Sorry to be such a prick…but I started to have serious issues withdumb tattoos as everyone around me started getting dumbass Chinese characters permanently inserted under their skin. My favorite dumb character tattoo story:
My friend Sue is Chinese American. She is friends with Mrs. Choo, who runs the little home-cookin Chinese eatery down on Prospect. A friend of Sue’s wanted a Chinese Character tattoo to “express his personal philosophy,” as all these jackasses do, so he enlisted Sue to translate for him as he explained to Mrs. Choo what his philosophy was so she could come up with the proper characters for him (Sue cannot write Chinese).
So he tells Mrs. Choo, through Sue, about his personal philosophy…full of hope for the future, yet still aware of this deep void within myself…a space that must be filled…seeking happiness at all turns, but overcome with a constant sadness…blah blah blah. When he was finished, Mrs. Choo thought for a moment, and then said to Sue:
“Tell him to go out into the country and find a large, old tree. Tell him to go and sit under that tree and be very quiet for a very long time. I promise that if he does this for a while, he won’t want that tattoo anymore.”
Score one for Mrs. Choo.
That and folks like the guy looking around the store I used to work at with “melody, water, dragon” tattooed on his arm in characters. I thought maybe the three of them together made a word I didn’t know, so I asked…“What’s that on your arm?” “Oh…this says ‘water,’ this says ‘melody,’ and this says ‘dragon.’” Bleack. Sorry, probably shoulda gone to the pit for this one.
Man, I know this will really ruin the day of any SF hipster who happen to have a barcode tat, but they’ve been around here in Cincinnati for at least eight years (which was the first time I saw one, and on a really unhip idiot, even.)
By Mark Twain’s logic, then, they’ve woulda been gauche on the coasts since approximately 1983.
Hmmm… I guess that puts them within the current date range of cool retro, so nevermind.
Are they on that “Dark Angel” show, too? IIRC, I first saw one of these on Bruce Willis in “12 Monkeys.” I seem to remember them being in other sci-fi things as well.
To me they seem to have a creepy Nazi concentration camp thing going on with them. (I don’t think the hipsters are thinking about that, though.)
Actually, most handheld scanners you buy today are ANSI approved and will read damned near any 1D bar code you can throw at them. I don’t think Satan is involved in the approval process, though.
I’d be impressed with a readable 2D bar code. Show me a verifiable Datastrip, MaxiCode, or even PDF 417 on your skin and I’d be very impressed.
Seriously, I wonder how many of those tats are real bar codes.
Re: sci-fi. Kyle whatsisname from the first Terminator movie has a barcode on his arm. There’s no question that without sci-fi there’d be no fantastic element to having a barcode tattoo. It’d just be sick.
Re: concentration camps. It’s true that the labour and death camps probably had more than a passing influence on the use of barcodes in sci-fi as a straightforward symbol of nightmarish, dehumanised cattle-culture. I’m tempted to say that because of the camps no-one should wear a tattoo, that it should be considered a sick thing to do, but very few of those who have them probably relate them DIRECTLY to the camps, more to the middle-man of science-fiction. And you can’t insist science-fiction stop using such images, because free art is free art.
Re: hassling the beast. Whatever form the beast finally takes, and God knows there have been enough theories, the chances are he probably likes us wearing them even now.
Re: cash. People in LA have too money, too much free time, and too much of an influence on pop-culture. While I’m sure there are plenty of good people there and good reasons not to nuke it, it just wouldn’t be LA without a devastating earthquake forecast for any minute now. That’s what decadence is all about. Do not get a tattoo. The end of the world is nigh. Learn how to do something useful, like farm or build. This… is getting serious.
Bar-code tattoos? Let’s think about this for a moment. Information is encoded in a bar code by the exact thickness and spacing of the lines. Human skin is both flexible and elastic, and bends and stretches considerably in the course of ordinary motions. You’d have a hard time “writing” anything on the skin that way, at least if you want it to be readable.
