I’m usually pretty particular about the sorts of traits that get assigned as humanity’s “special thing” in sci-fi settings, but I have to admit that I have a weakness for settings where the thing humanity is known for is something tiny and seemingly inconsequential that it wouldn’t normally occur to you to think of as a distinctive trait.
Like, maybe we have a reputation as a bunch of freaky nihilists because we’re the only species that naturally has the capacity to be amused by our own misfortune.
Alien: Why are you happy? You’ve been seriously injured!
Human: *struggling to control laughter* Yeah, but I can imagine what that must have looked like from the outside, and it’s pretty hilarious.
Alien: …
Captain XXlr’y: First Officer Jane The Human, your olifactory protuberance is severely damaged! Why is this a matter for mirthful celebration???
First Officer Jane The Human: A SPARKLY LITTLE POMERANIAN THING WITH A GODDAMN UNICORN HORN CHASED ME STRAIGHT INTO A WALL! OH MY GOD! DID YOU SEE THAT? I RAN STRAIGHT INTO THE WALL.
Captain XXlr’y: Yes I just observed this sequence of events! It was terrible!
First Officer Jane The Human: OKAY WHO GOT THAT ON CAMERA, I WANNA SEE.
Captain XXlr’y: So you more fully understand that this is a situation you should never get into again?
First Officer Jane The Human: SO I CAN SEND THE VIDEO TO MY MOM!
Captain XXlr’y: For… for the solicitation of maternal concern…?
First Officer Jane The Human: NO, BECAUSE SHE’LL THINK IT’S HILARIOUS TOO.
viewings of the ancient human art based seemingly entierly around purposefully inducing misfortune are a source of constant xeno-anthropological arguments. As near as anyone can discern, these acts are some kind of core human performance form- so meaningful to their culture that recording these acts was very nearly the first concern on the invention of moving visual media.
Somewhat more disconcerting is the fact that these aren’t just recordings of accidental happenstance, but carefully choreographed, practiced, and refined to such a degree that there are nearly species wise recognizable symbols and routines performed.
There are thesis’ on ‘large wedding cake destroyed’, and hotly argued debate on the purpose of ‘Jackass’
Reblogging this again to suggest a different view of humanity, one where it’s not that we find injuring ourselves to be hilarious is the “defining quirk”. No, this one’s got to do with why you always want a human engineer or programmer (or both) if your ship’s going to be within two parsecs of a human.
Humans break things. They don’t mean to, and it can’t just be their curiosity – other species are curious, but they don’t break things like humans do. Humans make things stop working by trying to do things that they were never meant to do in the first place. I should know, I’ve seen it firsthand – one of the stubborn little bastards decided he was going to get the holodeck to show him an outdated media format called a “Vee-Ay-Chess”, and he spent twenty chrons trying to fix it after it started belching black smoke – and then he was at it AGAIN! And don’t even get me started on how he almost wiped our nav computer to try and play something called “Wolfenstein”.
But the scary part is, for every time it fails, there’s three times it works. There was a time when our warp drive broke down. You know, it was a Caledon Industries model, they’re cheap but they like to break. The problem was that it was a Tritium Reactron Fitting, and it got wedged in the back. Like, “take the ship apart and put it back together to get the fitting out” wedged. We were convinced we were going to be stuck for a few days before our signal got noticed.
And then the human – same one who broke the holodeck twice with his Vee-Ay-Chess crap and almost wiped all our nav data with his Wolfenstein game – he goes into the engine room and begins calling over the intercom for random tools, trash, parts of other things that were working just fine. He spends maybe twelve chrons in there, and when he comes out, he tells us to fire up warp. It sails us right to the nearest star system, no problems. And then the chief engineer takes a look at what he’s done. It looks like – I kid you not – it looks like the entrails of a Galthan Wingbeast. One that got splattered by a bomb.
Says he “jury rigged” it, whatever the hell that means, and we should get it replaced before it breaks again. And that’s why I never go anywhere without a human anymore.
If a cat or dog is eating vegan meals, they’re doing it out of their own free will, just saying. Give a dog a piece of Tofu turkey and they eat it, i didn’t force them to eat it, so.
Give a dog anti freeze and they’ll eat it. Feed a dog rat poison and they’ll eat it. Give a dog grapes, nuts, chocolate, beer, etc. They’ll eat it. They don’t know that it’s dangerous for them. As their caretaker you are responsible for knowing better, not them. If you deprive your cats or dogs of meat, especially cats, you are actively killing your companion in the slowest way.
I once adopted a kitten who was being systematically starved by his previous human who insisted in feeding him vegan food. He was so excited when he got meat-based cat food from us that he gorged himself until he puked. He was left with digestive tract issues for years because of his previous human’s neglect. Do not do this. I don’t care what you believe in personally - cats are carnivores (not omnivores), depriving them from meat is cruel and animal abuse.
VEGAN DIETS KILL CARNIVOROUS ANIMALS
Say it with me, kids: obligate carnivore means no vegan diets ever.
sometimes i think about the fact that Dreamworks was working on the Prince of Egypt and Shrek at the same time and would apparently send people to work on Shrek instead of the Prince of Egypt as a form of punishment
the night i posted this i couldn’t find a source and i’ve been wondering ever since if maybe it was just some kind of fucked up fever dream or something. but no, it’s real:
Railroad Tracks
The U.S. Standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches.
That’s an exceedingly odd number.
Why was that gauge used?
Because that’s the way they built them in England, and English expatriates designed the U.S. Railroads.
Why did the English build them like that?
Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that’s the gauge they used.
Why did ‘they’ use that gauge then?
Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they had used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.
Why did the wagons have that particular Odd wheel spacing?
Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because that’s the spacing of the wheel ruts.
So, who built those old rutted roads?
Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (including England) for their legions. Those roads have been used ever since.
And the ruts in the roads?
Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear
of destroying their wagon wheels.
Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing.
Therefore, the United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot.
In other words, bureaucracies live forever.
So the next time you are handed a specification, procedure, or process, and wonder, ‘What horse’s ass came up with this?’,
you may be exactly right.
Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two war horses.
Now, the twist to the story:
When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, you will notice that there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs.
The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah.
The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit larger,
but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site.
The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains
and the SRBs had to fit through that tunnel.
The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know,
is about as wide as two horses’ behinds.
So, a major Space Shuttle design feature
of what is arguably the world’s most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse’s ass.
And you thought being a horse’s ass wasn’t important!
Now you know, Horses’ Asses control almost everything.
Explains a whole lot of stuff, doesn’t it?
This is the single most mind blowing fact I’ve read on tumblr, every day is a school day-thank you.
Nice history lesson!
My daughter and I were just discussing this very subject.
“If you have read anything about young people in recent years, you could be forgiven for believing that we are living through a cultural revolution, unprecedented in its destructiveness and self-regard. Millennials don’t just reject the music, art, or clothes of their parents; they also reject the older generation’s major sources of economic and spiritual well-being, like home ownership, cars, even sex. They’d rather pay to “access” music and movies than to buy them, and they don’t aspire to steady jobs (long live the gig economy!) or vacations. Their lifestyle choices are informed either by an admirable anti-consumerist streak or by a lazy reluctance to be weighed down by success and owning stuff. They’ve even killed the napkin industry
None of this is true. The idea that these “trends” in consumption are driven primarily by cultural preferences, rather than a faltering economy and ever-rising costs of living, is difficult to believe, but that’s the prevailing narrative. Business Insider’s story blaming millennials for a slump in the sales of paper napkins is a perfect example of why that interpretation is absurd. The article contends that, like eating cereal, buying paper napkins is too much work for millennials. Similarly, The Washington Post has pointed out that young people have found ways to make the paper napkin’s rival, the paper towel, look chic on social media, the only thing they really care about. Neither article mentions that millennials are the first cohort in American history to enjoy lower living standards than their parents. Not buying napkins is a pretty painless way to save money.
Which explanation seems more likely? Do we use Zipcar because we are ideologically committed to sharing, or because car ownership is still out of reach for a lot of people and renting piecemeal is the next best thing? Does a married couple decide to live with roommates because of our generational “openness to communal living” or because people in New York face impossible rents? Do people stop using napkins because of unshakeable cultural convictions, or because they’re a waste of money? If the new generation were really waging war on their forebears’ way of life, I doubt they’d start with the disposable table settings.”
— The Myth of the Millennial as Cultural Rebel | New Republic (via brutereason)
Earlier today (November 6, 2016) at about 1:00am the clocks were set back an hour!
You did not lose time, dissociate, or hallucinate. Clocks on your laptop and smartphone (as well as most TVs I believe) will be set to the correct time, but any clocks that plug into the wall will have to be reset to the correct time. This is why the clocks in your house are set to different times.
I just didn’t want anyone to be concerned or panic when they woke up today!
