In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit... @goldenegg31 - Tumblr Blog

Do you think Clark Kent's first few major articles were about the continued presence of lead pipes in parts of Metropolis' water system

(Average Metropolis reader after investigative reporter C. Kent's 452nd article on yet another case of landlords/business owners/factories' continued use of lead pipes/paint/gas/glass knowingly exposing the public to dangerously toxic lead levels) what the fuck happened to this guy

One day Bruce Wayne mentions in an interview that heroes like Superman are overrated, as the most effective way to reduce crime is to provide public resources and improve local infrastructure, then cites how neighboring city Metropolis has effectively lowered their violent crime by 13% after addressing their outdated water system and investing low income housing. the reporter conducting the interview suddenly starts looking a little uncomfortable

To be clear, Clark is still a fantastic investigative reporter. He still has to track down the sources to prove all this shit

"Who, Clark Kent? Yeah, we're pretty sure he's a Meta. Is he a superhero? Like what, "Lead-detector guy"? "Captain pipes?" Don't get me wrong, he's a great guy and it's a handy trick, but it's lead detection, not laser vision. He's not about to go running around in tights any time soon."

sindri42

I just love the idea of a cape maintaining their secret identity by pretending to be a completely different and less impressive kind of parahuman.

roach-works

everyone assumes that kent is so squirrely around superheros because he’s just desperately hoping not to be conscripted to the JLA to fix their plumbing

Local Metropolis Reporter Publically Recognized For Contributions To The City; Awarded Medal Of Distinction

championofdnd

They tried to get superman to present the medal but he was offended at being called "overrated" in comparison to Clark so he declined

Counter offer: Bruce Wayne disguised as Superman

beating this dead horse with memes

your-uncle-iroh

I was at the market today and a young man was very rude to the tea vendor. He said the tea was "just hot leaf water." Then proceded to laugh at the vendor.

He is correct. It is hot leaf water. And the leaves matter. And the temperature of the water matters. And the vessel you drink it from matters. And who you share it with matters most of all.

Everything is "just" something, if you are determined to miss the point.

muffinlance

Uncle stop vaguing me

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”.

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

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.

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.

thefingerfuckingfemalefury

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’.

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.

only 62 more frogs until we hit 8,000 species described. the moment we've all been waiting for

there are an average of about 150 new amphibian species described per year so I remain hopeful that 2026 will be the year of 8,000 frogs

I do love that somebody tagged tumblr's own frog scientist on this post. chop chop dr scherz, we've got 62 more frogs to discover and you're the only frog scientist any of us knows