My Thoughts Are Super Exciting, Y'all

I think things and sometimes I write. Sometimes I write about my thoughts. Don't hold your breath though.

[shiverandqueeef]

how measurements work in canada (ie/ badly)

[your-dads-filing-cabinet]

@/teaboot

[teaboot]

This isn't even a joke it's just what we do

[zapatism]

brazilians, imagine you’re a famous futebol player and are about to hit the winning penalty kick at the world cup finals. accidentally, the referee tosses a christian baby at you. would you still kick the baby to the goal and win the hexa championship, and sacrifice the christian baby?

[zapatism]

[lingonberry24]

[aeshnacyanea2000]

[wickedsick]

[corpseprize]

the reality of being a writer

[parkchanwoohoo]

[shinesurge]

Guys if you want queer shit written by queers on our own terms you're going to have to start seeking out weird independent media. I'm sorry that's the only place you can regularly find it idk what to tell you, we can't keep acting like there's nothing if we're not getting blockbusters and triple A titles or whatever it is we're waiting around for. The thing you keep saying you want is already being offered for free by one person making a passion project on the internet and you would both benefit enormously if you interacted with it instead of lamenting that the only options we have for representation are pandering afterthoughts from corporate shit

[fandomsandfeminism]

I say this with so, so much care: Real queer shit written by real queers can and will sometimes make you uncomfortable. That's one of the defining features of weird, independent queer media. And weird independent media more broadly. Art that comes from true individual passion and authenticity has edges and bite to it that mass market corporate products intentionally do not. Has a rawness that can offend.

You are allowed to feel uncomfortable about it. But don't ask for queers to self censor for your comfort.

[mundaneamerica]

Mundane America. Broken pole with rope and an American Flag. Cincinnati, Ohio.

[gaslampsglow]

Wait.  Wait.

Wait.

I know that telephone pole.

I know that telephone pole intimately because I’m the one who broke it.

Thats the pole next to Sycamore Jr. High, in between the jr high school and Pipkins, where I had my second car accident.  A woman t-boned my car and drove me into that pole in 2008 and it took them years to actually take it down.

That black metal pole you see just beyond the broken phone pole is a “Now Leaving/Welcome To Blue Ash, Ohio” sign, visible at 5520 Cooper Road on google maps.

(the flag is there, btw, because its the starting point for the Blue Ash/Montgomery July 4th parade.)

[nehirose]

The internet is so staggeringly immense that I can’t help but be disproportionately delighted when things like this happen.

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

so what you're gonna do is you're gonna trim the top off a bulb of garlic, using the knife's edge to take off the tip of every individual clove, that's important. you're gonna place the garlic face-up in a square of tinfoil, drizzle with olive oil, wrap completely in foil, place in baking tray, repeat with a copious amount of garlic bulbs. you're gonna put that baking tray in an oven set to 375-400°F, for 30-50 minutes, until soft and browned. you're gonna toast some good bread, slather generously with butter and honey, maybe a tiny lil bit o' salt. and then. you're gonna SQUEEZE. OUT. THAT. ROASTED GARLIC. onto the butter honey toast. and you're gonna eat it. food stolen directly from the plate of the gods. that's what you're gonna do.

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

the garlic. it beckons you

[thesweetestsupervillains]

It occurs to me that "1920s gangster doing a cooking show while holding you at gunpoint" is an untapped market.

We've had normal cooking shows. Now we need period piece cooking shows in character.

[prokopetz]

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.

[writebastard]

So to everyone else in the galaxy, all humans are basically Doc Brown.

[prokopetz]

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”.

[roachpatrol]

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

[roachpatrol]

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

[froborr]

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.

[megabeeprime]

Yeah, I love this.

[underscorex]

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.

[roachpatrol]

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

[the-real-seebs]

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.

[dragon-in-a-fez]

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.

[dragon-in-a-fez]

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.”

[sameenbyhat]

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.”

[jazzybot4]

reblog for new meta.  RE that last line: McGuyver. 

[deadcatwithaflamethrower]

“MacGuyver” is the equivalent of Vulcan vintage human horror television.

[roachpatrol]

during orientation at a human college, vulcans are presented with a list of swear words. 

“what is the word ‘fuck’ for,” the innocent young vulcans want to know. “surely there are more logical intensity modifiers.”

“yeah, you’d think so,” say the weary, jaded vulcan professors. “you’d really fucking think so.”

there is a phrase in vulcan for ‘the particular moment you understand what the word ‘fuck’ is for’. 

[thefingerfuckingfemalefury]

This is why the Federation is the only organisation to ever stand a chance against the Borg

The Borg can adapt to the brilliant millitary strategies of the Romulan Star Empire, the Klingons and even the cold logical intellectual prowess of the vulcans

The Borg weren’t prepared for a starship captain to lure them into his 50′s noir detective holo-novel and then machine gun them to death with a weapon made out of hard light

[elfwreck]

ANDORIAN YEOMAN: Captain! The replicators are malfunctioning, and the ambassador’s party will be here in an hour!

KIRK: Don’t worry. We got this. *calls engineering* Hey Scotty, you were in the dorms at Starfleet, right?

SCOTTY: Aye.

KIRK: And you weren’t allowed to have large appliances in your dorm rooms, right?

SCOTTY: Nae, we were not.

KIRK: Ok. So, the ambassador and co are gonna be here in an hour, and we need to set up a feast for them. And we have no replicators.

SCOTTY: *catching on* Right! I’ll take me team to the mess hall and we’ll get right on it!

KIRK: Thanks. Kirk out.

ANDORIAN YEOMAN: …What just happened?

KIRK: Ah, you weren’t in a dorm, I see.

ANDORIAN YEOMAN: No, I was part of the offworlders’ fraternity… we had a kitchen…

KIRK: So, you never fried eggs on tinfoil on a flat iron. Never painted a can of stew black, poked a hole in the top, and set it in a sunny window to slow-cook all day. Never used an instant coffeepot to boil rice to pour the stew over.

ANDORIAN YEOMAN: *horrified* N-No, sir.

KIRK: We’re gonna treat the ambassador’s team to a Genuine Earth-Style Scholar’s Feast!

*comm chirps* *Kirk answers*

SCOTTY: Well, we don’t have an iron or a coffeepot, but the warp core produces heat and we think we can rig a pipe from one of the vents to a storage locker to make an oven; Jones has volunteered some of his beer – good lad! – and we’re gonna get the guys in Science to extract some of the yeast and grab some of those grain samples and see if we can get some bread going. If not, we’ll settle for more beer. Also the Weapons team guys think they can set the phasers to shoot through a metal mesh screen and get us grilled cheese. So we’re off to a good start.

[sandersstudies]

Me, Catholic, walking into a Protestant church with no depictions of Mary: where’s my mom

[fuitgummyworm]

Me, culturally Protestant, walking into a Catholic church filled balls to the walls with paintings sculptures candles and god knows what else: why’s there so much stuff

[fantasticmojo47]

Me, Orthodox, walking into a western church:  w h e r e   a r e   t h e   b o n e s

[odin-n-out]

Me, vampire, walking into any denominational holy place: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

[hungry-hyena]

Me, a janitor, sweeping up the vampires ashes: where the fUCk did all this dirt come from

[worldheritagepostorganization]

World Heritage Post

[homunculus-argument]

Imagine if you met someone who can't eat watermelon. Not that they're allergic or unable somehow, but they just haven't figured out how to do that. So you're like "what the hell do you mean? it works just like eating anything else, you open your mouth, sink your teeth in, take a bite and chew. If you can bite, chew and swallow, you should be able to eat a watermelon."

And they agree that yes, they do know how to eat, in theory. The problem is the watermelon. Surely, if they figured out where to start, they'd figure out how to do it, but they have no clue how to get started with it.

This goes back and forth. No, it's not an emotional issue, they're not afraid of the watermelon. They can eat any other fruit, other sweet things, and other watery things ("it's watery?" they ask you). Is it the colour? Do they have a problem eating things that are green on the outside and red on the inside?

"It's red on the inside?"

Wait, they've never seen the inside? At this point you have to ask them how, exactly, they eat the watermelon. So to demonstrate, they take a whole, round, uncut watermelon, and try to bite straight into it. Even if they could bite through the crust, there's no way to get human jaws around it.

"Oh, you're supposed to cut it first. You cut the crust open and only chew through the insides."

And they had no idea. All their life this person has had no idea how to eat a watermelon, despite of being told again and again and again that it's easy, it's ridiculous to struggle with something so simple, there's no way that someone just can't eat a watermelon, how can you even mange to be bad at something as fucking simple as eating watermelon.

If someone can't do something after being repeatedly told to "just do it", there might be some key component missing that one side has no idea about, and the other side assumed was so obvious it goes without mention.

[therainstheyaredropping]

Yep.

https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/how-to-do-everything had a nice list of additional examples like this, with (non-)obvious major insights with regard to opening stitched bags, cleaning your bathroom floor, using a search engine, catching a ball, pinging somebody, proving a theorem, playing sudoku, passing as “normal”, improving your writing, generating novel ideas, and solving your problem.

If you’d asked me six months ago how to get better at something, I’d probably have pointed you to how to do hard things. I still think this is a good approach and you should do it, but I now think it’s the wrong starting point and I’ve been undervaluing small insights. [...]

I think my revised belief is that if you are stuck at how to get better at something, spend a little while assuming there’s just some trick to it you’ve missed. You can try to generate the trick yourself, but it’s probably easier to learn it by observing someone else being good at the thing, asking them some questions, and seeing if you have any lightbulb moment.

[hergan416]

My fiance played the clarinet when he was in school. When he was first learning to play, he rented an instrument from the school to learn on. He was the last chair clarinet, had been for years, because he could not make notes that required the register key. For years, they kept making him do embrature exercises and he started to get a few notes, with lots of effort. Eventually he had to get private lessons to stay in band.

Every time he tells me this story, his frustration by this point in the story, years later, is evident. He still sounds frustrated by it, despite all the time that passed. Teachers had been giving him crap for years because he hadn't been making much progress with the instrument.

When he got to the private instructor, she acknowledged his frustration, and asked him to try to play for her. He did, and she saw all he was doing. She then did something no one else had done before. She asked him to put his mouthpiece on a different clarinet and try to play the same notes. Like magic, it worked. She looked at the clarinet he had been using and found that the school's clarinet needed it's pads replaced.

He went from last chair to first chair nearly overnight, having been taught far more techniques than typically taught at that age just to overcome the broken instrument preventing him from making noise.

Sometimes you don't need to brute force a problem. Sometimes your clarinet is just broken.

[nowordsandnotune]

Not quite sure why the clarinet addition got me crying, but here you go people: just in case, let's get you some new pads.

[facts-i-just-made-up]

FIRST TRUE COLOR PHOTO OF AN ATOMIC NUCLEUS!

FIJMU News 10-19-21

Today, the world's most powerful microscope has photographed in real color the core of a single atom. The nucleus of an atom is like the delicious yolk of a hard boiled quantum egg, containing protons and neutrons (red) as held together by gluons (tan filaments). All known substances are made of atoms with nuclei like the one seen above.

The atom used was a Thulium atom because of its highly photogenic traits, bright coloration, and nice atomic number. According to microscopy professor Minnie Lewker, "Atoms have been photographed before but never in real color. They usually look almost like waves of light and dark instead of real, tangible objects as they are."

The same microscope team was also able to take the first known photograph of an electron:

[afriendofblahaj]

There is (somehow) an xkcd for that

[facts-i-just-made-up]

HOW

[tzikeh]

Maryland to Become First US State to Ban Surveillance Pricing That Charges More After Mining Personal Data

Maryland will become the first US state to ban surveillance pricing in retail stores, after passing Protection from Predatory Pricing Act.

Jesus fucking christ that this exists in the first place

[boyslit]

I WAS FUCKING WONDERING WHAT THOSE DIGITAL PRICE TAGS WERE ABOUT SUDDENLY i had hoped they were so the workers didn't have to finagle those little papers into the slider part anymore 😭

[eclipticasolaris]

Hi, yes, that is the OFFICIAL excuse made to me by the guy replacing the paper tags with digital ones at my local Walmart, but the end goal is to remove the numbers off the shelf entirely, replacing them with QR codes that you have to scan with the app…. Which requires your login information….. and also stores your card information so even if you didn’t use your Walmart account at the physical checkout, if you used a card they recognize, they assign that purchase to your Walmart account purchase history.

I explained very clearly to the manager my issue with the meat section not having the price tags listed, and they claimed it was only going to be for the meat, since meat is by weight, and the price of each item is printed on the packs of each item.

Sure. That’s how they get their foot in the door. Fast forward not even two weeks, and here we are:

Bar codes. No prices, no item descriptions. No price stickers on the individual items. Heck, not even the name of the item that is SUPPOSED to be there.

No. The only way to see the price is to scan it on your phone app, which is also recording what you looked at recently, as a way of gauging what you might be looking for in the future.

So here’s what we’re gonna do gang:

Every time you go into a store that has implemented these price-less tags:

Take 1-3 items up to the cash register. Ask the cashier for the price, or hit the price check item on the self checkout, which will likely call over the attendant.

Express that you didn’t actually want it, you just couldn’t see on the shelf how much it was.

POLITELY, AND WITH A THANK YOU FOR THE PRICE CONFIRMATION, Give the items to the cashier or attendant to put back.

When they inevitably try to push the app, politely decline. If pressed for why not, say you don’t want to have to carry your phone in-hand the whole time you are shopping in order to see how much things cost. (Not having cell service or data to use the app is NOT a valid excuse, as stores already often have complimentary WiFi AND more stores will provide WiFi rather than give up on this push for surveillance pricing)

If it’s a shelf-stable item, the cashier will have to set it aside, taking up room in their limited operating space, and eventually pass it off to someone to put in a holding area to put back later. If it’s a fridge/freezer item, it might have to get tossed due to food product sale regulations.

In either case, you are making it a pain in the ass for them to have these digital bar codes. Tie up the checkouts. Give the employees more busywork that the company has to pay them to do. Hurt their bottom line having to toss the pint of ice cream you carried around in your cart for 20 minutes before giving it back to the cashier.

Yes, call your reps. Yes, push for more legislation like this in more places. But also take an extra minute out of your shopping trip to MAKE IT HURT for companies to pull this shit.

[komaedalovemail]

i fucking hated your shoelaces this entire time

[butterfirefly]

for the uninitiated

[microsff]

A spaceship entered Earth's orbit and broadcast a message:

"We are the Interstellar Library. Do you want to swap? We have thousands of stories."

There were many replies.

The library was silent for a whole day, then:

"What do you mean, 'We have millions'?"

[a-krogan-skald-and-bearsark]

"And that's just on AO3!"

[monidoll]

instant loss 2koma

[prokopetz]

The really funny part is that many modern sources that want to gas up Sparta will bring up this specific anecdote, but stop at the "if" and just not mention what happened immediately afterwards.

[elucubrare]

similarly, "μολὼν λαβέ" (come and take them) is a really cool thing to say, made significantly less cool by having them taken

[what-even-is-thiss]

Spartan propaganda usually only works if you stop right before the end of the story tbh

[winterthebeau]

Spartans killed themselves to be "good at war" and they weren't even good at war

[diamantefangs]

[xeansicemane]

This is kinda ominous ngl

[vexwerewolf]

Gotta compliment him on his reflexes. No hesitation. Just described exactly what he was seeing, regardless of what it was.

[wherefore-whinnies]

[VD: A weatherman is giving a report and pointing to a map, saying "feel like temperatures really take a tumble too, because after the storm-" before he is interrupted by the screen going black and then displaying a picture of some baby spinach. He says, "um," then immediately points to the screen and confidently announces, "this is baby spinach." /End VD]

[depsidase]

[haunted-hideaway]

I’m glad that OP:

1) Figured this out.

2) Shared so others can learn from their mistake.