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Concept art by Syd Mead for a proposed but never made live action version of The Jetsons.

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Norseman / Thor by Frank Frazetta.

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☀️🌙

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Japanese CM for Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon (1993)

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I read through the email again. The overly positive response with a slight undertone of aggression reading only “You can do it!” stared back at me.

Now I could do many things. I could write some damn good proposals for pitch meetings. I could soothe frazzled investors nerves over coffee. I could design a marketing camping guaranteed to increase sales by a minimum of 38%. I could even hyper focus and eat nothing but microwaved chalupas for days if I was stressed enough. But sell a glorified modern day torture device as ‘kid safe’? They must be shitting me.

The “Trans-plant ©” was a teleportation device meant to move living organic material across a “Unlimit’d (Trademark)” distance, and was also on its 33rd rebrand for a name. I was partial to linking it to a Fey portal fantasy theme but was shot down by investors as it being too feminine a reference. Clearly none of them read spicy fey romance.

So while I had my brain bursting with yet another round of branding ideas, already thinking about hiring influencers that worked in garden trends and #cottagecore to possibly be our first publicity stunt of using the “Trans-plant ©”, I had gotten the official details of the product itself. After 7 months of bureaucratic red tape and 1000s of meetings, today I was finally sent a single password protected pdf… on a locked server that could only be accessed with a 3-step verification log-in involving my personal and work cell phones… and social security number.

Dear God, it’s literally over 2000 pages.

Now despite working for years in advertising, I actually hate it. I hate the clients, I hate the work, and I hate bullshit like expecting me to read engineer notes (and understand them!) when all I wanted to know was how long does it take for teleportation to work? Why couldn’t anyone tell me that, I had to give SOMETHING to graphic designers this week. And the fact that they hired me at all meant they couldn’t pull off an advertising campaign with AI tools alone.

So it was bad. There was something very bad in here that required human ingenuity to spin into a positive.

I fucking hate my job.

I liked paying rent though, so I began a first pass of the reading through the document from hell searching for my turds they expected me to polish into gold. It took 10 minutes of scrolling only looking at pictures to reach the bottom of the document.

It’s fucking giant.

Ok, so it had what could be considered a preppers wet dream of a bunker storage beneath it filled with all sorts of spare parts, so it’ll have to be built by itself in the middle of an open field… not super convenient liked they pitched, but still workable with my current #cottagecore marketing plan. Middle of nature, middle of nowhere construction site, people will love it. I'll make them love it.

A second pass of the document was just the search function trying to find the speed of teleportation itself. No matter my keywords though, I found nothing.

Honestly they should never try to lie to their lawyers or their marketing team. It’s their public image that will be ruined if I pitch something wrong.

I was on my 7th plate of microwaved cheesy sadness when I finally found the bit I was looking for, page 1112:

The distance to which the organic matter must travel is proportional to the time divided by the size of the matter. In practice it has been found for stability reasons that the endoskeleton be targeted for transportation first, followed by soft tissue. For this configuration it is not recommend for living exoskeleton matter, or matter without any endoskeleton.

The highly complicated math problem underneath I had no hope of understanding, and I knew if I plugged it in to a computer it be recorded and I’d be reported and fired in a hot second. But through years of gas lighting I had developed a brilliant skill in translating hot air bullshit, so I read it again:

It takes a while to transport something big. To make sure it gets there, skeletons are transported first, followed by the flesh. Not recommend for crabs or jellyfish.

What. The. Fuck.

Ok so I did a little creative copy pasting that I absolutely should not do, but the only way I was going to get my answers was through the math problem. And What an answer it was.

A cat took 28 seconds. A full grown adult took 42 seconds. Hypothetically you could go the distance to the other side of the planet, but it would take 4 minutes and 17 seconds to get there. Bones first. Conveniently there was no health reports or mention of comfort level. Pretty sure there was comfort level mentioned somewhere. Maybe an email?

But no, there was nothing specific ever mention. More hours spent going through old client emails I discovered the only ones mentioning comfort level, "kid friendly" and "instant arrival" were all other marketing team people. The last and most recent one simply reading: “You can do it!”

I can do what exactly? Record influencers climbing into a pod in the middle of a bulldozed forest to make a space for the underground bunker, slowly melting bones first for 42 seconds? Perhaps a time-lapse…. No, no!

This was bad. The whole thing made my stomach queasy and for once it wasn’t the chalupas. I… I couldn’t work on this. The more I read the worse it got. Tiny foot notes relating to installing and stocking sedatives and other drugs to keep travelers compliant for "exceptionally bad responses to transport".

I had an ex coworker once who had gone full whistle blower on one of the clients. I had still been mulling over what to do, when I got the alert from IT our team was the compromise origin. I did what I could to minimize damage, calm tempers, but I was a grunt back then. Nothing I said could stop the full weight of the corporate law from coming down on them with a 80 year sentence.

I still sent them commissary money to use in jail. Once every few months an email since they were no longer allowed physical mail.

There, but for the grace of God, go I.

This could not be allowed though. Every single thing about it was worse and worse and I didn’t even understand the math parts! I went to art school for craps sake. Human psychology was just another hyper focus of mine like my sad melted cheese lunches, that were only getting sadder with my reading companion. And cold.

The thing about my ex-coworker, is that they blabbed to the wrong people. The blabbed to the media, the general populace. But that’s just free publicity. The companies are titans. But you know… Maybe a titian could take down another titian?

It would be a longshot but… What if I it got leaked to their competitor? What if, in the rush to outpace my client, they got sloppy? A few horror stories here and there. Instead of influencers, everyday construction crew reporting live on the scene of the backstage horrors.

We’d need a name though. Something to mock, something to meme…. Bones first…. 28 seconds…

No, no. Wrong angle. People care about themselves first. Think locally!

Bulldozing homes and local markets to build these monstrosities. Underground bunkers holding mass amounts of drugs next to sweet children schools. Straining the resources of the power grid and knocking out hospitals, putting peoples lives in jeopardy. Sad music, rain in the background, night vision filters.

They’d lose every investor and most of the funding. At worst both company’s would install a hack job of a single set of teleporters, and it’d become a novelty no one uses after the first weekend.

I looked one last time at my email: “You can do it!”

Yeah… Yeah I think I can.

The teleporter was supposed to be instant. To your horror, as the one in charge of marketing, it is not. Now you have to find a way to sell this 'miracle machine' that slowly reassembles people, bones first.

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Rae Klein (American, 1995) - Untitled (n.d.)

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Come For The Cosmic Awe, Stay For The Skeletons In Spacesuits: Adam Rowe On Sci-Fi Art Of The 1970s – Unquiet Things

An interview with @70sscifiart!

Image: Bruce Pennington’s 1974 cover to A. E. van Vogt’s The World of Null-A

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Artist: dioknarf

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Yuko Shimizu, ''Little Nemo Dream Another Dream'', 2014

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atsushi_okiphoto

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Astronaut Barbie

#brbchasingdreams

prints | tutorials | my artbook

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Sailor Moon Episode 1: “The Crybaby: Usagi’s Beautiful Transformation!”

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Gahan Wilson (1930-2019) Some cartoons from the above artist from ''Playboy'' culled from various issues published between 1975 to 1983. Wilson, for me, was a precursor to cartoonists like Gary Larson of 'The Far Side' fame (which I loved). His work often lived in the kind of weird territory Larson explored although Wilson was attentive to different details given his darker sense of humor. It makes sense that Wilson credited cartoonists like Charles Addams (the creator of 'The Addams Family') and writers like H. P. Lovecraft as influences. I'm pretty sure there are collections of his ''Playboy'' cartoons out there and a few children's books Wilson wrote. The world benefits from the existence of weird people doing their weird things. If you're weird and you're reading this, keep on being idiosyncratic.

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i'm gonna show you, how it's done - done - done KPOP DEMON HUNTERS

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Coming Home, acrylic painting by Jason Limon