smoke&song

Thanks everyone for making all the awesome things! <— that may well be my epitaph

—-Ryan North

(Source: qwantz.com)

Back to the Future - the novelization - Page 26-27

btothef:

Well, it’s mostly Doc thinking to himself, about… himself.  He’s reminding himself of who he is and how he got wherever he is right now!  We each do that each morning right?

“Well, Ryan, as you know, the internet is a vast global telecommunication network upon which you post comics of talking dinosaurs, and this pays your bills.  Your entire life is improbable.”

-Me, each morning

[…]

Doc reminds himself of his past failed experiments leading up to this one, and we’re lucky because the English language I’m writing this in has a word that describes them perfectly: insane!   They include:

1. “uncovering the secrets of the mind via mind-reading devices” (this was shown in the movie briefly where it was a quick failed experiment gag, and where it was NOT implied to be something he’d spent “a half-decade on”)
2. “being smitten with the theory that all mammals spoke a common language” (go on, Doc, I’m listening)
3. “the notion that gold could be mined by superheating the earth’s surface” (This is the worst of them; there’s no way this would make sense either for Doc (the character) or Science (the thing being desecrated))
4. “the notion that each person’s age was predetermined and could be revealed by studying the composition of their fingernails” (I hope against hope that by “age” Gipe somehow means something like “the age at which they will die” and not the standard meaning of “current age”, because otherwise the word “predetermined” in this sentence makes this amount of sense: none)
5. “the sex of babies could be predicted before they were conceived” (I feel if you had complete information in a deterministic universe this is possible, let’s work on this, Doc… TOGETHER.)

Doc then tells himself the story about when he explained his theory of time to a newspaper (“It’s like the skin of an orange.  A change in the texture at any point will be felt over the entire skin.”) (DID YOU KNOW: this is the worst explanation / metaphor for “the past changes the present” I have ever seen.  Why is it presented in terms of “texture” of a point on the orange?  Oranges don’t even work that way!)

If you’re not already reading this blog, you should be.

Qwantz.com:

So with yesterday’s comic about delicious poisons I got a lot of links to people talking about antifreeze, a substance apparently SO TASTY that birds and dogs will drink any that’s spilled and then, you know, die. There’s bitter flavours added to it in some places to help prevent that from happening!

Welcome to the world of illegal flavours

qwantz.com

January 20th, 2012: Remember yesterday, when I mentioned the amazing “Sherlock Holmes Unlocks The Secrets of Effective High-Performance MySQL Database Administration”? I got a few emails saying “holy crap I would read that book” (so would I!) and then Bredon sends me… THIS.

Anyway long story short I’m pretty sure I wrote it in the future and sent it through time to be published back in 1983. I bought it and when it arrives I’ll let you know what secrets I’m going to / already have left there for myself!