So there has been a bit of “what if humans were the weird ones?” going around tumblr at the moment and Earth Day got me thinking. Earth is a wonky place, the axis tilts, the orbit wobbles, and the ground spews molten rock for goodness sakes. What if what makes humans weird is just our capacity to survive? What if all the other life bearing planets are these mild, Mediterranean climates with no seasons, no tectonic plates, and no intense weather?
What if several species (including humans) land on a world and the humans are all “SCORE! Earth like world! Let’s get exploring before we get out competed!” And the planet starts offing the other aliens right and left, electric storms, hypothermia, tornadoes and the humans are just … there… counting seconds between flashes, having snowball fights, and just surviving.
To paraphrase one of my favorite bits of a ‘humans are awesome’ fiction megapost: “you don’t know you’re from a Death World until you leave it.” For a ton of reasons, I really like the idea of Earth being Space Australia.
Earth being Space Australia
Words cannot express how much I love these posts
Alien: “I’m sorry, what did you just say your comfortable temperature range is?”
Human: “Honestly we can tolerate anywhere from -40 to 50 Celcius, but we prefer the 0 to 30 range.”
Alien: “……. I’m sorry, did you just list temperatures below freezing?”
Human: “Yeah, but most of us prefer to throw on scarves or jackets at those temperatures it can be a bit nippy.”
Other human: “Nah mate, I knew this guy in college who refused to wear anything past his knees and elbows until it was -20 at least.”
Human: “Heh. Yeah everybody knows someone like that.”
Alien: “……. And did you also say 50 Celcius? As in, half way to boiling?”
Human: “Eugh. Yes. It sucks, we sweat everywhere, and god help you if you touch a seatbelt buckle, but yes.”
Alien: “……. We’ve got like 50 uninhabitable planets we think you might enjoy.”
“You’re telling me that you have… settlements. On islands with active volcanism?”
“Well, yeah. I’m not about to tell Iceland and Hawaii how to live their lives. Actually, it’s kind of a tourist attraction.”
“What, the molten rock?”
“Well, yeah! It’s not every day you see a mountain spew out liquid rocks! The best one is Yellowstone, though. All these hot springs and geysers from the supervolcano–”
“You ACTIVELY SEEK OUT ACTIVE SUPERVOLCANOES?”
“Shit, man, we swim in the groundwater near them.”
Sounds like the “Damned” trilogy by Alan Dean Foster.
“And you say the poles of your world would get as low as negative one hundred with wind chill?”
“Yup, with blizzards you cant see through every other day just about.”
“Amazing! when did you manage to send drones that could survive such temperatures?”
“… well, actually…”
“… what?”
“…we kinda……. sent……….. people…..”
“…”
“…”
“…what?”
“we sent-”
“no yeah I heard you I just- what? You sent… HUMANS… to a place one hundred degrees below freezing?”
“y-yeah”
“and they didn’t… die?”
“Well the first few did”
“PEOPLE DIED OF THE COLD AND YOUR SOLUTION WAS TO SEND MORE PEOPLE???!?!?!?”
My new favorite Humans are Weird quote
“PEOPLE DIED OF THE COLD AND YOUR SOLUTION WAS TO SEND MORE PEOPLE?”
aka The History of Russia
aka Arctic Exploration
aka The History of Alaska
‘But surely you have records of volcanic activity doing tremendous damage to human settlements.’
‘Yep. Pompeii is legendary. Entire cities went. Towns buried under lava, peoples’ brains boiled in the first rush of heat, loads more killed by falling pumice.’
‘ah, good, they learned their lesson and didn’t build there again.’
‘…well…’
‘Are you seriously telling me this volcano is legendary for killing several urban conurbations and you built on top of it AGAIN?’
‘In our defence it hasn’t actually done it since.’
‘What about earthquake-prone areas? Tell me you’re at least vaguely sensible about those.’
‘Oh yeah. After the first major earthquake that flattens a city, we build them better.’
I live on both Earth Australia and Sace Australia.
alien: people died of the cold and your solution was tosend more people
human:
Aliens and monsters fascinated by humans will never stop being a thing for me
These are my favorite posts.
Alien – Ok, so tell me about war.
Human – Ok – lists everything from the 300 Spartans to possible WW3 –
Alien – So who are these people fighting in a square and a caged circle?
Human – Those are sports fighters.
Alien – You fight each other for fun?
Human – Yes.
Alien – WHEN YOU HAVE ALL THESE WARS!? THAT WOULD EXPLAIN IT!
Human – Well there’s the geneva convention. – explains what it is –
Alien – YOU BANNED WEAPONS OF WAR BECAUSE THEY WERE TOO EFFECTIVE!?
Human – It’s like cheating.
Alien – AT WAR!?!? WHERE YOU ACTIVE GOAL IS TO KILL EACH OTHER!? YOU ARE WORRIED ABOUT CHEATING!?
Human -…………………..
Alien – What?
Human – Nothing.
Alien – No, what? There’s something else isn’t there?
Human – Nukes are not technically banned under the convention.
Human: All this celebration needs is some booze
Alien: some what now?
Human: Booze. Alcoholic drinks.
Alien: What is alcohol?
Human: Ethanol.
C2H6O
Alien: wait, isn’t that the stuff your people use as disinfectant?
Human: yup.
Alien: and a fuel additive?
Human: yup.
Alien: Isn’t that a poison!?
Human: well yeah, but it’s watered down when we drink it.
Alien: !?
THIS IS MY FAVORITE SHIT
So what about the fact that humans can take so much abuse to the body and miraculously survive
Alien: So let me just review: You have records of people surviving fatal wounds commonly…
Human: Uh-huh.
Alien: And some of these stories include stab wounds to the brain…
Human: Oh, yeah, all the time.
Alien:….and then…surviving and even improving from crippling injuries or brain damage…
Human: Those are some of the truly strong ones, that.
Alien: Yes…indeed…………………………………………………
Human: What? What is it?
Alien: It’s just…..well………we had heard….rumors….
Human: Of?
Alien: It’s nothing. They’re false, they must be! Humans coming back from the dead–it’s funny really!
Human: o-o……………..
Alien: You must be joking.
Human: UM………WELL…….
Alien: TELL ME YOU’RE JOKING. PLEASE.
Human: *patting the alien sympathetically* I’m…sorry?
Alien: *slams head on table. Done*
This is the best thing in the entire world
I mean we only really “come back” like that if the water’s really cold…
Or if there’s an AED RIGHT there, or if they get us to the hospital in time to give us enough epinephrine to restart the heart …
(A first aid instructor was once super blunt about the stats around CPR, which are quite low – less than five percent of cases result in anything. Then he said, “However: WHEN DO YOU DO CPR?”
The class replied, “When someone isn’t breathing and has no pulse?”
And he said, “Right! Now next question: WHAT DO WE CALL SOMEONE WHO ISN’T BREATHING AND DOESN’T HAVE A PULSE?”
“ … dead.”
“Right! So let me reframe what I just said to you: in five percent of cases if you do CPR you can bring someone back from the dead. Now how do those stats sound to you?”
We then went on to discuss the stats in a bit more detail, such as how they cover EVERY REPORTED CASE OF CPR … including those started long after there was any hope of it helping, or when even if begun right away there was some other massive traumatic injury that meant even if you kept the heart going or got it going again it wouldn’t matter the body was dead anyway, etc etc etc, so the stats were actually less bleak if you sort of took that into account; and then even more importantly that in cases of cardiac arrest or severe distress and cessation of breathing that were treated IMMEDIATELY WITH THE FULL APPROPRIATE TREATMENT – AED when appropriate, hospitalization fast response, etc etc – the stats were actually frankly pretty bright. They just also dropped exponentially fast over a very short period of time – if someone’s got appropriate aid from the second they go down, great stats! … a minute later, meh stats … a minute after that, worse stats … etc.)
However my godfather did in fact get a metal spike through his head, survived, and lived several decades: there were after affects of the TBI to deal with, but he was still happy and comfortable in his life and a great guy and if you didn’t KNOW it happened, you’d never guess.
A depressed guy moves into a haunted house with 7 demons, each corresponding to a deadly sin. But, they’re all trying to help him get back on his feet; Pride helps with self confidence, Lust helps him get laid, etc.
I would watch the crap outta this like wow
Envy: “Glut, back off the guy, okay?”
Gluttony: “I’m just saying he could stand to gain a few pounds! I made spaghetti!”
Sloth: “After we eat, it’s gonna be time for a nice nap. We’ve earned it!”
Pride: “Damn right we did!”
Just imagine the Catholic Church making a statement regarding this new tv show.
Wrath does nothing but encourage him to punch assholes.
“You deserve better! That was YOUR parking space!”
“He’s like three hundred pounds of muscle, Wrath.”
“And you are 165 pounds of RAGE!”
Wrath’s advice isn’t great, but he means well.
Can the protag be a woman? Or like can we add a co-protag even for season 2, someone he met and made friends with (NO ROMANCE) and was like “no you need to come move in I promise it’ll be good for you.”
Are there any works in the post-apocalyptic genre with post-apocalyptic librarians? People who worked in the public library and after the Bad Thing decide to stay and keep the library clean, safe and available for anyone who needs it. People can’t remove books from the premises anymore, because they’re too precious, but you can stay as long as you want and read them or copy them out–the librarians encourage making copies, so that the information can circulate beyond the physical boundaries of the library.
After a while it becomes an unspoken reality of the post apocalyptic society that you Just Don’t fuck with the library. You don’t fight there, you don’t steal from it, you don’t allow harm to come to librarians when they have to leave the building for supplies.
People donate food and books and paper with no expectation of reciprocity, because the librarians don’t ask for anything when you need a place to hide or information or, fuck, to read a schlocky crime novel because you need to escape reality in some purple prose.
You’re an ancient Greek man coming home from 4 months of war to find your wife 3 months pregnant. Now you’ve embarked on a solemn quest: to punch Zeus in the face.
Soon after you begin your quest, you encounter another man in a similar situation. You decide to join forces, as two mortal men stand a better chance at punching Zeus than one.
Two villages over, you encounter a woman who had relations with Zeus and was left with a highly aggressive half-boar half-man offspring. She too feels your anger and offers to join your quest.
By the time you reach Mount Olympus, you’ve amassed a large and formidable army of cuckolded/ravished mortals, demigods with daddy issues, mythical creatures with scores to settle, and a seamstress who you’re pretty sure is Hera in disguise.
In peacetime, the ruler grows their hair long. In war, they cut it short.
A ruler with long hair is held in great esteem, for defending the peace.
The traditional declaration of war is for the ruler to send their cut-off hair to the enemy ruler. The statement carries greater weight the longer the hair: to receive long hair says that you have angered one who is slow to anger, that you have incurred a wrath not easily woken.
Violent war-mongering leader frantically and aggressively tries to shave just a LITTLE hair off the top of their head into an envelope.
A faraway king receives a heavy wooden crate filled with a coil of the longest hair he has ever seen.
A despised ruler finds hundreds of pounds of cut-off ponytails at her castle entrance, each one belonging to her own people.
A young emperor refuses to cut their hair and insists on trying to make peace with invaders. The enemy leader steps forward, draws their blade, and cuts the emperor’s hair themselves.
Hellen cuts her hair off and throws it in Cathy’s face at her son’s soccer scrimmage.
you know those photo series that are like “In The Running For The Next Spiderman/Young Han Solo/Bachelor/Prince Eric/Property Brother”
and it’s just like nine generically handsome brunet white men that might all be Henry Cavill or might all be Matt Bomer or might all be the photogenic runner guy from 2012 for all we know but it’s impossible to tell because they are just so generic?
and you know how nobody really remembers what Moist von Lipwig (slash Albert Spangler where applicable) actually looks like, they just remember the gold hat, or the glasses, or the bountiful ear hair?
what I want is an adaptation where Moist, whenever he’s being an anonymous face or The Man in the Golden Suit or Albert Spangler, is played by a series of generically handsome brunet white men who are swapped out shot-to-shot.
Concept: fantasy world where dragons are A Thing™ but instead of them being these rare, semi-legendary creatures who exist solely to terrorise and wreak havoc and mayhem and burn inconveniences to a crisp they’re like… dogs… vaguely domesticated cats…
They come in loads of sizes and it’s a common thing to hear them scritching across your roof or rummaging in your garbage. You pass by like four every time you go to the market.
There’s even some snoozing at market stalls and strays playing with children and stealing scraps of food that fall in the street, with mottled scales and mixed textures of feathers and mismatched jewel colours.
Your favourite baker has three tiny western diamondtips who are in charge of keeping the ovens fired up and don’t always eat all of the bread. Sometimes.
Linda Bagshot on the corner has a ground rooster who can’t fly but always reaches up and stretches her neck out as far as she can to try and scrounge pets as you pass her garden wall.
A local inn is named after its summer aura who is the length of the room, all careful length and soft scales, with breath perfumed like spring breeze and scales that emanate just enough warmth to comfort, just enough that you won’t fall asleep, just enough that it’s tempting nonetheless.
The school you went to has a forest guardian older than the town itself who spends all his time slowly ambling down the corridors, and his favourites are the kids learning their first letters who like to read to him, sound out letters and marks that don’t have any correlation just yet, and you know that nobody has conclusively proven that dragons understand human tongues but you also know that if anyone understands, it’s him.
There’s a festival of dragons, a public holiday where banners are strewn and candles glow even into the wee hours and rainbow confetti and paint clogs the streets and maybe some overexcited babies set things alight but that’s ok, the town prepared better this year, far fewer people will lose their gardens and eyebrows this time, they promise.
And yes ok, there are big dragons. Ferocious dragons. Dragons that only come out once every ten years to feed and pillage. Dragons who rule the seas and shake mountains, who take flight and block out the stars. There are reasons you don’t go into the woods at night, reasons some wells are avoided, reasons entire villages up and vanished without a trace.
But there are also dragons who curl up with your children to rock them to sleep, and ward off nightmares. There are dragons who open doors and fetch supplies and guide those without sight. There are dragons who mimic words and whistles and delight in your joy when they get them just right.
There are dragons who adopt orphaned piglets, kittens, lambs, calves, puppies, ducklings. There are dragons who sunbathe and dragons who need kept on ice and dragons who climb atop weather vanes in storms to conduct electricity. Dragons who sparkle like jewels in the light and dragons who glow in the dark and dragons with flora creeping in and around their scales and dragons who sound like windchimes when they fold their wings.
I’m gonna write an updated comedy of manners about excel spreadsheets and webcomic artists in which Jack Worthington is a data analyst who has invented a fake free-spirited webcomic artist brother so he has an excuse to visit the city; his STEM mentee Cecily lives in the burbs and builds robots but dreams of going to the city to meet Jack’s romantic artist wastrel brother. Meanwhile Jack’s friend Algernon, who is a “startup entrepreneur” with no visible employment, has discovered Jack’s secret life and threatened to tell his girlfriend, hipster social justice activist Gwendolyn, who thinks Jack works for Algy’s startup because that’s way hipper than wrangling Excel spreadsheets all day.
All is upset by Mrs. Bracknell, the imperious baby boomer who can never get the right coffee order or change from Dr. Frederica Chasuble, a barista who has an unmarketable PHD in feminist classical theology and a crush on Cecily’s college admissions coach Ms. Prism. Mrs. Bracknell doesn’t want Jack marrying Gwendolyn because due to a database error at the hospital when he was born, most institutions (banks, cellphone providers, insurance companies) think Jack is deceased.
I have decided that what I need right now at this very moment is a Channing Tatum and Michael Pena buddy cop movie. You think Dwayne The Rock Johnson is going to be the villain, but really he’s a secret do-gooder who stumbled upon the evil/illegal operation and decided to work his way in to expose its secrets. Chris Evans plays the real villain, who believes 100% that the evil he’s doing is the Right Thing to Do because that kind of bad guy is a fucking terrifying bad guy and if Chris Evans can make all of us believe that getting shot in the head by Hydra agents is the smart choice, he can make us believe that whatever evil thing his character is doing is the right thing, which is super creepy.
Also, the whole time, Channing Tatum and The Rock will slowly be falling in love and everyone’s aware of it but Channing Tatum’s character. Michael Pena will be like, “You lived with a dude for three years, it’s okay, I already know you’re gay,” and Channing Tatum will be like, “Dude, he was my bro, that’s it.”
“Yeah, your naked bro.”
“That’s a thing! Look, you weren’t in a frat so you don’t know this, but being naked bros with another bro is totally a valid thing.”
“That’s not a thing except maybe on the Cocky Boys website, or maybe Sean Cody, do you see the fucking lengths I go for you? I know the names of gay porn sites for you, dude.”
“But I’m not gay. Or bi. Don’t start that whole thing up again. I’m not into dudes.”
“What about that time I walked in and you were sucking your naked bro’s dick?”
“I wasn’t sucking his dick, I was giving him broral, it’s a totally different thing.”
“Yeah, but I’m pretty sure you swallowed his semen.”
“What did you expect me to do, spit it out on the couch? I’m not an animal.”
“I’m totally cool with you being gay. Everybody is. Your dad got that rainbow flag tattooed on his arm for you, you know.”
“My dad just likes rainbows.”
“Your dad loves his gay son and is showing his support by getting his love for you tattooed on his fucking skin, you’d better respect and come out already.”
Etc., etc.
And then they save the puppies and/or the world and at the climactic moment, the Channing Tatum character realizes that holy shit, he’s in love with The Rock and has a minor freakout because feelings.
The Michael Pena character will have to talk him down, like, “Look, it’s okay, men just aren’t encouraged to explore their emotions so you didn’t know, but it’s fine. Romantic feelings are totally normal, all right? And it’s totally normal to feel scared when you realize how vulnerable being in love makes you, but you have to calm down because you know more about bombs than I do and you have to stop hyperventilating long enough to tell me if I need to cut the red wire or the blue wire.”
“The blue wire. Should I call him? Or, no, should I text him? I should text him, right? He gave me his number five days ago what if he thinks I’m not texting him because I’m not interested and not just because I didn’t know, oh, my God, I’m going to text him right now. Do you think he’ll believe me if I tell him I just forgot or does that sound like I don’t care or, no, no, the blue wire! Blue! I said blue!”
And then they have to run really fast and jump while there’s a giant fireball explosion behind them that doesn’t actually cause any real damage or send any shrapnel flying.
And then they apprehend the bad guys (Chris Evans should probably be naked while he’s getting handcuffed, just to be on the safe side), and Channing Tatum and The Rock go on a silly yet romantic first date that involves mini-golf and Michael Pena goes home to his college history professor wife, played in a cameo by Sandra Bullock, who is also the movie’s executive producer.
In the sequel, Michael and Sandra and then Channing and the Rock all go to a couple’s retreat that turns sinister and all four of them have to save the day and there should be a naked cameo by Chris Evans. For continuity reasons.
This hasn’t happened yet and I want to know why. I think we deserve this. We’re good people. We deserve to live in a world where this movie exists.
Kimchi and Justice 