silly billy

emma, 31, sydney 🥰 cleo magazine bachelor of the year 1813

[animusrox]

Christopher Nolan Filmography (1998-2026)

[heatherwitch]

Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” that was written in 1950 is set on the day of August 4th, 2026 (tomorrow)!! Now’s your chance to read it around the time it’s based in!

Audio: A recording of Leonard Nimoy reading it on Internet Archive.

Text: A PDF version.

Graphic Novel: On Internet Archive.

[unamccormack]

I used to set this one for second year undergraduate creative writing seminars on writing science fiction on a double bill with Octavia E. Butler's "Bloodchild" and no-one here gets out alive.

[regionalpancake]

!!!! Today is the only chance we’ll ever have to listen to this absolute banger of apocalyptic fiction on the very day the story is set 😲✨

Nemoy’s voice is PERFECT in this!

(A content warning if you do listen - the dog dies, though it’s not super graphic)

[regionalpancake]

I paused the robot vacuum so I could listen to this 1950’s story predicting the robot vacuum.

[mihai-florescu]

Languages tend to peak at their word for butterfly. Never seen 2 that are the same, either. Papillon. Mariposa. Borboleta. Fluture. Vlinder. Schmetterling. Pillangó. Babochka. Farfalla. Sommerfugl. Perhonen. Farasha. Titali. Chōchō. Nabi. Húdié. Buom buom. Great job guys, i really mean it.

[klapollo]

i actually think it's scary that we seem to be forgetting what regular human beings look like and that in some cases it's being deliberately accelerated by incels and their esoteric mythology of appearance now that they have the cultural microphone. it's scary that i can watch a movie from like 1991 and be like "oh if this woman was cast as a leading lady today it'd be a culture war outrage session about ugly women being shoved in our faces"

[hotvampireadjacent]

[dct239394cvvd098dffgggp]

ill spend my twenties investigating the healing properties of salt i dont know about you guys

[protectspock]

[dct239394cvvd098dffgggp]

excuse me

[protectspock]

Sorry op. That's my friend the Salt Vampire from the Star Trek episode "The Man Trap" which first aired in 1966. Blessings be upon you.

[dct239394cvvd098dffgggp]

its just i dont feel blessed by its presence is all. sending love your way

[regging]

eating disorders and abortions are two things that are like, spoken about in most mainstream discourse as though they are pretty rare and aberrant, but then when you’re actually friends with a lot of women you come to find out that they are extremely extremely common and kind of banal & mundane

[academic-vampire]

A crucial part of the bookstore experience is saying hi to all the books you’ve already read

[macrolit]

Personal library of Richard A. Macksey, retired professor of humanities at Johns Hopkins University.

[inbabylontheywept]

I was walking out of the Walmart today, and a car passed me, and I got this incredibly vivid impression. It wasn't really in words, but if I had to put it into words, the two key points would be

a). I needed to watch that car and

b). That I needed to be careful, because the driver of the car was a massive bitch.

It kind of took me by surprise, because I really had no reason to be beefing with that car, and I also hadn't really had an impression like that since I was religious, which was in my teen years. Right? It'd been a decade since I had a little voice whisper in my ear, and I'd basically written it off as nonsense.

Anyway, I watched the car, because The Spirits or whatever were very insistent that I did. Car drove fine, went into the parking spot, inched forward, and right when it should've just stopped, the driver gunned it for some reason and it ran into the curb and cracked its bumper.

So, the driver got out, and she went to the front of the car to check that yes, she had cracked her bumper, and then she turned to look at me. The parking lot wasn't empty, but we were the only two people standing in that row, and I'd probably been staring at her for tenish seconds now.

She demanded very angrily to know why I hadn't warned her of the curb. And I could have said I didn't know you were about to gun it or is it my job to help every stranger park, or even could you have even heard me, inside your car?

And all of those would have been fine, but I was really, really busy digesting that I had somehow communed with Mormon Jesus again for the first time in fifteen years, and that the communion had mostly been there to let me watch someone park badly (?), so what I responded with was:

"Because it was foretold."

And I can't tell which would be funnier, if she went silent because there's not much to be said to that, or if she went silent because in Utah, she might actually believe me, but we parted ways without more words.

I'm still kind of digesting this myself, actually.

[villainessbian]

God is real but only to tell you to look at that dumbass fail a basic parking manoeuvre

[avoidbeing]

An obsidian mirror found at Catalhoyuk, 8,000 years old

[old-flesh]

“get the fries, you’ll need the energy in the coming days”

[grimeclown]

Cmon man

[eroscestlavie]

the level of employed i am is actually crazy relative to the types of posts i make

[eroscestlavie]

remember "nightblogging." sister I am on microsoft outlook on a sunday night

[nocturnaltigerrevelation]

>have problem

>recognize it as part of my divine punishment

>no problem

[teashoesandhair]

'A popular fanfic author stopped updating her fic because she said that the stress of being constantly falsely accused of using AI was a witch hunt and it was destroying her mental health to the extent that she needed to take a break from writing, leading to multiple online discussions defending her and debates about AI accusations and how You Can't Really Tell So Leave Her Alone, and then someone realised that there were Claude coding artefacts in her fics and that it was a super pervasive problem in that particular fandom, proven definitively by looking at the source coding of each work on AO3, and she denied it for a bit but then ultimately admitted that oopsie, she had been using genAI all along, and then she deleted all of her fics off AO3 and people got mad because they were being denied access to their favourite fics, even though they now knew definitively that they were genAI slop, and then it turned out that she'd actually stopped updating the fic on AO3 in the first place because she'd been shopping it around to agents and editors as an original work with the serial numbers filed off, and she'd been in conversations with a publisher which ultimately got dropped because she'd lied to them about her AI use' oh cool, so we're in Hell, then

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Can't wait to watch a 3 hour youtube video on whatever the fuck happened here in a year or so

[faggotfungus]

[cowardsexual]

he's an engineer. he's an apex predator. he is two apples tall. he's a sentient spider-shaped beehive made of rock. he watched his friends die. he can't take a compliment. he piloted a 23-crewed spaceship to a star 10ly away completely on his own and knowing nothing of relativistic physics. he talks in whale song. he was stranded in space for 46 years. he got distracted during first contact cause he was fucking with a tape measure. he's older than the united states of america. he loafs like a kittycat :]]]] it should've been him. it should've been him. it should've b

[cipheramnesia]

Working with different business cultures all over the globe, my biggest surprise is that while the USA is bad, it's not actually the very absolute worst I've ever worked with.

[cipheramnesia]

I can imagine all the guesses, but if you haven't talked with a crap ton of people from dozens of countries, it's not obvious.

[cipheramnesia]

The key is business culture is like its own weird separate culture with rules and structures, but most places have a fairly comprehensible set of expectations. So most of the time, it's just remembering perceived differences in expectations. Some places it's polite to be what feels really overly friendly to me. Some places it's polite to be what feels obsequious and formal to me. It's like, whatever. A secondary form of language kinda. It's not even social cues, it's just mechanics of language really. Places with that stuff, those are all fine and wonderful to deal with because there's a framework to communicate and all that.

Part of why the USA shits the bed trying to talk with is because every business person here has like zero framework, it's all lies and bullshit, and everyone wants to be the smartest bestest boy. It's not business culture as much as daycare for toddlers who have millions of dollars and hate human rights. Not the worst though, not by far.

[cipheramnesia]

What's key to understand is this is all separate from things like the real people in different places. Business brain people don't have any relevance to real human behavior, it's this whole other structure of make believe which controls everyone's well being. It's important to know because I know how to email a business guy in South Korea using language that will feel appropriate enough after translation, but that's completely irrelevant to the real people living there. It's easy to talk to business guys in China or India or whatever. Germany, Nigeria, Mexico.

UK business guys are pretty bad too. Still not the worst but you have to put a lot of extra work in because business culture in the UK still thinks the Brittish empire exists. The majority of business dudes in the UK see no difference between selling something that has their company name on it, and making it themselves. It's like how all the stuff that says "made in the USA" is 99% made somewhere else, and then one staple is put into it and it's made in the USA, but if you talk to business guys here, they never confuse where things are made, just like... more basic realities like linear time and physics. UK guys go the opposite way, and always say they own everything. But that's all relatively navigable. It's like, okay, you all live in an imaginary world, but I can still get everyone to understand time and logistics and stuff enough to get everyone understanding the same information. I can translate imagination land to reality and back, they get it.

[cipheramnesia]

Apparently tumble ate my explanation, but the worst business guys are Australians.

[cipheramnesia]

I cannot stress how much effort I put into explaining things in ways that work for people who aren't native English speakers, because I understand how weird translation can get, and I am not good at other languages. I have so many special little quirks and tricks to make what I say become something moderately clear and apropriate in translation. I can rotate through a dozen approaches to a topic to make it click for someone unfamiliar with what I'm explaining. I know it works because it's been time tested.

Australian executives simply take any information they receive, and do not. Did you say something is going to take a month - after signing a contract and collect a fee? The Australian business executive simply accepts that you have said you have begun work and it will be finished in 48 hours. If I told an Australian executive that the earth revolves around the sun, I would expect him to let me know that I had told him a hamster named Ben carries a really bright lamp around space to make the seasons. I have to painstakingly document every single detail of any interaction with Australian business persons, because they simply imagine things that have happened and information they have been told, and ignore whatever has transpired in actuality.

I have actually warned all my friends off buying anything from Australia - not because I think there's anything specifically wrong with the general quality of Australian goods, but because after every conversation with Australian executives going exactly the same (I say one thing, they declare I have said something completely different), I am hard pressed to believe anyone at a corporate level in Australian businesses actually understands laws, regulations, logistics, safety, or just... words. Every interaction I have with an Australian business guy inevitably stuns me into a loss for words through some completely unanticipated recap of an interaction we had or email I sent which is fully disconnected from the text or actual event. I cannot understand how the people of Australia, not particularly better or worse than people anywhere else, become the worst humans I have had the misfortune to encounter the second they enter the world of business. I wouldn't trust a single Australian executive to pour water out of a boot with instructions printed on the heel.