While pointing something out on a work colleague’s laptop, I often like to poke the screen with my finger. Sometimes the colleague gives me a strange look, particularly if he is of a more nerdy constitution. Is it wrong to touch a laptop screen?

Quite the contrary, at least for a conventional LCD (liquid crystal display).

To cut a rather long story short, LCDs are made from thin sheets of glass layered over an electrostatic jelly. Circuits connect the jelly to a backlight, and thence to your keyboard and trackball: type something or massage your ball, and words and shapes appear on the jelly.

Magic.

Now while this jelly is a delectable thing (”Great for robots with dentures!” as one tech wag once quipped), it was originally designed for calculator and digital watch displays, and actually struggles mightily when presenting all the crap that appears on our computers these days. Update your Facebook status too frequently or surf too much porn, and your jelly can develop a case of the “worms”, a gout-like disorder which leads to screen-warping and eventually cracking. (Most desktop LCDs, while theoretically prone to the same issues, bypass them by virtue of their substantially thicker jellies.)

For jellied laptop LCDs, poking the screen is a good thing.

Greasy fingerprints aside (a quick spray of sulphuric acid works wonders), poking does an excellent job of flushing the “worms”, leveraging a process not entirely removed from the poaching of rogue fruit chunks in human-consumable editions. If your colleagues have laptop screens of this nature, I encourage you to poke them (the screens) at every opportunity. (And if you’re “that kind of person”, go ahead and intrude upon the colleagues themselves; the worst you’ll get is a slap, and you may well end up in bed with someone.)

There is, however, a new type of display, designed to self-correct the insidious “worms”, and if a colleague’s laptop owns one of these, it is imperative that you not poke it.

This new technology is called OLED, or “organic light-emitting diode”. While not yet that common in PC laptops, OLEDs are now used in most Apple laptops. If your colleague has a recent vintage Mac lappy, there’s a good change it uses an OLED.

OLEDs, as you’ve probably already guessed from the name, depart from conventional LCDs by replacing the jelly with a living, seaweed-type substance, combined with what can only be described as an ancient form of mollusc, the whole shebang suspended in a very weak saline solution, gently spiced with a sausage-based emollient. When you type or roll on an OLED laptop, the seaweed gently sways in the solution, exciting the mollusc, which then ejaculates words and shapes onto the screen. While the ejaculation occurs at a rapid-fire pace (the typical OLED display has a 0.7ms response time), the swaying seaweed provides a buffer of sorts, controlling the “worms” for even the most fevered Facebookers and pornmeisters.

Touching such a screen is a very bad idea because it over-excites the mollusc, which in turn over-ejaculates. While this is fine in the short-term, actually increasing pixel density and colour dispersion, over time the seaweed buffer breaks down, greatly increasing the likelihood of ejaculate-powered destruction.

I see… And how I can be sure whether a colleague is using an LCD or OLED?

Simply sniff three times in the immediate vicinity; OLEDs should smell of the sea (with the very slightest hint of cherry blossom).

If sniffing should get you strange looks as well, simply make a joke about “night-time activities” and, if appropriate, commence your intrusion.

Why are Sunday papers full of such pointless, repetitive shite?

From Monday to Friday (traditionally known as the “work week”), the newspaper serves to keep us informed of the latest happenings. Of course, the papers are mere filters – focal points, if you will – presenting only those stories the mass, mind-controlled society has been brainwashed into thinking “important”, distracting it from itself and facilitating herding. Work week papers reinforce the masses, getting them hot for the breakfast exchange, afternoon debate, or evening disregard of the children. Robotic and drone-like tendencies are encouraged.

Sunday papers are different. They were invented by CEOs and other materials at the core to give the masses a so-called “day of rest”, a day to relax from the latest affairs and explore more personal, less time-sensitive initiatives, such as “gardening”, “food”, and “house and home”. There is still a news section in these papers, but it is generally tossed aside in a casual Sunday manner, as we dive into motorbikes and luxury resorts, and the children are fucked by the television.

You see, this herding thing is not natural. When the typical person leaves his work place, he is so utterly screwed, so outrageously fried, that he is barely alive, barely human. If you were to visit your local hypermarket, make your way to the raw meat area and stare at some of the packages there, you would get a sense of what has happened to this entity. (Though interestingly, the person himself will often veer towards the prepared food section…)

While this strikes some of us as unfortunate, the CEOs find it terribly nice, efficient and “on message”. However, even they know how unnatural it is, how divorced raw meat is from our genuine nature, and that without some respite, people would either die or explode, delaying the advance of this Great Train of Nothingness.

Hence, the Sunday paper, a chance to graze just slightly away and pretend for a day that we own our own lives. Saturday and its paper have brought us here, a transition when we were not quite there, and not quite here, but making our way here, and now we have arrived. Think of it as an Escape Pod, Still Attached by Invisible String.

Now the problem is that most personal domains are entirely fluffy and dull. We may turn less robotic at home, but our brains are still flushed by the same pointless routines, the loops of thought, emotion and action which are often taken for a person’s identity, but are in fact little more than a sad conditioning. It is these loops that the Sunday papers reflect and reinforce, doing for our private lives precisely what the work week ones do for our public selves. At work, we have opinions and intelligent discussions; on Sundays, we are idiots.

By recognising this, you show yourself to be at least mildly removed from expected attitudes, and for that you deserve polite applause. Sundays may have been ruined for you, but please, accept this gift of a car bumper sticker.

It reads: “Recycle or Die”.

Hallo! I have recently started playing World of Warcraft, the Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game from Blizzard Entertainment. I have chosen a very nice female Blood Elf for my character (I myself am male) and have noticed that sometimes when jumping, she will do a charming little spinning move (which I must say makes me want to invite her for dinner!). I very much enjoy this move and would like her to do it more, but I feel that it is perhaps random?

Introduced as the “pretty” Horde race in last year’s Burning Crusade expansion to attract the sort of mainstream, superficial fuckers who can’t handle running around as an emaciated zombie or fuck-ugly female troll (that is, most sane individuals), the Blood Elves have done wonders for Blizzard’s bottom line, helping to pump WoW subscriber numbers from an impressive 1,250 to an astronomical 47,000,002. Blood Elves are graceful, arrogant bastards and bitches, and they don’t take no shit, yo.

All of this yumminess is embodied by the spinning move you rather ineloquently describe, an apparently random event which kicks in – or “procs” – on average once in every 5.437 jumps, according to the latest research from WoW theorycrafters Elitist Jerks.

EJ concluded that the proc essentially operated in a 1-10 jump range, with a multivariate Zwiedelhaller chance dispersion / 10-spot focus dump, as later confirmed by WoW Lead Designer, Tom Chilton:

Yeah, the spin procs Zwiedelhaller 1-10 (with the occasional 20-jumper thrown in to fuck with your head). In our research, the 5.437 average was just right for keeping people consistently excited and playing WoW. More frequent procs diluted the power of the spin; less frequent ones resulted in smashed keyboards and mass conversions to a sickening Night Elf-style modus operandi.

Fascinating! So there is no way to control the proc then? I must wait for my 5.437 jumps to get that lovely spin (which in turn will inspire more thoughts on the dinner menu)?

Procs are, by definition, random and precisely uncontrollable. You can, however, impose a certain degree of will by issuing the following command in your WoW console:

/bespthing [jump range] [Zwiedelhaller coefficient]

(Type man bespthing in a UNIX shell for more info.)

Be warned, though: modifying the proc may disturb the delightfully delusional relationship you’re developing with your avatar, impressing upon your tender intelligence that she is not in fact a separate entity even remotely removed from your fucking fingertips, you sad, fucking loser.

As a bachelor, I tend to live off those prepared meals you “cook” at home. Yesterday, I decided to break free and purchase a fresh tomato. What should I do with it?

First, congratulations! While prepared meals – particularly the non-frozen ones – can be okay for the old internals, the fact remains they are rarely fresh, sacrificing nutrition for the space-age convenience beloved of bachelors, college students and “soccer moms”. Your “Hoisin Duck Wrap” and “Spicy Prawn Laksa” may have been packed with good stuff to begin with, but the various substances and processes involved in their preservation leech the vitamins and minerals essential to good bachelorhood, reducing productivity in typical bachelor-type activities (watching sports on TV, getting slammed at high-end bars and picking up “hookers”, etc.) by some 32%. Not to mention that most prepared items taste like crap, disturbing the less quantifiable pleasures to be derived from passing foreign objects across the tongue…

As for your tomato, I offer a gently escalating scale, three increasingly complex recipes to ease you into the world of cooking. Let’s drop-kick those industrial vats with giant whisk attachments into The Underworld!

Recipe 1: Tomato

1. Remove any stickers from your tomato, then pluck any green bits (remnants of the vine through which your tomato grew) and wash the juicy devil.
2. Cut into slices and consume, perhaps with a sprinkling of Maldon salt.
3. Enjoy the luxurious sensation of passing fresh food across your tongue. Allow yourself to moan, shiver and stroke your arms.
4. Apologise to your landlady.

Recipe 2: Ham and Tomato Sandwich

1. Buy another tomato.
2. Bake a loaf of artisan bread and cut two healthy slices.
3. Remove any stickers from your tomato, then pluck any green bits and wash the juicy devil. Cut into slices and sprinkle with Hawaiian volcanic salt.
4. Spread the bread with Vietnamese butter and lovingly position a good slab of organic dry cured Berkshire pig (that is, ham). Place the tomato slices.
5. Munch your E-free sandwich. Allow yourself to make deep-breathing sounds through your nostrils, even snort. And yes, go ahead, masticate in ways which would likely be deemed inappropriate in company more civilised than your own.
6. Apologise to your landlady.

Recipe 3: Tomato Soufflé with “Crunchy” Foam au Citron, Cooked While Preparing to Skydive, and Consumed While Skydiving

1. Book yourself into a skydiving course.
2. Grow some stubble.
3. Buy a few tomatoes, remove the stickers, green bits, etc. Get some eggs and other soufflé ingredients, and some lemon-scented shaving foam.
4. Complete the intro skydiving instruction crap, then grab your parachute and ingredients, hop in a plane and fly to 12,500 feet.
5. Once you hit 12,500 feet, cook the soufflé according to the classic recipe (fear not, it will not flop: the altitude provides a gorgeous margin of error), shave, and allow the foam and stubbly bits (these provide the “crunch”) to slop onto your perfect little puff.
6. Jump out the plane and consume the soufflé with chopsticks or a small syringe.
7. Land in a field and apologise to any wandering beasts.

Like most people it seems, I’m not a huge fan of “chuggers”, those charity people with clipboards who assault you on the street. Normally, I just ignore them or swat them away, but today I thought “Enough is enough!” and told one of them to “Get the fuck out of my personal space, mate!” Was that acceptable behaviour?

Ah, chuggers, the “charity muggers”. Stinking pustules on the arse of humanity…

Well, perhaps that’s a little harsh. For while few would disagree they’re bloody annoying, dancing and prancing into personal space and being just absolute fucking pests, the organisations they represent are often fucking fantastic, doing great things like stopping us driving our smog-spewing cars, sparing the lungs of hippy cyclists with those ridiculous helmets, while we suffer through snail-paced bus rides and overheated trips on the Tube, packed in with hordes of the most rude, vile humans (and some quite disastrous odours in the summer months). Oh, and let’s not forget the animal terrorists, dumping buckets of blood on our furs because we enjoy the odd Filet-O-Fish, maybe a banana milkshake or two.

Fuckers…

Anyway, yes, they’re bloody annoying. There’s no question about that. And yes, almost certainly they should be “eradicated” (that is, shuffled on to new careers). But the fact of the matter is that they’re here, that they do exist, and we must deal with them.

Now you’ve clearly developed your own, rather forceful coping mechanism, and for all the reasons I’ve outlined above, your attitude is entirely understandable. But you’re asking for more than empathy; you’re asking us to condone. And that, I’m afraid, we cannot do.

Quite simply, your behaviour was not acceptable, and if it were to become a habit, pattern or pollinated meme, would likely see you shunned by most of the more interesting social groupings, barring you from innumerable business ventures and cocaine-snorting opportunities. Charities are still charities, after all, and in general should be respected for the important work they do, balancing out the selfish, money-driven fuckers who occupy most of the world’s currently available incarnational nodes.

Fair enough… but something has to be done. I can’t just stop and let them do their song and dance crap. I’m very busy and they’re absolutely fucking annoying!

Yes, they are. Absolutely. And there is absolutely no reason for any of us to indulge them. If we’re interested in supporting their charities, we will do so in our own ways and on our own schedules. We do not need to be chugged into action.

As for some appropriate coping/avoidance measures:

1. Stroke the air

When you spot a chugger in your walking path, whip out your phone and pretend to be having a very important conversation. Speak loudly, saying things like “I will have the brief delivered to you in the morning” and “That is not in the best interests of this enterprise”.

It’s a classic manoeuvre, perfect for dealing with the common chugger. The more seasoned among them will see right through it, however. For these high priests of the order, elaborate your performance by slowly – gracefully – extending an arm and stroking the air with your index finger, as if you’re massaging an invisible iPhone floating a couple of feet in front of your head. They’ll think you’re insane and skip to the next victim. (If you have an actual iPhone, even better; that you’re stroking the air rather than it will cause no end of script-fucking dissonance.)

2. Do the noodle

While chuggers love to talk, most of them can’t stand the old listening thing. Interrupt them a few seconds into their spiel with something along the lines of: “Oh yes? That’s very interesting. Now I was wondering if I could get your feedback on my new business idea. It involves fake snails and genuine noodles in a kind of spiced, exotic broth. With free Wi-Fi.” Continue in that manner for a minute or so and they’ll soon politely evacuate themselves.

3. You are an alien

Rather than the standard “Sorry, no time!”, fuck with the chuggers by telling them you’re an alien and have to rush to Hyde Park before your spaceship leaves you behind. Very effective, and quickly becoming the New Classic in chugger avoidance. (Just make sure you’re wearing something silver.)

4. You wish to bring Jesus into their lives

Tricky this one, since you need to be carrying a megaphone, but again, very effective. As the chugger approaches, simply whip out your megaphone and tell him that Jesus forgives him. He will adjust his path and pretend he was heading for someone else all along.

In conclusion

So there you go. Just a few socially acceptable ways to help you deal with those awful chuggers. As you may have noticed, they generally focus on making you appear insane. In my experience, this tends to be an excellent way to free up some personal space and let you do whatever the fuck you want.

A large proportion of the people I encounter – perhaps in the order of 90% – strike me as robots. When I speak with them, I feel like I’m talking to a machine with no identity of its own. What’s going on here?

In the vast majority of human societies, our conditioning as robots begins the moment we pop out of the maternal vessel. The reason is simple: if we were encouraged to become the unique, creative individuals we actually are, the modern capitalist economies would collapse. Capitalism (at least, in its current perverted state) is driven by robots tasked by drones overseen by whip-wielding CEOs and the like, these last granted just enough individuality to organise grand plans, but not so much as to deviate from the Master Credo in any meaningful manner.

Amen.

As you’ve noticed, it’s not too hard to spot these robots, as long as you’re not one of them. The drones and whips are a little trickier, but I have no doubt they’ll phase into your perceptive apparatus in due course. If not, don’t worry, you’re already well on your way to humanity.

So… are we fucked?

I’m delighted to report that no, we’re not. Not only are very few people 100% robotic, but of those who exhibit bot-like tendencies, approximately 95% are less a machine in private. Away from the group mind, the urge to individuality (which is present and strong in all of us, appearances to the contrary) is more prone to expression, with even the most striking public metal-makers doodling on napkins over the familial dinner, dribbling chunks of meat and pea as the child looks on and wonders: “Will that be me in time?”

Now the question is, will those private lives ever fully blossom in the public arena? My own opinion is yes, they will. With the rise of the internet and online social networks, young people in particular are increasingly accustomed to sharing the most intimate personal details with the world (or at least, to the worlds admitted to their gardens). As open data initiatives like Google’s OpenSocial kick in, this attitude should grow even stronger and more pervasive, becoming a habit, and then a custom, and rising in time to the mark of tradition, before finally passing into the realm of mythology.

And what if I’m not big on social networks? Is there any other way to not be a robot?

Indeed. Aquatic gymnastics is excellent for short-circuiting conditioned responses. (See FAQ #5: Bump.) For future incarnations, consider being born into a hippy commune or New Age sustainable-farming enclave.

Ever since starting a serious yoga practice two months ago, it seems people on the street and at my workplace are bumping into me more. My yoga crew says it’s because I’m starting to operate on a higher dimensional frequency; my bar buddies say I’m drinking too much. Who’s right?

As multidimensional beings, we exist simultaneously in multiple vibrational planes. Just as we have a physical body which grounds us in the physical dimension (the likely preferred domain of your bar buddies), so we have bodies tuned to other, more subtle realms.

While these other realities are just as valid as the physical, they are often dismissed as fantasy due to their less immediately obvious points of access, read/write cycles and data storage platters. The dense vibrations of the physical mean it is always easy for us to grasp, no matter the particular evolutionary stage we inhabit; the higher frequencies of the subtle planes require much more sensitive sensory “helmets”.

As we evolve and become more attuned to our inner selves (often helped along by such practices as yoga, meditation and aquatic gymnastics), these other worlds become more accessible, our adventures therein more memorable. For less developed souls, this can often lead to a separation from the physical as we lose ourselves in the glorious lightness and delicious giant fruit of what the ancients called Heaven. As we divide, we become less physically obvious to those around us (particularly bar buddy-type people), resulting in the sort of increased bumping activity you describe. Due to lags in lower-level multidimensional portals, even when we’re very much back in the physical, we can still be effectively invisible to surrounding buddies, amusing and frustrating us in equal measure!

Of course, it’s also possible that you’re drinking too much in a sad attempt to enliven your existence by bumping into people and convincing yourself they’re bumping into you, making you aggrieved and special. In which case, please disregard all of the above; it’ll only give you a headache.

I’m about to launch what will become a very important website. What license should I use to distribute my content?

While you haven’t provided much detail on precisely what type of content you’ll be distributing, I’ll assume you’re going for a Wikipedia clone with an AJAX interface. The whole thing will be so slick, so smooth, the millions of people who rely on the millions of articles in Wikipedia will come running to your important website with no articles.

As for licensing, you have three main options:

1. Standard copyright

Standard copyright is an old-fashioned license for stingy fuckers. It basically stops anyone from doing anything with your work apart from “enjoying” it. If you don’t explicitly state a license, standard copyright is assumed.

The initial period of protection is 160 years (with a bonus month for good behaviour). The license can be renewed for a further 200 years within five years of the first term’s expiration – just have your descendants visit your local UFO mechanic and complete Form 7.

2. Creative Commons

The Creative Commons licenses were invented by actor Robert Redford at the inaugural Sundance Film Festival in 1885. Originally designed to provide reasonable protection for independent filmmakers who were too cool for standard copyright, they basically let others do whatever the fuck they want with your content, as long as they say how nice you are. In practice, no one bothers with the second part and just “steals” everything with no attribution. Since it tends to be wimps who use this type of license, no one has the balls to sue anyone, thus completing the virtuous circle.

3. Public domain

Introduced towards the end of last year, the public domain is the preferred staging area for cutting-edge content creators who recognise the fortunes to be made from good karma. Basically, you just give your stuff away, with no requirement that anyone tell you how nice you are. This earns you a shitload of karma koins, which can then be invested in standard copyright works, the good vibes guaranteeing a rapid climb up the charts and the copyright making sure you earn a fuckload of cash.

Which should you choose?

Look, let’s be honest: no one gives a flying fuck about your little project. It really makes no difference what license you use. If we want your content, we’ll “steal” it; if we don’t, we won’t.

Welcome to thar interwebs.

After Carla informed me she’d forgotten to turn on the rice cooker and that dinner would be delayed 30 minutes, I became disturbed and accidentally deleted the FAQ Monsieur database instead of dropping some tables in another db as I’d intended.

Thanks to the wonders of RSS, I had copies of the three hitherto published FAQs in my reader and was able to restore them, right to the minute of posting. Unfortunately, any comments have been flushed down the proverbial lav.

Apologies.

What is the Noodlenet?

When the internet was invented in the early 1900s, the vast majority of early users accessed it using so-called “dialup”. This involved tying strips of cooked spaghetti, fettuccine, tagliatelle and the like into ropes, which were attached at one end to the user’s telephone and at the other to the local phone exchange. When an internet presence was desired, the user flicked a switch on her phone to move from voice to pasta, dipped the device into a pot of tomato or cheese-based sauce, then had dinner and surfed the web. Speeds were in the 2-3kbps range.

With today’s super-fast broadband connections and seasoned web citizenry, it’s easy to look back and titter at such “unenlightened” technology. The fact of the matter is that this was seriously advanced shit for the times and is testament to the astonishing creativity of Herbert Semolina, lover of lasagna and the generally accepted “Chef de Cuisine” of the internet.

Now this isn’t to say there weren’t problems with the pasta networks. For one, in the interests of rapid and widespread deployment, ropes were laid over-, rather than under-, ground, often winding around trees and prominent bushes. As you can imagine, lines were constantly being disconnected as people broke through ropes as they dashed to work, or grabbed a section of someone’s rope on the way home for a quick on-the-go snack. Further, the inherent stodginess of pasta, while essential to the integrity of the early web, meant that data packets moved only half as fast as on the speedier, though slimier and more fragile, cellophane noodle networks used in Europe’s top acting schools. Further, the nature of the connection meant that surfing could only occur during meal times, specifically when pasta with a tomato or cheese-based sauce was being served. (Surfing at breakfast was almost unheard of.)

In order to explore ways to remedy these issues, Semolina set up a highly experimental underground network – open only to himself and his closest colleagues – based on those less stable cellophane noodles. With scattered pellets to keep the rats away, the noodles held and worked their magic, pumping packets at an impressive 8kbps. (Meatballs were used for hardware acceleration.) The noodles’ easier digestibility also meant that surfing could occur even during the morning hours, allowing Semolina and his gang to get a leg up on local stockbrokers and beat them to the punch on several significant deals. All resulting profits were channelled into further research on what became known as the Noodlenet, which over the next 30 years evolved into the high-speed tofu infrastructure which powers today’s World Wide Web.

Images: Jenn Forman Orth, Alexandra Moss