Lyft driver: “Your name, is Slavic? Me too. Bulgarian. I drive fast for you, brother.”
Now he’s waxing philosophical about the Ottoman Empire, imperialism, and human nature. “Humans? We are the most dangerous animal. Other animals, they kill when they need to. We kill when we think we need to. It is not the same.”
He just monologued about climate change and the military industrial complex, and the difficulty of having a Balkan identity when every Balkan country changes hands “every twenty years”. “Our history is getting swallowed by the biggest fish, and that fish getting swallowed by the next biggest fish, and so on.”
He had so many more gems. We compared family names, realized that his daughter shares my grandfather’s name (the feminine version), and then he started talking about The Old Country. The city where he grew up had a population of 300, and the population of his whole country could fit inside Chicago. He came here twenty years ago seeking a better life, but “everything in America is too big, the cars, the problems, the inequality”. He pointed to his phone and called it “stupid little computer” that’s meant to control his life, not to improve it, and how the world is getting steadily worse and the little people can’t do anything about it. He told me to continue my studies so that I don’t grow up to work in the service industry and can instead try to stop the concentration of power into the hands of corrupt people. Then he shrugged and said, “But who knows? Can anyone do it? I don’t know if it’s possible.”
it happened today, damn that was like 3 days maybe?
It Works the money is on its way!
Need this.
Of course
It worked tho
I just won $500 off a scratch Ticket lottery.
ENERGY
OKAY LEGIT I REBLOGGED THIS YESTERDAY. ME AND MY PARTNER ARE IN SUCH A TIGHT SPOT FOR MONEY ATM AS WE ARE SAVING FOR A DEPOSIT ON A HOUSE. I GOT PAID DOUBLE WHAT I THOUGHT I WAS GOING TO GET AND SO DID HE AND HONESTLY I CRIED SO MUCH TODAY IM SO HAPPY AND RELIEVED
y’all know that john mulaney quote “the things crazy people say mean nothing to them but everything to me?”
every time i hear that quote, i think about how i got this light-up pen
i got this pen four years ago when i was working as a barista at starbucks. I was on the registers and taking the order of this woman, who ordered a nonfat latte, because she was “watching her weight”
so this guy behind her, whom no one was talking to, for some fucking reason says “wathing your weight? but what about the wait for your watch?“ (which is a completely unhinged response. like just complete Mad Hatter nonsense)
anyway this lady gets really uncomfortable and of the five people (me, him, her, the other checker, and the customer at the other register) who were now sucked into the uncomfortable silence, i decided that i should alleviate the tension by saying “you can’t wait for a watch; you don’t have the time”
and then he said “oh, quick girl!”, gave me that pen, got out of line, and left without ordering anything
You are a soldier in an alien army. Recently, your unit has been deployed in a developing war against humanity. Seeing them in action, they make marches that would leave any other species dead tired and take injuries that would kill even the hardiest and live.
This war, it has changed me.
In the beginning, I thought our people were doing the right thing. Their planet was a mockery of its former glory, marred and polluted with the filth that humanity left in its wake. We had witnessed these creatures tear each other apart at every opportunity, at every turn. They lied, cheated, assaulted and belittled their peers, their own family was often a target for such behavior. They were savages, no better than the Garatheds of Zas IV, who would eat their own newborns if the children did not flee fast enough.
We began with a space to surface bombardment, shells falling on their major cities and blowing apart their military installations. We wanted to leave the civilians unharmed so that they might be taught how to live better lives.
What we had forgotten was that humanity and the bugs that crawl in their garbage share a trait. They find a way to endure.
The first push was easy, in the chaos of their burning cities the humans were disorganized and panicked, the few that turned on us and fought were like nothing we had seen before. On the continent of America regular citizens came out of their homes bearing primitive weapons that spat hot lead at lethal speeds. We fired back, aiming to incapacitate them with wounds to the arms and legs, but when we hit them… Gods, what horrors have we come against? Even their citizens refused to stop fighting when wounded, we took their weapons and they fought with balled hands that split open on our exoskeleton, yet it barely slowed them. In places without easy access to these “guns” they didn’t even take up military arms, rather they came at us with sporting implements, rods of metal torn from their streets and houses, some even took up the ancient weapons of their past, sharpened lengths of steel, sticks tipped with pointed metal, lengths of leather and cloth that cracked against our bodies with staggering force.
Our unit touched down in Australia first, where Homo Sapiens Sapiens had faded into the burning sands of their country, emerging in the night to beat down our soldiers and take their weapons, using them against us with no concern for their own health, some of them laughing in the face of pain. It was then that I learned of the most terrifying biological trait humanity employs.
Adrenaline.
The weakest of them, the slowest, even the most cowardly of their kind could at any moment manifest power ad courage beyond even their greatest athlete’s everyday means. An adolescent cornered in the street was suddenly a demon, moving so fast the eye could not follow. Pain meant nothing to them in this state, some laughed at it, taking pleasure in wounds that would have stuck down the hardest of our veterans.
It was triggered in times of danger for them, when death was all but imminent their bodies pumped them full of this chemical glory, their brains lifting its self imposed restrictions so they could lift solid stone, dent metal with their bare fists, carry their fallen.
Here we differ as a species the most.
I have witnessed during my time in the lands of Africa and China their people fall, covered in wounds that we would consider debilitating and rendering a specimen beyond repair. Yet these mammals, these humans who had warred with their own kind and killed each other in cold blood before our invasion, they banded together and would fight to the bloody and painful end if it meant they could save even one more of their own, if it meant they could take away the remains of their kin. Where we would abandon a downed soldier, knowing they were dead weight in the battle and fated to die, the humans would rally around them and refuse to lose a single step of ground. It was when they saw their friends and family fall that humans became nightmares.
They would scream, howling their fury and pain as water was released from their eyes. Half blind, hearts racing with adrenaline and throats torn from their own cries, humanity raged among their dead and littered the battlefield with ours. I came to this world assured of our cause, but what if we misjudged these creatures?
Savages would not be able to withhold against our strategy by hiding in the ruins and wilderness, taking our own weapons and turning them on us in the dark, savages would not band together and bond in the midst of anarchy, savages would not grieve so powerfully that even in the face of utter annihilation they stand taller still.
I have spent my time here considering them monsters, yet with every encounter we see another act of solidarity among them, of bonds that cannot be broken by battle, hardship, or even death. We invaded this world because of their ability to hate one another and to prey on each other. In the midst of our revulsion for their hate, we mistook this as their greatest flaw, but it wasn’t.
The others are starting to see it, their mandibles chatter with fear when we speak of it. While humanity may have turned that hatred on us, it isn’t what we are scared of. A human that hates is a human that can be reasoned with, a human that can be cowed using fear and violence.
But nothing we have done, nothing we can bring to bear against them has tempered the ferocity of their love.
Love which picks their bodies up from the dirt that should have been their grave. Love that makes them endure excruciating pain and denies them the time to recover. Love that forces them to fight on in the face of certain defeat. Love that binds them to each other even when they do eventually die.
Their hatred pales when compared to the flaw that is their love, and just like hatred, that love has turned itself against us. What hope do we have against such a thing? It took their civilians, their poor and their broken. It made them into almost invincible warriors, it gave them wealth dressed in rags, it mended their broken spirits. It united them against us, and for all our knowledge, all our strategy and military might, we have no defense against the ferocity and compassion that love gives to humanity.
It’s getting dark now, and the cold is closing in. We know where the last bastion of humanity in this country has hidden away. We number in the thousands and yet… If these creatures fight so viciously when their friends are in danger, what are we coming against by hunting the last of their family? The last of their race in this corner of Earth?
Humans may not be savages, but love?
It makes the meekest of them into an Army unto themselves.
It’s 20:11 and I’m sitting on my couch sobbing because this is a fucking masterpiece.
illiterate dairy maid in 1750, hundreds of years before germ theory was even thought of: because of my exposure to cowpox, im immune to smallpox. if we expose people to cowpox, they won’t die of smallpox
upper middle class college educated mother with internet living in the year of our lord 2018: vaccines are the devils handiwork and a conspiracy i’d rather my child die of polio than be the autism
i had a dream where tornadoes were made illegal or something i just remember like a dozen police cars driving directly toward a tornado with their sirens on and all getting sucked into the tornado
Japan’s complete lack of understanding of declining birth rates in relation to its work culture reminds me a lot of how America has an assumption that millennials are killing industries when the truth is they are more frugal because of a lack of funds.
Both come from a conservative mindset that neglects the impact that a toxic work culture can have on society.
A 80+ hour work week in order to maintain financial stability isn’t exactly a solid ground to date people and eventually build a family from a healthy relationship.
A workforce comprised of 20 somethings that make between 20-40k a year in entry positions isn’t a good ground to build a reliable consumer base when a huge chunk of that is going to rent, utilities, car payments, and student loans.
what if i told you that a lot of “Americanized” versions of foods were actually the product of immigrant experiences and are not “bastardized versions”
That’s actually fascinating, does anyone have any examples?
I took an entire class about Italian American immigrant cuisine and how it’s a product of their unique immigrant experience. The TL;DR is that many Italian immigrants came from the south (the poor) part of Italy, and were used to a mostly vegetable-based diet. However, when they came to the US they found foods that rich northern Italians were depicted as eating, such as sugar, coffee, wine, and meat, available for prices they could afford for the very first time. This is why Italian Americans were the first to combine meatballs with pasta, and why a lot of Italian American food is sugary and/or fattening. Italian American cuisine is a celebration of Italian immigrants’ newfound access to foods they hadn’t been able to access back home.
(Source: Cinotto, Simone. The Italian American Table: Food, Family, and
Community in New York City. Chicago: U of Illinois, 2013. Print.)
peter parker in the 2002 movie is fuckin…. incredible. he gets bitten by a fuckin jacked red blue spider and he doesnt say “hey someone should take me to the hospital mayhaps?” he just goes home. then the bite swells to the size of a fuckin jawbreaker but he’s like “nah i just need a nap.” then he wakes up the next day and discovers that he DOESN’T NEED HIS GLASSES ANYMORE and he has a fuckin six pack. does he flip his entire Fuck? no. he says, “cool.” iconic.
Researchers at MIT were surprised when they discovered that an A.I. which was designed to play League of Legends was instead found playing the popular indie game, Cave Story. The A.I., dubbed Playtron 2000, was created to test logic and learning in machines. “We wanted to create an A.I. that could learn and strategize over time based on its experiences.” spoke Dr. Richards, head researcher at MI, “We chose League of Legends as Playtron 2000′s testing grounds as we wanted to see how an A.I. that was designed to learn from its mistakes would go up against an expect human player.”
However, the researchers plans were cut short when they found on Tuesday morning that Playtron 2000 had uninstalled League of Legends and installed Cave Story in its wake. “At first we thought there may have been an error in Playtron 2000′s code,” spoke Dr. Richards, “but we discovered that Playtron 2000 had indeed gone through a complex trial and error process and had made its decision entirely logically.”
Similar experiments were ran earlier this year with two A.I.’s designed to play DOTA 2, which ended in the A.I.’s uninstalling DOTA 2 to play Bejeweled and Castle Crashers respectively. Research into why this happens is still ongoing.
The other night husband and I were watching a documentary about the yeti where they were doing DNA analysis of samples of supposed yeti fur, and every one of them came back as bears.
Anyway, the next night we watched a thing about some pig man who is supposed to live in Vermont. People said it had claws and a pig nose but walked upright like a man. Now, I happen to know that sideshows used to shave bears and present them as pig men. So every piece of evidence they gave of this monster sounds to me like a bear with mange.
So now the running joke in our house is that everything is bears. Aliens? Bears. Loch Ness monster? Bear. Every cryptozoological mystery is just a very crafty bear.
Bears. They’re everywhere. Be wary. Anyone or anything could be a bear.
