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I dreamt I was in the Matrix.

Maybe I was an update patch?

It started with my dream self thinking that I wanted to watch the newest Matrix movie, which I haven’t seen yet. And the movie started… then I was in it.

There was a desert and any people that appeared were hungry and thirsty. Desperate to survive.

And there was a desk in front of a ruined shack, with inky blackness welling out from beneath it. Tempting and dangerous, an apple sat on top of the desk as a lure to the unwary and the weak of will.

The dream cut to a scene on what seemed to be a skyscraper under construction. It was the stronghold of a group of powerful people that kind of dressed like goths in the Mad Max world. So, you know.

And Dumbledore and Snape and a couple of their followers were there to see those powerful people. They were looking for their savior, their chosen one, but they were denied in a mocking manner.

With a single shove, Snape was thrown through a window and Dumbledore and his followers apparated away.

Meanwhile, Neo was back in the Matrix as a little girl. At some point, she changed to become adult Keanu.

And back at the desk, the ripe red apple gleamed temptingly, and a starving wanderer from the desert reached out to take it, only to be consumed by the inky darkness. She was pulled, screaming, underneath the desk.

Trying to remember the dream, it seems somewhat nonsensical. But while I was sleeping, it seemed to play in linear order. Everything made sense, and now, my waking mind struggles to explain the things that I saw. Because that’s the power of dreams: It was all visual, arrayed in ways that mere words cannot explain.

Color and darkness. The sense of looming threat and burgeoning hope. The thoughts I had in the moment that explained things I glimpsed without really seeing.

I woke up, and I didn’t want to wake up because I wanted to know what was going to happen next. I wanted to see the story through to the end, but I couldn’t, even though my mind tells me things I didn’t have a chance to dream.

In my dream, there was something wrong in the Matrix. All these different stories and worlds were converging, and that’s why an update patch? was needed to fix things.

Everyone was waiting for a savior, and there was disappointment that the ones they had weren’t the ones they expected to see. Not realizing that appearances mean nothing, it’s what’s inside that matters.

And now? I have to look up how I can watch the new Matrix movie because I’m kind of curious what it’s about. Plus, it’s always nice to watch Keanu in a movie.

~Harper Kingsley
https://www.harperkingsley.net/blog
https://twitter.com/harperkingsley0
https://paypal.me/harperkingsley
https://kimichee.com.
https://patreon.com/harperkingsley.
https://ko-fi.com/harperwck.
https://amazon.com/shop/harperkingsley0.

P.S. Was I the inky blackness? The trap made to consume the unwary? To pull them into the depth of shadows where anything can be, and it’s only supposition that it was death inside and not the start of something new.

Dreams are weird.

I always feel such a sense of disgust for the "we should leave Earth, it’s the only hope for humanity"-style of propaganda movies and TV shows.

"We’ll terraform and colonize another planet!"–My dudes: You can’t even help keep Earth habitable, and it’s the planet we are adapted to live on.

Or the whole "The Earth is going to become a barren wasteland… We must create biodomes on other planets or moons, and we must take everything we need with us when we leave Earth" idea. Which is basically colonizer talk for "We need to rip out all the resources and leave Earth a desolate hull so that we, the rich, can live in miserable hovels on non-habitable planets. Its the only hope for humanity!" Which kind of handwaves the 8 billion people and all the animals that are going to DIE as a result.

I look at the kinds of people gazing up at the stars as the future for everything, and that who completely believe they will someday live as royalty on some other planet, and I am disgusted.

Not because they dare to dream. But that they see the cost of their dream as being the lives and wellbeing of everyone and everything else on this planet… and they shrug it off as a minor inconvenience. As a bit of nothing to be paid as long as they get where they want to go.

Meanwhile, Earth might very well be the only true home that humanity ever has.

We evolved on Earth. We evolved to survive in Earth-like conditions, and the likelihood of finding everything we need somewhere else is next to nil.

There is a reason there doesn’t seem to be large life out there on other worlds. There’s a reason we don’t gaze out and see the flickering lights of other civilizations reflecting back at us.

Because if they exist, they are so far away that we will never meet them as the universe continues to expand outward and away.

Because the lucky chances that all added up together to create a planet with all the requirements for life to evolve were so astronomical that to think they would be replicated on a planet close enough for us to ever reach… is fantasy.

We may not be alone in the universe. But we are remarkably lucky to have a planet that can maintain life. We are the blessed ones.

So to watch and listen to all those people talking about pissing everything we have away for the DREAM of being a God-Emperor-KING of some colony out in space… It’s grotesque.

Because you can dream of living on a Martian colony. You can make up the plans for biodomes on the moon, or space stations circling high above the Earth. WITHOUT destroying everything we already have.

You don’t have to take away from billions of other living people and the countless generations to follow. You don’t have to cause the extinction of all other life on the planet. Simply to imagine yourself as being able to have SOMETHING else.

We are on the cusp of a future that can be gloriously bright or a dismal despair. We passed the point of no return when we refused to stop polluting and caused the melting of essential ice. But that doesn’t mean the fight should end.

It means we must fight HARDER to reverse the damages humanity has caused. We must strive further and reach farther to make things better. To fix what was done in the past and prevent the harms of the future.

We have been given guardianship of a planet that provides EVERYTHING we need to live and thrive. And while others have abused and desecrated that great trust… Those of us that wish to see the future must raise our voices, change our actions, and save what is to protect what will be.

This Earth might be all we ever have. It will definitely be all that most of us will know.

Because while the wealthy dream of rocket ships to other planets where they will rule over a slave-class of workers… the rest of us will be left behind to die in the wreckage they have made.

And that disgusts me.

~Harper Kingsley
https://www.harperkingsley.net/blog
https://twitter.com/harperkingsley0
https://paypal.me/harperkingsley
https://kimichee.com.
https://patreon.com/harperkingsley.
https://ko-fi.com/harperwck.
https://amazon.com/shop/harperkingsley0.

I saw like a NowThis video of a solar panel setup in, I think, California, that is able to filter fresh water out of fouled water.

The solar panels absorb the sunlight and make energy enough to power a whole city, and as a part of that they create a great deal of heat. Using that heat, they’re able to pump in fouled water and condense it into clean water.

With a setup in someplace sunny and hot like Arizona or countries like Africa or India… communities will be able to provide electricity AND drinking water.

I’m not sure how much a setup would take to build, but it’s one of those things where billionaires wasting their money on stupid shit could ACTUALLY be helping both the human race and animals.

I was seeing the good works that the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust (https://sheldrickwildlifetrust.org) is doing in Kenya. They protect the animals from poachers, and rescue like elephants and warthogs and other animals from the terrible drought conditions that are leaving the infants orphaned.

Every day they go out to their many manmade watering holes and they fill them up with life-giving water. They provide bales of lucerne (alfalfa) to feed the different animals that are starving in the untenable conditions. They are doing AMAZING work funded by the donations of people that care about saving animals.

If they had access to fresh water and electricity, they could only do more good. Because they are good people.

Meanwhile, there are a few people with near limitless resources that are SQUANDERING what they have on pure selfishness. Because they lack the imagination and self-awareness to picture themselves doing anything good.

They dream of boarding rocket ships and flying off into the stars. To live as kings on other planets in the same way that they’ve lived as kings on Earth.

It is a lack within themselves. An emptiness in their own souls. Because while they see themselves as "great men," they are actually the smallest kind of people. One-dimensional cutouts that dream they are greater than they actually are, while completely empty of anything of worth.

They are small people in a big world, and they don’t even know it. A speck on a grain of sand, washed away by time, on an Earth that will continue to move on without them.

They are nothing. And they will always be nothing. Because their dreams are as shallow and empty as they are.

“Tucker & Dale vs Evil” is on Tubi and OMG… It’s hilariously horrifying.

A group of college kids go camping in the woods. On the way, they spot Tucker and Dale in the local shop. And of course, based on appearance, they think the two are a couple of spooky hillbillies.

Meanwhile, the two are actually on their way to the cabin Tucker has recently bought with plans to fix the place up. And being such good natured guys, they don’t freak out at the oddities they find in the cabin. They’re just really excited about their awesome new vacation home.

But things take a turn for the worse when they witness one of the college girls, Allison, taking a tumble off the rocks into the lake. They rescue her and take her back to their cabin.

And of course, her friends make the “logical” assumption that they’re murderous hillbillies. Especially when they find the message Dale carves into a log for them: “We got ur friend.”

What follows is a tragicomic romp through the slasher movie genre as the college students fumble their way to their own deaths.

REFERENCE TWEET: https://twitter.com/HarperKingsley0/status/1578831231902703616

The only famous female historical figures mentioned in cartoons during the 80s/90s growing up was like Marie Curie. As a result, I have not remembered the names of any female inventors/creatives in the same way that like Ben Franklin has hung around.

Rather than changing the history of real historical people…

I wish creatives would focus on shining the light on lesser known historical figures and telling real stories.

I want to know real history. So it sucks that people watched "300" with tiny kids because "it’s historical"

I mean, good on you for being able to track down all that real historical stuff and be able to add your parts and create an amazing masterpiece of sight and sound. All claps to you.

But did you have to keep the name of the real historical figure you’re IRL effecting the memory of?

Sorry I’m off-topic… But I was disheartened by the "Bohemian Rhapsody"; shocked to find out the bad crew member on "Titanic" was actually a HERO; disgusted by what they’ve attempted to do to poor Marilyn; and skeptical that they let those guys from Compton rewrite history 🙄

I miss the days when someone would write their completely epic fanfic… Then file off the real names and turn their largely original interpretations into fully original characters set in beautiful historical settings in an OBVIOUSLY fantasy world.

Like, AU is fantasy.

Maybe I’m off-base, but yeah. I see AU as fantasy, while high-fantasy is swords and sorcery, and urban fantasy is magic and all that jazz in a modernish-world, likely in a city-setting.

⚡️

Sudden realization of self: I remember a time when genres were easier to find.

That’s like a modern variation of "When I was your age, I had to walk 10 miles to get to school everyday."

And I know people roll their eyes at the saying, but think about it: There was a time people were so spread out there was only one school and kids WALKED 10 miles to get there.

Like even now, all the historical shows and movies are from the perspective of rich people.

A vast FEAST of historical moments are being wiped from our collective consciousness because the only people able to read and write at the time were rich people. They were definitely the people with the most free time to enjoy reading for entertainment. (And they wouldn’t have to worry as much about the cost of lantern oil.)

The classics were written for rich people.

Like, if it was you back then, what would you write about:

• The horribleness of your hard life of poverty with all of its many indignities and a definite "eat the rich"-vibe?
• A story of love and romance in high society featuring beautiful people having beautiful people problems?

We all live on coin. And back in the day, there 100% WERE NOT any programs to feed the poor. Like, maybe you could get some food from some nuns or some rich people making penance or whatever, but otherwise they’d scoop up your body like the Little Matchstick Girl.

You’d maybe be a sad story in the newspaper, a little blurb some rich dude would puff his pipe past while looking for news he actually cared about.

Kind of like now, but with less of a social media presence left behind and probably no policing at all.

Like, it is ridiculous to find out how recent the "invention" of detective work is. Forensics. Basic evidence gathering.

Like, dudes today purposefully bungle their evidence gathering, but back in the day THEY SIMPLY DIDN’T KNOW.

They would WANT to solve a crime but fail. (Would be haunted by the memory of the terrible things they had seen and the murders they failed to solve. That was the pathos of the sad retired cop back in the day. Not having been in a violent gang and now angry at the way things have changed, but someone that tried so hard but simply didn’t know how to catch the person ruining so many lives (murder is bad, but there are other things that can ruin a family, including a serial philanderer leaving a string of pregnant people behind him) with such wild abandon.)

It was a time before instant communication.

You would pay some person to deliver a letter for you… and that person might just take your coin and run off. (DRABBLE: The letter had been so hard to write. Not just putting pen to page, but being able to find the money to buy the paper and envelope. Everything was so expensive. And then had come the days of work to save up enough to pay Old Man Hughes to deliver the letter. It had hurt so terribly bad when Mama had never responded. He longed to see her face once again, to hear her laugh. To know that she was still healthy and hale, and not more worn down than she had ever been.)

And if something happened to you your family would never know where you ended up, just that you were going to somewhere and never got there.

Like, with rich people, they had their manor houses and they’d keep their manor houses unless something "dramatic" happened. Otherwise, even if they weren’t currently staying at the manor, there would be a groundskeeper or someone to send word to family that you had made it there. And there would be much rejoicing and your harrying experience would become a tale of adventure to your laughing family and friends.

Meanwhile, poor people might be forced to move around. Hopefully to a better life, but maybe to the same kind of life somewhere else. Maybe their village would fail and the buildings would be left abandoned to the elements. Or maybe there would only be a single old neighbor left behind that only knows "the people that were there moved away about 5 years back. The new family moved in a week later."

There are real tragic stories of people that lost their family and never found them. How amazing to reunite them with their loved ones historically after death?

So why don’t we ever see the stories of a young person separated from their family, making it home… to an empty house?

There are so many historical people that lost their families yet had to continue living. And not all of them lost their family members to death.

How cool to compare the DNA of real historical figures to find out if they shared relatives?

Though I guess it would suck to think your whole life that you were directly related to a famous historical figure… then they run your DNA and find out that somewhere in your direct family line someone lied.

Your whole identity would be rattled. Your sense of self would change.

~Harper Kingsley
https://www.harperkingsley.net/blog
https://twitter.com/harperkingsley0
https://paypal.me/harperkingsley
https://kimichee.com.
https://patreon.com/harperkingsley.
https://ko-fi.com/harperwck.
https://amazon.com/shop/harperkingsley0.