No Future

I just re-read The Invisibles from the beginning, and wow, is it drug-addled perfection. A lot of Morrison's stuff swings the needle a little too far toward "manic gonzo incoherence" and away from "story", but this series straddles the line very well. It's also much more amusing after having read his semi-autobiography Supergods, which goes into a lot of detail about how insane his life was at the time, and how he saw the comic as some kind of sympathetic-magic invocation.

In particular, I would like to share these panels, written in 1997, showing what morning-commute radio was to be like in San Francisco in the far-future year of 2012:

Let's review:

  • Nanobots, comma, plague of;
  • People know who Terence McKenna is, comma, take seriously;
  • Schwa face;
  • Mayan apocalypse;
  • Motorcycle HUD pr0n;
  • Max Headroom broadcast hackers, comma, terrorist;
  • Swearing!

No Future, indeed.

On the other hand: drag queens, clowns. Ok, fair. There's really quite a lot of that sort of thing in my life, here in The Future.

And finally, we'll just file this under "Wow, do I know that feel":

Previously, previously, previously.
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8 Responses:

  1. Paul Rain says:

    Distinct lack of Honda Civic wagons in the future, admittedly.

  2. Frank Hecker says:

    Ah, nostalgia. I spent many an idle hour reading "Invisibles" annotations at barbelith.com, and even contributed a few myself. I get the feeling Morrison threw every oddball idea he'd ever read into that series. (P.S. Appropriate choice of music.)

  3. Jens says:

    To be fair, that Mayan apocalypse was a thing.

  4. Random update, once upon a time, you had a split keyboard, with each half mounted on an arm of your chair, it died, and you couldn't replace it.

    There is now such a thing becoming available. "The interconnect cable is an RJ12 (Just like RJ11, but with 6 live wires) cable. The wire protocol is currently i2c. We have tested it to as much as 15 feet. "

    And an individually programmable color LED under each key, with quality keyswitches.

    https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/keyboardio/the-model-01-an-heirloom-grade-keyboard-for-seriou?ref=users

    • jwz says:

      Actually, I hoarded parts for that keyboard, so I have plenty of spares. But I don't use it any more because I no longer use a chair.

      But wow, that keyboard you linked is remarkably, staggeringly ugly. Also I don't see any indication that it comes with chair arm mounts, which is the hard part. There are lots of split keyboards out there, but none that easily mount to chairs.

      These days I'm using a Matias Ergo Pro.

  5. tobias says:

    Just say feeling. It's OK to express the word 'feeling'. This time, with FEELING.

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