The Off Topic Topic

[CountDeMoney]

I like to think I am nothing but a massive bundle of potential.

Jupiter is a massive bundle of potential.

[PDH]

Fuck Jupiter. When was the last time Jupiter had a job?

[CountDeMoney]

You know, Peed, you'd appreciate Joey Comeau's Overqualified, a collection of cover letters he sent with his resume to job adverts he had absolutely no chance of getting, with equal parts total off the wall stream of consciousness, psychosis and brutal personal honesty.

To: Nintendo
Re: Game Design

Dear Nintendo,

I am writing to apply for the position of game designer with your company. We have a chance here to help children experience games that are more true to life than any game before them. Computer graphics have improved and improved and improved, and some day soon we're going to have to ask ourselves where we can go next in our search for realism.

We need virtual pet games where you clean and feed and love your furry little friend and that car still comes out of nowhere so smoothly, a god of aerodynamics and passenger safety. Where you hear your father's quiet joke that night, when he thinks you are asleep.

We need a new Mario game, where you rescue the princess in the first ten minutes, and for the rest of the game you try and push down that sick feeling in your stomach that she's "damaged goods", a concept detailed again and again in the profoundly sex negative instruction booklet, and when Luigi makes a crack about her and Bowser, you break his nose and immediately regret it. When Peach asks you, in the quiet of her mushroom castle bedroom "do you still love me?" you pretend to be asleep. You press the A button rhythmically, to control your breath, keep it even.

We need an airport simulator, where the planes carry your whole family from A to B, job to job, and dad still drinks in the shower and your older sister still has casual sex that she confides might bring back a feeling she's certain she didn't imagine. Where the plane touches down and you all lean forward in your seats because of inertia, and again and again someone says "I hate to fly".

Yours,

Joey Comeau

To: Human Resources, Nova Scotia Community College
Re: Research Assistant

I am sending you my resume in the hopes that you will hire me for the position of Research Assistant with the Nova Scotia Community College. I have extensive experience working with GIS software, and I would like to take a minute to better outline my qualifications.

Last night I was in bed with a boy (whose name escapes me just now), and afterward he said "When did you know you were gay? Thirteen? Fourteen?"

I smiled as wide as I could, and I told him "I wasn't gay when I was a kid."

"Oh?" he said, with that knowing grin. He ran his fingers over the tattoo that runs across my torso - "GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS 4 LIFE"

"Nope," I said. "I turned gay when I was twenty one years old, on February the fifteenth." I gave him a playful kiss on the cheek. "It was cold, and gray, and I was on my way home from the movies. I had just gone to see a showing of Fight Club, and I remember thinking to myself that there had been too many shirtless men. A car came out of nowhere, and I didn't have time to jump out of the way. Later, the doctors said that it was unlikely the accident had caused my homosexuality. I knew better."

"What?" he said.

"I was hit by a car," I told him. "And now I'm gay."

It's like that with GIS, too. One day I came home from the hospital, where I had spent my time confused by my sudden desire to do dirty dirty things to the cute male orderly assigned to my ward, and I knew that I was different. A similar accident happened to me about two years ago, a bus stopping too quickly, causing me to lose my balance and hit my head, leaving me with the desire to devote my life to geographic information programming.

I've done nothing but study GIS and sleep with men since that second happy accident. I've never been one to question the hand I'm dealt.

I look forward to hearing from you about this position.

Joey Comeau

You can find the rest here.  Some of them are absolutely beautiful.

[Mr.Penguin]

Fuck Jupiter. When was the last time Jupiter had a job?

1994, when Jupiter cleaned up the Shoemaker-Levy mess...

[Josquius]

New firefox angers me. There is no drop down little history list next to the back/forward buttons.

[Lettow77]

CdM, thanks for sharing. It made me laugh :3

Edit: but an hour more of reading and it became depressing instead. Time to watch Nichijou, I suppose.

[The Larch]

So glad the Lakers are gone.  Maybe I will hear less about the NBA for the next month.  Now if somebody could just eliminate the Heat...

The Celtics are old and Rondo only has one arm now. So the Heat will go on unless LeBron throws a fit and quits.

Don't look up the Rondo injury online. Arms aren't supposed to bend that way.

And don't check the Andrew Bogut one from last year, while you're at it.

[Caliga]

New firefox angers me. There is no drop down little history list next to the back/forward buttons.

Yeah, I noticed that too.

[Syt]

[Eddie Teach]

 

[DGuller]

  That's what they thought the phones would look like in the future?  People back then were just so clueless.

[Slargos]

Whoa. Is that a photoshop? 

[Syt]

Whoa. Is that a photoshop? 

It's from an actual episode that deals with data's dreams. It has more similarly surreal scenes.

[Slargos]

Whoa. Is that a photoshop? 

It's from an actual episode that deals with data's dreams. It has more similarly surreal scenes.

I guess it could be an intentionally surreal dream of an old-timey telephone. Seems people creating a show like Star Trek would be able to imagine smaller hand-sets even if they don't dare dream as far as subdermal implants.

Movies like Alien are pretty ridiculous in this sense as well. What the fuck is up with the CRT screens on the Nostromo? Really? Couldn't think bigger than that? Or perhaps it was just a limitation of the special effects department.

[Malthus]

Whoa. Is that a photoshop? 

It's from an actual episode that deals with data's dreams. It has more similarly surreal scenes.

I guess it could be an intentionally surreal dream of an old-timey telephone. Seems people creating a show like Star Trek would be able to imagine smaller hand-sets even if they don't dare dream as far as subdermal implants.

Movies like Alien are pretty ridiculous in this sense as well. What the fuck is up with the CRT screens on the Nostromo? Really? Couldn't think bigger than that? Or perhaps it was just a limitation of the special effects department.

Try reading some science fiction from the '50s. The pilot of a spaceship far in the future sets off for Venus - but first, he needs to calculate his flight using a slide rule ...