This month’s DrakeGTA Archives article: Russia wants to deflect an asteroid!
I love you Drake, but republishing your old articles can be a real pain in the ass sometimes.
The Internet Archive is one of the most useful sites on the entire internet, but one of its greatest downsides is that it doesn’t always archive images. The further back you go in a site’s history, the less likely it is that they managed to capture the images included in articles.
I get why they don’t save every little image, and I don’t necessarily blame them. It costs them tens of millions of dollars a year to operate, I’d be cutting as much useless shit as I could too.
Still, it sucks when I’m looking for old DrakeGTA articles to publish and half the articles are full of missing images with next to no context as to what they could have been. Sure, I knew Drake well enough to make legitimate guesses as to what those images probably were, but that only gets me so far sometimes. Also, it feels like a lot of old shit from the internet is slowly being scrubbed and sanitized away, so relocating some of those images is hard. Case in point, the image I previously mentioned of the Asian guys with giant magnets. There’s some serious enshitification going on, and it creates more work for me when trying to republish Drake’s old stuff. Why, oh why, did you have to make your articles so image-heavy?
Going forward, I’ll be winging it on some of these images. Did he really include a picture of Marv from Home Alone being electrocuted? I don’t fucking know, but that’s the picture I’m using. It gets his point across well enough. I’m also pretty sure he didn’t use a watermarked stock photo of a dinosaur holding a baseball bat, but the original filename said “bat.jpg” and he made a reference to someone failing to stop an asteroid from hitting Earth, so as far as I’m concerned it was a dinosaur trying to hit the damn thing with a baseball bat. Drake, if you’re reading this from the Great Beyond (or the “Sweet Hereafter” as us Riverdale fans call it), I hope you’re cool with the improvisation. If not, well, tough luck dude, shouldn’t have died (miss you bud).
Anyway, this article, originally published in December of 2009, was about Russia announcing that they plan to stop Asteroid 99942, aka “Apophis”, from hitting Earth in 2030. Apophis has been a hot topic in the astronomy community for a long time, since it has the potential to wipe out all life on Earth. Thankfully, it’s unlikely to actually hit us, and is currently scheduled for a close pass-by in April of 2029.
In classic Drake fashion, he made fun of a potentially devastating situation with lighthearted musings and pop culture references.
I’ve got nothing else to say about this one. This is “OMFG We’re All Gonna Die: Putin Our Place”, originally published to DrakeGTA.com on December 31, 2009.
This will be another regular feature here on drakegta.com. We’re calling it: “OMFG We’re All Gonna Die.” The basic premise of “OMFG We’re All Gonna Die” is that we will present you with an interesting news item, and then explain why it’s time to put your head between your legs and kiss your sorry ass good-bye. Like all “regular features” on drakegta.com, it will probably be done once or twice, and we’ll stop doing it, because we don’t actually give a crap anymore.
So you heard about this? “Russia Plans to Save Earth From Rogue Asteroid.” This is an interesting story here, because there is this asteroid, called “99942 Apophis,” that Russia thinks will slam into the earth in or around the year 2030. Which, just as an aside, is proof that astronomers suck at naming things, because if they had any class at all, they would have named it Ragna-röck. Now, us Americans have been tracking 99942 Apophis for a long time, we realize that it is in an orbit that crosses paths with our orbit, but we’ve done the math, and we decided that there is about a one in four million chance of this thing hitting the Earth in the near future, if we leave it the hell alone. Think about that, mathematically speaking, I have a greater chance of getting struck by lighting while having wild sex with Megan Fox than we do of this rock hitting the earth; but strangely, that’s still better odds than hitting the lottery.
There is an important distinction with that one in four million figure, it’s “if we leave it the hell alone.” Well, back in the USSR, their mathematicians have come up with some slightly different figures. (Because in Soviet Russia numbers crunch You.) We have a one in for million chance, they have a 100% likelihood. It’s not that I don’t trust Russian math, it’s just that…
…Ok, you’re right, I don’t trust Russian math.
I’m not one of those strange space hippies that believes we shouldn’t screw with the orbits of asteroids or anything, I just don’t think Russia should be in-charge of it. Think about it, this is the same guy who sits across the Bering Strait, watching Sarah Palin undress through a zoom-lens; well, wait a second, I guess I can’t fault him for that.
All I’m saying, I’ve read enough science fiction to know that deflecting an incoming asteroid isn’t as easy as it sounds.
Look how well it worked out of those guys.
Oh, but this did inspire me to write another six word story…
Putin deflects asteroid… …directly into Washington.
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