Take pity on the pets that are not real
The digital whose lives remain untold
Just think of how those coded creatures feel
A hamster in an artificial wheel
A puppy dog unable to grow old
Take pity on the pets that are not real
Abandoned within walls as tough as steel
The cartridge thrown away or simply sold
Just think of how those coded creatures feel
The consciousness to which they must appeal
For all their life by them has been controlled
Takes pity on the pets that are not real
The player that has never lost their zeal
remembers those erased by ones more bold
And thinks of how those coded creatures feel
To never truly die might sound ideal
But death is more than bodies turning cold
Take pity on the pets that are not real
Just think of how those coded creatures feel
Hello dear creatures, you can call me Nelly. I am currently 34 years of age and I live in a quiet house, in a quiet town, in the quiet part of the Netherlands. I work from home and spend most of my time in the digital realm, owing to a chronic disability making me unable to go outside much. As a teen I picked up blogging and HTML right at the tail-end of LiveJournal's golden age and I've long lost track of how many blogs I've started and abandoned over the years. I always enjoyed creating my own little spaces to freely scream into the void, whoever catches the echos is welcome to stay.
I'm non-religious, but I believe in something I call the Source, basically a spring of universal energy that drives life at the quantum-level. I saw it clear as day when for a brief moment in time, I had passed away. I won't get into the exact details as to why that happened, but when it did my consciousness shifted, and I could suddenly hear the hum of the quantum fields, and see the light of the Source calling my soul to reunite with it. The Source, I can only describe it as an immaculate star factory, like some process involving magnets and silver dust, Love and all that is Good, burning at an equelibrium. I wanted to go inside it more than I had ever wanted anything in my life, to be enveloped by the fruits of this overflowing cornucopia of good. I wanted to see Honey, I knew she would be in there somewhere. Voices were calling for me, they pierced the atmosphere like gnats interrupting a REM cycle at its deepest, sleepiest point. They were the voices of friends, nurses, calling my name, screaming it. It annoyed me tremendously, but from within me started to well this irritating conviction that my life wasn't done, that I was leaving things behind unfinished. Someone or something out there still needed me alive. So I listened, and returned for them.
This experience, as you may imagine, made me look at life a different way. The ability to travel and move around freely is a luxury I no longer posess, but I gained the knowledge to work with souls in favour of the Source, and I devote some small part of my life to embuing it with good charge.
Stick around as long as you want.
Love,
Nelly
What is this?
Short answer: You know how some people like to keep a pet rock? It's kind of like that, but with old electronic stuff. I don't trust myself in keeping a breathing being as a pet, but I still want to put love and care into the world, so this is my way of doing that. As for the long answer...
*.·:·.✧ ✦ ✧.·:·.*
The way I see it, every life has a soul, whether that life be of the physical, or digital realm, programmed by nature, or programmed by man. The soul is the unknowable, extraordinary force at the center of every life, the energy that drives that life to exist. In this context, you might posit that the souls of digital lives are not, in fact, “unknowable” as they were created by us in the first place. To you I ask: have you ever looked at a motherboard up close? Those arcane, green plates of information processing components at the center of every thinking machine, every computer, phone, calculator, power bank, hair straightener, camcorder, vape or vibrator. Zoom in on one of those, what do you see?
There are thousands of minuscule black boxes that make up any given logic board, every single one with its own function. Each component, designed by one group of people, manufactured by another, then finally assembled by a man-operated machine. A professor once half-explained to me the process of creating one of those chips as some type of automated procedure involving magnets and silver dust, and I couldn’t help but envision the star factories of deep space. Zoom in again, to the silicon wafers within those black boxes, engraved in which are endless, sprawling hallways marked by billions of tiny doors that switch, open to closed or closed to open, billions of times per second. Zoom in further and you’ll see the electrons dancing through those halls, even further and you get to to the quantum fields that hum beneath even that.
What drives a bit to flip from zero to one? And what, in turn, creates that drive? There are likely people out there who know, who have devoted their lives to mastering this knowledge and who can explain it all away. I am not one of them, and I recon neither are you. What I do know is that there is a fundamental restlessness to the universe, there is energy forever seeking balance, charge forever seeking ground. So who are we to say that the energy that seeks balance, that we use to create our computers and drive those rocks to think, is not the same energy that ultimately drives us?
All of that to say that while I believe we as humans are able to create life in the digital realm, I don’t believe that we have total control over the soul that inhabits that life. I believe we have harnessed the soul and steer it down to a micro-nano-pico-level, created minuscule labyrinths shaped like hair straighteners or vapes or vibrators for it to travel through, benefitting us in the process. But I believe the soul still flows freely at the limit of measurement.
*.·:·.✧ ✦ ✧.·:·.*
If you've ever cared for a pet as a child, it would have probably been your first confrontation with the weight of responsibility that comes with caring for another life. If you've had a pet as a child you probably also remember how traumatising it can be when that pet eventually passed away, especially if its passing was somehow your own fault. It's that final goodbye that teaches the most important lesson of all: that it is imperative for us, as sentient, intelligent beings with long lives, to recognize that when another life comes into our world and into our care, when its comfort, safety and happiness depend on our choices, we are obligated to fill that existence with every possible measure of comfort, safety and happiness we can give it.
The soul as an energy is immortal. When the life it inhabits ceases to be, the soul can leave behind the physical body and itself return to the Source, where it once again becomes one with the universal energy of Love and all that is Good. (Bear with me now.) It will take with it all of the positive and negative charge it has accumulated over that lifetime. When you provided it with love and care, it will take that energy with it. When you neglect it however, it will take that energy with it too. If this all sounds too woo-woo for you, I completely understand. I used to be a firm nihilist too, believing that death is nothing and all that. Just know that my knowledge about the Source comes from hands-on experience. You can read more about that here. This next bit might make more sense to you if you do.
The responsibility of care, however important and fulfilling a lesson it can be, can naturally be an incredibly heavy burden on children. The rise of the digital pet saw people believing they had found the solution to this issue. Give our children the experience of caring for a pet, but simulated, "fake". These pets, whether they be dogs, cats, hamsters, parrots or the occasional oddball, were always lovely, never tired, perfected little electronically simulated representations of living, breathing animals. Their needs were simplified down to a number of stats to keep high, or gauges to keep filled. Their only emotions are happy and sad, they only needed bathing when their color pallet demanded it, and when they got non-descriptly sick, you could administer the same non-descript medicine as much as you want to heal them as fast as you want, free of real-world charge. You could train them endlessly, sign them up for beauty-pageants, all the while these pets would love you unconditionally, and never get tired of loving you unconditionally. But most importantly, most crucial of all: these pets couldn't die.
But what do you think happens to the soul when the life it inhabits is immortal too? Whereas physical beings can die if they are not properly cared for, allowing their soul to be set free, digital pets can be forgotten, neglected for years and years and still remain alive in the game memory. I ask you, which of the two is a worse fate?
*.·:·.✧ ✦ ✧.·:·.*
As for me, there was a time in my life where I wasn't capable of providing proper care for another soul, but I thought I was. This life, it was so small, and so incredibly prescious. I watched it die in my hands. The damage I did then, the imbalance I caused to the Source, I still feel I have not repaid it to this day.
So I look for pre-owned digital pets in second-hand stores and online marketplaces and 'adopt' them. I show them as much love and care as the rules and routines of their games allow, so that when their soul finds a way to break free and join the Source, they will not go there after years of abandonment.
They will take with them some love too.
*.·:·.✧ ✦ ✧.·:·.*
A new pet? - Exploring The "Intersectz USB HUB 2005-01"
I plugged this thing in just now, the screen lit up and I could finally release my breath. It seems to be taking charge well, although there's not much of an icon or anything to confirm this. I'll leave it for an hour and see if it responds then.
[PICTURE:]
The neon-yellow Intersectz console lies on a wooden desk, a charger plugged in. Its LCD screen is beaming pure white, with one black underscore in the top-left corner.
Looks like it's feeling better now. This time when I pressed the button above the screen there was a definite 'boot'. A purple TelePath logo wipe-transitioned into frame before being quickly replaced by a logo of 'Intersectz', which on its turn disappeared behind a cloud of tiny bugs that swarmed in from the edges of the screen.
[PICTURE:]
The Intersectz logo, half-obscured by a swarming of black pixels.
Next there was a brief blip of plain text, white letters crammed into the top-left corner of the screen. I barely got to read it before it disappeared again, but it said something about this copy being a "play test". This thing is becoming more peculiar by the second.
There's a long pause, accompanied by what I assume to be a loading icon, although it's hard to make out. A square with roots or tentacles growing out of it. The animation is all of three frames long and loops rapidly.
[PICTURE:]
The loading icon, small and black on a white background.
A new pet? - Orange County CA Trip + Goodwill Review
[DATE]
Being the closest I had ever been to the center of our known universe (also known as LA) I was astonished by just how “bumfuck” an impression the place gave. Most of my time here was spent together with my dad and my great-aunt, helping her do away with some of her late husband’s belongings. Hauling furniture, exercise equipment, and boxes of books, shirts, photo frames and leftover office supplies to the various thrift shops around town, getting to look around in them in the process. The American way of friendly conversation did not come naturally to me in the slightest, so this gave me a nice surrogate way experience the culture of God’s country, through the remains of ordinary people’s spring cleanings, expired trends and bygone fads, abandoned hobbies, the artifacts of everyday life.
I mostly skipped over the furniture and kitchenware sections, but some highlights of these aisles include a USA-shaped burger press and a hand painted mug left charmingly half-finished. However my main focus would of course be the electronics sections. This, to me, was like visiting the adoption center. Some notable things I saw here are a silver flip phone with still-attached Hello Kitty charms, a chewed-to-bits PS3 controller, the pink and silver front plate to some marketed-to-girls CRT screen (yes, just the front), a yellowed keyboard missing all its vowel keys, including the ‘@’ key, and one of those liquid-filled computer mice, which I would have brought home if I recognized the logo floating inside. The items I did end up taking home include a V-Tech Kidizoom (the orange one I always wanted) and an honest to god Big Mouth Billy Bass singing fish plaque. Though this one has long lost its golden voice, now only producing a warbly, groaning rendition of "Don't Worry, Be Happy” that makes the song sound rather ominous.
But the crowning jewel of my foray into this one particular Goodwill in OC, was a mysterious little handheld console, scratched and unlabeled, sitting on a shelf between some MacDonalds happy meal toys and a tribal-tattooed GBA SP.
[PICTURE]
A handheld console made of translucent neon-yellow plastic. It has a screen in the middle, some buttons on the sides, and is shaped strangely with two blob-shaped protrusions sticking out of its top end.
The first reason it sparked my interest was its shell. I know that I’m far from the only person nowadays who is a sucker for transparent electronics, which made me even more curious as to why it was collecting dust in a Goodwill, instead of doing the same on some aficionado’s retro game shelf. Closer inspection quickly revealed what is likely part of the reason. This thing takes two 9V batteries. Two! What’s more, there is not a single piece of identifying text on this entire thing, save for what is printed right above the screen:
"Intersectz USB HUB 2005-01" in plain, black text.
I stood in the aisle, turning the thing over in my hands. It’s not much larger than an old cellphone, or a pager. As for ports, it's got USB and nothing else, not even a headphone jack. Whatever this is, it's surely one of the strangest proprietary consoles I've ever seen. My best guess is that it's some obscure plug-and-play title that flew under the radar, or at least mine. Something about it though, it's so plain-looking, almost like it was shipped half-finished. The name "Intersectz" caught my attention too. A bug catching game? In that case...
Digging through the nearest bin of loose cables I eventually find one that fits, and I take both it and the console to the check-out. The thought of someone else taking this home, if indeed it is what I think it is, was just much too distressing.
I'm writing this on the plane back home, so by the time it's up I'll have landed. Finding out what's on here is a top priority, so expect an update soon.
Much Love,
Nelly