Laughing Through Life
A friend recently reminded me of something. Upon eating my favorite $5 five-street-taco-plus-drink combo, I proclaimed “If this place had Cherry Coke, I’d come here instead of going to church on Sunday.” Considering I’d just recently returned from a full-time 2 year volunteer mission for my church, that’s really saying… something. But it’s something I thought, and something I said, and knowing what I know about my life, I find a deep well of humor I come back to again and again.
I do a lot of things that I guess would be humor for it’s own sake, but really I just try to add humor to the regular work I’m doing. I have to admit, most of my humor is very immature “your mom” style humor - I just think it’s hilarious in a post-ironic sense with where we are at in the web. Maybe I just like Napoleon Dynamite a bit too much.
When you set up the VM at 2am and it requires a username, why not make it piss? Then 6 months later when you try to boot the stupid thing up in an act of desperation when all else has failed and your very sanity begins to slip through your fingers - you see the username of “piss” and can’t help but smile to yourself. It’s just a joke for you, between yourself.
I say this for strictly your own stuff, maybe it helps us remote workers futher mentally safeguard our hobby time from work. If you’re using [email protected] for a test email and not [email protected], you know you’re having fun and not working.
I have a thumb drive with a single file on it named pr0n.mkv. What is it? I think it’s actually a copy of “My Neighbor Totoro”. Why? I looked at that and made a decision and kept it. I’m sorry, but to me, it’s funny. It’s funny for me. I’ve never had actual “pr0n” saved ever, just like I don’t make a habit out of downloading YouTube videos and keeping them on a hard drive… why would you even do that? I mean I don’t watch YouTube, err… moving on.
Say you have to sign up for something actually awful, not the
website that’s actually okay↗
, and they want your name. LOL r u kidding me? Playing Pokémon Red taught me enough about what names are funny - My dude. This also helps with password management. You should be using unique passwords for each account right? Well how to remember all that? Say, I had a PayPal account (which I don’t). I might make the password PayPal is a criminal organization123!, which is both easy to remember and also helps me keep my mind in the right place when dealing with that account.
Just today I hopped on the newfangled Claude bandwagon and told it my name is “Daddy” and it’s jut way too funny at each and every usage. “Good evening, Daddy” is the prompt. To me, it’s a middle finger to whatever design the VC-funded vampires think I should be using. They’re not bad people, it’s not a bad design, it’s good. Which is why it’s so funny to have Claude call me “daddy”.
I also really like “easter eggs”. On my homepage I have a tagline that’s randomly chosen each time the site builds. I just have a file with 20-or-so little things and I forget about them that they stay funny to me. Sometimes I add more.
I’ve had fun making some dumb videos on youtube. I don’t know why, but Final Cut Pro comes with a huge library of sounds and music (you’ve probably heard them a lot if you don’t already know it). Why not use it? Why not add a random fart noise? I worked for like 20 hours on a video that a few thousand (more likely dozen) people are going to watch so I optimize actually for my own personal viewing experience. One comment I received is worth more to me than any millions of views could ever be:
its 1 am and the sounds effects are killing me
I laugh, and laugh, and laugh about that comment. The fact that I spent all that time doing something so pointless and silly, and some random person found it, and was bothered enough to let me know that - I love it. That is what the internet should be. There’s no ill-will, no judgement-passing, no insults. “It’s 1AM, and the sound effects are killing me” is something you might say to a roomate doing questionable activities. My very wife has said almost the same thing, it’s the stuff of legend among my brethren. Let’s just say a game of THPS2 got a little late and a little loud.
If you’re not laughing, what are you doing? Are you sad? What do you think is funny? I’m just a guy saying you should spread that laughter through your life as much as you can. Sprinkle it, like the Johnny Appleseed of personal inside jokes. There’s a certain authenticity I find at the median of making a joke to yourself
Finally, a word of caution. Laughter means a lot of different things. I’m talking about humor. Humor never makes you feel bad. We laugh a lot because we’re embarrassed, that’s not what I’m talking about. Humor never puts anyone else down. Humor is never mean-spirited. Humor is also well-informed; it’s easy to laugh and scoff at things we don’t understand. Never laugh at something you don’t understand. Never laugh at someone else who’s being genuine. Laugh at yourself the most. I was driven to tears laughing at my own gross ineptitude after realizing I’ll likely never comprehend “transcendental functions”, but I think I might co-opt the term for my new programming language - 𝗟𝗜𝗦𝗣₄ (a hybrid of common lisp and
HolyC↗
, implemented as a Forth). “Transcendental functions supersede both space and time, but are not necessarily quantum-proof.” Actually that kind of sounds like my experience with Verilog in college. You know what Dave? It’s going to work out just fine, trust me. So what if your finite state machine is blowing through interrupt service routines because you have sprintfs all over the place? That’s 5 hours of your life you’ll never get back but I sure appreciate it now.
My brothers make fun of me, saying that I’m the funniest person I know. Well, I am. Actually my brother is slightly more funny than I am. I burst out laughing multiple times a day. I’m literally 10 pages into Infinite Jest but I think I get the point. Life is truly absurd - but it doesn’t have to be scary. It can be hilarious, because it is!