Lost Explained

Last night, I watched a television program called "Lost" with some friends.  Since I had never seen it before, my friends warned me that it would probably be impossible for me to follow what was going on: they barely understood, and they watch it every week.

Within the first two commercial breaks, however, I was able to tell everyone who the good guys were, who the actual good guys were, who the evil mastermind was, and how the series is going to end.  And now, I am going to tell you.  Which is to say

ZOMG Major Spoilers Ahead‽  

First off, I think it's pretty clear that the final boss of this show is Higgs Boson.

Boson:  Evil as fuck.

In 2013, our friends at CERN finally manage to liberate Higgs Boson.  Rather than express gratitude toward its emancipators, Boson goes SKYNET, and starts forming little tiny black holes.  The little black holes amass into a much bigger one, eventually digging a Möbius strip through Minkowski space-time, and forcing mankind to loop through it perpetually.  The tunnel leads through the film "Donny Darko", then to the 1972 presidential election, through the film "Primer" several dozen times, followed by the American Prohibition, and finally back to 2013.  Eventually, this infinite procession started to wear on people, as you couldn't drink half the time, you couldn't prevent Nixon from winning, and those movies are confusing no matter how many times you watch them.

A resistance group forms, calling themselves the "Dharma Initiative".  During a trip through "Donny Darko", they reroute the airplane toward Switzerland in an effort to prevent the construction of the LHC and hopefully shore up reality in the process.  Unfortunately, they overshot, and flew into 1972, where Boson and a gang of massless photons were waiting.  The photons created a large electromagnetic disturbance, stranding both Dharma and Boson on the island, and creating a new, linear, timeline.

Stephen Hawking

At this point, things start to get weird.  With Boson trapped in the linear timeline, Stephen Hawking attempted to straighten out the Möbius timeline.  He managed to get it to run consecutively from 1492 to 2013, but accidentally turned himself into an evil old lady in the process.  Each time history repeats, the Dharma initiative makes an attempt to stop the Large Hadron Collider, but instead crashes into the island and creates a new timeline.  Sometimes they crash in the 70's, sometimes in the 00's, and sometimes they wind up evil.  This is where the "others" come from.  

Hermann Minkowski

All this messing with space-time has also caused every major philosopher and scientist to be born in the late 20th century, and most of them eventually wind up on the island via the doomed airplane, including Michael Faraday and C.S. Lewis.  The most important among them is Hermann Minkowski, the famous analyst and contributor to special relativity.  As he is also one of only four people ever to understand Minkowski space-time, he is the last, best hope for mankind.

And that's it.  Lost explained.

Forty Days of Grilling

Since the beginning of the year, several friends of mine have decided to go thirty straight days without consuming any alcoholic beverages.  The idea isn't that they will never drink again, but that, they what and some stuff, an exercise of will, it's about embiggening, and, you know, a chance to refresh their perspective on life, and some other things.

I can sort of appreciate the benefits of this, but their methods make no sense to me.  The way I figure, I can get the same benefit from choosing to commit to "not-do" pretty much anything for a month, so it shouldn't suck any more than it needs to.  Furthermore, the benefits of committing to not-doing not-something follow as easy corollaries.

During this thought process, I remembered that God gives you extra points during this month for not-doing things.  I've decided abstain from not cooking something on a grill at least once a day (per sleep cycle, really), and to give Haiti all of the points I earn by doing so.  In other words:  I plan to cook something on a grill at least once a day.  For forty days.  For Haiti.

I cannot conceive of any way that this plan could go wrong.

Transylvanian History Week

So apparently I missed the Dracula convention held at the Westin last weekend.  Not that I'm into Draculas or anything, but you might be, and as a journalist, it is my duty to report the facts, even if I have to make them up.  Fortunately, my esteemed colleagues at the PI made it to the event, and I will use my powers of summary to tell you what went down.

First, we have this girl.  According to the caption, she is wearing "vampire themed contact lenses."  I'm not sure what this means, exactly.  I would have just called them "red".  When I think of "vampire themed" objects, I have something more like this (mildly NSFW) in mind.

Various celebrity Draculas were in attendance, such as Count Chocula and Count von Count, seen here posing with some of their fans.  Also of interest are the young man and woman to the right; their gazes belying a profound sense of trepidation and/or disappointment.  I speculate they are deeply upset that Franken Berry was unable to make it.

Gregory House, M.D. also made an appearance, for reasons which are thoroughly unclear to me.  If I had to guess, I would say it is lupus.  I've been wrong about that in the past, however.

While werewolf/Dracula relations have been historically tenuous and even violent, things have changed significantly in the last decade (thanks in large part to the work of noted scholar Glenn Danzig).  The situation has come so far, in fact, that werewolfs and Draculas now invite one another to their respective birthday parties and conventions.  Here, we see two werewolfs sharing an inside joke.

Finally, you are probably wondering how you can become a Dracula.  Rumors and misconceptions abound, and once again I am intensely grateful for Yahoo Answer's ability to resolve this in a definite and accurate manner.  According to ichigotenshi11, a level 2 Dracula, you either have to be born a Dracula, or find one who is willing to give you a total blood transfusion, and then teach you the ropes.  Without these ropes, you apparently "become a killing machine. Craving blood all the time. Because your confused you go mad. That's why there are so few vampires in the world."  In other words, not a decision to be made lightly.  Good luck!

How Midi Forever Changed the Internet, Part I

The internet became self-aware at 2:14am EDT August 29, 2003, and since then, the landscape has changed drastically.  Users once lived in Homepages, but no longer: the internet has provided them with blogs, Facebooks or Twitters to call their own.  There is now a vast system of Youtubes, inhabited by webcam-wielding 13-year-olds.  Most significantly, the internet now gives its users these gifts free of charge or Computer Science prerequisites.

You may ask yourself, "How did I get here?  Where does this information superhighway come from?"  The events leading up to this new era (sometimes called Web²) are poorly documented and often forgotten (largely because Wikipedians keep reverting my edits).  It is therefore my great pleasure, dear friends, to present, in complete and thoroughly researched detail, the story of how midi forever changed the internet.


In the Beginning Was the Command Line

Long ago, the internet was a text-based dungeon fraught with danger. Its sole inhabitants were a technocratic cult of wizards, the only people powerful enough to tame this frontier. For the time, the non-wizard public had to be content with the relative safety provided by AOL and similar services. With the advent of the Wide World-Web, however, everything changed.

The wizards had added graphics to a portion of the internet, and it was now safe for a new generation of users to venture out and explore. What they found was mostly confusing to them, but also wildly fascinating. They moved around by riding WebCrawlers, capable of taking them to the StarTrek webpage, the NASA webpage, or the MIT webpage. It didn't take long before they started to want webpages of their own; the frontier was wide open, and they were ready to stake their claim.

My midi collection. You are the visitor to my Homepage

Construction guys building a Geocities Homepage

To create webpages, they needed to learn to html, a technique not easily mastered.  By observing the techniques of the wizards, however, this new generation of users were able to pick up the basics of the skill. With the assistance of animated construction guys, they founded Geocities, and built themselves Homepages. It was a golden, prosperous time.

DOOM midi is pretty cool, actually

Just like today's internet users, the citizens of Geocities enjoyed trading music with one another. They were limited in their choices of format, however. The internet's tubes were significantly smaller then; so they got used to midi, the only format small enough to fit. It was a decision made out of necessity, but one that would have consequences not even the wizards could have predicted.

Thanks for Tuning In

Well, this has been a hilarious first week for "Fight for this Fish", I think we all can agree. There's no possible way this pace can continue, as I'm not actually as funny as you think I am. I've used up my cache of good ideas already, in fact. But here are a few of the average ideas I'm considering subjecting you to anyway:

• Other good places to shit in Seattle
• What if survivors of an apocalypse thought "The Family Circus" was an important historical document?
• A special series on how midi built the internet.

And as a special sneak peek, I leave you this:

What if the Survivors of an Apocalypse Thought "Red Meat" Was an Important Historical Document?

Here's the game:  apocalypse or whatever happens, a few generations pass.  People can still read, but they mistake a comic strip for a historical document, and take it really, really seriously.  What if that strip were

 Red Meat

 In the 22nd century, a spaceship-load of ill-tempered and arbitrarily destructive travelers from a distant planet set out to find and harass new life and new civilizations, for the sake of their own amusement.  They found Earth, they blew up the moon for fun, and began their invasion.  The spectacle was quite visible from Earth, and while theories varied, everyone agreed this was probably a bad sign, as the moon didn't usually explode.

 

The spaceship contained a race of lemon-headed humanoids and their metallic robot overlords.  Recalling the recent destruction of the moon, mankind grumpily opted for occupation over obliteration.  Over time, they grew to be nearly as selfish, sadistic and chaotic as the robots. The robots were amused.

Hoping to extract further laughter from mankind's foul mood, they ordered the lemon-heads to serve the humans.  Still relatively displeased with the whole situation, humans treated the lemon-heads rather poorly, forcing them to perform useless and degrading tasks.

 The robots grew more and more amused by the pettiness and arbitrary cruelty of the humans. Thinking maybe they could even learn something from man, they began to experiment with human vices.  Whiskey, in particular became very popular among them, and they ordered production tripled.

Soon, intoxicated flying robots littered the sky, and they were frequently seen colliding with buildings, getting tangled in power lines, and disintegrating one another.  The property damage was extensive, but this was taking its toll on the robots as well.

It seemed making bad decisions while drinking whiskey wasn't an exclusively human trait, and eventually, the robots wound up destroying themselves.  Mankind was once again free, though not a whole lot was left standing, aside from a handful of distilleries.  As the human race began to rebuild, they swore to never forget:
 Whiskey might cause a lot of problems, but it solves a robot occupation pretty well.  

What if the Survivors of an Apocalypse Thought Comic Strips Were Important Historical Documents?

There's an episode of the original Star-Trek, where Kirk finds himself temporarily stranded on a world inhabited by two factions: the Kohms and the Yangs.  They're mortal enemies, but not really sure why; the reasons predate their history.  They don't really care either. Kirk's been hanging out with the Yangs, and they keep saying "E Plebnista" over and over, which makes no sense to anyone.

Eventually, he winds up back at their cave, and they show him this big piece of paper that is apparently a big deal to them.  Then Kirk is like "Uh, what?  This is the Declaration of Independence... Jesus Christ you guys.  It's not 'E Plebnista', it's 'We the People'".  Then he reads the whole thing to them, and everyone gets really excited.  Spock teleports in, and explains that this is a parallel world to our own, that wasn't able to avoid a nuclear war that we did, and then some stuff happens that I don't remember

The point is, this document and phrase passed through a post-apocalyptic game of "Telephone".  I guess if the Yangs (i.e. the Yankees) held onto any single piece of paper, that one sort of makes sense.  What if they had grabbed a different paper or book by mistake though?  What if they grabbed the comics?

Here's the game:  apocalypse or whatever happens, a few generations pass.  People can still read, but they mistake a comic strip for a historical document, and take it really, really seriously. They do their best to interpret the strips, and learn from the mistakes of their predecessors, but of course, they get it pretty wrong.  What kind of nonsense would become their doctrine?

Coming soon:
What if the Survivors of an Apocalypse Thought "Red Meat" Was an Important Historical Document?
and
What if the Survivors of an Apocalypse Thought "The Family Circus" Was an Important Historical Document?