humor Archives » Exolymph

This website was archived on July 20, 2019. It is frozen in time on that date.
Exolymph creator Sonya Mann's active website is Sonya, Supposedly.

Photo by Anthony Quintano.

April 22, 2017

Indignities of Late Capitalism

I prefer capitalism to the alternatives, but I’ve still gotta laugh (and cringe) at some of the results. Modern life is fucking weird. Links links links…

Juicero is a startup that raised more than $100 million to “reinvent juice” or whatever bullshit. A ground-breaking scoop showed that Juicero’s machines are basically unnecessary. You can squeeze the pre-filled juice bags by hand and get essentially the same result.

“Omg they were selling a $400 bag squeezing machine 😂😂😂” — Ryan Lawler
“if you thought ‘a $400 wifi juicer is a thing i should buy’ you deserve this. respect to juicero” — Brian Feldman
“I Just Love This Juicero Story So Much” by Albert Burneko (xxxtreme snark)
“Juicero users find that man trumps machine” by John Biggs (in the form of a noir screenplay)
Juicero CEO responds and refers to the bag-squeezing as “hacking”
“Juicero CEO Begs You: Do NOT Squeeze Our Juice Bags” by Libby Watson

The whole Juicero saga made me snort audibly at least once. Thank you, venture capitalists. (Maybe Juicero’s valuation is actually justified because of the amount of amusement it caused?!)

Another tidbit from Silicon Valley; this one is a #shortread: “Investing in Snapchat is something that no one responsible should ever do. Snapchat is the equivalent of driving drunk.”

Tweet by Sarah Jamie Lewis. Insert “this is fine” dog here.

Tay Zonday of “Chocolate Rain” fame articulated what’s wrong with journalism better than just about anyone else. He’s also very woke, which somehow surprised me. Man, remember when that video went viral? I did not take him seriously, but apparently I should have.

Sophia Amoruso’s #Girlboss rally creeps me out. Examined through a feminist lens, the name is demeaning — how about a hashtag-less boss who just happens to be a woman? Also, yeah, I’m a woman, not a girl. Plus all the ~omg inspiration~ smacks of multi-level marketing schemes or infoproduct “how to be an entrepreneur” sellers.

There’s more to the Wall Street bull and newly added Fearless Girl sculptures than most of us realized. Capitalist guerilla art + pernicious marketing + the author is dead so who cares anyway. (Every possible take will be written, as the commandments of the internet say!)

“Fake art is art that’s significantly more useful to someone involved in making it than audience suspects. Hidden utility is insincerity.” — @vgr
the blog post that sparked a lot of debate: “seriously, the guy has a point” by Greg Fallis
actually the original bull sculpture was commercially motivated too
no the guy DOESN’T have a point, says Caroline Criado-Perez

Tweet by Charlie Warzel.

Lastly, Louise Mensch thinks that everybody is a Russian agent. She’s pretty close to being Alex Jones for liberals. It honestly seems possible that she’s undergoing some kind of psychotic break and broadcasting the whole process on Twitter.

Header photo by Anthony Quintano.

Photo by Michele Walfred.

January 23, 2017

Perils of the Connected Farm

Note from the editor: My friend Greg Shuflin posted the following story on Facebook. I asked if I could redistribute it here, and he said yes.

It was a pretty crazy day on the farm — the farm of the neocyberpunk 2040s that is, where cybernetically modified agrohackers wielded vast armies of AI-controlled smart tractors and fertilizer drones to eke their genejacked grain out of the dry soil of the post-Ogallala hellscape that was once a polity called “Kansas”.

Old Farmer Mauricio had programmed his cyberbrain to start nanofabbing caffeine molecules at 6am, and ever since then he’d been dealing with shit — some web bandits had exploited a quantum memory zero-day and broken into half of his private cloud’s namespace. Probably some fucking thirty-something LOMPs [low-marginal-product-of-labor proles on basic income] with nothing better to do than fuck with people, Mauricio thought to himself darkly.

Before the sun was finished rising, Mauricio had patched the vuln, killed as many of the malware AIs as he could find on his network, and had started to restore the water-recycler control AI from backup. He grabbed a quick breakfast of rice porridge and a Chinese doughnut, then woke up his lazy teenage nephew Chuck, who was staying with him during the growing season.

“Time to get up, Chucko,” he said, as the sleepy teen fumbled for his ocular implant on the pile of dirty laundry near his bed. “We’ve been hacked. I really need your help today.”

Chuck quickly brushed his teeth, threw on some work clothes, and went to the hovertractor in order to go do a hard reset on the network node out in field #3. But as he pulled the tractor out of the garage, he found that his way forward was blocked.

All of the AI-controlled wheel hoes that his uncle owned were spinning in circles and brandishing their spikes, in the most menacing fashion that their hardware allowed. Of course, the damn wheel hoes were behind the same firewall as everything else! So they had been infected and turned by the LOMPs’ fuckery too.

Mauricio let his nephew set out, with a word of warning: “Watch yourself, kid. These hoes ain’t loyal.”

You may be wondering, “Was that whole story really just build-up for a pun based on a Chris Brown song?” The answer is that yes, yes it was. Watch out for the LOMPs at work today, y’all.

Header photo by Michele Walfred.

I think #Sponsored might actually be a joke? @ClickHole on Twitter.

October 20, 2016

Ready for Your Perfect New Digital Life?

For those of you who aren’t familiar, ClickHole is a parody of the cliché parts of BuzzFeed and all those vapid quiz sites that people love on Facebook. It’s owned by The Onion.

ClickHole publishes gems like a guide to arguing online — “Find out what kind of spider your opponent is most scared of, and mention it in your argument to throw them off their game” — and the touching saga, “This Man Lost His Entire Memory. Can You Explain To Him What Leather Is?” (Spoiler alert: JKJK, I can’t bear to spoil it.)

I’m sharing this “Clickventure” today because of the golden future it allows you to enter:

Unlike real life, which is plagued with wars, battles, and violent fighting between armies, life inside a hard drive can be customized to be blissful. No longer will there be poor people or hungry people — in the Singularity, everyone will be happy. The best part is that nothing will ever, ever go wrong, because the people who invented the Singularity ran a Norton AntiVirus trial on it and no viruses came back.

I’m so stoked for computers to solve all our problems! Thanks, free Norton AntiVirus trial!

Yes, that Ask.com toolbar is permanently installed on your vision. The default mental search engine is both Yahoo! and Bing — your memories will only be queried if no online answer can be found. I’m sorry, you’re asking about configuration? The options menu? I’m afraid I don’t understand.

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