3d illusion arts: This Blog Rules

This Blog Rules

10 Things You’ll Need When Your Internet Goes Away

Posted: 29 Feb 2012 07:54 AM PST

by Will Conley

No problem.

The Internet is in danger. The SOPA/PIPA bills (which have only been shelved, not destroyed), the Megaupload.com shut-down, Twitter censoring tweets, telecommunications companies being forced to turn over complete customer information to Homeland Security — the threats are endless.

But that’s okay! Don’t fear. We at This Blog Rules have prepared a convenient list of the ten most valuable items you will need in a post-Internet age. While everyone else is out crying and scratching their eyeballs out after five minutes without a free and open Internet, you’ll be sitting pretty.

1. Notebook

A notebook farm.

“Notebooks” are the latest advancement in communications technology for the coming post-Internet age. A notebook is a rectangular object filled with “paper” made from “trees” that have been chopped down and pressed into one-use disposable flat-screen computer monitors.

Paper is widely admired by cell phone manufacturers for its built-in obsolescence. Even Apple has yet to produce a tablet as short-lived as a piece of paper.

2. Pen

A “pen” is a special stylus filled with monitor pixels blended into a liquid called “ink.” When you press the wet end of a pen against a notebook and move it around erratically, a Facebook status update is created for your friends and family to read.

The resulting chaotic visual patterns or “writing” on the paper are impossible to decipher, ensuring your updates are safely encrypted.

Nobody knows, nobody cares.

3. Bulletin Board

A “bulletin board” is like an Internet server, in that it holds all your tweets so that anyone can read about what your stool looked like this morning.

But unlike Internet servers, which are made out of unicorn dreams, bulletin boards are made out of cork, which is a kind of dried peat moss. And instead of existing in the clouds at the right hand of God as servers do, bulletin boards exist right here on Earth, in a place called “in public.”

Portrait of the author on his first encounter with "in public."

When you have something to tell the world — such as “lol do i look like i have duck lips” or “lol obamas dum” — you just blog it on a page from your notebook, hold it against the bulletin board, and stab it with a thumbtack.

4. Bullhorn

It has been said, “The pen is mightier than the sword.”

It has also been said, “I am going to hit you with this bullhorn.”

A bullhorn helps you win arguments against any dangerous pen-wielders you might encounter on your new adventure of being in public.

We also heard you can talk through it, but we don't see how.

5. Pants

“Pants” protect a part of your body from the elements and save you embarrassment when you are in public. You simply slide them onto your legs.

Pants technology is still in its early stages. One common complaint about pants is that they tend to have holes at the bottom, leaving your feet totally exposed.

6. Shoes

Shoes are a form of foot armor design to compensate for the common problem of pants holes. Shoes protect your feet from thumbtacks when traversing vast bulletin board farms littered with thumbtacks.

I’m sorry. I’m moving too quickly. Let me back up.

“People” are kind of like an iPhone, except with all kinds of vestigial parts attached. If you’ll turn away from the screen for a moment and look down, you’ll notice you have something called “limbs” attached to the awkward hulk that props up your brain container.

There are exceptions.

Limbs are classified either “arms” or “legs.” There are usually two of each. Before the Internet, people used their arms to shake “hands” with each other, and their legs to move their “feet,” which connect the entire gangling unit to the ground and propel it from place to place. Shoes reduce the pain and agony of this pointless exercise.

7. Deodorant

Because you will be communicating with people in ultra-high-definition 3D virtual hyper-real sensual immersion hangout time-space, you will need plenty of “deodorant.”

You know how sometimes you stop to take a breath while front-loading your face hole with Doritos, and you feel a powerful cheesy feeling in your nostrils? That’s called your “sense of smell.” Except in ultra-high-definition 3D virtual hyper-real sensual immersion hangout time-space, there is not just one smell, but many — maybe dozens. Scientists differ on the exact number of available smells, but they all agree that your B.O. is nasty.

Facts are facts.

Deodorant solves all that. You just rub a stick of it under your arm hinges, and you’re ready for your webcam-less Skype session in public.

8. Toothbrush

Like your B.O., your mouth air kills houseflies. The smell is considered a faux pas when dropping a mouth comment on someone’s earspace. That’s where your “toothbrush” comes in handy.

The toothbrush’s hygienic properties — along with the toxic chemical fluoride — were first discovered by medieval interrogation technician Franz Johnson in 1353, who used toothbrushes and fluoride as a way to make political prisoners give up state secrets. It is said that when King Ronald the Credulous visited Johnson’s prisoners, he remarked on how delightful all his prisoners’ faces smelled and wanted to know how this had come to be. The toothbrush became a smash hit among the general public soon after.

Simply squeeze some fluoride paste onto your toothbrush and torture your teeth for one minute, and even your deodorized arm hinges will be jealous.

9. Currency

Currency is like PayPal in that it helps you acquire stuff, but currency comes in a convenient paper form that you stuff in your “wallet,” which is a folding envelope made from cow flesh that you stuff in your pants.

When you go out in public, you will encounter something called “buildings.” Actually, you will probably encounter a whole lot of them. Buildings are where notebooks, shoes, deodorant, pants, and other necessary post-Internet items can be found.

You might think that just because those things are sitting there inside the buildings, you can just walk in and take them off the shelves. And you’re right, you can just take the stuff. When you walk out of the building where the stuff is that you take, you just pull some currency out of the wallet that was in your pants and hand it to the guards stationed near the exit. If you don’t have enough currency, you just go take some from the “ATM,” or currency fountain.

We're pretty sure it looks like this.

This is widely viewed to be a much less convenient way of getting stuff than the PayPal method, in which everything that exists is manufactured on Internet servers and delivered to you by the postal service, but it will have to do if you expect to survive.

10. Gun

Stephen Spielberg once said, “If it doesn’t have guns in it, it’s not a movie, or my name’s not Stephen Spielberg and I didn’t actually say any of this.”

Since there are no free movie downloads in a world without Internet, you are going to need a gun to keep the action flowing. You can trade some of your currency for a gun inside any building labeled “Walmart.”