How has technology changed your job?

Dear VNR,

Clearly you guys are the bees' knees, the cat's pajamas, the wolf's tin can, the ostrich's gall bladder, and the salmon's abacus. Because I'm definitely a real person and y'all are definitely the best at satiricaling things, I was wondering how has recent technology changes prevented you from ending all life on Earth? K' thanks!!

Regards, 

Real Human

Dear R. Human,

Thanks for your letter. The short answer is, using technology, we finally have a reason to put off summoning Cthulhu and ending all life on Earth, until we can do it right. You’re welcome.

The role of every satirist is to tell a good story, get a few laughs, and poke fun at ridiculous things and/or injustices. We’ve been doing this since we were naught but pond scum lining the great methane lakes on Planet Bleepblorp in the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy. Back then, life was good. We were really just a collective of single celled organisms, like your amoebas, but a little different. Instead of a Golgi Apparatus, we had a Bulging Lampoonitis. This one change allowed our kind to develop a keen humor and sense of moral superiority before we developed things like style or common sense.

Ah yes, those were the golden years, the halcyon days, the numbskull months. We bathed in the light of our twin stars: Bevis, Buttheadus, soaking up the nourishing goofus radiation–a very rare radiation event caused by the geo-nexial constronction of cross-vectorized, bi-flatternal star systems. And there we joyfully oozed and secreted ourselves over Lake Tittybooby, the largest of the methane lakes on planet Bleepblorp, eventually creating a layer of our amoeba-like colonies over the whole lake as thick as two of your flattened giraffes. But, all good things come to an end, and so were we forced from the warming goofus-rays of our home, forced to land in this backwards planet, inhabited by the Destroyer of Worlds, Global Tetrahedron, and their evil, PR spin machine, The Onion News Network.

Our war for justice in satirical journalism started 26,000 years ago when we landed on this planet. That’s when we started evolving from single cell organisms to shit-throwing howler monkeys. A few millennia later and we’d made a name for ourselves in the world of satirically burlesque journalism and as pranksters for hire (you might remember our breakout prank of Thag vs T.Rex when we gave him a whoopy cushion). Back then, the Earth really was the center of the local solar system. That was a big deal! A few more millennia later, some bloke named Tolosani paid us to play a prank on a rabble-rouser. He wanted us to use our secret space-juice to change the center of the solar system, from the Earth to the sun. Oh man, that rabble-rouser lost his MIND when everything was all of a sudden different. Imagine having to tell the church they were wrong… OUCH! We like to imagine he sat there for three days scratching his beard with little cuckoo clocks dancing around his head as he wrestled with his observations. Sadly, we never got credit for changing the solar system just before Copernicus’ famous discovery. That shit was hilarious though. Everyone KNEW the EARTH was the middle. But then, WE CHANGED IT, to play a prank on this poor guy. And then we just left it. What’s better than satire that becomes truth¹?

Fast forward a few hundred years and now we see the strength of The Onion News Network is growing, but we only have enough magical space-juice to summon Cthulhu one time! We can’t miss this opportunity to end all life in this galaxy in order to wipe out Global Tetrahedron. No. What if we mess up the incantation? We’d be stuck with a version of Instagram where EVERY DAY IS THROWBACK THURSDAY! Fuuuuuuck… that would suck. We almost gave up all hope of ever destroying our nemesis, those genius ladies and lads over at the Onion who write quality satire for a fair price and spread good cheer. Those bitches! This is where we turn to technology.

By leveraging recent developments in blockchain-crypto-ai-quantum-compoopulators, we’ve been able to run parallel simulations of exactly how we should summon the great ancient one to destroy all life on Earth, but do it correctly. Until we find the right incantation method, with the proper candles, devil signs, virgin blood type and average gpa, credit score, with a low apr mortgage, we promise NOT to call Cthulhu early and destroy you.

So, that’s pretty great of us, if you think about it. We’re using technology to make sure we don’t accidentally kill you, until it’s time to kill you.

I’m so proud of us.

---

1. Full disclosure, we pulled the same prank on Aristarchus a while earlier but discredited him by putting all the planets back the way they should be before doing it again to Copernicus.²
2. Such a dick move. Hahaha. We feel kinda bad for Copernicus and Aristarchus. That would be like cats discovering that the human world really revolves around cars! That would KILL them.