Wednesday, May 19, 2010

A Working Goddamn Ansible!

Humankind is unlocking teleportation, people! We're at 89% fidelity, struggling with getting the ion particles to play ball as well as the photon particles do, and limited to a ten mile range - But we're making progress!

We used to be limited to meters. I sure do loves me the scientificky stuff.

Now, what this means is, we've unlocked instantaneous transmission of information. While this might be relatively uninteresting for use here on Earth, once mankind reaches the stars, and we travel vast distances, keeping in touch will get hard. A simple radio broadcast from Alpha Centauri would take over five years.

Travelling at 25,000 mph (The escape velocity needed to break free of Earth's gravitational pull), it would take us about 114,000 years to get there in a conventional rocketship.

Imagine being able to transmit data in an instant across such distances!

Alright, so maybe we're inventing the interstellar phone before we create the interstellar ship. So what? It'll be a handy thing to have, right?

-F.

Saturday, May 15, 2010

What I Want The News To Tell Me Each Morning

Often, I check my regular news sites and such for, well, news. And not as often, not even regularly, but a few times? I get hit in the face with some of the coolest science fiction-sounding stories. By way of a for instance?

"Time Traveler Caught in Museum Photo?"

The story about the picture someone found in a museum in Canada. It's a black and white photograph from the early 1940's, regarding the reopening of the South Fork Bridge after a flood. And in between all the old clothes and trends of trench coats, hats and old fashioned dresses, some guy is wearing sunglasses, a hooded sweater, a t-shirt complete with a stamped image, and holding a compact camera. He looks somewhat out of place. AND TIME.

How can I NOT read this? That's how you write a goddamn heading!

(Although his clothes and even camera is not completely atypical for his time, they were just not stereotypical, is all. However, I leave judgement to his time travelerisms up to everybody else.)

Here's another one for you:

"Sundamaged Zombie Satellite Ravaging Earth's Orbit!"

Apparently, the satellite Galaxy 15 (G-15) got hit by high energy particles from the sun, which caused an anomaly. It is now circling out of it's designated geostationary orbit with it's telecommunications signal-receivers and -amplifiers still firing. If it drifts close enough to other satellites it will "eat" their transmissions, messing up our daily shit in a big way.

I mean, you could risk missing the last 20 minutes of the series finale of 'Lost' or something because this thing is on a rampage. It has ignored over 200,000 commands to get it's act together and shape up, and a series of high-powered signals that were intended to kill it off.

ZombieSat continues it's journey. Woe is television.

And last but not least:

"People All Over The World Dream of This Man"

The man, referred only to as 'This Man', has not yet been identified by name. The case started in a well-known New York psychiatrist's office in early 2006, when a patient drew a detailed sketch of the face of a man who had been appearing in her dreams. This Man had been giving her advice about her personal life. The woman swears to have never met this person, outside her dreams. While not completely unusual, as dreams are very individual and strange, the sketch that lay forgotten on the desk was picked up by another patient a few days later. This patient also recognized This Man as a person appearing in his dreams, giving him advice on his personal life!

The psychiatrist ends up sending copies of the sketch to other psychiatrists, and eventually a website appears on the internet, connecting together people who have dreamed about This Man.

To date, over 2,000 people claim to have dreamed about This Man, in cities all over the world.

He has yet to be identified.

I do not need news to tell me the world is full of evil people and indifferent societies. I'm aware of these facts. They are not news to me.

I need news to keep me interested in the world. I need the strange, and the new, and the weird.

Give me all the strange, new, weird shit you've got to spare.

-F.

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

The Elephant in the Living Room

My generation has many choices of brainrot. There's reality tv in all forms and shapes, like Big Brother, The Robinson Expedition (which might be called Survivor in the states, I dunno what it's called over there), Idol (of many different varieties), This Country's Got Talent, dancing competitions, singing competitions, who can eat the most bull testicles and spider eggs, all culminating in Paradise Hotel, which is tv at it's most base form - putting young, physically attractive people with extremely abrasive personalities in a luxury resort with free access to alcohol, beds and eachother and putting cameras on them, waiting for the money shot.

Oh my how glorious tv has become.

Besides that, there's news, which are always grim and about the bad stuff that happens. There's very rarely a happy news story, so the news are rarely uplifting.

There's documentaries, however these are usually limited to people building bikes, people building cars, people doing tattoo work, people blowing crap up or sharks. Or meercats. Or animal police. Which is more uplifting material, yay.

Then there's the new fad that's come through the last few years - sms tv. Basically some young blonde chick or extremely outwardly homosexual fella who sits in a box in the corner while people's text messages are shown on-screen. Then the person in the box goes on to try and provoke people and have them send in their text message (which costs several dollars a pop) just to earn money for whatever mobile company owns the show. Either that or some ludicrously easy quiz or challenge that people think they have a chance to win, where sending the same right answer several times will earn you a greater chance of winning. I've seen people try to win these things spend so many text messages it would've just been easier to go to the store and BUY their own toaster/mixer/dildo apparatus with built-in bluetooth and a USB port. I've also seen the host of these shows give away the answer just so people will send more text messages before time ostensibly "runs out." Yeah. Right.

Then there's what MTV has degenerated into. Basically, a variation of everything previously mentioned so far in this post, interspersed with the latest Black Eyed Peas tripe to show off a little flesh combined with extremely blatantly banal mediocre bullcrap attempts at "music". I should mention that I don't hate Black Eyed Peas especially, they're just a good example of mediocrity in music.

Finally we come to tv-series and films on tv. While I have nothing at all against series or movies, I very much so have something against commercials. Those 30 second snips of advertising that's found every 15 minutes or so through whatever happens to be on tv. Holy crap, how I hate having my program interrupted.

I say "I HATE COMMERCIALS!!"

Joe Moron goes "Well Fred, how's about yous try to look on the bright side, huh? At least then you can go get a snack, or take a bathroom break, or walk the dog?"

I deftly reply with my intelligent wit "THAT'S WHY GOD INVENTED THE PAUSE BUTTON, YOU ABSOLUTE DUMBASS!!"

....Phew. That felt good!

-F.