pyesetz | Jan. 1st, 2021

(Title is a riff on this novel from 1964.)

Nothing new under the sun: If you’re mining ancient literature for ideas to use in your new novel, it is likely that your work will end up having many tropes in common with every other novelist who’s doing the same thing. This is especially true if the trope-matching is loose (the phrase “big hairy friend” unfairly minimizes the many differences between Chewbacca and Hagrid).
John Atkinson is a famous cartoonist. You’ve never heard of him, have you? The world is full of semi-famous people who are known by many others but not you. This paragraph is just filler because the comic is so tall.

Military Secrets: It is officially unknown whether the MARAUDER plasma gun still exists, or to what extent it ever worked as a weapon. No pictures of it were ever released; no papers published on it since 1995.
This photo is of the Shiva Star, whose capacitor banks were reused for MARAUDER. It was built in 1971 and was still being used for fusion research as late as 2007. Supposedly it got its name because it originally had four arms, like depictions of Shiva, rather than because that Hindu god is also called “The Destroyer”.

Schrödinger's Douchebag: There is no particular reason for this crook to be mentioned today. I was trying to determine whether DPYDIT is a standardized Internet abbreviation for “don’t put your dick in that” (it isn’t) when I came across Urban Dictionary’s Word of the Day for December 27ᵗʰ. Their choice was Schrödinger's Douchebag, defined as “A guy who says offensive things and decides whether he was joking based on the reaction of people around him.” Naturally I like this joke because of the umlaut in its name — accent marks are so 💠cute💠! 💝 So it seemed to me that I could use this in my week-long “Links of the Day” series, perhaps attached to a photo of Martin Shkreli, the pharma bro douchebag. He has such a punchable face! But it turns out, the problem with this is, it’s just not very funny. Not every joke-idea actually works; some of them need to be cut from the show. So how could you be reading this?