I only just remembered - I was one of the artists for @stillalivezine, and iirc we were allowed to post our pieces online a year after the zine’s release.
So here are the two pieces I made for it (a year ago)!
Human hair is the Achilles’ heel of virtually any precision system. You name it: dishwashers, sex androids, spacecraft. Anywhere a person is involved, we’re shedding a ton of hair from every part of our body directly into the workings of a meticulously-designed machine.
Generally, this is fine. Sure, once in awhile you’ll notice a fan getting clogged up with hair, or a lot of gross gunk building up in your washing machine’s filter (go clean it out if you haven’t) but it doesn’t really impede function until it gets too bad. And then there’s vacuum cleaners.
A vacuum cleaner’s entire job in life is to pick up hair and put it into a central tank for later disposal. It turns out that this is an impossible task: if you have long hair in your house, you’ll spend more time clipping chunks of hair out of the boiling-hot rollers of the vacuum cleaner than you will actually cleaning. The apologists will tell you to do something radical, like vacuum the floor more than once every three months, but now is not the time for drastic solutions. Now is the time for a grotesque application of horsepower.
Here at Switch Labs, we’ve determined that the problem with these vacuum cleaners is that their wimpy-ass little motors just don’t have the grunt to push through some measly hair. And that’s understandable, if you’re building to a budget, and also if your company is run by some kind of British asshole who looks like he does cocaine with Harry Potter in the planetarium at the science centre. I make it clear to my employees every day: I will not tolerate the words “enough power” under any means. I’ve fired like fifty of them.
Of course, this sort of revolutionary change doesn’t come easy. It turns out you can only put about six hundred horsepower through a jet turbine before the carpet tears. We had to step it way back with reduction gears, which means that it’s a little delicate to get the vacuum started in the morning. That’s where the starter cart comes in: we got these Buick V-8 powered babies from military surplus, real fuckin’ cheap. And we passed the savings on to us. Who says sucking is easy?
cave johnson here. the lab boys have told me that the giant, hideous slug we’ve been extracting gel from for the last two months may be… i mean, how do you want me to say this– it’s homophobic. i don’t even know if it’s been near a homosexual employee or employees, but damned if it doesn’t pitch a fit whenever two men are within five feet of each other. i can’t fire the thing, it’s not on the payroll, so: if you ARE a homosexual under our employ. invest in salt.
“Cave Johnson here. I’ve received complaints from anonymous employees that our support of the “homosexual lifestyle” is “degenerate” and “irresponsible”. It really got me thinking and I think I found a solution. So good news! We now have 23 vacated positions reserved for members of the LGBT community. Additional good news, we began a new testing initiative on evolutionary degenration with 23 test subjects all ready to go.“
“Cave Johnson here. If you’re experiencing a time loop in which you’re repeating the month of June over and over, that’s totally intentional. We at Aperture Science felt that pride month was not long enough and so we created this loop to let employees experience as much pride as they feel like. To get out of this loop, simply use the pod labeled “Time Machine” in Shaft 6 and then either kill or save the baby on the other end depending on when in the loop you’re on. Don’t worry about the baby’s identity, he grows up to be an asshole.“
“Cave Johnson here, happy to announce that our Rainbow Gel project was a massive success. We have developed distinct gels in every color of the rainbow pride flag. In fact, it was too much of a success, so we’ll be updating our pride flag accordingly to include 75 new colors corresponding to all of our new gels. Word of advice, though, don’t stare at the flag for too long, most of these colors haven’t been tested on human eyes yet.”
“Cave Johnson here, Cave Johnson queer. Get used to it.”
“Cave Johnson here. Caroline just informed me that I am her “beard”. I checked, and I fail to see how I could possibly have grown out of her face. If anybody knows anything about human-to-facial hair transmogrification, please report to my office.”
“Cave Johnson here. Friendly reminder that Aperture employees living prior to the legalization of gay marriage are invited to use our Aperture Science Temporal Matrimony Pod in order to travel to the future with your same-sex partner and get married there. Employees from the future who wish to return to a time before gay people being able to marry are also welcome to use the pod and we’ll make sure to send you to an era well before gay marriage. I’m thinking maybe Late Cretacesous.”
“Cave Johnson here. I’m proud to announce that our plan to hire only female test subjects to prevent them from flirting with our female scientists has been a resounding failure.”
“Cave Johnson here. I’m afraid we’ll have to temporarily pause all experimentation with the Gender Affirmation Beam. The testing itself is going great, the beam is working. But we’re starting to run out of thigh high socks and khaki shorts.”
the best part about cave johnson’s lemons speech is jk simmons’ voice breaking on ‘do you know who i am?’
probably irl he was just trying not to laugh because of how ridiculous these lines are, but it’s so easy to interpret it as this sad, dying old man realising just for a second that his self-importance was all for nothing and he has ended up alone
