Full truth: It’s 2137 and we still don’t have captioning on EyeStream video. Or on Onion News Network video, a favourite for years. I spent my $2.99 for the iTunes download of ONN’s Future: News from the Year 2137 (on the Facebook).
An instant classic. We spent all last evening freeze-framing the thing and just rerewatching it from scratch. It’s got everything you need in a communiqué from the future – typography, linguistics, gay marriage. But even after working on it for a year, it ain’t got captioning. Even TwatVision’s got captioning.
For the iTunes ecosystem, the only captioning format that works is conventional Line 21 or 608 captioning (skiamorphically enough), and pretty much only WGBH can bundle together the video and captioning files. a 13-minute video costs a few hundred bucks to caption. So let’s consider that a sweet solution to the fucking problem and not bother waiting for all eight houses of Lil Congress to pass a law.
Or does somebody need an obedience chip?
Lingo
This isn’t quite the exolinguistics of District 9, but the writers made another stab at a dystopian English while still remaining comprehensible to American viewers. Now, what do I mean by that? Refer to the following transcript while watching. It’s not as though there’s any other way to read the dialogue, now, is it?
MALE ANNOUNCER: A lot of networks report the news as it happens. But only one has the power to report the news before it happens. Through our state-of-the-art wormhole satellite, the Onion News Network Future Channel brings you exclusive news transmissions from the year 2137. Because to stay ahead in today’s world, you need to know what’s going to happen in tomorrow’s.
[News theme with electronic beeps and whirring mechanical effects]
ZESTY LEWIS: Well, here it goes again. Government contractors announced today that construction on the Omega-12 particle accelerator, which will destroy all life on earth and finally bring an end to humanity’s suffering, is facing much delays. The Omega-12 is now three years behind schedule and like $800 trillion over budget. Today’s holdup, which is being blamed on late helotanium shipments, will set the project back six months. At a newstalk this morning, the program’s bossruler responded to criticalisms about the delay.
ROSS SAN: Pushing back the death date is the only realistic way to make sure that when the machine is turned on, the, um, we will all be atomized.
LEWIS: The Omega-12 project, originally presented by Lil Congress in 2119 as a sweet solution to the problem of continual life on our wretched planet, was met originally with widespread popular approval. But today, citizens are expressing their frustrage at Onion News Network Feedback Zones all over the place.
DANNN YESTER: It’s frustrageous, you know? Every day, the government keeps saying “We’re all gonna die. We’re all gonna die,” and then it not happens. If I could remove my obedience chip, I’d just kill myself.
MEESE JOHNSON: I didn’t care about the cost because I thought we’d all be dead. But now we’re paying a million dollars a week for this project and we’re still alive. This is why I don’t pay to vote.
TIMMIE WESTON: I’m a little better off because at least I have this baby to sell. Uh, but I still want the world gone.
LEWIS: Today’s delay is only the latest in a rope of problems that have plagued the Omega-12 project since its fucking inception. Meanwhile, criticalism is piling up near President Performance H. Wilson, who was voted into office for a sixth term primely because he promised to kill us all.
WILSON (bellowing): You don’t need a bunch of empty promises! Ha! You need to die! Do you want to die?
[Crowd cheers]
WILSON: I can’t hear you! Do you want to die?
[Crowd cheers louder]
LEWIS: President Wilson’s approval ratings have gone down steadily since that first delay, excepting a small rise when he personally murdered 7,000 people with a hatchet. And government-watchdog group Citizens 4 Leadership recently named Omega-12 as the worst-managed government program, surpassing even the ill-fated Mississippi Fire Dam and the never-completed South Florida Relandification Program. So, to be continued waiting.
For all the latest on the end of the world, keep looking at the Onion News Network. Till then, sustenance to you.
News for real: A new poll finds most people wish dinosaurs were still extinct. Remain motionless to be informed. [Voice fades]
[News theme]
LEWIS: Hot young news out of the Middle East Multicultural Battle Zone! Violence reamed the Gaza Scrap today as fighting broke out between the one remaining Palestinian and the one remaining Israeli. The struggle over the Gaza Scrap, which began long before the Burndown, has stolen the lives of more than 99% of the region’s inhabitants.
Here is what the news satellite showed us this morning. The violence began when the Israeli Army Lev Rosen entered the Gaza Scrap and began building a permashed on the disputed land. The Israeli was forced back over the border after suffering a sprained ankle and a bleeding nose at the hands of the Palestinian Army Amjad Olrud. Even after the retreat, the Palestinian bombarded Israel with rocks and empty fire-raid cartridges for near two hours. One Israeli soldier was injured in today’s fight. At a press conference in front of the governmental hovel today, the Palestinian president condemned the Israeli’s incursion.
[Olrud speaking Palestinin]
LEWIS: The Israeli responded by hollering right back at him.
[Rosen replying in Isjabber]
LEWIS: We go now to Onion News Network war correspondent Vitamin Daniels, full live just outside the battle zone. How it do, Vitamin.
DANIELS: What it is, Zesty. There was celebrating in the street of Palestine following—
LEWIS: Uh-huh.
DANIELS: —the successful defensive. But stray moments ago, the Israeli launched another attack—
LEWIS: Mm.
DANIELS: —and pushed the Palestinian to the edge of the Gaza Scrap.
LEWIS: But Syria recently came out with a statement backing the Palestinian and refusing to acknowledge the existence of Rosen.
DANIELS: Yes, Syria has been a friend country for some time. The Six Minutes War from last year pitted the entire nation of Syria against Rosen. But he beat them back with a broken bottle.
LEWIS: But after losing 66% of its troops to pneumonia last year, many people thought Israel was finally prepped to end the conflict.
DANIELS: Full truth. But even during the cease-fire, there has been sparring. Last week, an edible cat wandered into the disputed zone.
LEWIS: Ah.
DANIELS: Both men laid claim to it, resulting in a prolonged shouting match between the two sides. And today, Israel renewed its pledge to build a barrier between the two nations – a plan that has widespread support among the Israeli.
LEWIS: But the border wall, the border moat, the border plasmoat, and the border photonic crystal laser shield did not stop the two sides from fighting.
DANIELS: Full conveyance, but Israel’s latest plan is to build a 30-foot-high wall—
LEWIS: Ah.
DANIELS: —directly around Olrud while he’s asleep.
LEWIS: Fuck chance of that.
DANIELS: Most international observers believe the Palestinian Army will just climb out.
LEWIS: Well, thank you, Vitamin. I love you.
DANIELS: Love you.
LEWIS: Egypt offered to hold talks, but both sides rejected the offer, suspecting it was a trap by the Egyptian spider king to ensnare them in webbing and drink their blood.
Every word I have said here is true. More news was not possible.
Body news now. The Major Surgeon General has issued a warning against diets high in fat people. Think STOP to halt download.
CONDO MERCURY: Roll up this news. Warts from across the Indiana Grimlaws descended today on the Kapitol to protest the possible legalization of gay marriage in what remains of their state. As lawmakers debated the fucking bill this morning, protesters chilled it out in the Free Speech Skware to voice their opposition, some having traveled over 60 miles by sewage-canal barge to shout there. The protest was conjured by a group called Remaining Families Coalition.
NATURE’S THOMPSON: If we allow gays to marry, God will punish us even worse than he already has. We have to oppose this legislation not just for our own sake, but for the sake of America’s packs of feral children.
MERCURY: An Onion News Network poll shows 64% of Grimlanders not burned to death or rendered mute by radiation opposed the bill, cranking the issue as more important to them than detoxifying food supplies or confining wolf-mutants to the Wastelands.
RUBBER FARR: If I could spawn a child that’s not stillborn, I don’t want him growin’ up in a world where two men can marry.
WOMAN: If the Grim legislature fertilizes this law, what would be next? Men married to donkeys will be allowed to take a second donkey as a wife?
MERCURY: If the Roughs of the Grim Legislature legalize same-sex marriage, it would shove Indiana into the ranks of the other five states to have done so – Massachusetts, Vermonty, Procter & Gamble, Carolina, and Gay Texas. Marriages performed in these states are not currently considered legal in the Indiana Grimlands, meaning gay residents of the state are not allowed to visit their partners on government smallpox hospice boats or dig graves for them when they die. Citizen X436A is a gay from the Grimlands.
X436A: If we secure the right to marry, maybe one day we’ll derive the right to live aboveground. We deserve the same rights as all the other subhuman groups. Are we not as good as the Lizard People of Arizony?
MERCURY: Despite the protests, the bill is thickly supported by such liberal-leaning politicians as Harlan Downey, who bought his senate seat two years ago.
DOWNEY: This landmark bill is the next step in the war for gay equality that began 168 years ago.
MERCURY: Other Grimlands residents worry that their state could suffer the same fate as Wyoming, which elected by popular referendum to nuke itself after their state legislature legalized gay marriage. If the law is passed, it will raise the number of laws in the Indiana Grimlands to six. That news is quenched.
More hot news: In Brownsborough today, a massacre-watching party turned deadly. Blink twice—
ZESTY LEWIS: Oven-roasted news in delicious reduction: We’ve all seen the images of razor-toothed mandibles, impenetrable beetle shells, and human bodies torn limb from limb by the bloodthirsty two-ton bugs on news EyeStreams. But are giant beetles as for-real dangerous as the media makes them out to be? Standing there is Orange Clark, director of media-watchdog group YouSafe. Orange, how’s it hanging?
CLARK: How it is hanging.
LEWIS: Now, your organization says the news spends far too fucking much time reporting giant-beetle attacks.
CLARK: Yes, Zesty. Last year, there were over 14,000 EyeStreams about giant-beetle attacks—
LEWIS: Right.
CLARK: —while in reality, there were just 389 recorded instances of humans actually being killed and devoured by mutant beetles in that same time.
LEWIS: Right. And your report tells me most of those people were cooling around clearly-marked beetle-infested zones or corpse piles where giant beetles would feed.
CLARK: Places where humans shouldn’t be trudging around nohow.
LEWIS: True reality.
CLARK: But the overreporting creates irrational fear. So now most people wrongly believe they’re at risk of being pulled out of their homes and eaten in the street by a beetle.
LEWIS: But beetle attacks rank tops in eyeviews almost every time they’re EyeStreamed, even above TwatVision in some zones. Isn’t the media just giving people what they want?
CLARK: But that does not justify scaring people into thinking they’ll get sliced in half if they ever go to the soilfields.
LEWIS: But the—
CLARK: Your footage gets eyeviews, but statistics show you have a far better chance of being eaten by airslugs or dying from oxygen sickness.
LEWIS: And you point at this Sledge!Fakt news clip of an elderly woman having her limbs ripped off by a beetle as a particularly egregious example of that.
CLARK: Sledge!Fakt EyeStreamed that clip over 40 times per day and produced a three-hour special about her story. But that same week, President Performance H. Wilson killed six senators, there was a major cat-meat health advisory, and 30 square miles of Vermonty fell into the ocean.
LEWIS: Right.
CLARK: And where was the coverage of that? And I might point out, Zesty, that the Onion News Network is guilty of this as well.
LEWIS: Uh, we report what the public must see.
CLARK: What about your dung-beetle terror clip of the day?
LEWIS: Scope this! We—
CLARK: You have an entire show called Hunters of the Blood-Mad Beetle.
LEWIS: That is a fact program teaching human viewers how to kill giant beetles if they are attacked. It’s saved lives.
CLARK: But your August Beetle Month, which consists of nonstop, extremely violent, recycled footage of beetles tossing people into the air—
LEWIS: Because—
CLARK: —impaling them on their claws, and sucking—
LEWIS: —because August is when beetles have their feeding craze.
CLARK: Yes, but I think the media needs to stop fearmongering and tell full truth on beetles. Only radioactive giant mutant beetles ever enter population centers.
LEWIS: Real spicy. Well, we—
CLARK: 90% of beetle victims provoked beetles by accidentally looking at them. Only—
LEWIS: All right. Orange Clark, thank you for standing there. OK.
CLARK: OK.
LEWIS: Well, I’ve shot my news load. Fresh sports news: We’ve got the final scores of last night’s rapeball games. That news for your braintank in s—
CONDO MERCURY: Here’s a skull-filler. It can be so hard to find a mate when every day is a constant fight for survival. Well, lucky singles in robot-controlled CalifornieX are getting a helping hand. Yesterday, humans were treated to a delightful piece of activity by their mechanical overlords – a speed-dating event called Commence Dating Now. Organized by the robot Department of Human Natural Resources and Waste Disposal, the event was intended to help more than 200,000 single subcitizens in the San Andre Shatterlands find love and begin repopulating the devastated area in order to provide vital construction labor.
ROBOT: Encouraging humans to mate by smashing them together did not work.
MERCURY: Nearly 200 singles came out to the event for real.
RUSHA KINDLE: This is full good. Uh, I’m ready to f-find someone I can settle down with and have a child to – to turn over to the robots.
SALTED RUGGIERI: Usually the only people I’d meet are the women I’m chained to on the work site. So I’m very aroused.
MERCURY: During the event, participants chatted with opposite-sex members for 90 seconds before advancing on to the next single.
MECHANICAL ANNOUNCEMENT: Advance to the next phase. Advance to the next phase.
MERCURY: Some had a bit of trouble getting used to the rules of speed-dating, but most participants would grade the evening as a big success, saying they true appreciated the chance to meet so many singles at once. At conclusion, the speed-daters named their preferred matches, and if they appeared among that person’s favorites, the two were sent to the mating warehouse.
MECHANICAL ANNOUNCEMENT: Begin copulation now. Begin copulation now.
RUGGIERI: I’m full fucking happy they mandated me here. Much better than the robot Disobedience Center.
MERCURY: Humans wishing to provide care for their own offspring may do so until they reach the age of two.
Hot body-lift-up news here! Chef Phillip Poohbear shows how to season and prepare our own lopped-off tumors in ways that the whole family can enjoy. Blink twice to download.