It has been a constant struggle in our relationship for my other half and I to reconcile our respective environmental proclivities. I, for example, abhor nature and would not shed a single tear should it be decided that the verdant fields and sweltering jungles be paved over, where she finds the bustling, concrete hives of cities to be a sensory apocalypse of which she wants no part.
This becomes especially evident when we travel. I simply cannot think of a more uninteresting vacation destination than Pangaea. Really, I ask you, besides cowering in fear from the vicious flora and fauna, what is there to do? Lounge around the resort? No, thank you, give me the Outer Colonies. Even future Tokyo, with its loathsome, robot denizens, wins hands down over the unpopulated super continent.
Whichever you prefer, you can remember your trip with these retro-styled time travel posters. 826LA, McSweeney’s non-profit student writing center, is offering five of them. Perfect for you, or the time machine enthusiast in your life.
Staring wistfully into the distance, intrepid chrononaut Chesh Morgan remembers the day he unveiled his plans to span the great oceans of time like some chronological Magellan. As a smug smile tugs at the corners of a mouth obscured by the last vestiges of his origins, the brave explorer recalls the painful taunts of his peers prior to his expedition.
If only he had accounted for the potential desire to return to his time armed to the teeth and ripped to the gills on the finest chemical cocktails the future has to offer. While delightful in their own right, Threadless tees and Star Trek simply can’t compare with putting long-dead skeptics in their place with a good, old-fashioned blood-soaked hallucination courtesy of the 21st Century.
Our deepest apologies, dear readers, for having fallen down on the job as of late in regards to one of our most sacred traditions. Needless to say, we are filled with a great sense of shame and assure you it will not happen again. If, in the future, one of us is unable to fulfill their obligations our newly acquired team of Korean animators will leap into action, producing original cartoons for your enjoyment, although in all honesty I personally cannot guarantee this. You see, by “team of Korean animators” I actually mean a Korean family that Eliza met — and subsequently forced into her windowless van — while running errands at Home Depot. They have tried to reason with her, explaining that they are involved in other professions, the father is a salesman for a lighting manufacturer and his wife works as a bank teller. The children are, well, children.
Eliza would hear none of it however, either assuming that they were lying or under the impression that all people of Korean descent have an innate ability to animate. The rest of the staff has done their best to ignore the situation, knowing full well that once Miss Gauger has set her mind on something, one has little chance of ever changing her opinion. It is for this reason that we do nothing when she insists that her aforementioned van has the ability to travel through time or that Qais is, in her words, “a spy sent by space Turks to steal her chocolate secrets.” Regardless it has been uncomfortable, the tired and nervous familial unit has taken up residence in our break room where they were horrified to find only four items : coffee, tea, pipe tobacco, and squid chips. It would be worse when they found out that these items were our sole sources of sustenance. The children, unsurprisingly, did not take well to the tobacco. Perhaps we should send out for food.
Ah well, I’m sure they’ll be fine, besides it’s cartoon time! Click through, loyal Ectomites, and witness their triumphant return!
P.S. Also, remember that if you visit the YouTube page for a particular video you have the option to watch it in high quality. Especially well suited to the anime.
Y’know, I always thought that once time travel had been invented I’d use it to go back and give advice to my adolescent self, not to parade around the streets of Paris in what is apparently the natural evolution of my already questionable fashion choices, though when I think about it the idea makes sense. Apparently even in my advanced years I am a force of fashion with which to be reckoned.
Oh to have been born in the 27th Century, where the futurenymphs of indeterminate sex prance and lurk in the neon drenched, rain slick alleyways. A place where the Martian fashion districts are surrounded with federally mandated billboards, warning potential shoppers of the fashionshock that lies within. This is a place in which clothes such as these are de riguer, and I will not rest until I call it home.
Silent film star Edmund Kesting and dancer Dean Goodelle “go like this”. If you’ll excuse me I have to go reprimand Ross for his flagrant disregard for my “do not abuse the time machine” rule.
This video (and stupidly enjoyable track) must have cost at least a cool million, but the Backstreet Boys didn’t care. They were riding high on Lou Perlman’s buggery adoration, they had legions of teenage girls at their beck and call, and it was the nineties, so nobody bothered telling them (to their faces) how stupid they looked, acted, and sounded.
When you’re that rich, that vaunted, and that young, what can you do? Why, a Thriller rip-off that will live in infamy for a chosen few, of course. Namely, me and the rest of the malcontents who were impressionable youth during that cursed era.
And by impressionable, I mean we thought backflipping werewolves were pretty much the golden apex of comedy. We still think that.
Why am I posting this on Cthursday? Pay attention to the gangly gentleman in the deceptively intellectual glasses, with the briefcase and the obsession with staring away from the camera at exactly a ninety-degree angle. I assume he’s supposed to be some sort of Jekyll/Hyde manifestation, but his bifurcation is less monstrous than it is piscean. My hypothesis is that some concept artist snuck that one past the board, giggling into his dog-eared copy of the Compleat Works of Lovecraft the while.
But I don’t think backflipping werewolves had to be snuck past anyone.
It is nice to know that, if I made a brief pit stop in the year 1898 on a brief time-traveling adventure (the overall aim being to teach my fourteen year old self how to make out with less prematurely sticky inefficiency), I would be able to communicate with the locals, despite the evolution of the casual English patois.
I was worried about this. Would the denizens of 1898 — my own squealing, monkey-like genetic progenitors — be able to understand my strange, moon man language, so casually filled with post-modern references to electrons, twenty-third dimensional physical laws and robots you can have sex with?
Probably not. However, it turns out that telling someone, “Hey, I fucked your mother last night. Suck my ass, you cunt-lapping dog” is as close to a universal bonjour as the modern-day time traveler is able to accomplish.
In the dim history of my mumblings there are mentions of a property called, intriguingly, Ranklechick and His Three-Legged Cat. I first read this and wrote about it back at Table of Malcontents, mentioning it in a post on comic book MBQ. The post earned me to scorn of an entire generation of American manga fans (”white, fat, mousy-haired, wire-framed and lacking in personal hygiene”), and perhaps was not the best venue in which to introduce Rankle.
Allow me, instead, to quote from creator Rosearik Rikki Simons:
Ranklechick and His Three-Legged Cat is about a child Ghoul named Ranklechick. Ranklechick lives near Jupiter’s moon, Europa, within a sentient space station called the Europan Zoo. He lives with his three-legged cat, Pumpernick. Since birth, Ranklechick has been accused by his father of murdering his mother and now the sad little Ghoul thinks he can make everything right if he can just talk to his mother’s ghost. This is Ranklechick’s obsession, and every Ghoul on board the Zoo must have an obsession in order for the Zoo to survive. Being that he is of the inventor class of Ghoul, Ranklechick invents an absurd collection of devices in his quest to speak to his mother, like his Bliss Extractor, which he uses to try to get an autograph from the ghost of Charles Dickens, or his Sphere of Belligerence, a spacecraft propulsion system that literally insults physics. All Ghouls are social idiots trapped in a society that thrives off of absurdity, like a vast population of Asperger’s patients. Ranklechick spends his time living in the densely populated Europan Zoo, building necrotic communicators when he isn’t being interrupted by the the strange and unnatural — and he has many interruptions: running from handshaking lessons, avoiding being made into candy by the evil android Nathan Burblepinch, getting repeatedly decapitated, suffering the company of oniomaniac children, being possessed by the Spirit of Failure, suicidal disembodied brains, melancholic ham, a sardonic talking three-legged cat for a best friend, and all the while Ranklechick continues to believe he is becoming a comic book character. When all is quiet and he has time to think, he wonders if he’ll ever get to tell his dead mother that he loves her. This is a comedy.
I was so taken with Ranklechick’s cast and setting that I penned two pieces of fanart, something I never, ever do, one of which can be seen to the right. That is Sister Toovibohnes (I’m iffy on the spelling), a straight-laced space nun that lives aboard the Europan Zoo with the rest of the gang.
Ranklechick has been generously made available for free on Simons’ website, along with Super Information Hijinx: Reality Check! (which I have not read, but I believe it involves catgirls and also “the internet”).
The position you see here is position 01010100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01010010 01100101 01110110 01100101 01110010 01110011 01100101 00100000 01010000 01100001 01110010 01110100 01101001 01100011 01101100 01100101 00100000 01000001 01100011 01100011 01100101 01101100 01100101 01110010 01100001 01110100 01101111 01110010, more colloquially known as the ‘Reverse Particle Accelerator.’ I must remember to try that one.
Sent to us via EctomAIM by Camillomiller, the original uploader’s caption proclaims:
My grandfather. He lived in South Dakota, then Michigan. He last lived in Florida, according to records. I never met him. He was married to Cecilia McFadden and his daughter’s name, my mother, is Mary Ann, born in October of 1930.
In sheer defiance of the World Wide Web Consortium's will, Ectomo was designed using a non-web-standard font. Luckily, it is included in the excellent font pack released by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, which can be freely downloaded in Mac and PC formats here. Ectomo should still look fine without it, though.
