Asian Mental Crisis

The Asian Mental Crisis was a prolonged disturbance of intellect all around Asia, that had severe and far-reaching consequences, including the Asian Financial Crisis and the PSP.

What Happen?

“Someone set up us the bomb. But Korea NOT get signal.”

~ Cats on The Asian Mental Crisis

Indeed it was a bomb that set off the mental problems. This bomb went off in the ancient Temple of Seoul, just when ancient monks were in the middle of reprogramming the Seoul of Korea. As is well known, the souls of all Koreans are updated weekly from this temple. The high-speed fiber-optic link was, however, destroyed by the bomb halfway through just such a patch, leading to a corruption of the souls of all Koreans.

Within 2 hours, a Russian hacker discovered that the corrupt souls had a security flaw, and proceeded to install a virus in a large number of Koreans. Seeing as Japanese have no souls, the virus was also able to spread to them.

Then the Russian hacker made a new virus that exploited a security flaw in the old virus; this new virus allowed him to mine information about its host. From this he collected enough details on the inner workings of the Asian brain to build a third virus - one which went beyond his initial expectations, and actually spread to all Asians.

SARS

The virus was released in July 1995. Due to its symptoms, it was soon named SARS - Severe Asian Retardation Syndrome.

Koreans of course, were soon over the problem with their next update. But from Singapore to Japan, the rest of Asia was falling deep into a mental crisis.

Actually, North Koreans got the virus in 2004, since they weren't connected to the internet until 2001, and took 3 years to download the virus. They are currently at 89% on their download of the anti-virus.

The virus was devastating, and often lethal. Some sufferers literally forgot to breathe. Almost all forgot to flush. This was good news for sewer workers, because they not only had reduced workloads, but also were very unlikely to come into contact with the virus.

Other common symptoms included:

• Reverse bargaining (Where the shop owner tried to sell for a low price and the customer wanted a high price)
• An urge to change clothes (including undergarments) every hour, no matter where the sufferer was
• Trying to drive cars onto bullet trains
• Mistaking the letter D for a Chinese character meaning "constipation"

Some notable items:

• After a group of Chinese youths addicted to online games all forgot their logins, they went on a rampage and broke into a bubble-wrap factory in Wi Lai Kyu province, and spent the next three days causing the biggest bubble-wrap shortage in living memory. One (who held the Starcraft hotkey record) allegedly was capable of popping 13 bubbles per second
• The Sam-Yue family (formerly the Wong family), changed their surname by mistakenly writing their company name on a form instead
• Japan produced the shoulder-slung 'portable armrest'
• Taiwan re-invented the wheel... it was square
• 12 Vietnamese fire-fighters drowned while trying to drive their fire-truck to the Pacific Ocean Underwater Library to help put out the fire that broke out there.

Solution

Within 2 months the creator of the virus was discovered and sent to the Gulags, and to preserve relations with China, Russia disabled the virus.

However it was not an easy process. Given that Russian hackers, like Klingons, never comment their code, it took the authorities 5 top programmers (4 of which were executed in the process) to find a way to remotely halt the virus. But eventually it was done, and the virus was subsequently removed from all known infected persons.

Aftermath

But the damage was done. IQ levels around Asia plummeted; depression rates rose, and many stupefying animes came out. Eventually the results began to wear off, but not until 1997 was the average Asian capable of speaking his native language. To date, no Asian has regained the ability to speak English.

Several years later, due to one particular Thai whose retardation persisted (though some say this was present since long before SARS), the Thai currency known as the Butt dropped in value significantly, leading to the Asian Financial Crisis.

Other effects included an accidental export of 630,000,000 extra bras from China, flooding worldwide markets and helping to bring an end to braless feminism. Also, Sony came up with the Invisible Television and Honda produced the one-wheel car (that would be eroded to nothing after but 2 weeks of driving).

Intel's first edition of the Pentium 3 processor lacked the ability to subtract. This occurred because someone at the production facility at Wi Fa King, China, rolled his sushi in a page of the design drawings. And ate it.

Lastly, someone during this time in Japan came up with the idea of the Eye Warmers.