Anonymous asked: Hey Moran! Have you ever pulled a double all nighter? Like stayed up for 2 full consecutive nights?
Okay, so on the one hand: if you mean no sleep for two full nights, no. To date, I’m pretty sure the longest I’ve been awake at a stretch was around 40 hours. I’m weird enough all day, every day, there’s no need to add truly crippling sleep deprivation to that. I generally try to sleep at least two hours a night because it keeps me just this side of functionality.
On the other hand, fun story. If you were around in April, you may recall me making this post about Organic Chemistry pickup lines. Now, other than the fact that I’m still delighted with that last one on there, the reason I bring this up is because (ha) I made that post on a Monday night. I’d already been running on little-to-no sleep by then. By the following Saturday night, I had gone eight days on twenty-four hours of sleep total. I wrote two papers, did a problem set, and took an Organic Chemistry exam, among other things. I got all my work done on time (although the last day or so is kind of a blur) and this is why, in case you’re curious, @twistedangelsays calls me Hamilton.
the other night i tried to make a curry and i got chilli burns all over my face, so i thought to myself ‘hang on, doesn’t milk soothe chilli burns? it does’ and i couldn’t google because i couldn’t see so i just had to blindly feel my way to the fridge and pour out a bowl of milk, and then plant my face in the bowl of milk, anyway at that point the rice cooker went off and triggered a power surge which turned my electricity off, which i didn’t notice at first because i had my face in a bowl of milk and when i did emerge from the dairy prison i thought i had gone blind with chilli burns. so no i don’t really cook much.
so my art teacher assigned us to do a chalk pastel still life of fruits n shit and I was like “no”
so I drew a banana instead.
and my teacher came by like “you need to have more than one fruit in your still life”
so I was like “k”
and so I put that cherry on top of the banana and titled it “Banana Split Without The Ice Cream Because Life Is Full Of Disappointments: By Fall Out Boy“ and I turned that shit in.
My art teacher just started laughing out loud in the middle of class
Tbh all of these fake stories going around and they’re so obvious but if any of them said “so I work in retail” id be “okay yeah” because the weirdest shit goes down when you work retail. It could say “so I work in retail and today Jesus came in and turned all our water bottles into wine” and I’d be like “shit that’s wild what’d your manager do”
Also the Pro-life movement used his line “a person’s a person no matter how small” on their literature without his permission, and he made them stop using it an apologize because he was pro-choice.
Random Headcanon: That Federation vessels in Star Trek seem to experience bizarre malfunctions with such overwhelming frequency isn’t just an artefact of the television serial format. Rather, it’s because the Federation as a culture are a bunch of deranged hyper-neophiles,
tooling around in ships packed full of beyond-cutting-edge tech they
don’t really understand. Endlessly frustrating if you have to fight
them, because they can pull an effectively unlimited number of bullshit
space-magic countermeasures out of their arses - but they’re as likely
as not to give themselves a lethal five-dimensional wedgie in the
process. All those rampant holograms and warp core malfunctions and
accidentally-traveling-back-in-time incidents? That doesn’t actually
happen to anyone else; it’s literally just Federation vessels that go off the rails like that. And they do so on a fairly regular basis.
So to everyone else in the galaxy, all humans are basically Doc Brown.
Aliens who have seen the Back to the Future movies literally don’t realise that Doc Brown is meant to be funny. They’re just like “yes, that is exactly what all human scientists are like in my experience”.
THE ONLY REASON SCOTTY IS CHIEF ENGINEER INSTEAD OF SOMEONE FROM A SPECIES WITH A HIGHER TECHNOLOGICAL APTITUDE IS BECAUSE EVERYONE FROM THOSE SPECIES TOOK ONE LOOK AT THE ENTERPRISE’S ENGINE ROOM AND RAN AWAY SCREAMING
vulcan science academy: why do you need another warp core
humans: we’re going to plug two of them together and see if we go twice as fast
vsa: last time we gave you a warp core you threw it into a sun to see if the sun would go twice as fast
humans: hahaha yeah
humans: it did tho
vsa: IT EXPLODED
humans: it exploded twice as fast
I love this. Especially because of how well it plays with my headcanon that the Federation does so much better against the Borg than anyone else because beating the Borg with military tactics is nigh-impossible, but beating them with wacky superscience shenanigans works as long as they’re unique wacky superscience shenanigans.
Yeah, I love this.
Reminds me of the thing I wrote a while back about Humans in high fantasy realms - they’re basically Team Fuck It Hold My Beer I Got This.
Impulsive, passionate to a fault, the social structures they build to try and regulate this hotheadedness ironically creates even greater levels of sheer bull-headedness. Even their “cooler” heads take action in months or weeks.
All their great heroes of the past were impossibly rash by galactic standards. Humans Just Go With It, which is their great flaw but also their greatest strength.
klingons: okay we don’t get it
vulcan science academy: get what
klingons: you vulcans are a bunch of stuffy prisses but you’re also tougher, stronger, and smarter than humans in every single way
klingons: why do you let them run your federation
vulcan science academy: look
vulcan science academy: this is a species where if you give them two warp cores they don’t do experiments on one and save the other for if the first one blows up
vulcan science academy: this is a species where if you give them two warp cores, they will ask for a third one, immediately plug all three into each other, punch a hole into an alternate universe where humans subscribe to an even more destructive ideological system, fight everyone in it because they’re offended by that, steal their warp cores, plug those together, punch their way back here, then try to turn a nearby sun into a torus because that was what their initial scientific experiment was for and they didn’t want to waste a trip.
vulcan science academy: they did that last week. we have the write-up right here. it’s getting published in about six hundred scientific journals across two hundred different disciplines because of how many established theories their ridiculous little expedition has just called into question. also, they did turn that sun into a torus, and no one actually knows how.
vulcan science academy: this is why we let them do whatever the hell they want.
klingons: …. can we be a part of your federation
Come to think of it, I mean. Look at the “first human warp drive” thing in the movie. That was… Not how Vulcans would have done it.
you know what the best evidence for this is? Deep Space 9 almost never broke down. minor malfunctions that irritated O’Brien to hell and back, sure, but almost none of the truly weird shit that befell Voyager and all the starships Enterprise. what was the weirdest malfunction DS9 ever had? the senior staff getting trapped as holosuite characters in Our Man Bashir, and that was because a human decided to just dump the transporter buffer into the station’s core memory and hope everything would work out somehow, which is a bit like swapping your computer’s hard drive out for a memory card from a PlayStation 2 and expecting to be able to play a game of Spyro the Dragon with your keyboard and mouse.
you know what, I’m not done with this post. let’s talk about the Pegasus. the USS Fucking Pegasus,
testbed for the first Starfleet cloaking device. here we have a handful
of humans working in secret to develop a cloaking device in violation
of a treaty with the Romulans. they’re playing catchup trying to develop
a technology other species have had for a century. and what do they do?
do they decide to duplicate a Romulan cloaking device precisely, just
see if they can match what other species have? nope. they decide, hey,
while we’re at it, while we’re building our very first one of these things, just to find out if this is possible, let’s see if we can make this thing phase us out of normal space so we can fly through planets while we’re invisible.
“but why” said the one Vulcan in the room.
“because that would fucking rule” said the humans, high-fiving each other and slamming cans of 24th-century Red Bull.
there
must be like twenty different counselling groups for non-human
engineering students at Starfleet Academy, and every week in every
single one of them someone walks in and starts up with a story like “our
assignment was to repair a phaser emitter and my one human classmate
built a chronometric-flux toaster that toasts bread after you’ve eaten
it.”
Humans get mildly offended by the way they are presented in non-human media.
Like: “Guys, we totally wouldn’t do that!” But this always fails to get much traction, because the authors can always say: “You totally did.”
“That was ONE TIME.”
There’s that movie where humans invented vaccines by just testing them on people. Or the one about those two humans who invented powered flight by crashing a bunch of prototypes. Or the one about electricity.
And human historians go, “Oh, uh, this is historically accurate, but also kind of boring.” To which the producers respond: “How is doing THIS CRAZY THING boring????????”
There are entire serieses of horror movies where the premise is “We stopped paying attention to the human and ey found the technology.”
reblog for new meta.
RE that last line: McGuyver.
“MacGuyver” is the equivalent of Vulcan vintage human horror television.
Anonymous asked: for the random fic titles: "spring will be here soon"
Since you didn’t specify a fandom….this is the story of the girl Jaylah.
Her people are from a high tundra part of their world–even after she forgets the name of her planet, the name of her people, the name of her family, she will remember this. The shimmer of the sun at midnight, the dance of stars at pitch-black noon, and the song of the wind over the snow-layered ground will stay in her dreams all her life, a tiny scrap of peace. Winter on the high tundra is dangerous, even in the cities-and-starships age, and Jaylah’s people never quite managed to forget their heritage of cold nights and terror. The promise of new life, of melted snow and living things, is the hope their people holds up to get through the days of unbroken night, the vow they make in the darkest moments of their life to fight on.
As a little girl wondering if the sun will ever come back, Jaylah’s mother strokes her hair back from her face and whisper that spring would come soon, so soon that Jaylah wouldn’t even believe it.
In Krall’s dungeons, as Jaylah sobs silently, hands pressed to her mouth so hard that her teeth draw blue bruises on the white skin, her father hugs her to his side. “Spring will be here soon, you’ll see, precious girl,” he whispers–a lie, but the familiar words soothe her tears and make her mother, bleeding out slowly from a gash to the leg, and her mama, pressing her hands to her wife’s skin, smile faintly.
When her mama is taken, still smudged blue with her mother’s blood, she kisses Jaylah forehead and her cheeks and promises, “Spring will be here soon, little snowflake, little darling.” A lie, but a warm and gentle one, bittersweet.
When her father dies, and she runs until she can’t breathe for tears, she curls up in a mountain cave, far too close to the search parties scouring for her, and she lies to herself, “Spring will be here soon, Jaylah. You just have to stand up.” And she scrubs her face with her palms and pulls herself upright.
She tells the lie a thousand times, a hundred thousand times, every time a new circuit breaks or she hasn’t eaten in twelve days or she is run off from a precious salvage or she can’t stand the loneliness any longer. Spring will be here soon, Jaylah. Get up and meet it on your feet.
Years from now, she’ll be an ensign sitting cross-legged on a chair in the Enterprise mess hall, surrounded by the bridge crew and Montgomery Scotty and Doctor Bones, her red Operations uniform a bright contrast to her white hair and a glass of scotch from Montgomery Scotty’s illicit still in her hand. (She will know, by then, what a nickname is, but she will insist on her old names for them, at times like this, when they are together and laughing.) Captain James T will smile at her, and Montgomery Scotty will clap her on the back as he tells them about how she repaired the replicators and stopped them from turning all the food purple, and she will think that perhaps she was not lying to herself all along after all.
