I have a bad habit of calling things “loathsome” if they mildly inconvenience me, which usually isn’t that bad, but today I spilled my drink and said “loathsome juice…” under my breath without realizing that’s not a normal thing to say
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.
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
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.
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.
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
We drink ethanol (in concentrations high enough to be used as an effective as microbicide or a solvent!) for the express purpose of achieving blood toxicity and disrupting normal brain function… AS A RECREATIONAL ACTIVITY!
On the same subject, we also deliberately incinerate assorted substances and then inhale the particulate-heavy smoke and vapor resulting for the same effect. EVEN IN THE FACE OF SAID SUBSTANCES BEING CARCINOGENIC, BECAUSE WE JUST DON’T GIVE A FUCK.
Humans do not have biological castes. Kill their commander and another will take its place. Soldiers left alone on a planet will start farming and manufacturing to survive. Farmers and manufacturers will take up arms and kill you if pressed. Just because two humans look different doesn’t mean they cannot do each other’s jobs.
Breeding does not kill them. A single human can mate dozens or hundreds of times in a lifetime. They often do so as recreation. Xenobiology team six believes they do not have a mating season but this is too strange to be true.
Their appendages are not designed for hitting, so they developed special training to make them very good at hitting anyhow.
The proteins making up their bodies are toxic and cause prion disease. Do not touch anything humans have touched. Do not consume earth foods. Fire does not adequately remove this contamination.
Humans perceive sixteen times the colors we do. Do not hide in bushes or vines from humans. They can distinguish your pelt from the foliage with ease.
We tried venting waste gas into the tunnels to kill the humans when they attacked. Turns out they breathe it.
Everything on their planet came from a single biological strain. They developed comprehensive genetics BEFORE they developed space travel.
They lack radio receptors and cannot be brought into compliance with right-thought simply by broadcasting to them. Even after we learned how to translate it into sound-waves one of their hatchlings drove the Great Authority mad by responding to every demand with a single question: “Why?”
I’m basically molesting procreate while in quarantine. I’ve been drawing digitally since 2009 yet I’ve never used any brushes except from the standard one in Photoshop, that until I got my ipad pro and procreate and suddenly the temptation was too high. So please bear with me XDDD
do you guys even know what anne carson is like. you reblog her quotes all the time but are you aware that seeing her in person is a spiritual experience
she came to my college in the spring of 2019. she was wearing
a flannel under a pinstripe suit, cuffed trousers and bright red sneakers, and
she had her hair up in a messy bun. I didn’t take a picture but here’s my
artist’s rendition
the whole room was full of Classics wlwTM and we
Absolutely Could Not Handle This Like Even a Little Bit. I got so distracted
thinking about her during my workout today that I accidentally did 15 more
jumping jacks than I was supposed to, which I think is the gayest sentence I’ve
ever written.
how do I describe the way she speaks? it’s this very floaty,
dignified, vaguely curious, uncompelled, but very intentional style of diction,
like if you met god at a garden party and she handed you a pitcher of cream and
asked you why you think you should get into heaven. I wrote down the phrase
“Your ridiculous little glasslike soul” and I don’t remember in what context
she said it, but THAT’S the vibe.
she is screamingly funny but relentlessly deadpan.
“You know Oscar Wilde was imprisoned for—” she pulls down her glasses and looks
at us, like a librarian who moonlights writing erotica – “sodomy.” She had us do
an “interactive portion” during one of her poems, instructing the right side of
the audience: “Your part is simply the word Deciduous? With a question
mark at the end.”
She has flawless comedic timing, and she does not use
filler words. Remember this line from Elektra? it sums up her sense of humor
PERFECTLY:
She spices up her wit by dropping in the occasional
mind-blowing quote like “Tears are all about the weeper, aren’t they?” and “Roses
and hurricanes are too much as they are to be anything else, to be damaged by
metaphor.” and “Do I frighten people, saying there’s no back wall? Nothing
between you and your heart of darkness?”
like. she is an incredible writer and I’m not about to denigrate
her translations by saying she didn’t put work into them, but I honest to god
think that is just How This Woman’s Mind Works. she is on “not to me, not if it’s
you” and “someone will remember us I say even in another time” levels of galaxy
brain wordcraft, but IN REAL LIFE.
I came up to her after the reading and asked her to sign my
Bacchae copy. I did not say much to her besides that I was a fan, because I got
the sense that if I formed a complete sentence in her presence she would see directly through me and reach into my body and swallow my entire ribcage like a snake.
she signed my book “regards, A.C.” I’ll never forget her.
I was raised agnostic and tend to remain ambiguous on theological matters.
-but my house has a porch on the second story that affords me a terrific view of my neighborhood and the Colorado Front Range and I was partaking of some peace before the 4th Of July Finger-Loss Festivities begin, and I have had a
~*Spiritual Experience*~
I just watched my neighbor try to unload an actual wooden pallet that had to have been forklifted into the back of his insecurity pickup worth of fireworks.
Except that he does not have a forklift in his garage.
He does have so much sports memorabilia and cardboard boxes of unsold MLM Merchandise and patriotically themed camping gear and posters of women in bikinis and flags of suspect political organizations in his garage that there is only BARELY enough space for the fireworks and certainly none for his truck.
So he had to unload the individual boxes of recreational explosives from the back of his truck and stack them in the minimal space he had cleared by hand. This is a tedious and time-consuming process as this neighbor has purchased a wide variety of recreational and locally illegal explosives instead of many of just a few types, so the individual boxes are rather small.
He begins, and this is crucial to what happens next, by cutting apart the industrial-grade saran wrap his explosives dealer had so carefully wrapped his merchandise in, and discarded it unsecured on his lawn.
hey netizens! i’m not sure how many people are aware, but youtube’s been slowly rolling out a new anti-adblock policy that can’t be bypassed with the usual software like uBlock Origin and Pi-Hole out of the gate
BUT, if you’re a uBlock Origin user (or use an adblocker with a similar cosmetics modifier), you can add these commands in the uBlock dashboard to get rid of it!
reblog to help keep the internet less annoying and to tell corporations that try shit like this to go fuck themselves <3
Where do I copy-paste these to? “My filters”? “My Rules”?
‘my filters’! if you look closely you’ll notice the format is different between the two pages. the (website)(##)(additional text) format goes in filters
Whatever strikes my fancy, which is mostly memes, pictures of critters, miscellaneous fandom, and music. Hit me up on Flight Rising or Fallen London. Newfriendly on FR and Lily Greywers in FL
