Using advanced image analysis and component deciphering algorithms, I have created what I believe will become the single most popular image on the entire internet. I present to you the world’s first Pirate-Ninja-Zombie-Cyborg-Monkeysaurus-Rex! I call him Fred.
…Well, the most popular image on the entire internet without boobs.
I’ve decided to write a book for people that have found themselves in the exciting and challenging world of physics.
I’m clearly going to be rich.
I consider it an immense shame that most of the world has not been exposed to a great computer-animated show of the 90’s called Reboot. This was an amazing program that revolved around the lives of ‘people’ whose world existed entirely within a network of computers. I’m not sure of the mechanics of this world… whether they exist when the computer that housed their city was off, whether they lived on the hard drive, or if they were purely electronic entities, but I do know that they routinely participated in computer games as the sprites against the evil and mysterious ‘user’.
This is what awesome looked like in the 90’s.
What made the show so great, however, was not the premise. Rather, it was the way the show evolved over time. Here’s a synopsis of a typical plotline for an episode in the first season:
It’s little Enzo’s birthday and his sister, Dot, and the ‘guardian’ for the system in which they live, Bob, are trying to put together a giant surprise party. Even Enzo’s dog, Frisket, is doing his part to prepare for the celebration. Attracted by all of the activity, the ruthless tyrant virus, Megabyte, crashes the party with his violent minions. With most of the citizens of the entire system at his mercy, Megabyte forces the populace to listen to him play a heavy-metal riff on his giant, tweaked-out electric guitar. Bob, who cannot let Megabyte get away with this, grabs his own guitar and joins Megabyte in a hair-band style guitar duel. After the last few notes of the song die down, Megabte gives his guitar to Enzo as a present and promptly leaves.
Awwww.
Now here’s a synopsis of a typical plotline from season three of Reboot:
Bob has been locked out of the system by Megabyte in the heat of a battle that has claimed the lives of most of the citizens of the system, leaving Dot and Enzo to defend the remnant of the system from the virus. Meanwhile, Enzo also has to take Bob’s place in the games to prevent the ‘user’ from destroying what’s left of the system. Having bad luck in the games, Frisket is shot in the face at close range by a user with a shotgun (barely surviving) and Enzo loses his eye in another game. He eventually loses a game and is ejected from the system. He spends years as a renegade traveling through the games hopping from one system to another trying to find his way home, which has become a dystopian, hellish nightmare world dominated and almost obliterated by Megabyte. In his travels he grows hard, angry, and bitter which drives an emotional wedge between him and everyone he used to love, including his sister, his only living family, when he finally finds home. The battle is now less focused on defeating the bad guys and more on the question “Is it worth going on?”
And this is what Armageddon looked like in the 90’s.
Wow.
I like to think that Hat Shrapnel will take a similar path over time. Today I’m writing funny observations about the physics of toast, but as I grow angry and bitter at the world, I will start getting darker and darker until I post my manifesto here and then proceed to systematically wipe out all of mankind.
This is possibly the worst drawing of a dinosaur ever combined with the worst drawing of a guitar ever. This is actually the dinosaur from which Grimace, the McDonald’s shill, evolved.
As anyone will tell you, I’m an admirer of fine art. As one who has failed so completely and repeatedly at trying to create exquisite expressions of the soul on canvas, I have a particular respect for the great impressionists. They combine remarkable talent and incredible insight to create pictures that clearly represent a real world while still looking at it through the artist’s emotional viewpoint.
One of my favorite pieces, “A Bunch of French-Looking People at the Park”.
On the other side of the spectrum, we have the abstract artists. These people make fools of the art world by turning a complete lack of talent into “art”. Any hack can splatter paint on a canvas in some insipid pattern, claim it represents the pain of splattering paint on a canvas in some insipid pattern, and make millions of dollars.
A piece entitled “My Six-Year-Old Did This.”
The same holds for photography but in reverse. Any hack with a camera can point it at some random object, push a button, and, voilà, you have a photograph that accurately represents a real-life object.* But just as it takes a real artist to turn paint on a canvas into a picture, I contend that it takes a real artist to take a photograph of a real-life object and turn it into abstract art. At least, that’s the misguided idea that lead me to undertake my own foray into the art world (which requires a camera with real film, which makes me all artsy and hot). And with that, I present to you, my poor devotees, my first exhibit of Abstract Photography. I call this collection the “I Hope to Make Millions of Dollars from Stupid People Collection”. Enjoy.
I call this piece “Red”.
This piece is entitled “Red in One Corner”.
Lastly, my pièce de résistance, “Complete Lack of Red”.
I hope that through my art I have allowed you, the reader, to peer into the soul of a true artist. Or at least waste a couple minutes.
*(Ok, that’s a complete lie, as is most everything on the entire internet. Real photography takes a combination of skill and artistic vision that I will never possess. If you need proof of the power of photography, check out Kelli Oedekoven Photography which has some of the most beautiful photographs I’ve ever seen, especially in the nature section. Seriously, go there now or I will take away your internet privileges.)
As I walked into my sister’s living room today she was watching a documentary about a woman that poisoned her husband, burned the corpse, and very nearly got away with the whole thing. My sister looked at me and, with a deadpan expression that would make Bud Abbot jealous, said, “I love these home improvement shows.” My sister is way more suited to comedy than I.
So, a new year is upon us. Well, actually it’s been upon the rest of you for two weeks now, but I’m serious about my procrastination, so I didn’t start the new year until 7:36pm this evening. For the three of you Shrap fans left, here’s my New Year’s resolution: I will update EVERY SINGLE WEEK. You read that right, folks (or possibly, folk), every single week I intend to post humorous observations about the Kronecker Delta Function or crappy crayon drawings of the disturbing inner workings of a juvenile, psychopathic mind or whatever crazy hogwash is floating around in my head. I’ll shoot for Thursdays since “Thursday” is “Hat Shrapnel” spelled backwards, but I’ll see how that goes. Hold me to this one, Shrapnelonians. If I miss a week, I expect bricks thrown through my window and dead animals in my mailbox - anything to show you care. See you in a week, Shrapnelites!
And if my brother-in-law is reading this: Dude, RUN!
Browsing through some pictures I took earlier this year, I found this one from The Great Kokoweef Adventure.
In the middle of the mountainous high-desert region of the Mojave Desert in southern California are vast fields of gravel and sand almost entirely devoid of life. The silence and seemingly unending horizon paint a vivid metaphor of both spiritual and corporeal despair.
But if you look at the ground very closely, as in the above picture (look in the center), you might occasionally see the smallest glimpse of color, a tiny flower in the middle of the desert. These flowers are so small that they almost defy imagination and so spread out that it might be impossible to find two within 20 feet of each other. Solitary, minuscule, and intricate, they are made all the more beautiful by the struggle they must have endured to take root in such a harsh, lifeless environment and push their way up to the surface, fighting against all odds not only to survive, but to thrive.
There’s probably a deep life lesson in that, but I’m really not in the mood to learn it right now.
Physics will steal your soul and make you cry.
I have been absent for nearly two months and I make no apologies for abandoning HatShrapnel in the meantime except to say, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry. Please don’t leave me, HatShrapnelites. I’ll never do it again for at least two months or until I feel tired.”
Now an explanation: for the past two months or so I have locked myself in my apartment studying physics preparing for my Physics Graduate Records Examination, the most evil exam ever perpetrated by mankind. (Rumor has it that the exam was written by a supervillain that lost his mind after looking into The Abyss.) I locked myself away from television and radio (not hard since I own neither) and all forms of normal people fun while I studied physics for hours every day, which I contend is its own fun. Physics twenty-four hours a day and six days a week (I’m not a machine) can have an adverse effect, however. After awhile it pervades every thought, interjects itself into every simple task.
Passing by a window in my apartment and noticing a cold draft, I resolved to stuff a towel or something at the base to stop the incoming cold. In the two seconds it took from the beginning of my consideration to the end I thought, in order, “I’ll just stuff a towel in there. What has a higher insulation rating than a towel? Insulation rating just measures a rate of loss, there’s no way to stop it entirely so no matter what I use, the cold will get in eventually anyway - it’s the second law of thermodynamics. Come to think of it, the second law of thermodynamics dictates that the energy density will slowly smooth out over the age of the universe, dooming all life and order to a freezing, lonely death as the eons march on so nothing anyone ever does will matter in the end. And I don’t know where I have a towel handy.”
But worry not, HatShrapnelers, physics isn’t all depression and bleak prophesy. There’s also the constant confusion about the real world. I received a voice mail the other day from an old research professor with whom I have not worked for ten months asking if I had calibrated the electron streams like I was supposed to last night and to give him a call back. Now that I think about it, a normal person’s response might be to assume the professor had accidentally called the wrong number from his contact list. My response involved immediately checking the year on my calendar to ensure that I had not unknowingly traveled back in time one year to when I was working on the electron streams. The possibility that the call was a mistake didn’t occur to me until ten minutes later as I was pondering how I could connect to a military satellite to check it’s internal date.
Anyway, HatShrapnelonians, the message is that I’m back and will no longer ignore HatShrapnel for months on end. Now I can return to the regular routine of ignoring HatShrapnel on a weekly basis.
For those of you that don’t follow pirate news as closely as I do, you may not know that last Thursday three ships full of pirates (buckling their swashes, one would assume) hijacked a Ukrainian ship carrying 33 T-72 Soviet tanks and small arms off the coast of Somalia. I will wait while the full impact of that sinks in for you.
Pirates.
With tanks.
Soviet tanks.
Clearly, this is the coolest thing that has ever happened in the history of the world because somewhere out there is a real-life pirate sitting in a real-life tank.
Artist’s rendering of what pure awesome looks like.
If I understand the Law of Conservation of Coolness Momentum, on the directly opposite side of the Earth a ninja is playing a laser guitar while riding a T-rex. When they finally and inexorably meet in battle, we can take solace in the fact that at least the world will be destroyed in the coolest fashion imaginable.
The days are getting shorter, the leaves are falling off the trees, and the elusive Question Mark is awakening from his summer-induced hibernation wherein he has communed with the cosmic forces that dictate the workings of our universe for a three-month poetry reading of the collected works of Leonard Nimoy. Now The Question Mark, blessed with nearly infinite knowledge and overly infinite b.s.-ery is here to answer your metaphysical, philosophical, and gastrointestinal questions. So buckle yourself down for some enlightenment; it’s going to be a rough one.
Dear Question Mark,
I have not frequented the site lately, but I came back and noticed that the menu options are on the left side of the screen now instead of the right. Why did you change it? That’s the kind of sneaky thing that happens when you are with a group of friends at a restaurant and order drinks, then you go to the bathroom and when you get back your coke suddenly has salt, creamer, or arsenic in it. “Did you put arsenic in my drink?”, you say when you see your friends faces trying to conceal their chuckles. “You did, didn’t you?” Still no response, so you take a drink of your lovely refreshing beverage, only to die 60 seconds later. So Question Mark I ask you, Did you put arsenic in my webpage?
Sincerely,
Murdered? in Mystery Novel
Dear Murdered,
I can understand your concern regarding arsenic in the website. I want to take this chance to let the entire internet (except those sick freaks down at NekkidMark.com) know that we here at ‘The Shrap’ take pride in the fact that the site is 100% arsenic-free, dolphin-safe, and entirely free of poisonous monkeys*.
However, your concern is not invalid, Murdered. The suspicion that one’s coke has been laced with salt, creamer, arsenic, or some other deadly poison is a common neurophysiological effect known as the “I have a suspicion that someone laced my coke with salt, creamer, arsenic, or some other deadly poison response” which was named after the psychologist that discovered it. Neuroscientists don’t agree on what causes the effect, but neuroscientists don’t really agree on anything. Neuroscientists gather every year at annual neuroscience conferences to disagree with each other and no one is allowed to go home until every single neuroscientist has disagreed with every other neuroscientist in the building. Getting the pizza order is a nightmare.
Luckily for you, devoted readers and victims of the Chilean penal system that have to read HatShrapnel as part of your sentence, The Question Mark knows exactly what causes this disturbing and complex effect: your friends don’t like you. Through years and years of closely monitoring and analyzing my own “friends”, I have unequivocally (which means unable to be equivoked) determined that all of my friends are jerks who laugh at me every time I fall down, hit myself, or am intentionally poisoned.
So don’t worry, Murdered. You’re probably not going crazy, there are just hundreds of people out there pretending to like you and waiting for an opportunity to kill you. The only healthy way to cope is to arm yourself and start taking shots whenever you are the slightest bit provoked. And give ‘em one for me.
Off to kill my friends,
-The Question Mark
We find ourselves at the end of another post, my friends. But The Question Mark is awake and hungry. Send him your questions or he will be forced to come to your house and eat you. Post a question in the comments and see how long you can avoid death in the belly of The Question Mark.
*Not actually free of poisonous monkeys.