Playing Prophet

Shortly after graduating highschool, I found myself writing the "prophecy" part for our yearbook. Now I don't really know how your school yearbook works but traditionally, predictions for your class are written down as an article so you have something to laugh about during a reunion after 15 years or so. Unfortunately for our batch, there were no class prophecies, so me together with Matt and Pao(?) had to make one for the whole batch.

Now, guessing the futures of 40 or so people is already tough. We had to do it for 200ish, half of them we didn't even know by face. (I know, I wasn't the friendliest guy in school. Maybe.) We had to base them on the answers of the students to one question: what do you want to be when you grow up.

This was what we came up with:

The year 2000 was an interesting year. The internet was only starting to boom and I made this silly prediction that many years from now, everything will probably be online. Using what little HTML knowledge I had (to be fair, there were only three people in our class who had net connection, out of 58 people) I chose the theme to be a futuristic online website and made a mockup dummy for the first page (as seen below).



One interesting thing I'd like to point out is that there's a picture of a counterstrike character there and this was long before counterstrike became mainstream. (for nerds out there, if you check his rifle, it's a Steyr Aug, which was at the time still available for both CT and Terrorists. It's THAT old.)

Anyway, most of my HS classmates reading this will probably be familiar with the rest of the article already, mostly futuristic stuff that focuses on parody of our existing jokes at the time (like our teachers) rather than attempt at accurate predictions.

What you probably didn't see if you were a batchmate of mine was the original draft prologue, which I'll put in here, so I can go refer to it after the reunion 6 years from now:



April 25, 2000
The following data were salvaged from the data banks of the SAS school computers after an unknown messenger hacked the network two days ago. Apparently, the computer could not handle the injected information so all units malfunctioned. The next morning, a team of Men in Blue (nope, not the guards) came in and restored system integrity. Although major sections of the hard drives can no longer be accessed, data of what resembled webpages were extracted. After an initial analysis, the SAS Mafia speculated that the pages were from the future. April 25, 2016 to be exact. In the proceeding page are the contents of the extracted material. Also, the intruder left a note at the registrar’s office. It said:

To the SAS Annual Staff,
I have come from the future or at least one of its possible paths. Here is a copy of the database of SAS COURIER ONLINE. I know you will be having a hard time doing the Prophecy so I decided to hep[SIC] you. Anyway, this is just to test my time traveling device. Just post this in you annual and let all the graduates read it. Uhh, I was also about to send the advanced CED copies but the PC’s crashed. Sorry about that. Say Hi ! to Ms. Cabrera for me.
--Space Shifting Guy


In the event, this part got cut off because it was a waste of space.

Other highlights of the blog included primitive "adsense" images at the bottom and the top of the screen, one of which includes this old joke:



And of course, there's one last question. How did I prophesy myself? Here's the main article:

“They wanted a fight and a fight they shall have!” These were the words spoken by Philippine President Johnsen as he deployed more troops today to Neo-Spratly where battalions of hackers and mercenaries are trying to heighten up the cyber war in order to destroy the world’s fastest computer, the “Erlinda VI”. The team of engineers composed of Eng.Arthur , Eng. Larry Wayne , Eng. Jerome Allen and Eng. Peter Paul created this computer one year ago to end ongoing crises involving the World History Paradox. Apparently, the hackers did not want anything to be done about the problems. The conflict started early this Tuesday when Captain Markus Otto and his co-pilot Captain Zyrex spotted six owner-type hovercrafts carrying hackers near the island facility while the two were testing a new prototype jet designed by Benedict . There also have been reports that the world’s best covert firewall technicians were deployed to prevent the hacks from coming through the system. Among the elite are Andreans namely, Eng. Erickson Suarez, Eng. Redkinoko, Eng. Billy Paul and Eng. Janvier. As a final word, the president said that should things get fiery, the Mobile Fortress will be deployed together with a thousand Marines headed by AFP Chief-of-Staff Phil Albert . CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE

*(surnames removed)

Erlinda is actually the name of our borderline-insane world history professor.

It's a bit of an insider joke, but a good one, because damn, 9 years on, I read this again, and I'm still laughing.

----

(post script)
For my officemate/HS classmate who might end up reading this, here's what I got from your part, on the top 20 books of 2016:

13- “ Urination For Dummies” by Dr. Christian Dave

1. I've been misspelling your name even back then.
2. You really wanted to become a urologist, didn't you?