Nunc est Bibendum

"Now is the time for drinking"

[heymonster]

[embiggen]

hey guys, did you know that you can get all the current SFCs together on one print? Well you can!

Check it out.

[azizisbored]

There are so few people that you meet in life that give you that feeling that you’ve found a real unique, original person. Harris Wittels was one of those and we lost him yesterday. He was 30 years old. I’ve been devastated.

I’m still waiting for the other phone call to let me know that Harris...

[jackiekashian]

#BeaconOfHope Now that I’ve cleared up, to the approval of anyone still confused and full of men’s rage why #yesallwomen isn’t a personal attack on them…let me fix loneliness.

I am the hero of this story.

I had one “boyfriend” for 6 months in college and then, 17 yrs later, I met my husband...

[trickybeck]

It's a curl-up-in-a-face-down-ball-in-the-middle-of-the-hallway kinda night.

[trickybeck]

Wish I wasn't paralyzed by shyness as a youth so that today I'd have some relationship skills and not be so anxious at every step.

Oh well, guess I'll just keep fumbling my way through.

[trickybeck]

Brilliant.

[trickybeck]

Go up the wizard steps...

[trickybeck]

Why are all these places sending me my tax information? It's not 11pm on April 14th...

[trickybeck]

Today I Learned...

...that mammals are older than flowers. By like, 70 million years. Flowers are total noobs.

[trickybeck]

Hell is other people fucking.

David Gilbert, & Sons (Another personally relatable entry from Slate’s 21 Best Lines of 2013)

[trickybeck]

Looking in the mirror is always disappointing – it’s strange that something can be always disappointing; you’d imagine that eventually you’d adjust your expectations downward to the point where they’re congruent with reality – but today it’s even more disappointing than usual.

Gabriel Roth, The Unknowns Slate's 21 Best Lines of 2013

[trickybeck]

Sometimes, it's all one can do to keep one's wardrobe from vascillating too wildly between "douchebag" and "hipster."  No wonder old people give up and just wear blue slacks and velcro shoes.

[trickybeck]

Dealing with terrorists has taught us some things. You can't deal with 'em. This mess was created by the Republicans for one purpose, and they lost. People in my district are calling in for Obamacare - affordable health care - in large numbers. These guys have lost, and they can't figure out how to admit it. You can't say, OK, you get half of Obamacare - this isn't a Solomonic decision. So we sit here until they figure out they fuckin' lost.

Rep. Jim McDermott (D), Washington

[trickybeck]

The Republican congress is holding America hostage, like a band of terrorists, over their opposition to a democratically passed law. And the media is portraying this as some sort of typical failure to compromise that they are blaming on both sides of the aisle. No. Do not create false equivalence here. You do not get to refuse to participate in the basic functioning of government because of sour grapes. You received millions of fewer total votes than Democrats in senate, house, and presidential elections in 2012, yet you claim some sort of non-existant popular mandate. You do not get to put millions of people out of work because you dislike a law that helps millions of others get health care. They are fucking over poor and middle class people whether they get their way or not.

And they are not just refusing to vote for a clean resolution that allows the government to continue to function, they are refusing to allow the clean resolution to be voted on at all.  They are doing this because they know it will pass with a majority of House votes, you know, the consitutional requirement for something to pass. But because of a criteria invented by former speaker Dennis Hastert, the Republicans won't allow a vote on a bill unless they know it will pass with a "majority of the majority." That means that they won't allow voting on a bill unless the majority of Republican congresspeople will vote for it, even if it would have passed by virtue of Democrat + crossover votes creating an overall House majority.

The Tea Party element of congress is apparently proud that they shut down the goverment over what they see as a tyrannical overreach of federal power. There is an alarming lack of perspective here. The founding fathers they so idolize were opposed to the tyrannical rule of a bloodline-based monarchy and a hereditary, aristocracy-controlled parliament that were concerned with little beyond expanding their own power and enrichment. The Democratic faction of the current US government (while still falling prey to those 2 vices on an individual level, if not an organizational level) is being villified for passing laws to help the poor and the majority of the US population. This is not taxation without representation, and Obama is not King George.

[bogleech]

It’s funny how science fiction universes so often treat humans as a boring, default everyman species or even the weakest and dumbest.

I want to see a sci fi universe where we’re actually considered one of the more hideous and terrifying species.

How do we know our saliva and skin oils wouldn’t be ultra-corrosive to most other sapient races? What if we actually have the strongest vocal chords and can paralyze or kill the inhabitants of other worlds just by screaming at them? What if most sentient life in the universe turns out to be vegetable-like and lives in fear of us rare “animal” races who can move so quickly and chew shit up with our teeth?

Like that old story “they’re made of meat,” only we’re scarier.

[drethelin]

HOLY SHIT THEY EAT CAPSAICIN FOR FUN

YOU GUYS I HEARD A HUMAN ONCE ATE AN AIRPLANE.

A HUMAN CAN KEEP FIGHTING FOR HOURS EVEN AFTER YOU SHOOT IT

humans are a proud warrior race with a pantheon of bloody gods: Ram-Bo, Schwarzenegger, etc.

REMOVING A LIMB WILL NOT FATALLY INCAPACITATE HUMANS: ALWAYS DESTROY THE HEAD.

WARNING: HUMANS CAN DETECT YOU EVEN AT NIGHT BY TRACKING VIBRATIONS THROUGH THE ATMOSPHERE

WARNING: HUMANS CAN REPRODUCE AT A RATE OF 1 PER SPACEYEAR. DESTROY INFESTATIONS IMMEDIATELY

THE HUMAN MOUTH HAS OVER THIRTY OUTCROPS OF BONE AND POWERFUL JAW MUSCLES.

HUMAN BITES CAN BE FATALLY INFECTIOUS EVEN TO OTHER HUMANS

WARNING: HUMANS CAN AND WILL USE IMPROVISED WEAPONS. SEE CLASSIFIED DATA LABELED J. CHAN.

HUMANS CAN PROJECT BIOWEAPONS FROM ALMOST EVERY ORIFICE ON THEIR BODY. DO NOT INHALE

OH GOD THE HUMANS FIGURED OUT DOOR HANDLES OH GOD OH GOD

[prokopetz]

More seriously, humans do have a number of advantages even among Terrestrial life. Our endurance, shock resistance, and ability to recover from injury is absurdly high compared to almost any other animal. We often use the phrase “healthy as a horse” to connote heartiness - but compared to a human, a horse is as fragile as spun glass. There’s mounting evidence that our primitive ancestors would hunt large prey simply by following it at a walking pace, without sleep or rest, until it died of exhaustion; it’s called pursuit predation. Basically, we’re the Terminator.

(The only other animal that can sort of keep up with us? Dogs. That’s why we use them for hunting. And even then, it’s only “sort of”.)

Now extrapolate that to a galaxy in which most sapient life did not evolve from hyper-specialised pursuit predators:

Our strength and speed is nothing to write home about, but we don’t need to overpower or outrun you. We just need to outlast you - and by any other species’ standards, we just plain don’t get tired.

Where a simple broken leg will cause most species to go into shock and die, we can recover from virtually any injury that’s not immediately fatal. Even traumatic dismemberment isn’t necessarily a career-ending injury for a human.

We heal from injuries with extreme rapidity, recovering in weeks from wounds that would take others months or years to heal. The results aren’t pretty - humans have hyperactive scar tissue, among our other survival-oriented traits - but they’re highly functional.

Speaking of scarring, look at our medical science. We developed surgery centuries before developing even the most rudimentary anesthetics or life support. In extermis, humans have been known to perform surgery on themselves - and survive. Thanks to our extreme heartiness, we regard as routine medical procedures what most other species would regard as inventive forms of murder. We even perform radical surgery on ourselves for purely cosmetic reasons.

In essence, we’d be Space Orcs.

[astrakiseki]

I do hope you realize I’m going to be picking up this stuff and running with it right? 

[friendlyfrankenstein]

Our jaws have too many TEETH in them, so we developed a way to WELD METAL TO OUR TEETH and FORCE THE BONES IN OUR JAW to restructure over the course of years to fit them back into shape, and then we continue to wear metal in out mouths to keep them in place. 

We formed cohabitative relationships with tiny mammals and insects we keep at bay from bothering us by death, often using little analouge traps. 

And by god, we will eat anything. 

[siderealsandman]

We use borderline toxic peppers to season our food. 

We expose ourselves to potentially lethal solar radiation in the pursuit of darkening our skin. 

We risk hearing loss for the opportunity to see our favorite musicians live. 

We have a game where two people get into an enclosed area and hit each other until time runs out/one of them pass out

We willingly jump out of planes with only a flimsy piece of cloth to prevent us from splattering against the ground. 

Our response to natural disasters is to just rebuild our buildings in the exact same places. 

We climb mountains and risk freezing to death for bragging rights

We invented dogs. We took our one time predators and completely domesticated them. 

On a planet full of lions, tigers and bears, we managed to advance further and faster than any other species on the planet. 

Klingons and Krogan and Orcs ain’t got shit on us

[teal-deer]

can we talk about how pursuit predation is fucking terrifying

it’s one thing to face down a cheetah, which will slam into you at 60 mph and break your neck

it’s another thing to run very quickly to get away from a thing, only to have it just kind of

show up

to have it be intelligent enough to figure out where you are by the fur and feather you’ve left behind, your footprints and piss and shit, and then you think you’ve lost it and you bed down for the night but THERE IT IS

WAITING

WHEN YOU WAKE UP

and you split! again! but it keeps following you. always in the corner of your eye. until you just

die

we are scary motherfuckers ok

[trickybeck]

I'm kinda happy when I finish a bag of chips, because then that means there's no more chips around to stuff into my face.

[trickybeck]

A pair of real American heroes