This blog does have a lot of stuff that doesn’t appear elsewhere, but my Patreon also has a lot of stuff, and I’ve really been post-posting on my YouTube.
I make a lot of videos of me typing stuff.
Blog posts. Fiction. Commentaries. Just whatever I usually type, a lot of which I keep to myself. But now I’m old and I’m tired and I guess every human has the desire to be known after they’re gone.
I’m honestly scared those people are going to kill us all. Or it will be like "V for Vendetta" where she was in her mid-to-late twenties but she had never known a world that was different than the bleakness she lived in.
She had no clue or concept that she was living in a cage. Fed just enough knowledge to be kept alive, like a parrot getting it’s water and food replaced.
A parrot loves fruit and nuts and all kinds of different food.
Yet some people just feed them birdseed.
They love water and being clean.
Yet people have them living in metal cages lined with newspaper. Maybe some wood shavings if they’re lucky. Having their cages cleaned once a week.
And he was like the old bird luring away the younger bird and showing it a memory of what life is supposed to be. And his methods were brutal and cruel, but she was able to survive and later is allowed to be free.
And she learned about happiness from memories that got left behind. Diaries and books and words and pictures and videos and loud statements of "I AM ALIVE!"
The joyous life, the seeping fear, the cruel handling, the unfair death. All because they loved each other. Because they wanted to be together.
It’s a painful watch if there’s no final vindication had. The idea that humanity just continues living forward into a cyberpunk future that techbros are masturbating about. Because they all fantasize about being "Diamond Jack," standing at the head of the world, unbreakable, boundless, ALPHA breeder male.
And the only way they can see themselves as being top-dogs of the world are if everyone else is subjugated.
Your super cool castle in the sky ala "Altered Carbon," with your mind kept alive for millennia inside a storage device that can be loaded into different bodies, doesn’t mean much if other people aren’t jealous of all that you have. That they can’t live as long as you with as much money and stuff as you.
I still remember a 1980s/1990s science fiction novel I read when I was young. It was a battered old paperback, but the words jumped off the page and burrowed their way into my brain.
The main character is a hit man. He’s hired to make a kill, so he goes to the body rental place and he rents a body to use for the assassination. But then when he comes back, he finds out that the shopkeeper rented out his body to some uninvolved nobody guy. Like, someone forgot to put a "LEAVE THIS ONE HERE" tag on his body.
And for the assassination, he rented a beat up body. A not ugly but not good looking body that’s a bit overweight and has funny tastebuds kind of body.
Meanwhile his real body is a top 100%. The nobody guy splurged all his savings to rent a top-class body for like a week.
So the assassin puts on the nobody’s body and chases down his body to get it back. Shows up in time to keep the nobody from getting killed because the assassin is Very Famous in certain circles. He spends a lot of time wearing costumes to hide his real face.
And I don’t remember the rest of the story, but that scenario has always stuck in my head.
The idea that someone else could just walk away with your body.
I read the Wild Cards series when I was young too. Blaise being buttfucked by that old pedophile to gain a bodysnatching power… I think he ended up killing the guy once everyone in his gang had been "given" the power to bodysnatch? I remember the guy ends up getting killed by someone. And after that no more bodysnatchers can be made.
I have to wonder if that guy really had to buttfuck people to give them the ability to bodyswap. What if the whole time he could have done it with a handshake?
Like, a lot of the Wild Cards books were about characters that can only use their powers in a certain way because they have mental hang ups that keep them from freely using their abilities.
Mark having to use his different chemical mixes to transform into his other personalities. BUT one of the guys he hangs out with casually dropped the info that at some point like 20 years ago when they were hanging out, Mark got really high and transformed into some guy that The Sleeper had never seen before and was never seen since. And that made Mark start wondering about his powers in a way he never had before.
I think I remember in the first book, Mark was just a straight-edge chemistry nerd that tried LSD for the first time. And he transformed for the first time. And after that he became a hardcore long-term drug user because he can make different chemical combinations that will turn him into different superpowered people.
Mark’s ex-wife accidentally burning her hand, and Mark turning into Jack Flash who is able to draw the heat out of new burns and heal the skin. And "Do you drink coffee? Then you use drugs." Those are core memories for me.
So I’ve seen the horror of bodyswap scenarios.
Rich people don’t think they will have body dysmorphia when they switch to completely different bodies. And so they don’t think people being terrified of that prospect are worth caring about.
Harper Kingsley
Ko-fi: HarperWCK
Paypal: HarperKingsley
"I’m so brave and strong and AMAZING that there’s no way it will faze me to see a strange face in the mirror every day. To touch a different cock attached to my body. To have foods not taste the way they’re supposed to, because everybody’s tastebuds are different."–Like, as people get older they begin craving the flavors of their youth. So imagine never being able to taste something you really want ever again because your body doesn’t possess the tastebuds that gave you that elusive flavor sense?
You will always wish for something you will never have again.
You will crave something with no way to sooth that wanting.
And I don’t know why that’s a future rich people want.
Where you will think about things from your past, and the nostalgia-filter will make it seem so amazing and good, as though happiness is in touching distance, as long as you can experience that whatever again.
The taste of pumpkin pie. The refreshing sour sweetness of lemon bars. The way ice cream tastes when you eat it right out of the container in the middle of the night. Spicy chicken wings with that pervasive vinegary scent. The soup you’d eat when you were a child sick home from school with a cold.
Sometimes I get a craving for Vienna Sausages. Those super processed skinless sausages that mush in your mouth. I’ll think of the remembered flavor of them, and I’ll think that I want them. But then when I’ll buy a can, it’s like "Oh yeah. These are not as good as I remember." And every few years I’ll forget and start craving them again.
Because I ate them at some point in my childhood and my brain associated that flavor profile with "happiness."
"Vienna Sausages = tasty" is a core memory for me. And it’s really hard to rewrite mental childhood associations because that stuff is firmly entrenched. It’s the basis on which the whole of a person’s mind is built upon.
So yeah. I don’t think bodyswapping is going to go as well as rich people think it will. And I don’t think the world has to be destroyed so that a cyberpunk future can happen.
Like, you can create a grungy grimy city experience if you have enough money. People would probably like to go there and have a lot of fun living a cyberpunk lifestyle. As long as they could go home afterward, they’d probably have a great time.
But forcing everyone to really live that kind of pre-apocalyptic dystopian lifestyle just so you can be the fanciest dressed at the party?
We are not your playthings. We are human beings.
We can pick locks.
~Harper Kingsley
https://paypal.me/harperkingsley.
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https://harperkingsley.bsky.social.
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