around since the Singularity event nearly 250 years ago, give it up already. But I digress.

I left Titan and decided to hit one of the vClubs. I danced, stimed, played and even got into a fight. This slimeball said I grabed his girls ass and tried to hit me with a destab. Are you kidding? Amateur. I wrapped him in a bubble, sent him to the ceiling and let him bounce around until he had to unplug. Ha! Course, none of that was very legal, so I decided my time was up. I doubt anyone would care but the bouncers were looking at me with concern. Not just anyone throws bubbles around after all.

So, I left the club, ditched vSpace and headed down into the vDen. Best to lay low in the biggest criminal network in the system after all rather than sit around waiting for a sniffer to find you. I doubt they could but you never know. I’ve heard of a few of us that decided to go to work for the man. I could never do that.

I won’t go into details of what I got into in the vDen, probably can’t honestly, would get me busted for sure. Suffice to say, I stayed low, met some friends, waited to see if a sniffer was on me, there wasn’t, and unpluged. All in all was a great time. I know a lot of my fellow netters think vSpace is for tourists, wannabe’s and the like, but I kinda like it. It is largest network out there and really, at the end of the day, it’s about the people.