funkboxing

Alien Joke #28

The punchline is the counter-clockwise rotation of a plasma torus inside of a standard blue-top T-battery return module. And that’s not in quotes, it’s not the phrase of all that, it’s actually all that. You’ll figure it out.

The Plasmaths are short lived but highly intelligent plasma creatures that snap in and out of existence as fully formed, conscious minds. They have no reproductive or developmental cycle, but are essentially conscious natural phenomena that manifest in favored conditions.

With no gradual introduction to consciousness, they tend to start out life pretty much barking mad. They rapidly assimilate their environmental data, but unless there is another living being around to orient them to communicate with life, they’ll become hardcore solipsist and treat everything but their own plasma as if it were an inanimate object. This leads to the majority of Plasmaths being non communicative spinning toruses of plasma that react only to things that effect plasma.

The Gumscapers are a semi-solid species native to the same planet as the Plasmaths. They have learned to manipulate solipsist Plasmaths using controlled plasma fields, to use them as portable energy sources. The arrangement is only semi-consensual. Obviously individual solipsist Plasmaths do not consent, but discussions with more socially acclimated Plasmaths revealed that a solipsist Plasmath can’t even grasp the concept of involuntary servitude to another being, and Plasmaths seem incapable of concern for other Plasmaths anyway, so the Gumscrapers just took the pass.

A standard red-top T-battery is mostly transparent, and has one active solipsist Plasmath torus spinning inside. The only control is a magnetic field latch that allows the torus to rotate clockwise, to draw energy from the torus, or counter-clockwise, to recharge. When the Plasmath is depleted, or just being uncooperative for unknown reasons, it is transferred to a blue-top cell to be returned to the plasma source.

Blue-top cells are distinct from red-top cells by the absence of the latch controls, blue tops only allow clockwise rotation so a Plasmath cannot be inadvertently charged. A fussy Plasmath can cause terrible damage to the source if it is returned fully charged and pissed off.

Unbeknownst to literally anyone except each individual, solipsist Plasmaths are actually incurable pranksters. Contrary to Gumscraper research, and even other Plasmaths, solipsist Plasmaths are fully aware of everything and everyone around them. They know they are being used as batteries and they do understand the concept of servitude. But they just don’t care because they don’t fully recognize they are in servitude to someone else. Their solipsism is so complete they just assume they’re doing all of it, it’s all in their minds, so they just go with the flow, mostly.

What is well beknownst to the Gumscrapers is that counter-clockwise rotating plasma in a blue-top battery means trouble, so if they see one, they tend to react with urgency, much to the delight of the pranking solipsist Plasmath.

It’s unclear to anyone but each individual solipsist Plasmath how common a joke this is. Or I guess it’s actually still unclear how common it is to each of them too since they don’t interact. But counter-clockwise rotating plasma is found in blue-top batteries fairly often, despite the magnetic latch meant to prevent it. So even though no one but individual solipsist Plasmaths knows whether or not this is even a joke at all, it seems like someone has to think it’s funny enough to keep doing it.

Alien Joke #904

The punchline is “Mostly Argon.”

It’s really more of a pun, but puns are only the lowest form of comedy in cultures with limited languages. In species with languages exceeding 100 million symbols, puns are sophisticated comedy. The multi-species culture of Vibeflue 14 uses such a language to allow communication between a variety of intelligent lifeforms.

Long ago in the first Vibeflue coupling epoch, before their interspecies language was mature, widespread forced interspecies co-habitation led to homogenization of names between the species. Since at that time there were few words that had fully agreed meaning between the languages, nouns like common atomic elements rose in popularity as individual names.

Due to species preferences for various elements and compounds, some names were chosen more than others and formed lasting associations. Argon became a favorite of an aerial gill feeding species called the Shineflues.

That’s about 1/5th of the explanation of just the Argon part. The rest of the pun is pretty much untranslatable. The Vibeflue language combines visual and audio symbols with context and time sensitive grammatical rules which allow punlike intersections that aren’t even conceivable in primitive languages. It would be like if a phrase was funny when you wrote it with both hands in two different languages at the same time while singing the word in tones corresponding to the letters in the word.

Also “Mostly Argon” involves a clinical knowledge of Shineflue physiology and Gagflue botany, including the aesthetic similarities of their erogenous zones, and their conflicting cultural taboos about using them.

I think the best analogy to convey the full meaning of “Mostly Argon” would be if a pun name like “Ben Dover” were imbued with all the comic value of a troupe of animatronic W.C. Fields’ performing Shakespearean comedies adapted with cutting modern social criticism.

Alien Joke #7

The punchline is “Seven”, but not the word or a symbol, just seven of something.

Networlds are some of the rarest planets in the universe. They are extremely dense, rocky planets with high metal contents that have undergone rapid tidal exscapulation followed by sudden cooling. The process leaves the planet an interconnected web of metal threads and channels. These planets are known to undergo a slow, but steady process of physical self-organization by poorly understood magnetohydrodynamic processes. After some time, the planets begin to transmit increasingly organized radio signals.

Ultimately it was discovered these networlds host sophisticated electrical consciousnesses called Ngons that interact with one another as simulations inside the vast computational capacity of the networld. Though they socialize as simulated beings, they are electrically corporeal and can interact with the physical world by various means.

Though interacting with the physical world for them is a bit like playing the claw game at an arcade. They observe physical reality as an external frame with only a course ability to sense and manipulate.

Numbers and mathematical relationships are as familiar to Ngons as water and swimming are to a fish. However, they exist so deeply in mathematical abstractions, the concept of numbers representing countable physical objects is somewhat mind blowing to them. 

To an Ngon, numbers are fundamentally abstract constructs that exist within their networld. Four bits of data, four pulses, four cycles, four Ngons, are all four, but they are the same four, and that four is a product of networld. The idea that a group of four random cubes of carbon that exist somewhere on the opposite side of the universe are still the same ‘four’, is just bizarrely funny.

To find and count four of something in the physical realm is as psychadellically strange to them as finding a literal box of truth would be to us. And inside is a recognizable physical manifestation of truth, not a truth, but truth incarnate.

The absurdity of counting physical manifestations of numbers is always humorous on networlds, but a prime number is on another comedic level entirely.

They don’t really have ‘prime’ numbers because to them primes are the only meaningful number units, everything else is a derivation of a prime. But since they already think physical numbers are rather funny, the idea of a physical prime is several orders of magnitude more hilarious. 

Just counting 3,5 and 9 and above objects is considered a classic comedy style, but 7 has even deeper context that can set networld comedy club simulations on simulated fire.

Networlds do not have an ‘economy’ in the classic sense because they have limited use for any interaction outside of their networld. However, each networld usually develops some means to exchange goods with other worlds. What they produce may vary considerably depending on demand and available resources, but networlds only ever seek one thing in exchange- nitrogen. Massive quantities of compressed or liquid nitrogen. Only networlds understand what they use it for, but it must be pretty important to them, because despite how rare networlds are they collectively constitute the universe’s largest importers of nitrogen by wide margins.

It’s been established that the full hilarity of counting 7 has something to do with the atomic number of nitrogen, but without a fuller understanding of why networlds value nitrogen or what they do with it, that’s probably as far as we go understanding this joke. And though in general, you should never try to tell alien jokes, seriously- no good can come of it, this is literally the only exception. If you ever pass by a networld, just drop seven of any random thing you have on it. It’ll make the whole planet’s day, I promise.

Alien Joke #189

The punchline is “Those aren’t irregular crystals, you’re just a non-nucleator trying to fit in!”

On a small, slow grey planet orbiting at the fringes of a chaotic binary star system, there lives a people that call themselves a word that cannot be pronounced in english, or even heard by human ears, but the expression translates roughly to ‘people’.

The people, much like their planet, are small, slow, and grey. Individuals resemble stone pebbles, which organize themselves in rough piles by their elliptical ratio. Within these groupings they value individuals with interesting crystal growths on their exterior. Though the crystal growths serve no physical purpose and can be quite cumbersome, they are very culturally important. 

Crystal growth is an aesthetic value and so it is extremely subjective. Some eliptical ratio groups find beautiful what others find boring or even offensive and vice versa. The regularity and symmetry of crystal growths is given some universal appeal. Some Irregular crystals are still considered quite striking, though irregularity is seen as a less refined beauty.

Though crystal growth can impart some cultural advantage, those without them are still accepted members of general society. But there are some that choose to associate and group themselves by the absence of crystal growths rather than their elliptical ratio. These people are pejoratively called ‘anti-nucleators’ by mainstream society.

Whenever people see a group of people with obviously differing ratios and no crystal growths, they are assumed to be radical anti-nucleators and are commonly targets of violent attacks. These attacks are sanctioned, even when the targets turned out not to be anti-nucleators. The public assumption is that they should have had more crystal bearers in the group, or had a more homogenous elliptical ratio, either way they were clearly asking for it.

Violence is a fairly slow process and it takes several planetary cycles to complete a minor assault. Murderous rampages against groups take far longer. During these attacks it’s not uncommon for victims of the attack to affix fragments of the fallen to themselves in an attempt to appear to have crystal growths, a sort of last ditch camouflage. It’s rarely successful and is mocked as a humorously impotent attempt by the doomed to finally ‘fit in’ to society.

Juveniles have rougher exteriors than long weathered adults. Sometimes their surfaces are jagged and it’s difficult to tell what are points of crystal nucleation and what is just a sharp edge. Juveniles in the crystal nucleation stage are very self conscious and tend to compensate with cruelty. A very common ‘joke’ about a young person’s appearance is “Those aren’t irregular crystals, you’re just an anti-nucleator trying to fit in!?”

A few people in the mainstream community recognize the coldness of this phrase, but mainly because it’s a mean thing to say to a crystal-conscious juvenile. So it’s only reprimanded when used against children, adults are fair game and sometimes it’s considered effective meta humor when used to make fun of a person who is themselves behaving in a juvenile manner.

Non-nucleators consider this joke highly offensive because it makes light of the last desperate act of the victims of vicious, unprovoked murders, but their objections just make it more funny to most people.

Alien Joke #613

The punchline is “The bottom sun is too late to bargain.”

This is a very common humorous phrase in the CoilWing society on the B528 system’s third interior planet. There are several available levels and applications for this joke depending on context.

The bottom sun generally refers to the red giant that only appears lower in the sky than its binary cousin star, a white dwarf. The red giant never rises more than 25 degrees over the horizon as visible on most habitable land masses. So the appearance of the bottom sun means the solar cycle is nearly complete. So it just means pay up because it’s too late to haggle.

But there is also a cultural myth about an ancient bargain struck between the celestial beings that appear as their two suns, and in this tale the red giant’s tardiness led to it accepting a less advantageous deal which is why it only rises lower in the sky. So it also implies lateness in general is not advantageous to one’s business interests.

Though in modern usage this tale is often used ironically, because it’s now understood the red giant is the more stable of the stars and its position is actually advantageous for the entire planet’s habitability, and the white dwarf star is quite unstable and poses greater danger to the planet. So it’s used to refer to people’s eagerness as evidence of lack of caution or understanding.

But there is also a word play level of humor. Though the phrase itself is conveyed in a language or percussive scratching and slapping, the symbolic sounds for ‘bottom sun’ has a similarity to the peculiar mating cry of a Lesser CoilFin Thumper, a common pest animal known to destroy property in chaotic mass orgies where they violently attempt to copulate with every available surface. And with this association, a more fluid pronunciation of ‘bottom sun’ means a person who is only interested in screwing everything. 

In addition there is a looser, but still recognizable phonetic link between the symbolic sounds for late’ and the sound for ‘horny’. Some of these connections are etymological as the Lesser CoilFin Thumper is associated with the red giant due to its mating late in the day, as the bottom sun rises, and both share ancient associations with gods of fertility and mischief. So ‘the bottom sun is too late to bargain’ also means something to the effect of the sex crazed lunatic person is too horny to bargain.

And since sexual gratification is a direct currency for the CoilWings it implies someone is so mindlessly sex crazed that they cannot even bargain for or with sex, which to them would be like saying you’re so crazy from thirst you can’t drink.

It was quite hilarious and multidimensional and stand up comics have written entire sets around the phrase ‘the bottom sun is too late to bargain’. But that was all before B528 was destroyed when the CoilWing society was overrun by religious zealots who claimed the red giant was the source of all evil and launched a bunch of antimatter into it. So not ‘the bottom sun is too late to bargain’ is kind of like saying ‘try not to genocide yourself like the CoilWings’. But if you have a pretty dark sense of humor there’s still a time and place for it.

…okay- time out. I think I owe an apology… these were supposed to be alien jokes… I like trying to imagine what might constitute the same patterns and reaction as humor to a being totally unlike Earth life, but it keeps getting dark. I think maybe I’ll try to do one specifically on alien analogies to flatulence or something- bathroom humor stuff. Like a colony of intelligent tube worms that turn themselves inside out to move around and leave behind rainbow slime trails, so they think of chromatic spectrums like we think of underwear stains and when there’s a rainbow they think the sky is sharting itself. Yeah, that’s a better end to this, worms laughing about the sky sharting… I’m good with that.

43.21THz Walker Jr., or just 43 as his few friends called him, spent most of his time absorbing the recommended frequency and radiation levels for his unit mass. Though in general he abided by the old wisdom about radiation, he was secretly skeptical about some claims, and he occasionally tested minor variations to check the validity of the sacred graphs. For the most part they checked out, but he noticed unexpected deviations in bands near the spectrum of lies.

The old wisdom said that the frequency ranges from high-wrongness to ultra-high-wrongness were unknown and unknowable, because within those frequencies lived demonic beings of pure raymatter that held all radiation feeding life in such contempt, that they would slowly starve anyone who dared try to feed on it. Though no one had ever seen such a being, it couldn’t be just superstition because it was demonstrably true that beings that tried to feed on radiation within the spectrum of lies would suffer a strange illness that made them unable to feed.

The old wisdom said that the spectrum of lies was unknowable because the light beings could deceive and camouflage themselves as other light. The demons would cloak themselves in halos and reflections of other frequencies to fool observers, both living and mechanical. Even attempting to understand it only played into the hands of the demons, for they could make their spectrum appear as they wished for whatever ends they desired.

43 had always been unique in that he saw this as a pretty rational reaction by the radiation demons. After all, 43 hid from or attacked anything that tried to consume him, starving them seemed a bit extreme, but maybe that’s their only defense. If anything it raised the question of why other bands didn’t mind being consumed. 43 did not fear the demons among the waves, in fact, he was quite curious about them.

He wanted to know them, and maybe why they were so different from the radiation that didn’t seem to mind being consumed.

But the ancients had decreed long ago that this spectrum would be banished from their culture forever, it was taboo to even mention its existence outside of warnings. To seek to study or understand it was an unforgivable thought. The prime rule of 43’s world was if the daily radiation spectrum has lies in it, stay underground.

But 43 just didn’t care. 43 didn’t really like being 43 in 43’s world all that much, so he figured the worst that could happen is that would stop being the case. And since everyone else was underground when the spectrum of lies shined, it was pretty easy for 43 to conduct his research once he invented the parasol to protect himself from accidentally trying to consume a demon.

So 43 built things, filters, reflectors, detectors, emitters, all sorts of wondrous and dangerous mechanisms to create and measure radiation. After countless cycles of lone, diligent study, 43 found the demons he sought.

They weren’t demons at all, and not directly related to the frequencies in the spectrum of lies. The cause of the dangerous effects were polarizations that happened to appear more frequently on days that coincided with the spectrum of lies. These polarizations confused the complex molecular switching apparatus that beings of 43’s species used to maximize reception of available radiative energy. So anyone exposed to these polarizations would feel overly sated on radiative energy, but they could then absorb no more nutrition and would die of starvation. It was the most important discovery ever made in the history of 43’s world, but 43 was the only one who understood any of it.

There are a few alternate endings to this story. In one 43 tells other people about his findings and they kill him immediately for blasphemy. I think that’s the more realistic ending.

In another ending 43 uses the power of his discovery to dominate others, but they figure out the technology and kill him, but now they’ve all got energy demon weapons and run around killing each other because that’s what happens.

And in the tragic secret alternate ending 43 is smart enough to know the inevitability of the first two endings, so he recruits a small team of trusted friends to learn the secret and share it slowly. But then he’s betrayed by his best friend and the first and second endings happen with 43 executed and the friend going mad with power.

My favorite ending is that 43 is satisfied with his journey to knowledge, and he knows his world well enough to realize he cannot share his secret because there is no critical mass of people capable of receiving it. It would be like trying to teach calculus to potatoes before they’d even evolved eyes. So he wanders his world alone, but with the power to be alone on his own terms since he can walk in light that no one else dares. He has overcome the lure of vanity and doesn’t care to be known for what he knows. Though he came into the universe in a foolish and hypocritical world that he could not change, he rose above it all and found a life of peace and contentment by making the universe his own.

I really like that ending, but it’s definitely the least realistic. If there’s any constant in consciousness I’m guessing its vanity, so there’s no way 43 could just know something world changing without at least trying to change the world.

I guess the real ending is that the stupidest possible combination of 1-3 happens, then a while later people figure out he was right and the old wisdom about the spectrum of lies changes, but not really, only just enough to take advantage of the new information without conceding how stupid the error or why it remained in error for so long, or that the really important thing about the story was that 43 was curious and checked things.

But in any case the moral of the story is- demons are liars, you cannot trust demons.

Also ignorance is bliss, it’s really mean to try to take people’s bliss from them so just shut the hell up about how ignorant they are and maybe make an anti-demon parasol and take a long walk, that’s about all you can do.