The Daily Doodles

“The Blank Tape”

Simón Martínez presses his nose against the TV’s monitor, his hot breath fogging the glass, as he tries to position his face as close to the television screen as humanly possible.  

He remembers doing this during his bored moments as a child, thinking he may find something secret being broadcast that he’d miss if he was watching from the couch like a regular person.  

The static fills the screen with its never-ending frenetic dance, never stopping to stay still even for a moment.  Simón focuses on just one black or white dot, trying to track its trail as it hops wildly across the screen, but each time he loses the poor thing as the rest of the static overwhelms it.

Having found this blank VHS tape in an ancient box that he forgot he ever had, Simón hoped there was some sort of lost treasure from his childhood recorded on the cassette… but nope.  Just static.  He guesses he was saving it to record something special, something special that never came.

But still, for whatever reason, he actually likes it this way.  The static is somehow soothing, filling his field of vision with the endless movement while the white noise quietly hisses on and on.

The magnetic tape inside the cassette *snaps*, and Simón hears the gears of the VCR grind to a halt as it struggles to eject the broken VHS.  The picture goes black.

Simón unwinds the magnetic tape from around the VCR’s reels, the strip crinkling in his hands, and throws the useless blank tape away.

Posted 5/10/2013

(Thank you to the extremely talented Samantha of other-side-of-the-universe.com for helping me gif this!)

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One of my favourite sites, Stranger Dimensions, did an awesome write up about me and my site!

You can read it here: A SPACE BETWEEN DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES: The Daily Doodles.

It was a very nice surprise, as I actually do read Stranger Dimensions daily when new posts are delivered to my Gmail each night, and about a week ago I was scrolling down the newest email, reading about many of the weird, paranormal, science-y news they report on, when suddenly I saw one of my drawings! :-o  I certainly wasn’t expecting it.

If you’re into news about scientific discovery, time travel, ghosts, aliens, the paranormal, and basically everything cool and fun that is known and unknown in the universe, I think you’d love Stranger Dimensions too. 

(And also, if you’re like me and you grew up listening to Coast to Coast AM, I KNOW you’d love Stranger Dimensions).

Thank you to Rob Schwarz for the great article! 

—David Michael Chandler

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“Defragmenting the Brain”

Horrible memories next to good means the two often commingle.
You wish to remember a nice moment, but get that uneasy tingle.
Pleasant nostalgia ruined by things you wish you could erase.
Forgetting is usually impossible, but brains have a lot of open space.

Simply defragment your brain, store the dark memories to the side,
In the empty unused portions of the mind, you put them to hide.
There they can’t bug you, or infest what you wish to recall,
No more pausing on past regrets, slowing your brain to a crawl.

You’ll live happier not remembering anything that made you sad.
Filled with confidence knowing that you never did anything bad.
While over time that data may leak out, and flashes break through,
Just defragment your brain again, and you’ll never have to be you.

(A Golden Oldie originally posted 10/24/2011)

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(Source: thedailydoodles, via elgarabatodeldia)

“The World Under the Bed”

While hiding from terrorists who just killed her parents dead,
Sarah-Louise fell through a portal that opened under her bed.
Down for miles she plummeted, into the Inter-Dimensional Zone
Endless spiraling colours flashed by, and she never felt more alone.

After an hour of falling, she asks herself “Why?”
Why did this have to happen, and why did my parents die?
But she doesn’t get an answer, because that’s not how life works
There isn’t always a reason for why the fates are such jerks.

Once she sees the Inter-Dimensional Beings slowly form and take shape
Sarah hopes that one of these creatures can help her out of this scrape…!

But alas!  For if they had lips, the Beings would be licking their chops
As swallowing recently orphaned girls is their favouritest of crops.
They’ll absorb her entirely without giving a second thought,
And any pathetic begging or pleading would all be for naught.

As she nears the end, she thinks of her dead mom and dad
She hopes they’re in heaven, and that they aren’t sad
She thinks when she lands she’ll be with them soon,
The naive thought alone makes her tiny heart swoon.

Sarah is wrong, of course, as the Inter-Dimension will never let her go
And as she hits the bottom, all she can feel is a brightly coloured glow.

And once she’s completely absorbed into the Inter-Dimensional sea,
She knows she’s just cursed to be energy… for the rest of eternity.

(Starring Sarah-Louise Kelly’s from “From DC to ZZ”!)

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(Source: thedailydoodles, via elgarabatodeldia)

“A Bit Too Much”

As his hand melts away into a chunky collagen gravy and insects pop from blisters planted by the eggs of his ancestor’s mistakes and his eyeballs peel away layer by layer while the universe implodes upon itself and starts attacking the idea of his existence and the nice pleasant high feeling fades away and starts transitioning into that awful too high feeling…

Brian Sonksen realizes he MIGHT have taken a bit too much.

Originally Posted 4/29/2012

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(Source: thedailydoodles)

“Finally, a Reason”

For all of her 19 long, arduous years on this Earth, Madison Bancroft has hoped that she projected an aura of mystery… a cynical world weariness well earned over a lifetime of hardship and struggle.

Unfortunately, she has grown up in the suburbs, to a happily married upper-middle-class couple who always tell her she can be anything she wants and that they love her, and simply has had too pedestrian and easy of a life to pull off the moodiness she strives for.  Blast it all!

So as she watches the alien attackers fly in over the purple hills from the view of her childhood home’s spacious wrap-around deck, all Madison can do is smile… FINALLY, this is her chance to have something actually bad happen.  FINALLY, there is a reason.

Unfortunately again for young, striving-to-be-dark Madison, the rest of the world is going through the same alien invasion, so once more her experiences are pedestrian and not resulting in the “seen it all, been through worse” demeanor she hopes for.

Ugh!!

Originally Posted 9/12/2012

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(Source: thedailydoodles)

“Studying the Happy People”

Nicole Ponce often wondered how some people can be happy
Such an odd way to be, since humans are meant to feel crappy.
So she kidnapped these strange folk, took them to her secret lair
The underground laboratory, that she keeps under the stair.

She sticks twelve happy peoples in tanks full of nutrient-enriched goo
(And while it’s a small sample size, it’ll simply have to do)
As they float in the tanks for years, she pokes and she prods
Studying the reactions of these poor happy clods.

While they don’t seem as happy as before, they still seem quite fine
They quickly adjusted to life as test subjects, and hardly cry n’ whine
No matter what Nicole does, the happy dolts stay the same
Just happy to be alive, and they seem to smile without shame.

As the experiment ends, Nicole finds it’s worse than she feared…
All conclusions of her study suggest that happy people are just weird.

Nicole dissolved her test subjects in acid the next day.

Posted 12/5/2012

(Starring the lovely Nicole Ponce of Lyricalpuppetry.tumblr.com!)

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“The Black Hole at the Center of the Galaxy”

The long dormant electronics creak and moan while R-EM1 the Droid snaps out of its hibernation mode and the ship’s console comes alive for the first time in 300 years… its’ gears and joints stiff, the robot looks out, and slowly but instinctively scans its surroundings while it tries to remember exactly what it’s doing out here in the emptiness of space.

Outside the window, R-EM1 finds its optic sensors transfixed upon a swirling gigantic blacker-than-black mass in the distance, unsure of what its looking at but knowing it is significant, until it glances down at the digital readout on the monitor— it’s the black hole at the center of the galaxy.

Upon that realization, memory floods back into the robot’s hard drive as its little-used circuits warm up, helping R-EM1 remember his mission… his mission to circle the black hole at its event horizon, just out of reach of its immense gravitational pull, and to continue circling for 500 years before returning back to Earth.

Since time moves differently the closer one is to a gravitational force such as a black hole, time within the ship will feel steady… but back on Earth, thousands of years will have passed.  The robot will be rocketing into the future, returning to an assumeably vastly different Earth, where it will be studied and treated as a time capsule of sorts, each read-out and scrap of its framework being picked apart and studied as the 5000 year long experiment comes to fruition. 

And, R-EM1 hates it.

So, R-EM1 plans to fire the ship’s atomics at the heart of the black hole, theoretically creating a chain reaction that causes the entire galaxy to collapse and all life in the Milky Way to end.  Ohhh, it sounds like bliss to the exhausted R-EM1… no more robots being used for these scientists’ games, no more war, no more heartbreak, no more death (after the initial “everyone dies” phase, of course)… if there were history books to be written after everything is destroyed, which there won’t be, but if there were, R-EM1 is sure that it’d be treated as the hero it believes it is.  A champion for all of Living-Kind.  Everything will make sense then…

R-EM1 overrides the defense mechanisms meant to prevent someone from doing exactly what it is trying to do, and the atomic missiles blast into the inky darkness of the black hole, swallowed up quickly by it’s enormous gravitational pull.  And then, R-EM1 waits.

And waits.

And then waits some more.

Something should be happening by now… the chain reaction that collapses the entire galaxy and destroys everything we know SHOULD be chain reacting-ing, but the black hole just sits there, almost taunting poor R-EM1.  The atomics didn’t matter at all, the black hole didn’t even flinch.  It couldn’t care less about what R-EM1 wants to do.

For 7 years R-EM1 floats there, depressed and sullen about its plan not even coming close to working… Stupid, stupid, STUPID it repeats to itself endlessly, as the pathetic failure of the plan plays over and over within its memory banks.

Finally, pouting all the way, the robot decides it should just do what it was created to do, and begins to circle the black hole for the next 500 years. 

Oh well… :-/

Can’t just sit here and do nothing, after all.

Posted 11/27/2012

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“Finally, a Reason”

For all of her 19 long, arduous years on this Earth, Madison Bancroft has hoped that she projected an aura of mystery… a cynical world weariness well earned over a lifetime of hardship and struggle.

Unfortunately, she has grown up in the suburbs, to a happily married upper-middle-class couple who always tell her she can be anything she wants and that they love her, and simply has had too pedestrian and easy of a life to pull off the moodiness she strives for.  Blast it all!

So as she watches the alien attackers fly in over the purple hills from the view of her childhood home’s spacious wrap-around deck, all Madison can do is smile… FINALLY, this is her chance to have something actually bad happen.  FINALLY, there is a reason.

Unfortunately again for young, striving-to-be-dark Madison, the rest of the world is going through the same alien invasion, so once more her experiences are pedestrian and not resulting in the “seen it all, been through worse” demeanor she hopes for.

Ugh!!

Posted 9/12/2012

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“Uploading the Mind’s Eye”

Nervous about the procedure but knowing that his organic-casing has been feeling kinda rundown lately (he tripped and scuffed an elbow the other day, plus his nose has been running for at least a week now), Franklin MacMurray settles down into the chair as the Robo-Assistants start threading the wires through his pupil and under his eye and he can hear the familiar crunch of the connections clicking into place.

The downloading of his Virtual Soul (a compilation of his memories, thoughts, feelings, personality— all that makes him, him) and subsequent uploading into a new organic casing has become remarkably easy, but still… as they hook up everything and he feels the memories be duplicated and pulled out, Franklin always feels regretfully uneasy.  He can’t shake it.

Plus, he doesn’t need a new body (the current one works fine, just a bit slow is all), but with the deals they got now it’s sooooo cheap to upgrade, and they have all these amazing features… yeah, he probably won’t use 99% of them, but he thought the same about the Clearview Retin-A after all, and he doesn’t know what he’d do without it.

Besides, it’s almost his birthday.  He’s allowed to give himself a nice gift.

The dreamy glow that the absence of self brings is tingling through his body, acting as a natural sedative, and Franklin knows it won’t be long now before the transfer is complete.  While he can’t “see” his thoughts and memories in his head, he can still feel them being sorted and compiled in the new frame…

But something… something feels off.  He can sense the gaps in his memory that everyone has (you can’t remember everything, of course), but instead of them remaining empty and void, he can feel something… new being installed.  Something foreign.

He tries to hone in on the blank gaps in his consciousness being artifically filled, but as his sense of self drains away he finds it harder to focus… the outrage he feels over this invasion becomes more and more difficult to muster and maintain… 

All he knows, is that that is not him.  Something must be going wrong, they’re not meant to put anything besides me in the new me…

It must just be some mistake, he tells himself.  It has to be.

As the last bits of his Virtual Soul are downloaded and everything fades to black, he swears that he will remember it… when he wakes up, he will get to the bottom of this.  He will fix it.  They can’t do this.

Unbeknownst to Franklin, however, this is the 5th time he has made this promise to himself.

And just like before, the memory of it all is left in the dead husk of his former body, which is soon to be melted down and reappropriated into various breakfast cereals, off-brand kitty litters, and glue.

Franklin wakes up, confident in who he is, but subtly unrecognizable from who he was. 

Posted 8/22/2012

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