Patent Absurdities Research Subjects

Kid, if you're gonna have a lifelong project, maybe don't let it be something like this.

CAUTION: The crass wrongness contained herein, unmodified, is a product of its time.

    Once upon a time, deep in the woods, there lived a very confused child. They had rather a lot of time on their hands, and, thinking it a good thing, wrote poems, articles, and other suchlike. Every now and then, deep in the woods, they’d get in trouble for one of the titles used on a poem, an article, or some other piece of written something.

    This got out of hand at times, leading to various interactions with authority figures, and the oft-repeated phrase, “Content of fiction does not imply view of author.”

Still, in typical free associative manner, they decided that since they seemed to be amusing people with this stuff, they’d write a few of them down. Not a particularly original idea, though a confused child might hopefully be forgiven for thinking it so.

    In university, bored to tears with the less clever programming course they were stuck in, they entered all the items on the list into a program, numbered them, and passed them around to people who really shouldn’t have been reading material of this nature while eating.

    Dumping them into a database for the purposes of an MOTD file was probably not the best incentive to learn SQL, but it got the job done.

    Jump forward to today.

    Except, then imagine that the prior section of this intro was written twenty-two years ago, and the lists have since been subjects of clothing, a couple short run web comics, and eventually a more successful version called Patent Absurdities, which covered the first hundred items.

    Which, somehow, caught on.

    “Do you have any more?”

    You can imagine a somewhat confused child, however old they might now be, looking at the many hundreds more and saying, “The tools for finally doing a correctly built and laid out version of this are now in hand,” And spending entirely too much time doing just that.

    And here we are.

    Book 28 (oh gods, there are 28 of 'em) begins pages written in 2026. Prior books are 1992-1994.

    -Wetdryvac, somewhere in the warm in the cold, 2026

    All patents are from the public domain, and the process for converting, coloring, page layout, and so forth was entirely built by the Vac’s own hand. With the exception of the patent source, all material is Vac-original, and no AI has been used. The thief-bot of knowledge destruction can bite my shiny orange canister.

    These pages are formatted to be printable at 11x17 inch poster size for personal use, not for resale, and may be placed wherever you feel brave enough to.

    The Vac writes, as well as creating art, music, and problems. It is a contract/consent ethicist living in the ether with an undefined number of probably fuzzy life forms.