Family Portraits

Now, this may be hard to believe, but not even 100 years ago, families had to spend minutes driving to a photographer, I’ll get to what that guy does later, but it wasn’t just minutes spent, it was decades of whole minutes! I’m talking twenty to the thirty minutes!

Speaking of, did you know that if I told a geezer to wait a decade of minutes they would think I am asking them to wait ten years worth of minutes? I came across one stupid oldy, listening to geezer stuff. He told me it was a song from “A Musical Called Rent.” Sounded like a dumb name for something. What is a musical? What’s rent?

Anyway, the lyrics told me that there were 525,600 minutes in a year. I asked my holowatch, it knows everything, and it said there were 5.25 million minutes in a decade! People back in the day were so bored, they made sure they knew when the earth had traveled an ENTIRE revolution around the sun. It’s so stupid, I mean you have...um let me ask my holo...so you have 86,400,000,000,000 nano seconds in an entire DAY, and you want to worry about over three hundred entire days? I bet in three hundred days we will have colonies in the Andromeda galaxy. We may even be able to create our own stars.

Wait, what? Oh, how did I know what the geezers were listening to? I am sorry, we have been here for several minutes and that is quite a long time to remain focused. I never mentioned he was, ‘jammin on a speaker?’ Yup, actual speakers, makes noise that other people can hear. I know I know, weird that they didn’t have Apple’s™ iAudio. ‘i’ stands for internal audio or it could be implanted audio...I can’t remember what the ‘i’ is for! Damn thing came out before I was born, doctors put it in when I was a baby, don’t remember it much at all.

Why did they not have iAudio installed? Some babble about old myths - new world order, mark of the beast. You know how the geez are. They talk about government, but I am not even sure what that is. Are those the guys that make sure my iAudio stays in constant connection? Or the guys who sometimes refill my holowatch? If so, those guys kick ass.

Back to the pictures. So the geezes spent an unfathomable amount of time for family portraits. They gather everyone in the family and lump them all together in this steel box, which is smaller than your bedroom! It weighed tons and could travel at speeds high enough to outright obliterate yourself. They called it an ‘automobile,’ but get this, it was controlled by a human! How stupid! I guess ‘manual mobile’ is a mouthful. People died in them all the time. I think that’s why geezers are so scared, death happened so much back then. They were scared about humans not driving anymore, thought it was going to end the human race. I asked my holo - driving those boxes killed over 3,000 people everyday. Oldies would be terrified to deviate from something that killed over a million of them a year.

Yes, family portraits, sorry. The whole family would risk life and limb inside the steel death traps. They would arrive at a location and give a guy resources, “cash” to take their pictures. After spending entire minutes in a steel box, begging fate that another human operated box won’t smash into yours, the family had to go inside a room with special lighting, and this guy would point an oversized camera with big lens at all of them, standing together. I haven’t stood in the same room as my brothers in years, and my parents? Being in the same room with them would be weird. I hear the test tube thing is catching on, makes sense. Have you seen what babies look like when they are born? They have cone shaped heads and they are covered in human cheeses. It is disgusting. Test tube baby? Might as well be looking at a picture of a Gerber™ baby.

Pictures, pictures.. Well, they didn’t have holowatchs to take pictures for them, and they didn’t have the software to digitally insert each family member into a photo. Yup, things are way better now, that one picture that gets taken of you at birth, they can use that for the rest of your life. The algorithms for digital aging are a perfect reflection of what we really look like. I saw how I was going to look at 50, and let me tell you, even at that age I am still going to get tons of likes when I post it.

Someone told me once how they do the aging thing, it involves that DNA sample they take at birth. That sample tells them things like what you are going to look like, how you will age, any minor genetic anomalies, and a statistical analysis based off genetic data predicting behavior and personality. It is only partially accurate, won’t confirm you are a genius or serial killer. I’ll ask my holo why. The holo tells me it’s because ‘we don’t have the monitoring capabilities to accurately measure all the factors that go into the experience of living.” I don’t know what that means, it sure has a lot of syllables and long sentences. I think I had a daydream in the middle of “accurately measure.” One of the guys fixing my holowatch once told me that “if it wasn’t for the damn geezers infecting these young folk with ‘individualism’ and ‘self-reliance’ we’d be able to predict every criminal, every thief, every liar.” He asked me if I would like a world that didn’t have any bad guys. I asked him if he meant like the robbers when I play Virtual Justice 3. He told me exactly like them. I think that sounds pretty kick ass.