High school grad who accidentally fell into a surreal-ass future (help)

October 6, 2019 2:49 PM

Natalie finally convinced me to make an Instagram 😝 Name’s Liv 💖 Liv may have been tempting fate when she chose the Instagram handle livinthefuture. (Main link is to the first entry in an illustration-based Instagram storytelling project. Second link is to the overall Instagram profile, which will be a spoiler because of Instagram's reverse chronology.)
posted by Caduceus (25 comments total)

I've no idea who is behind this account. Sorry if they turn out to be terrible somehow.
posted by Caduceus at 2:49 PM on October 6, 2019

The account's following Rebecca Sugar, whoever it is probably isn't the worst.
posted by Caduceus at 2:52 PM on October 6, 2019 [2 favorites]

The only way I’ve found to navigate in the correct order is to blur my eyes, go to the overall profile, scroll to the bottom, and then click the last image. It will come up with arrow buttons on the sides so that you can navigate.
posted by danielparks at 2:53 PM on October 6, 2019 [2 favorites]

Good lord I didn't even realize it wouldn't have the navigation arrows in the first link. Instagram you're terrible. I wish tumblr hadn't committed suicide.
posted by Caduceus at 2:55 PM on October 6, 2019

tumblr also would have been terrible for navigating a story like this, actually. I'll stop spamming this thread now.
posted by Caduceus at 2:58 PM on October 6, 2019

I’m intrigued. Followed.

Tumblr is actually built for this kind of thing; you can add a “/chrono” tag to the end of a Tumblr URL to read a feed in order. If only Tumblr’s owners had bothered to promote itself with webcomics creators. Sigh.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 3:04 PM on October 6, 2019 [1 favorite]

Tumblr is actually built for this kind of thing; you can add a “/chrono” tag to the end of a Tumblr URL to read a feed in order. If only Tumblr’s owners had bothered to promote itself with webcomics creators. Sigh.

Good lord that would have made my life a lot easier if I'd known it like 5 years ago. At this point it is somewhat less useful.
posted by Caduceus at 3:08 PM on October 6, 2019 [2 favorites]

Is that Springfield? Or Hill Valley?
posted by chavenet at 3:13 PM on October 6, 2019

This is an amazing form to create art in; wow. Loving everything about it.
posted by So You're Saying These Are Pants? at 3:17 PM on October 6, 2019 [2 favorites]

Sorry MeFites, this is clearly a hoax. It’s supposedly the year 3000 but I don’t see a single bending unit.
posted by ejs at 3:28 PM on October 6, 2019 [3 favorites]

This is fantastic, thanks for sharing!!! I love that she's responding to people's comments.
posted by lemonade at 3:56 PM on October 6, 2019 [1 favorite]

Honestly my biggest question is how does her phone still have battery left.

(iri reference! that album is dope!)
posted by chrominance at 5:01 PM on October 6, 2019 [1 favorite]

Great comic so far, and loving the responsiveness of the fiction.

Thanks for the link. Well worth the minor frustrations of the instagram interface..
posted by bonehead at 5:35 PM on October 6, 2019 [1 favorite]

Great work, though the factory morgue is a tad noir oblique.
posted by clavdivs at 5:39 PM on October 6, 2019

Thanks for sharing!
posted by haldaneBAS at 5:39 PM on October 6, 2019 [1 favorite]

Sigh. In the year 3000, the US is *still* going to be using farenheit? Really?
posted by jacquilynne at 6:04 PM on October 6, 2019 [3 favorites]

I mean... hopefully it’ll be a revised Fahrenheit scale that is a touch less arbitrary but as weather temperature scales go...? Celsius and Kelvin are just fine for scientific and industrial purposes, and even probably medical if you don’t mind measuring the difference between “this is totally fine” and “this is A Serious Problem” all within a literal couple of degrees, but as an air temp scale, a 0 to 100 scale where 0 is “this is definitely too cold to be outside for long without precautions” and 100 is “this is definitely too hot to be outside for long without precautions” (for the vast majority of people) is actually a lot more intuitive and useful than one where 0 is “I mean it’s the frost point where water freezes so that’s pretty important for agriculture but not like the only significant factor, also I’ve known multiple people in my life who could take a jog in shorts in this weather and be fine” and 100 is “you would have instantly died if you went outside 50 degrees ago, but water boils here”.

YMMV if you grew up using Celsius for weather, but as an American, Fahrenheit for the weather temperature is the only bit of Imperial I wouldn’t happily replace with metric with some kind of a genie wish that could only be used to make life mildly more convenient.
posted by Caduceus at 7:41 PM on October 6, 2019 [2 favorites]

YMMV if you grew up using Celsius for weather

Australia officially switched from dungarees Frankenstein to dungarees sCience in 1970. I was eight. By the time all official weather reports were being delivered solely in °C I was seventeen. I would have been in my thirties when I realized that the kind of talk I used to hear about hundred degree days was now always about forty degree days, even from people of my grandmother's generation.

It's just not a huge deal, any more than the frequently alleged "convenience" or "naturalness" of inches compared to centimetres and millimetres. Yes, it did initially strike me as ridiculous that building products in particular were now all officially specified in millimetres exclusively, so instead of an eight foot length of two-by-four you'd now be supplied with 2400 of 90 by 45, but the consistency of that has grown on me. For a start, it fixes this.

And one thing we can all agree on is that if it's -40° out, you're going to want your thermies.
posted by flabdablet at 5:08 AM on October 7, 2019 [6 favorites]

Australia officially switched from dungarees Frankenstein to dungarees sCience in 1970.

This is the greatest sentence ever and I am so glad you didn't catch the edit window.

Also I don't understand Instagram at all, but this thing is amazing.
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 8:46 AM on October 7, 2019 [1 favorite]

I love this and love that she’s interacting with the comments. It’s a little distracting that the posts are dated when they are posted when the action is clearly happening more quickly than days apart but that’s the one thing to forgive. I hope she goes on to curate some of the comments because I can predict this accumulating thousands of pointless LOL comments when some of them are really contributing to the spirit and the story.

I also love that several people have suggested hiding something in the present for her to find in the future that would help her and I hope she incorporates that into the story at some point.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 9:26 AM on October 7, 2019 [1 favorite]

I attribute the length of time between posts to the peculiarities of Instagram trying to transmit her posts back through time nearly 1,000 years.
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 10:05 AM on October 7, 2019 [1 favorite]

I mean, Facebook owns Insta, right? I just attribute it to Facebook messing with the order of posts on people's feeds. Again.

Hell, they're probably messing with the order of her posts in the year 3000 AND in the year 2019, just for shits and giggles.
posted by jacquilynne at 11:32 AM on October 7, 2019 [1 favorite]

I am trying to work out who can go out in 20°F weather "without precautions." The 0 was initially chosen as just the coldest day Fahreheit ever saw, and was then normalised to some frozen magnesium salt solution or something, wasn't it?
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 12:15 AM on October 8, 2019

Billy Connolly can, that's who.
posted by flabdablet at 3:45 AM on October 8, 2019

i wanna try those vanilla doritos
posted by numaner at 3:16 PM on October 10, 2019