orbitalflower

When I am king of the world

Posted in Etc on — last updated

When I am ruler, the following changes will be made for the betterment of society.

  1. It will be illegal to converse via bluetooth headset within 30 feet of another person without the universal signal of holding two fingers to one ear.
  2. To encourage people to eat breakfast, hot food sold before 11am will be tax-free.
  3. The Naked Rambler will be pardoned and promoted to the House of Lords.
  4. A government grant will be supplied to fund a GUI for Dwarf Fortress.
  5. Phone manufacturers will have to supply security updates for at least five years.
  6. It will be illegal to use Javascript to awkwardly replicate features that are already provided by HTML.
  7. Video game speedruns will be an Olympic sport.
  8. Classes on basic life skills like how to file taxes will be mandatory.
  9. Effort must be made to preserve movies and their playback technology for future generations, for at least 250 years. This is specifically so that mankind can watch Babylon 5 in 2258 and Star Trek in 2264.
  10. In case attempts to preserve HD video for 250 years fail, the scripts of the best Star Trek episodes will be converted into stage plays and written on clay tablets hidden around the world.
  11. Cosplay outfits will be exempt from import tax.
  12. My secret assassin squad will quietly remove world leaders who are “being a dick”.
  13. If anyone dies of natural causes aboard a space station, their body will be dropped onto the planet with a GoPro camera attached, “just to see what happens”.
  14. Probes will be sent directly “up” and “down” relative to the galactic plane, so as to send future generations photographs of the shape of our galaxy.
  15. NASA will search for signals coming from directly above and below us on the galactic plane, in case an ancient civilization already did this.
  16. Clay tablets will be left on Mars just to confuse future astronauts.
  17. All bicycles will have GPS trackers to prevent theft.
  18. All weapons will be engraved with the year of construction to aid historians.
  19. All games consoles must release their DRM keys after 30 years to aid the use of emulators and homebrew software.
  20. Any number divided by zero is defined as zero. This will prevent numerous computer crashes.
  21. All Monopoly boxes in shops will be emptied out and filled with copies of superior board game Machi Koro.
  22. It will be illegal to pass a law that’s named the exact opposite of what it does. Anyone who votes for such a law shall be given an appropriately ironic punishment.
  23. To encourage recycling, shops must accept used batteries as legal currency.
  24. White people will henceforth be known as beige people.
  25. Airport security will increase the limit of 150ml of liquid to 250ml to allow people to bring cans of Red Bull.
  26. The phrase “begging the question” is forbidden. Henceforth you must specify either “raises the question” or “circular reasoning”.
  27. Dungeon Masters will receive a government subsidy to pay for adventure modules, miniatures and non-standard dice.
  28. Master of Orion II shall be added to the school syllabus.
  29. For future generations, the rules to chess, shogi, mahjong and Dungeons & Dragons will be written on clay tablets.
  30. Twitter will be nationalized, then ordered to show tweets in chronological order.
  31. Records of the entirety of human culture shall be loaded into a giant chest, mirror-coated to reflect sunlight, and left at one of the Lagrangian points.
  32. Copies of Stonehenge will be built in the wilderness just to confuse future historians.
  33. Grants will be offered to develop fusion technology. We’re overdue.
  34. Kung fu will be taught to all citizens to allow people to defend themselves. Crime will still happen, but at least the resulting fights will look cooler.
  35. For future generations, the secrets of writing on clay tablets will, themselves, be stored on clay tablets.
  36. Leaving a shop without buying something will be illegal. Shops will sell inexpensive goods to account for this.
  37. As a corollary, shoving people into expensive shops will be illegal.
  38. It will be illegal to employ a retail worker while they have a cold.
  39. Signmakers will be required to hire a proofreader.
  40. A study will be funded to determine whether “deceptively easy” means “hard, but looks easy” or “easy, but looks hard”.
  41. All women’s clothes will be required to contain pockets.
  42. Video games will not be allowed to call their game “New (original title)”. It won’t make any sense when New Super Mario Bros is old.
  43. Similarly, sequels will not be permitted to start their number count over. It will confuse historians that Battlefield 1 was newer than Battlefield 2, and that Doom (2016) was newer than Doom II (1994).
  44. No game with “Steam” in the name will be allowed to sell on Steam. This is a blatant trick to catch people typing Steam into Steam for funsies.
  45. People’s cars will be secretly swapped for electric cars in the middle of the night. All gas stations will be retrofitted prior to this to work with electrics.
  46. Shoe sizes will be abolished and replaced with a measurement of your foot length in centimetres.
  47. To encourage gaming, any outlet which sells sugary drinks must also sell dice.
  48. One serving size will be measured by leaving a packet of the product in a room and watching how much a test subject eats in an hour.
  49. To improve social order, funding will be made available to promote rap music about positive activities like cleaning up litter.
  50. Richard Stallman will get his own TV show.
  51. Tipping will be forbidden.
  52. All prices will include sales tax.
  53. All citizens will be measured for clothing on a regular basis. Measuring will be paid for by the government, but this policy will pay for itself with the new jobs created in the bespoke clothing industry.
  54. To avoid confusion over pronunciation, “meme” will now be spelled “meem”.
  55. It will be illegal to play or perform “Let It Go” from Frozen in public.
  56. I will outlaw plastic food containers, cutlery and appliances which smell strongly of plastic. It cannot be healthy.
  57. All anime streaming services will be required to subtitle the opening/ending theme karaoke.
  58. By royal decree, the plural of Linux is Linuces.
  59. Advertising popups will be heavily taxed.
  60. Tattoo artists and sign makers will be required to pass a spelling test.
  61. The plural of footprint will be feetprint.
  62. A chessboxing match shall decide whether it is pronounced gif or jif.
  63. I shall secretly rig the chessboxing match.
  64. Statues shall be built of Richard Stallman.
  65. Subsidies shall be given to cover all that empty land in the United States with trees. It worked for Dark Ages Europe.
  66. Playing Monopoly without the true rules shall be forbidden.
  67. Anyone who falsely sells a processed burger as “flame-grilled” will themselves be flame grilled.
  68. For ease of cooking instructions, all microwave ovens will be standardized at 800 watts.
  69. “Amen” is too archaic for modern churchgoers. Prayers will now end with “Nice”.
  70. Funko Pops shall be heavily taxed to fund public art education so that future generations will not create something like Funko Pops.
  71. Any forms which require my subjects to fill in their name will place the first name first and surname last.
  72. There shall be a Nobel Prize for Discovering Interesting Glitches in Videogames.
  73. “Being a dick” is now a crime. Internet and TV advertisements will remind people of the new law with a catchy slogan: “Don’t be a dick!”
  74. March 1 shall be celebrated annually as X-COM Day.
  75. The tradition of inventing fake news stories on April Fools day is abolished. False news isn’t a joke, because jokes are funny.
  76. April 1st shall be made a day for wearing amusing costumes. It’s at the perfect interval between Halloween and next Halloween.
  77. The letter ‘W’ will be renamed “double V”.
  78. Spoiling recently released movies shall be a crime.
  79. Wood veneer shall be standardized to make it easier to shop for matching furniture.
  80. English numbers shall standardize on the short scale.
  81. Youtube will ban anyone caught speeding up music and tagging it as “Nightcore”.
  82. Graffiti shall be a minor misdemeanor. Graffiti without artistic merit shall be a felony. You want to draw on the walls, you’d better be ready to convey tone and themes.
  83. Pills for cats and dogs shall be made out of beef jerky.
  84. To avoid international confusion with other forms of “football”, soccer is now officially known as “footy”.
  85. I shall bring back walled cities in case of technological collapse or zombie outbreak.
  86. Bathrooms shall be constructed to be an even width and length of bathroom tiles.
  87. If amber worked for preserving million-year-old mosquitos, we’ll preserve the bodies of people in amber for future generations.

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