May, 2014:

Let’s Slip into Something More Virtual

Hold onto your hats, virtual reality is going to be a thing. Actually, you’ll have to take your hat off because it interferes with the helmet and could potentially scramble your brains. Let’s start over. Virtual reality is going to be a thing, especially if you’re not wearing a hat. Perfect. Between the Oculus Rift and Sony’s Project Morpheus, soon your dream of donning a pair of jorts and running through the jungle like Crash Bandicoot can become a reality – A VIRTUAL REALITY IF YOU WILL.

How does virtual reality work, you may be asking? Well, it’s very simple. You put the thing on your head and there’s like screens and mirrors or some shit in there, and when you look down at your hands in the virtual world, they could be anything. They could be crab claws. They could be stupid normal human hands, but maybe they’re adorned with bejeweled armored gloves. They could be bejeweled crab claws. Look, what I’m trying to say is that the possibilities are endless, ok? And that, in a nutshell, is how virtual reality works.

The reality may be virtual, but the mom jeans are as real as the day is long.

The reality may be virtual, but the mom jeans are as real as the day is long.

Both Oculus and Sony are trying to shift the focus away from gaming and instead are promising all new virtual experiences. Imagine the thrill of traveling alongside Neil deGrasse Tyson as you explore the galaxy together, and having him punch you in the face for asking rudimentary questions. “Dr. Tyson, what’s air?” WHAM just PUNCHING PUNCHING buffering… buffering… PUNCHING PUNCHING.

And that’s just one experience. What if we could fuse this virtual reality technology with the fast paced world of online dating? Now instead of an old fashion message from a creep with the subject line I WANT TO TOUCH YOUR CLAVICLE, you can meet this person in a virtual coffee shop and have your avatar’s collarbone leered at from the comfort of your own home. “Mmm yeah, I could really hang my dry cleaning on that shit, so bony and pronounced.” And afterwards, no more awkward walks to your car in the darkened Starbucks parking lot, you can just disconnect from BONE_DESTROYER_420 and live another day with your skeleton safely in tact.

But not all virtual reality experiences are good. I think we should all take a minute and think about what happened in the movie Lawnmower Man. From what I remember from the commercials, a dimwitted fellow, the aforementioned Lawnmower Man, uses virtual reality for some reason and becomes an evil genius. I’m pretty sure this was supposed to be a bad thing. I don’t want to spoil anything, but I’m going to assume he could only be stopped with virtual lasers. Is this what Oculus and Sony want? Average joes fighting groundskeepers with lasers in a virtual world? I don’t have time for this.

Sony and Oculus laugh at your obsolete analog reality, with its gears and steam whistles and religion and newsies on street corners proclaiming “Extree extree! Read all about it! Humans still don’t have crab claws, why do they bother existing?” I don’t know, fictional newsie, but I do know this: Analog reality is hot garbage.

You can watch me scream and yell all of my recent posts on AwesomeTalk! It airs every other Tuesday at justin.tv/aweseometalktv or constantly on our YouTube channel.

IT BELONGS IN A LANDFILL

Last night on Awesome  Talk I read these words. Please hum the theme from E.T. as you read it, but switch to the theme from Jurassic Park when I start talking about dinosaurs. Then switch back to the theme from E.T. They’re all in the key of John Williams, it’ll be a nice mashup.

IT BELONGS IN A LANDFILL

Sometimes the best solution is to bury all of your problems in a New Mexico landfill. The creators of the Atari 2600 E.T. video game knew this, as the game was so shitty and sold so poorly that the only way to fix the problem was to dig a very large hole in the desert, chuck the unsold games into the hole, then figure out a way to light the hole on fire.

Documentary filmmakers excavated the cartridges last week to confirm that yes, this thing that happened? This thing that Atari workers in the 80’s said they did? They sure did it, it happened, and here’s the garbage covered proof.

For some reason, I owned E.T. as a child. And it was barely a game – you would move him from one shitty green screen to the next shitty green screen, and he would fall into holes looking for parts to his… thing that he needed parts for. Repeat until he has all the parts, wait for some indecipherable rune to appear at the top of the screen, press the button on the joystick, and win, I guess. My older sister, the owner of the Atari, was determined to beat this piece of shit game. And one night, on the 13 inch black and white tv in my bedroom, she did it. She woke me up in the middle of the night so I could see E.T.’s spaceship buzz and fart around the screen and watch a pixelated Elliot run in circles, I’m guessing out of joy. The game was sold at a garage sale a few years later, and I’m sure it’s also rotting away in a landfill somewhere as we speak.

FuncoLand OF THE FUTURE

FuncoLand OF THE FUTURE

Apparently there were more E.T. cartridges in existence than there were Ataris to play them on. And throwing them in a hole was the easiest, most cost effective way to get rid of them. Now, throwing shitty shit into a landfill, doesn’t this sound familiar? It should, because history often repeats itself. Millions of years ago, dinosaurs roamed the earth. They had a pretty good run, but god threw them in a landfill because he couldn’t figure out a way to market them to his next creation – humans. Humans would be like, we already have cars, these things are slow as hell, and there’s not enough leather on earth to make comfortable dino saddles. So into the landfills they went with all of god’s other failed creations. Interesting postscript to that parable – eventually the dinosaurs turned into oil and god saved the day and became employee of the month.

I think everyone deserves a chance to landfill something. Everyone has their own E.T.-like debacle that they need to disappear… have yourself one of those peyote-fueled vision quests in the New Mexico desert and figure it out. Bills piling up? Landfill. Car won’t start? Landfill. Economy’s in the toilet? Throw the economy and the toilet in a landfill. Eventually we’ll have so many problems buried in so many landfills that we’ll have to bury the landfills in bigger landfills. Waterways choked with huge barges schlepping away our pianos that we never learned how to play, our decks that we never finished building, our 3-D printed monstrosities. Away with you, 3-D printed prosthetic arm with tiny swords for fingers! What the hell was I thinking?

It doesn’t matter. It’s buried in the ground and it never happened. Until documentary filmmakers dig it up 30 years later. Will the prosthetic arm with tiny swords for fingers light up like E.T.’s heart? Probably not. But I can guarantee you’ll say “ouuuuuch” when you touch it.