Technology had advanced; a compact virtual reality headset had transformed the internet.  Users could now visit a kind of wavering transparent ghost world and use their minds to visit sites, communicate with people, access information.  Social media was like entering a domed room full of shadows where the user's contacts were in full color, others ( Read more... )

Valco Fashion Mall had been remodeled into a “Nostalgia Mall” using the décor and landscaping of The Old Mill mall (anyone remember that one?) so that it was like an indoor Disney version of a Thomas Kinkade painting with little cottage store fronts and a stream flowing through the middle of the mall.   Several friends and I were trying to get ( Read more... )

Just a few weeks into my new job my new employer had announced we were relocating to Carsten, Nevada, a barren nowhere in the middle of the high desert that was trying to cash in on the prestige of Carson City by having a confusingly similar name.  I was miserable about it, but without any other immediate income prospects and limited cash reserves ( Read more... )

I decided to help people in the inner city, so I disguised myself as a mortal human being, filled several bank accounts with money, and set up investments to keep it rolling in.   Then I went to a neighborhood in South San Francisco and offered to repair and revitalize it.   The people were very excited about my plans and so I went ahead.  I fixed ( Read more... )

The US had temporarily ceded most of California back to Mexico due to constant lobbying from idealistic liberals who felt white guilt about the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo being an example of racial injustice and white privilege, and because the Mexican economy was so very bad.  This had effectively become a huge give-away to the drug cartels, and ( Read more... )

I was visiting a friend in Sacramento when we decided to go in to town.  For some reason we could not drive ourselves and her husband was not there to drive us - the band he plays in was currently on tour of a set of truck stops and nowhere towns that had sprung up around gas stations and convenience stores on highway 80 ( Read more... )

( Of abandoned neighborhoods, bialys and punching out kids... )

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A couple rented a mountain villa in a foreign land for their honeymoon.   Their first night there was the start of a local festival, so after a romantic dinner they stood on their balcony, watching the moonlight on the town far below and listening to people singing.  As they stood holding one another a bell began to ring in the town and they saw ( Read more... )

( Deadly game shows and the lucid dreamer )