Ha Ha Yeah No isn’t dead yet. We have several drafts that the technology of today hasn’t yet caught up with. Meanwhile we are doing a new thing over here if you are the type of person who is interested in seeing new things. 

If you have read all of our posts so far, you might be realizing that when we paint pictures, we often hover around the same palette. One of the colors that we work with most often is a dim little shade we like to call “you can’t escape your own skull.” It is the anchor of at least 3 and probably more of our posts so far.

There is very limited room on the mysterious island of HaHaYeahNo for the kinds of adults who still honestly believe in astral projection or vulcan mind melds. The chemical and electrical processes that take place inside your brain are definitely pretty remarkable and worth considering at length while under the influence of powerful recreational drugs, but certain things about how interpersonal communication takes place are straightforward. A phenomenon happens in the physical space between you (a gross body odor, a punch, a sext message) and a physical receptor on your body (your nostrils, your jawbone, your iphone gland) reads it in as crude input which is the passed along to the brain to let you know that a bad smelling and violent person who only communicates electronically is ready to fuck.

That information and everything that your brain does with it, however, is completely trapped inside of you until you also choose to manipulate the physical space between you. If you are paralyzed with fear or erotic feelings, your grody paramour can’t have any idea what you are feeling. You have to pick up your iPhone with your hands and type out “yeh letz do tihs” to get the ball rolling.

The primary thoughts and feelings you had on the situation are forever trapped in your mind until you take enough ecstasy to rot that part away or until the whole pile just dissipates to mulch. 

Because the activity is electrochemical and such things are measurable, it is not entirely outside the realm of Buck Rogers possibility that we will one day come up with a totally boss headset that lets you view the lines of code going on in a human brain as they happen - a miasmic Media Player visualization of all the dirty fantasies, workplace ponderings, and primal fears that smear together in your brain causing you to constantly struggle with your own internal dialog for the one thought you have in any given moment that will keep your boss from having you escorted out by security and your friends from setting you on fire. Yeah we might build that machine and it might make speech obsolete, but this is not the same thing as telepathy. There is no gland or receptor on your body that receives “thought” from another person, no matter how many Romanian relatives you have or how many scarves you wear or how many tapestries and candles to have in your room. 

Tonight before bed, I can kneel down and concentrate super hard on my favorite episodes of MacGyver, squeezing my brainlobes hard enough that my nosebleeds and ultimately still die unfulfilled, or I can get out an envelope and send Richard Dean Anderson a lock of my hair and really connect with him for real. Which is the better choice?? DUH!

Certain aspects of cloning are speeding towards us like a stone ball of inevitability in a dark temple of questionable decisions. The only thing that can save us from a future of war between clones and natural beings is the cleansing fire of old fashioned “smash the machines” luddism or a true and decency-restoring apocalypse. We have already cloned sheep and puppies and teeny tiny ponies, all of which are creatures that are way more adorable than humans, and the adorability index is the only measurement I even bother with when I am screwing around with God’s unalterable plan in my volcano fortress.

To be honest, I don’t even think the ethics of cloning are really all that exciting to talk about. The beings we create in our gelatinous vats may grow to lead lives of hollow despair because they can feel the black pit in their consciousness where the soul never formed. Futuristic miracle-grow cloning processes that speed a clone’s maturation so the deepest dirty birds can have a love slave delivered in under a week could lead to crippling degenerative disorders that ultimately leave the clones as a quivering mass that howls in pain until it’s custom brain finally collapses. Maybe the clones will all just be born with goatees and be totally evil. None of that really gets to the core of what you and I as self-interested creatures of base desire would most likely be in pursuit of were we handed the keys to the clonerator.

The dream of anyone who has ever said “I wish I could clone myself” usually involves an unspoken circumstance that actually isn’t really a given, which is that your mind and essence would have any connection to the clone. Once the clone is born, it is a separate entity. Even if it were implanted by ultra-science with all of your memories and experiences, it’s still going to be an entirely separate and unconnected creature who, for example, might not want to go to school and pretend to be you so you can sit home and play Mario Kart… or who might get mugged at the grocery store and become too paranoid to ever leave the house again… or who might end up serving as just the kind of mirror reflection of you that you needed to realize you are an intolerable asshole, creating a social divide between you and your clone that makes this whole process a total bummer. 

You will definitely not share a psychic bond with the clone and once the clone is walking around getting things done, you will no longer have the same fundamental experiences as the clone. It will be a copy rather than a node.

Maybe you will get lucky and your true self is such a laid back and appealing old soul that your clone and you will get along like peanut butter and more peanut butter, but in that case it’s kind of unlikely that you’d be the sort of person who would even want a clone. You’d be better off with a really easygoing Labrador Retriever that is into frisbees and jumping in the water and you’d probably rather spend your time on woodworking and cool movies and we should hang out sometime.

So could you clone a younger, stronger version of your body and prolong your life and sexual peak by transplanting your brain from aging, spent husk to strong virile new shell every 30 or 40 years? Yeah well of course you can do that. The only problem is that you are stuck in that brain and it is aging, man. It’s getting wrinkled and shitty even as it wheezes and pulses inside a hot new body like a rusty, acid leaking battery inside a brand new flashlight. It might work for a while, but time is going to win this race sooner or later and then your estate will be paying for ten graves instead of one.

We haven’t died, we haven’t been put into a dubious hypersleep bed, and we haven’t moved to an undersea lab with shitty wifi. We just took some time off to draw this completely decent Spacetopus. Enjoy it while new entries are selected for survival or elimination based on genetic profiles while still in the womb.

By the way it used to look like this before I turned off the disney tentacle suckers layer on accident and ended up falling in love with that grimy, probably doomed-to-print-poorly look.

So if you spend any time getting hot and heavy with wikipedia on extremely broad but impressive topics like “universe” or “personality” or whatever, you can really fall down a well of terrible discoveries that put you in your place for the rest of the day. You get to a point where you start to wonder if maybe somebody is just making some of this shit up because the grant money was running out and they needed to publish something. Universe, universe, universe… uhh… shit man it’s uhh… shaped like a… a hula hoop… wait no… gordita.

So I am not prepared to go on record as saying that there will never be a way to hop from one side of a completely asinine shape to another side of it. People are doing new things all the time, like wearing tighter pants or drinking Four Loko. My limited chimp brain is prepared to believe in any number of bright, beautiful horizons in which Ben Affleck or Denzel Washington invents a magic lens that lets you gently spoon with time in a soft bed. But one thing I can say, for certain, is that it will not happen in my lifetime, and you can probably determine quite easily whether it happens in yours.

For instance, are you a millionaire? If so, let’s be besties. If not, that’s because future-you doesn’t live in a time when time travel is possible because future-you would instantly take a ride back to your 18th birthday and hand past-you a few future-newspapers.

Future-me, for example, might have traveled back in time to suggest that college-me get a better haircut and take more computer classes. Let me check - no, this did not happen! 

Granted this thought experiment isn’t exactly comprehensive because millionaires and billionaires do exist and maybe they are all the products of some distant future bloodlines that were the only people with access to time machines. Maybe every person who enjoys pornographic volumes of money and fame owes it all to a cantankerous but straaangely familiar old man who showed up in mysterious colorful chair talking about apples and eye pods and windows and finally telling them to just forget about it and bet on the Rams.

In either circumstance, the end result is the same. If you are not currently experiencing delicious, honey-succulent wealth, that means you will never get to time travel. If it ever exists, it sure as hell isn’t doing you any favors.

It’s cool with me if you are the kind of person for whom “meat” is beef and “drink” is bud lite and “dinner” is those two things set down in front of you. Not everyone wants to explore a 14 course tasting dish of frog foams and ice vodka mint noodles and bubblegum salmon. For some people, food is fuel and a utility, or at least they want to appear this way because they watch lots of sniper movies.

If you are this kind of person, though, and you wish there was a way to even further reduce the amount of time you spend pursuing even this microscopic concession to one of your body’s top 3 requirements, what exactly would you do with all 10 or 20 minutes of reclaimed time? Even if you happen to be someone who needs to keep your eyeball intensely focused on some ancient, impossibly distant sun to see if an ancient, impossibly distant planet passes in front of it, I am very certain that a computer can keep an eye on that for you while you miserably and resentfully choke down a turkey sandwich. C’mon, man, it’s quick! Use water to help!

But I get it. You are really wrapped up in your own stereotype and you want to broadcast to the world that you are too busy or lazy or manly or cheap or dumb to learn how to make an egg in a pan or pay a teenager to assemble a burger for you and you don’t think your cargo-shorts-and-flipflops or sweatpants-and-dirty-velcro-sneakers ensembles are doing the trick. You want to sit down among all these savages gruesomely cramming wet meats and weeds and fungi into their misshapen orifices and conspicuously take out a rattling bottle of all that you need to get through a day and really show them what assholes they are.

Unfortunately, the human body needs a certain amount of burnable fuel to keep functioning. That is just a fact of life and energy and burning. Even if you just stop moving and sit nice and still in a couch, you will still prefer the experience if your brain keeps doing electro-chemical things and your heart keeps beating and your lungs keep pumping, all of which requires a base level of calories. Even using all of the satellite origami math available in the last 10 years of “geniuses to watch out for” Wired articles, you would probably have trouble folding 1500-2000 calories into even 3 or 4 horse-pills. More likely you’d end up eating a bowl of pills. Products of this nature are already available to those in the know under such cryptic street names as Cheerios and Lucky Charms.

In the year 2000, we finally caught up with and surpassed all of our most cutting edge product names. Mop 2000, FudgeWhipper 2000 and ButtMaster 2000 all became quaint antiques INSTANTLY as we unexpectedly transformed into wise, celestial future-people. It then became our duty to grow indifferent to the breakneck pace at which our technology develops, and because of the noisy, messy attitude we have developed toward progress, fully tactile virtual reality is probably going to sneak up on us.

There’s definitely a glove in a lab somewhere that let’s you feel the magic of a virtual ball and any minute now there will be a Virtual Brooks & Dunn Experience at the Mandalay Bay where you can pay $200 to feel the sweat from a doughy pop country star spattering on your face for a full 7 minutes.

It is practically a given that this kind of experience is on the Horizon. Movie makers are hoping that they can ride the 3D tide toward a literal billion dollars per picture. Every video game console has a way for you to use your actual body to make Mario do sexy yoga. The problem with the Holodeck isn’t that we won’t get it or that it will be dangerous. 

I have never seen the movie Avatar, but apparently a guy uses some kind of virtual reality system to pilot the body of a Native American on planet DooDooButter. I am also told that during the course of his adventures, he uses his ponytail to have a little sex. There isn’t really any kind of analog for that in my personal experience, which kind of leads to a terrible system of questions about what brand of reality we’d be able to ultimately virtualize. If it’s possible to experience forbidden hair sex, does that mean one could invent any sensory scenario, whether tethered to the rules of human experience or not, and actually feel it? Would one be able to step into a grubby, violated rubber suit, type in “leftover pork chop that orgasms when a stray dog eats it” and expect to actually explore the true and deep inner abyss?

I think it’s fairly common for people who work with computers to go through their day wishing for a “find in page” option when looking at a paper book… or subconsciously thinking “undo” after making a mistake… or being barely able to write words with a pen anymore… So how broken will our brains be after we have tasted every virtual flavor of doughnut, spent some time flying around virtual planets, and had love affairs with every virtual object we can imagine? What’s left to do at that point except fold the soggy, crumpled husk of our world-view into a paper airplane and throw it off the roof?

No journey into one’s own spacewar fantasies can be considered viable without a hazardously impractical energy weapon and all other hazardously impractical energy weapons look down at their feet and hurry out of the room pretending they have someplace else to be when the Lightsaber shows up. It’s got an awesome name, it had awesome sounds even during a time in cinema when nothing had awesome sounds, and it is a central to one of western society’s most enduring, shut-in friendly, and blister-pack sanctifying religions. 

Anytime I hear anything about the making of the original Star Wars films (or let my mind momentarily wander to the nightmare wasteland of the current state of Star Warsness), it becomes that much harder to believe that such a tasteful and timeless fantasy weapon made the final cut intact. The Lightsaber is so deeply a part of my personal brain that I just can’t imagine I won’t have at least a little Rachael Ray santoku or a keychain bottle opener with a pharmaceutical company logo on it that uses this technology someday. 

BUT I WON’T.

Light and lasers WANT to make you happy. They bring magic to roller rinks and Motley Crue concerts. They bring quality time with cats to the next level. Clearly a laser beam is going to WANT to shoot out of an elegant and portable handle in an eye-pleasing cylinder that is just the right length for disco-majorette dazzle-twirling. That’s basically ALL a photon wants out of its blazing and fast life. But wishing and wanting just isn’t enough. 

You might be able to invent a stick that surrounds itself with some kind of deadly plasma. You might work out some sort of brutally inefficient blowtorch that makes a vaguely blade-like jet that would probably be so amazingly sketchy and unstable to use that you’d be better off just handing it to your enemy for them to try. My extensive training in 11th grade physics tells me, however, that you will probably not be able to make a powerful beam of light stop dead it its tracks 3 feet away from its source all on its own.

But this is just a minor science problem. You can probably figure out some tricky way to sneak in the back door by trapping and stretching ball lightning using a crazy magnet and becoming the most dangerous cosplayer to ever stand behind in line, but then keeping your reality-defying beam of galacti-light actually functioning would almost definitely require AT LEAST a backpack to house its considerable equipment and energy source. So my suggestion to basement tinkerers is to grow up, stop pursuing this completely childish fantasy, and begin the important adult task of developing a working Ghostbuster Proton Pack.

Who doesn’t love dolphins? Who wouldn’t love to chat one up? You know they’re smart, right? If we gave them IQ tests, they would ignore all the questions on the paper and instead use it as a scratch pad to solve global warming, concoct a formula for world peace, and then make little origami trilobites with the extra bits. I don’t know if you are aware of this, but dolphins used to live on the land. They tried it out for a while and dove right back in the ocean. They know things we don’t.

One of these days a scientist or pastry chef or pastry physicist will invent a device they’ll call the Cetacea-n-Say, finally allowing us to talk to the dolphins.

It’ll all start off pretty well. Dolphins will reminisce about that time they lived on dry land. They’ll want to know if that one tree is still over there by the tar pit and if they ever those asshole dinosaurs finally died or what. Then we’ll want to know some stuff about slippery dolphin skin and those crazy blowholes and the dolphin version of the triple gainer. The dolphins will feign interest as long as possible, but eventually they will tire of us and there will be a lull in the conversation.

You then will attempt to fill the conversational void with super important trivialities such as reality tv programming and celebrity baby heptuplets with 8-syllable first names and oompa-loompa creatures who like to do a lot of laundry or something. Laundry? Are you hearing yourself speak? Are you listening? The dolphins are and you have let them in on our dirty little secret. We, the humans, are morons. They know now. THEY KNOW.

And now that they know, you can forget about them ever saving you from shark attacks and boating accidents and pirates. In fact, you should just go ahead and avoid the ocean altogether because dolphins are going to extinct you the first chance they get. Forget meteors or the death of the sun. Humans are going to be wiped out by dolphins all because you wanted to have a little chat with them.