“More waking than reality”…

January 17, 2013 by osteoderm | 3 comments

Today I learned that my brother Sasha died alone, cold, and crazy, head-down in a muddy hole. Most of his family are only now learning of this, months after his body was found and identified. And while there’s no “good” way to hear this news, I can’t help but feel that this was an especially poor way to find out: by a fluke, an accident, via the friend of a friend of a friend.

The last letter I had from him was tagged: “What you can do to help me.“, and came to me as follows:

The care Bears “get” thier powers, derive really, from the
words “You can honor yourself into disgrace”.
I dreamt in Fullerton CA about a diner, I was a much
older man. More waking than realiity, I was aware that I would have to wake into a younger body.
I was stabbed and bled to death until I woke.
I am now host to a demon, or a man I knew named
Abraham, that feeds like a demon for lust.
He claws with his fingers on my testcals, jams his
fingernails down my uretha, shoves his fingers in my rectum, once his whole hand.
He controls my erections day and night for increments
lasting longer than 30 minutes sometimes. I have self-recipricated once(I’m always trying to fight physcologically for pain relief, mostly for redemtiom).
It’s turned me into a very acute rascist, not a bigot,
-more than ever it is a fight to stay human.-
Face value will create the appropriate proper glad
to dispel this entity, I know it.
Yuri, I have had this curse unknowingly for more than
just a few years.
Contact the Tyra show. Tell them I am real, they do not
want to believe what I write because of how I’ve survived, a man who seeks insinuation.
I DO NOT SELF-RUE.
P.s.
I smelled this instance before and I anchored a lawsuit
in case of neglegence.Please follow my directions to the letter. Sasha.

 

What could I have done to help him? Even before he asked it of me, I knew in my heart that he was lost to us, and yet, my failure to seek him, find him, and help him has remained one of the few deep and powerful regrets of my adult life.

In the end, who to blame? Nobody. Still, the truth was held from us: my brother has died, alone, cold, and crazy, head-down in a muddy hole. It’s going to take me awhile to get my head wrapped around this one…

 

Forewarned Is Forearmed

October 12, 2011 by osteoderm | No comments

Have you ever left your car lights on, or noticed when someone else has? Just last week, I left my van lights outside the coffee-shop one morning, and was grateful that someone passing by both noticed and popped in to let me know. Likewise, I appreciate it when people remind me of the keys I might have left on the counter, or of the dropped item as I pass by. In turn, I try to do a good turn myself when the opportunity arises; plugging an expired meter from time to time, holding open a door, letting people into traffic, etc.

Lately, I’ve added another “act of kindness”, although it might ruffle some feathers. When I find open accounts on unsecured wireless networks, I login and leave a message to let the account-holder know that they really ought to be more careful. The most pointed example of this has got to be Facebook; I simply assume the open account, and change the holder’s status to something like: “(Name Here) has just realized how potentially dangerous it is to surf on an unsecured wireless account.”.

I don’t dig further. I record nothing, and if anything, do my best to avoid actually knowing who the account holder is. That’s none of my business. If I saw a car driving down the door with their gas-cap unscrewed and flapping in the wind, I’d signal them and point their attention to it, not wait for them to pull over and then siphon their gas.

Maybe a few of my readers are still hung up on the whole technical aspect of how this works. In this modern networked world, if you don’t know what a packet sniffer is or how it works, it’s just willful ignorance. Suffice it to say that if you are connected to an unsecured wireless network without engaging some other specific encryption and/or security protocols, then anyone within typical WiFi range, using pretty much any other wireless device (laptops, tablets, phones, and some portable game consoles) can have basically unrestricted access to whatever you are sending/receiving. Yes, that’s perhaps an oversimplified explanation, but it’s basically correct, if not technically robust.

It’s not my intent to be mocking, harsh, or harmful; I just want to make people a little more aware of the privacy they are freely (if unknowingly) giving up.

Love It Or Leave It: STFU About Facebook

September 23, 2011 by osteoderm | No comments

Another Facebook redesign, and another wave of hysteria. Good grief. The pattern has become too frequent, to predictable, and altogether too insignificant.

First, if it really sucks so bad, if it really harms your life, if you’re really afraid they’ll change the profit model and “force you to pay”, then just leave. Get out. Take off. I don’t know of any friends on Facebook who have actually voted with their feet on this one and actually left. Well, honestly, maybe I do, and just didn’t notice them leave; I don’t miss them on Facebook, and apparently they don’t miss me, at least enough to drop me an email (yes, email, that loathsome snailmail of the FB generation).

Secondly, this is the first redesign that actually seems focused on improving privacy and the control thereof. Personally, I’ve had all my FB settings on “Friends Only” since it first became an option, several iterations ago, and as such, this newest “upgrade” really changes very little for me. If anything, I do believe things are improved a little, in that I can now (partly) defeat the “smart feed” and actively pull more content from people I want to see more from.

Thirdly, these “services” are really products, bought and sold in a marketplace. You’re dumping almost everything about your life into private servers owned by private companies driven by strong private financial gain. Worried about paying for Facebook? Google? Hotmail? These companies are already profiting by mining your personal information. In return, they are offering you a “free” service, which you are under no obligation to make use of. Is this nefarious? Not at all. When Google reads my email in exchange for excellent “free” webmail service, I consider that a fair trade.

Lastly, and most importantly, you cannot lose what you have not got, and in this case the lacking item is an expectation of privacy in a glaringly public place. No, I’ll correct that: in a glaringly private space, albeit owned by someone else. Right now, someone somewhere is sitting at their laptop, on an unsecured and/or public wireless network, uploading some scathing and virulent critique of Facebook’s privacy abuses.

Those of you readers who plainly perceive the irony at play understand all too well, while those of you who don’t probably never will.

The Bacon of Vegetarianism

September 1, 2011 by osteoderm | 5 comments

It is a long-standing and well-accepted fact of life that everything is made better by bacon. Well, this at least holds true for foodstuffs, and for folks who consume bacon. Obviously, if you eat meat, and furthermore eat pork, then it is not entirely unreasonable to state that you are a fool for anything wrapped, infused, or otherwise doped with that sweet sweet salty sweet pig candy, bacon.

Still, there are those, even amongst my closest friends, who do not eat bacon. This leads me to ask: is there a vegetarian equivalent to bacon? Now let’s be very clear here: I’m not talking about veggie bacon, soy bacon crumbles, or other fakery. Real bacon is real bacon, and nothing else is close. No, what I’m after is the foodstuff that, for the vegetarian, has that same magical power to completely transform any/all other (vegetarian) foods to otherworldly greatness, in much the same manner as bacon is able to do for those of us with less herbivorian instincts.

Is there such a substance? An ingredient? Some magical vegetarian condiment with powers approaching those of mighty bacon?

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