the future

I’m Not Prone To Hyperbole*, but in Any Other Era, I Would Probably be Dead

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27

Or: Why the Wand Thingie in the Shower is the Greatest Invention in the World

*Yes, yes I am. Don’t let me lie to you like that.

It occurs to me on a remarkably regular basis that if I was living in another era (say, for example, Victorian times, when “pants” was a dirty word and people wore clothes with eighteen billion heavy layers), I would not survive, much less thrive. I’m a product of The Future, and I love it here.**

**Even though I’m still mysteriously lacking my flying car. I’m waiting, Google.

Don’t worry. I have a helpful example to share with you to demonstrate my very limited technological-survival time range.

We’ve previously discussed that I am not a morning person. I love sleeping with a deep, abiding passion, and I view the morning sun as my arch nemesis. Things are even worse when I have to get up before the sun has started to peek over the horizon.

Curtains are the best invention

For the purposes of this demonstration, let’s pretend that I don’t have blackout curtains that deny the sun the ability to enter my bedroom. Let’s pretend together.

If I have to get up before the sun, I’m forced to acknowledge that morning is not the sun’s fault, and that really ruins my arch-nemesis-hating.

On the other hand, we all know who the true enemy is in the morning:

The alarm clock is evil

Yes. Early O’clock is a legitimate time. My alarm clock declares it to be so every morning.

You’re not fooling anyone by pretending to be helpful, Alarm Clock.

IT IS SO EVIL.

Nothing gets the adrenaline going in the morning quite like the sound of my alarm clock. It probably also doubles as an impending nuclear war alert.

The morning is a confusing time for me, which probably just highlights the fact that in the days of cavemen and super-predators, I would have been a delicious morning meal.

Confused in the morning

I also sound like a zombie when I walk. And look like one. I really don’t know what happens to my hair when I sleep.

My general level of morning awareness hovers right between “completely oblivious” and “just awake enough to not walk into things.”

TURN ON WATER

This is an accurate depiction of my morning in-the-shower pose.

Which is incidentally low enough on the awareness scale to be completely confused when the shower does not automagically turn on. I mean, this is The Future, right?

The shower does not know you want to be clean

Ok, we should probably invent me-sensing showers before we invent flying cars. Get on it, Google.

Eventually, though, I successfully manage to both turn the shower on and hurl soap at myself.

Drawing soapy hair is hard.

This is as close as the Internet will ever get to seeing me in the shower. You’re all welcome.

On this one fateful day that we’re discussing, however, I discovered that my lack of awareness in the morning had delivered me into the grasp of a horrifying nightmare.

Dun dun. Dun dun. Dun dun dun dun dun...

This is how you end up with soap in your eyes at 5:30 in the morning.

The most terrifying, horrifying thing that can happen to a girl in the shower outside of a Hitchcock film:

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

In any other time period, this would have been the end of me***. This enthusiastic insect was sharing the tiny box of a shower with me. And guys. GUYS. He’d been there the. Whole. Time.

***Seriously. No hyperbole or exaggeration at all. At. All.

And my boyfriend says it makes me look very pretty.

This is my grown-up tough-girl face.

Since my first survival technique is “close your eyes tightly and pretend you are still sleeping, and then it will be a dream,” this could have been a very dangerous situation. Then, however, something occurred to me. Something important. Something life-saving.

Down the drain!

You’re feeling bad for the bug, aren’t you?
Don’t let him trick you. You can’t trust anything with more than four legs, and he had like, 80.

It occurred to me that the inventors of my modern shower had already thought through this situation. They’d invented the perfect bug-removal device.****

****DO NOT GOOGLE “Uses for shower wand.” THE INTERNET IS WRONG. It is for killing bugs.

Otherwise I'd be dead

The future has all the best murdery devices

So, you see, without the tools of the future, I’d be food for all SORTS of horrible creatures.*****

*****Like itty bitty insects. Which are the most dangerous kind.

(P.S. – Hi Internet. I missed you. Please still read my blog. <3)

I Am Totally Prepared for Our Robot Overlords

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15

Or: This Post Is Going to Talk about a Lot of Geeky Things and You Might Judge Me

I know I keep it pretty under wraps, but you may have guessed that I’m kind of an enormous nerd.* I read geeky books, and I’m in love with science. I can talk philosophically about unicorns and dragons and dinosaurs. I play a lot of video games. I watch a lot of action movies and science fiction.
*If you happen to be dating me at this moment, or have just met me and have fallen for my suave act of awesomeness, please stop reading this right now. I’m totally cool and normal. For sure. Go sports teams!

What this all boils down to is one thing: I think I am totally prepared for our future robot overlords.

Have a hug of war, not a tug of war

No, I cannot draw robot hands. And yes, he has four fingers on purpose. How many fingers do YOUR robot overlords have? Go ahead. Count. It’s four.

I know some people aren’t looking forward to the future. I mean, we already haven’t gotten the flying skateboards we were promised by Back to the Future.** So the future can seem like a little bit of a letdown. But one thing all predictions of the future seem to include are robots. We’re already making them (thanks, Japan!), they’re already kicking butt at Jeopardy (thanks, Watson!), and we’re totally using them to perform surgery magic (thanks, medical science! …No, really. I mean it.).
**We’re flying car-less, too. And none of us normal people have jet packs. Basically, we’ve been lied to a lot about the future giving us lots of ways to defy gravity. I’m outraged by the fact that I’m still required to walk places and have not been able to melt into a Wall-e style space blob. OUTRAGED.

I don't know how to skateboard

It doesn’t even really help if you make flying noises.

But all of Hollywood has convinced us that robots are going to develop sentience and rebel against mankind. Some people are worried about this.*** Not me, though. Because I have officially watched enough movies to know that this whole “robot rebellion” thing happens because we aren’t nice enough to all the robots.
***I’m not going to name names here or anything, but you know who you are.

Me and mah robot friends...

YAY! Robot friends!
Watson is not a very good dancer.

Think about it. Skynet/Cyberdine (we’re talking about the Terminator movies here) was full of roboty slaves that culminated in a horrendous judgment day. In AI, robots are cool as long as we love them, but then we neglect them and everything goes wrong. In Portal, well, a lady gets forcibly dumped into a mega-powered robot body for the continuation of science. What this tells me is that robots probably be more ok with things if we’d just given them a day off or two. And probably a hug.

So I’m all set to hug robots when they hit the mainstream. It’ll probably help make them nicer overlords.

And they might even build me a flying skateboard.

WEEEEEEEEEEEE!

“Flying skateboard” sounds more fun than “hoverboard.” Just accept it.

(I really wanted to write about the Olympics today, but since everything that happened last night is currently living on my DVR because I went to yoga, I had to get a little off topic. And learn how to draw robots. Which was difficult****. See the things I do for you? It’s because I care. You’re welcome.)
****Not really, because when you doodle things on post-its, no one expects high art.