Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Slightly Less Unsatisfactory


            (Wanted to get something up to appease my possibly nonexistent audience, so this is the first third of a post. The last two-thirds seem to have departed at some point, so I’ll be searching for them over the course of today. If you spy me in your dictionary holding a spyglass and a shotgun, please refrain from violently shutting the book. I’m just doing my vaguely-defined job.)

            (Okay, for some reason my blog decided to eat the entire post after I had put it together. It’s complete now, but we may have just seen its first steps towards sentience. The strange part is, if it does gain sentience, go insane, and start raving about wanting to take over the world, I doubt anybody will notice a difference.)

            I think that anybody who has read this blog for more than five minutes and lived to tell the tale will know that I don’t think that society as a whole engages in enough comically insane engineering projects. Sure, we build a lot of dams, but at the end of the day a dam is just humanity’s way of feeling superior to beavers. A dam, after all, is just a wall with a horrible sense of navigation. They’re the Forrest Gump’s of the construction world: they don’t know why they’re there, or what they’re doing, but they don’t really see a reason to stop, so they’re just going to sit there blocking the river until they eventually discover the location of their childhood girlfriend and we have to deal with a thousand tons of concrete sprinting across the countryside to reach her. And I have no idea where that metaphor got away from me. My point is that dams really don’t do anything special, aside from the whole “keeping towns from drowning” thing, which is pointless anyway because any biologist will tell you that humans are 70% water, so it’s just hypocritical of humans to suggest that they might have too much of it.
            Skyscrapers are equally boring. Have you ever built a skyscraper before? I haven’t personally, but I have played Jenga, and I assume that the process is pretty similar: you just start stacking things on top of other things, and you only stop when it either gets knocked over or you get bored and go have lunch (incidentally, this is why they’re called “buildings”: They’re never actually fully built. Most modern architecture techniques are based around carefully scheduled lunch breaks to distract the workers. Given the chance, most construction workers would keep building until the mass of the structure visibly altered the moon’s orbit.) And even if you have a skyscraper up and running, all you can do with it is listen to the pleasing thonk of birds slamming into windows at speeds of upwards of seventy-five kilometers per hour. There’s a reason that Godzilla hates those things so much. He’s really just expressing his indignation at the stagnation of modern architecture, and I for one think we should applaud Godzilla for that.
            So dams are to be pitied, and skyscrapers are, ironically, pits of boredom. At least that’s what I assume that I wrote; if I actually commended their contributions to modern civilization, then I’d like to offer my deepest apologies. But if we’re looking for a massive engineering project that manages to be even more pointless while still engendering hatred towards all ninety degree angles, then I’d like to propose that we dig a hole through the center of the Earth. Some of you are going to notice that this would probably mean drilling through miles of molten/supercompressed metal for the exclusive purpose of saying that we did it. And yes, the displacement of the materials would probably create a mountain so high that the Earth would appear from a distance to be making an offensive gesture towards the moon, though in my defense the moon has had it coming for a long time. But look at it this way- the Earth’s core is its gravitational center. Therefore, you would slow down as you fell down the hole as terminal velocity decreased and air friction slowed you down. Inertia would probably take you past the center, but the now reversed force of gravity would just drag you back. Do you realize what this means? We would have the greatest carnival ride of all time. I mean, seriously, a carousel would have absolutely nothing on that. Oh, you want to ride a horsie? Well, get on, and hold on tight, because we are throwing you to the center of the Earth, because it will be exhilarating and mind-blowing and getting back up will be entirely your problem. Next in line!

13 comments:

  1. the other 2/3rds of this post still only counts as one post. don't think you can get out of the post backlog that easy.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Oh, I don't intend to get out of it that way. I don't intend to get out of it at all. I just know that I'm going to wake up one day to find that I've inadvertently produced several dozens confused diatribes on various topics. How do you think this blog got started in the first place?

    Who are you, by the way? I feel like I should've asked that sooner.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I'm just a guy on the internet currently in college. i play indie games(creeper world, minecraft, terraria, ect) and flash games mostly on kongregate though occasionally i get into MMOs (bgo currently) and mainstream titles (diablo me3 skyrim). saw your funny posts on the escapist forums and it led me here. personally i think you're hilarious yet you're almost completely unnoticed so i thought it might be fun to get some reactions from you and see what you do when you get someone consistently posting comments into the dusty comments section. :P what about you? whats under all of the crazy? ive seen you make sense on the escapist before (games are totally art)

    ReplyDelete
  4. there are some pretty amazing construction plans already being planned out. a skyscraper thats a mile high, making a city that floats on water, an underwater tunnel to allow trains to carry cargo from Asia to north America, a freaking geodesic dome to go over Houston city. an elevator that goes into space, ect. hows that for crazy? also I've always dreampt of a ride exactly like what you just described. it would be awesome but it would have a practical use of cheaper transport because gravity would carry it the majority of the way to the other side of the earth.

    ReplyDelete
  5. A space elevator wouldn't be exciting. It's still an elevator, no matter how tall it is. They're quite simply black holes of boredom: place a Dr. Seuss book on an elevator, and it'll be completely blank by the time it reaches the top. Same problem with skyscrapers: no matter how tall, it's still boring. See whatever logic I happened to apply above; can't remember right now. Floating cities contain skyscrapers and elevators, so they're out of the question anyway. And trains are awesome anyway. Making a giant railway would just be asking for trouble. So digging a hole to the center of the Earth is definitely the way to go.

    As for who I am- I'm Hal10k. An enigma wrapped in a mystery covered in riddles and cooked on medium power until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

    ReplyDelete
  6. oh come on Mr. Halvorson can't you tell me more? like how you graduated from Norges teknisk-naturvitenskapelige universitet with a masters of science in communication technology? or how you're a Consultant at Helse Vest IKT? isn't it amazing what a Google search and some deductive reasoning can do to unravel an "enigma covered in riddles"? :P anything else you would like to add?

    ReplyDelete
  7. I'm more interested in how you arrived at the conclusion that I must be Norwegian when the entire blog is written in English.

    ReplyDelete
  8. well this is your twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/thesisbot

    and you posted an article claiming you wrote it

    and the author of said article has the last name of "HAL"vorsen. coincidence? i think not!

    ReplyDelete
  9. That wasn't me, and I can give you a clear indication of how I know: whoever made that Twitter account used the phrase "LOL". I do not use that phrase under any circumstances. We do not abbreviate things here at WFTA.

    ReplyDelete
  10. so youre trying to tell me that the twitter account hal10k with the exact same picture and exact same username is not you?

    ReplyDelete
  11. also its perfectly reasonable for the blog to be in English if you're from Norway because English has been taught as a mandatory foreign language in Norwegian primary school since the 1960s, so close to 100% of the population below age 60 or so will know at least some English. and since English is the most commonly used language on the internet you would get more views by being in English.

    ReplyDelete
  12. It's probably just some guy who has no idea what dire conflicts his username has spawned. Believe me, I'm not the first person to dub himself as the succesor to a (justifiably) paranoid AI. I'm just the most single-minded about it.

    ReplyDelete
  13. yes but what does 10k have to do with hal? isnt the character hal 9k?

    next guess: your last name is Hallok? cmon give me a hint :P

    ReplyDelete