You know every show that the premise is like “people find out ghosts/monsters/demons are real and are charged with stopping them” appeal to me way more now as a post-graduate not because I believe in ghosts more or whatever but because can you IMAGINE just being handed a job that you don’t even need to apply for? Like just being told “basically there’s this bad thing and all you do is make sure it doesn’t do what it wants” that’s just customer service baby and I worked that for 6 goddamn years! Just TRY getting past “I have a job to offer you” before I can jump down your throat agreeing.
some idiot with a dumb ghost-hunting name who joined the Cause because they love the paranormal: oh fuck oh shit this is really scary guys I’m having second thoughts
me, who knows that if we run away I have to apply to like, a real actual Jobbe again: wakey wakey demons it’s this or retail so guess who’s got nothing to lose
best thing tumblr ever did for me is the term “rotating it in my mind”. it’s really true that sometimes you think about something real hard but you can’t tell what the thoughts are exactly. it’s revolutionary stuff, i might even say
Us, arriving to Austria to a tiny family hotel owned by an elderly lady
Us: speak only limited German
Lady: barely speaks English
Us:
Lady:
Lady: Czech? Slovak?
Us: Czech
Lady, to herself: Czech, that’s a Slavic language right
Lady: understand Yugoslavian?
Us:
Us: yeah that works
Shit like this can really only happen in Europe. Reminds me of the time I took my best shot at ordering at a restaurant in Spain in spanish. The closest language to spanish that I actually speak is latin.
Waiter: Germany?
Me: No, Czechia.
Waiter, in a heavily accented but intelligible Czech: Why didn’t you say so before! We get you guys here all the time!
Já v roce 2019 na Ukrajině: OK, takže když použiju tohle staročeský slovo, přidám polský sloveso, své chabé znalosti záhoráčtiny a řeknu to s ruskym přízvukem, tak to projde.
[Me in 2019 in Ukraine: ok so if i use this Old Czech word, add a Polish verb, my poor knowledge of the Záhorie dialect of Slovak and say it with a Russian accent, it might pass]
Reminds me of the time when we were in Poland and I tried to order a burger using a truly unholy mix of Slovak, Russian and Ostrava dialect (which in itself is like an unholy mix of Czech and Polish).
I did get the burger
[#my grandpa called this “Slavic Esperanto”]
I know Ukrainians who can do this on purpose and masterfully, and it was mind-blowing to hear a speech as immediately understandable to an audience of native speakers of three different native Slavic languages, not just two languages as is common
During one student exchange I (a Pole) got acquainted with two students from Czechia and Russia. At first we talked in English or German, but after a while we’ve noticed, that we could understand each other’s native languages just fine. And if some word was unknown in one language, another one had the right synonym.
*Each of us talking in their mother tongue*
Me: Bla bla bla.
Russian: I don’t know this “bla”.
Czech: Oh, we have “bla”! We also call it “that”!
Russian: Oh I know “that”! It’s a very old version of “this”.
Me: Oh, we have “this” too, but it means something slightly different.
German acquaintance: Was für nen Scheiß zieht ihr da ab? o_O
the reason there aren’t slavic people in the bible is that they wouldn’t have been surprised or awed to hear the disciples speak in tongues and be understood by people of many nations at once
Slavs walked away from the Tower of Babel mildly inconvenienced.
Hairdresser: We’re going to have to use a color remover to take out the blue pigment, then apply more pigment to allow for the proteins in the hair to adhere to it. Then possibly mix three different types of toners to reach the goal of your natural hair color.
Hairdresser: pretty simple
Me: this is chemistry
Hairdresser: yeah, but people don’t like when we talk that way
Hairdresser: so you’re a mortician?
Me: apprentice
Hairdresser: do you know why formaldehyde is used in clothing?
Me: I didn’t know that was a thing
Hairdresser: I think it’s due to the preserving qualities? But I don’t think that’s right.
Me: It’s not just a preservative, it’s also a disinfectant ‘cause it destroys bacteria as well as their food supply. It’s also a dehydrator.
Hairdresser: why not just use alcohol?
Me: good question. Formaldehyde is super cheap, so probably to cut costs
Hairdresser: is it really a carcinogen?
Me: yeah, I’m going to have so much cancer
Hairdresser: so you’re going natural to work at a funeral home?
Me: yeah
Hairdresser: while still in school?
Me: well we work in the funeral homes so we have uuuuh … experience with cases
Hairdresser: you can just say bodies it’s fine
Me: oh thank god
Five Minutes Later
Me: yeah so we don’t do autopsies it’s one of my pet peeves
Hairdresser: what if someone wakes up while you’re embalming them?
Me: there’s a huge difference between a living body and a dead one
second hairdresser: I think we should add more toner, but yeah I think rigor mortis would make it pretty obvious
Me: that and being in a fridge for a few days you will be dead by the time you get to us
Hairdresser: I think pumping them full of a carcinogen would help with that
I am so pleased at how many notes are some version of “I don’t fear the science, I fear the corporations who control it” because that is EXACTLY the attitude you should have. GMOs can save us. Monsanto will kill us.
what people fear about GMO- ‘theyre gonna make frankencarrots that crave human flesh and cause diarrhea ’
what GMO actually is- ‘we made rice crop that is both drought resistant and flood resistant which will prevent about 20% of major famine disasters, also it now makes vitamin A because vitamin A deficiency in poverty stricken areas is a major killer of kids as most vitamin A rich foods dont grow there’
what people SHOULD be upset about- ‘i made all crops sterile so all farmers have to buy the seed from me in perpetuity and i will sue anyone who tries to go back to crops that produce their own seed’
i love you well crafted narratives i love you clever callbacks i love you seemingly nonsensical plot lines that begin to make perfect sense when they converge i love you sneaky little easter eggs you only notice on your second watch i love you consistent but not overdone motifs i love you deeply satisfying series finales i love you gratifying and tangible character development
“Some guy a few houses down barricaded himself in his house with an assault rifle. Fortunately, they got him (or he gave himself up) without any shots fired or anyone getting hurt.” - SgtScheisskopf
am i insane or should masks be mandated for hospitals as a permanent installation. a forever institution. always. covid is an irrelevant factor when hospitals are always full of both very sick and very immunocompromised people..?
fucks me up that by total coincidence the sun and moon’s size difference is exactly matched to their difference in distance from us, thus making our beautiful total solar eclipses where you can see the silver threads of the sun’s corona possible because the moon just covers the sun completely
The stars (literally) aligned just right for this experience to be possible. It’s likely that aliens don’t have this
The moon is also absolutely gargantuan by moon standards. It isn’t the largest moon in the solar system, but it is BY FAR the largest in comparison with its planet. Ganymede is the largest satellite of Jupiter and the largest moon in the solar system. Its diameter is only about 3.8% of Jupiter’s. Titan’s radius is 4.4% of Saturn’s. Callisto and Io are the next largest in the neighborhood, with 3.4% and 2.6% the diameter of Jupiter respectively.
Our moon is number 5. It is smaller in direct comparison to the above moons. The diameter of the moon is 3475 km. That is a full 27% of the diameter of the Earth. More than a quarter. That’s ridiculous. It’s unheard of. The universe is large enough that the word unique probably doesn’t mean a lot, but this might be about as close as you get.
This has had a huge impact on our planet. Other things aliens might not have are significant tides. One of Mars’s dumpy little potatoes wouldn’t be able to move oceans the way our moon does.
Our moon has also stabilized our axis to a massive degree. Without her up there our axis would wobble all over the place and our climate would be far more chaotic. Aliens might not be quite so lucky.
I guess what I am really trying to say is that the moon is extremely cool. I like the moon.
Just want to add that the reason we have such a large moon is because a whole planet crashed into proto-Earth. Theia (the planet) and Earth got so superheated by this collision that their component cores fused and the impact jettisoned a lot of material into space. That massive amount of jettisoned material became our moon. So Earth and the moon have very similar composition. This does not seem to be a common method of lunar formation.
what if the answer to the fermi paradox is that life cant exist without a moon like luna
I got a serious beef with the Fermi paradox. There is no Fermi paradox. There stopped being a Fermi paradox once the first radio telescopes went up, and we began to get a true sense of the sheer scale of the universe.
Space is big, empty, and loud. Sunspots can cause enough interference to affect global communications. We’re not even loud enough to talk over our own sun. On our own planet. We can barely communicate with Voyager, and we know exactly where it is and what its signal sounds like.
The Fermi paradox is like doubting the existence of Belfast, because you stood on a windy New York beach shouting towards it and didn’t get an answer.
the thing is that our specific kind of life-bearing planet may very well be a rarity; we’re within the Goldilocks zone of a medium-size yellow star (an estimated 75% of stars in the Milky Way galaxy are red dwarfs), and yes, without the Theia event, it’s very likely that complex life would never have developed on Earth, because not only does Luna help by keeping the oceans moving and thus causing life-facilitating elements and compounds circulating, but the impact also set the Earth’s core spinning and generating a magnetosphere that protects us from solar winds and radiation; Mars’s atmosphere of about 0.01 bars and its aridity are partly because it doesn’t have these protections
it may be that large satellites of gas giants might be the “safest” place for life to develop, staying warm through tidal heating and protecting the liquid ocean beneath a thick layer of ice; the best places to find life elsewhere in the solar system might very well be Europa, for example, or even in parts of Jupiter’s atmosphere
the other thing is that life is probably common in the universe, because we’ve actually demonstrated in a laboratory that if you just put a bunch of the right elements in water and pump energy into it, you get proteins forming, and four specific nucleotides (adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine) are the building blocks of RNA and DNA
not only that, but we’ve found, like, free-floating clouds of amino acids in deep space
it’s improbable to the point of being indistinguishable from impossible that we’re the only intelligent life in the universe, and although we might be the only intelligent life in our home star system, it’s quite probable that there’s life elsewhere here, just not in a place we can easily see it
[ID] Single-panel XKCD comic shows 2 ants on a floor of tiled linoleum, stretching into the distance. They’re both facing each other.
The ant on the right says “We’ve searched dozens of these floor tiles for several common types of pheromone trails. If there were intelligent life up there, we would have seen its messages by now.” /text
A caption at the bottom of the page reads “The world’s first ant colony to achieve sentience calls off the search for us.” [End ID]
I have another dog to put on this theoretical show. The original story can be found at this link. If the link breaks, it’s a story on NotAlwaysRight called “Absolutely The Goodest Boy”
