I love a good HFY / Humans Are Space Orks post, and I think one element of Humans we’re sleeping on is an instinctual understanding of ballistics.
I mean, I get why it’s not as popular here on Tumblr dot com, given it’s kinda a jock/military adjacent thing, but like. Our ability to just. Pick up a small, firm object, judge its internal inertia and mass by holding it for a bit, and then flinging it with the kind of accuracy and speed Humans are capable of is.
Like there’s another post about how Humans in an alien zoo would probably be breaking out constantly, since we consider escape rooms to be a fun courtship ritual, but
imagine the aliens who are designing the enclosures just so happen to pick up, say, a devoted amateur baseball pitcher. Not even a legend by any means, just somebody who’s practiced with intention. And one day they’re watching her pass some time and blow off some steam by doing some pitching practice and they realize to their mounting horror that this gal can turn literally anything she can wrap her digits around into a ballistic weapon.
this reminds me of a paper I read a while back about how the way our shoulders work to enable us to throw anything from rocks to pointy sticks - plus a brain trained to think in 3D from climbing trees while also capable of calculating future trajectories from living on the savanna - is how we survived terrifying predators and came to dominate the world
Did anyone ever like attempt to document and compile the variations of Barney the dinosaur murder ballads across the elementary school system in the early 2000s. Like legit it has always fascinated me as a phenomena and I would love to know if there were like traceable regional variations or what.
Looking at the tags so far I’m kind of fascinated by how much the ‘I Love You’ parodies vary in their phrasing/murder weapons but the ‘Joy to the World’ ones are nearly identical
here is my collection of barney murder songs as they appeared in the notes and comments of this post at about 4 pm pacific 7/25, somewhat arbitrarily color coded to show similar memes. it appears that "baseball bat and 2x4" is the mode configuration but there is so much variation that that exact phrasing only makes up a small part of the set. if i knew more about statistical modeling i would turn this into some kind of data tree that shows which phrases are most likely to follow other phrases.
We do not do elf of the shelf but our house does have borrowers. Penny knows that if she leaves a mess out at night the borrowers will take that as a sign that they can have it and take it into the walls to build their homes
This teaches her to out her stuff away at the end of the night or I chuck it out and also sometimes she wakes up and yells "HEY ELEVES I LEFT YOU SOME STUFF!" And it is hilarious
Me: I had to explain to Penny how the borrowers are part of the elf union and so they go to North Pole the last 3 weeks of the year so no one ever has to work too much over time and that's why they haven't taken mommy's wrapping paper or scissors or anything else I've left out... shes trying to explain the elf union to you.
okay so, guy at work, who i find out afterwards is famous at this place for being a sex pest, comes up and starts with what i also learn is his favorite opener to conversations where he’s going to be a sex pest, namely: “Do you know where the term ‘blow job’ comes from?”
and here he made his first fatal error. his moment of hubristic sex pesting. because of course i know where the term blow job comes from, i love learning about sex and the history of sexual terms! i know so much about oral sex that i could write a book on it!
his second error: approaching a little autistic freak with what he intended to be an uncomfortable sex question that would make me feel weird and gross. Friends, Romans, Countrymen, I Have Never Misjudged A Man’s Intentions So Incredibly In My Life. because i did not realize he was trying to harass me. because i love talking about sex facts, albeit not usually at work. unless. someone prompts me. my coworkers are the kind of people who are generally online enough to know terms, but not exactly what they mean, and they realized they could ask me a while back and get good answers without the resulting awkwardness because i do not experience shame. i am primed to answer questions like the one he has proposed.
So I Answered It.
and well, really, what happened is that I began answering it, then realized the answer required a bit more context. I mean, you can’t just say “oh, well, the term first appears in writing in the 1940s” without first explaining that ‘blow’ by itself already had sexual connotations for centuries, and then, really, are we talking about the origin of the term or the origin of the act. and well we have a ton of literature and art depicting fellatio throughout human history, did you know a lot of it was men performing it on other men? oh, that reminds me, there are a multitude of latin words for oral sex performed on penises, and hold on let me quote you the entirety of catullus 16 from memory and explain it’s fascinating insights into the roman world of homosexuality-
i do not know how to turn any of this ^ off, by the way. i’m sure some people out there have a switch that disables their infodumping mid-speech. i do not. and i also didn’t realize he wasn’t looking for a real answer until my other coworker explained so hours later. he could not excuse himself from the conversation he started, and i made a conservative man at least 30 years older than me to listen to my catullus recitation. i will sodomize and facefuck you, indeed.
anyway, i think i got a bad grade in being sexually harassed. my pro tip is maybe don’t start with what a very autistic individual will misconstrue as you earnestly asking them to explain sex to you. the special interest shield will cause splashback damage.
god I wish I had a pair of menacing black gauntlets with really sharp fingertip claws I bet it feels good as fuck to have your hands resting palm-down on a surface and then scratch some deep fucking gashes into it as you clench your hand a little closer to a fist when your evil minion delivers some bad news to you
its terrible for any number of reasons, but i think if we invent immortality there should be an extreme sport called civilizational speedrunning where teams of 20 go into the wilderness somewhere and try and be the fastest build the first internal combustion engine. i bet you could get it down to like 3 years tops
jbbartram-illu
kianamaiart
izzy806
snowghoul
origamiaround
annaxmalina
turnnoffyourmind
