i don’t understand why people don’t instantly respond to “what would your dream superpower be” with the ability to manipulate probability. think about it. what’s the chance someone will drop 1mil in front of me? 0%? let’s make that 100%. what’s the probability i’ll wake up tomorrow and be X gender? 100%. what’s the probability my bathtub is filled with mac and cheese? 100%.
as a casino employee I can confirm this would be terrifying as fuck
I still like teleport, no error, whether I’ve ever been there or not.
The superpower of
probability
is terrifying for other reasons.
what’s the probability my bathtub is filled with mac and cheese? 100%.
Consider all the unlikely things that must occur in just the proper sequence for this to happen. It’s not just wishing 50 gallons of mac & cheese into existence – that’d be a different superpower.
No, we’re talking about some serious reality bending here.
Like maybe: an 18-wheeler hauling a load of instant Kraft macaroni & cheese collides with a tanker truck filled with water outside your home. Both vehicles erupt into flame, which cooks the combined noodles & cheese mixture within a small non-nuclear mushroom cloud of an explosion.
The cooked mixture of mac & cheese (and burning fuel!) rises into the air on thermals a hundred feet above your house, exactly above your bathroom.
At just the right moment, as the starchy cloud of cheesy noodles reaches the apex of its hideous arc, a freak storm causes a lightning bolt to crash down out of the blue, blasting a hole in your roof above the bathtub.
Shingles and plywood explode away from the roof and are diverted to the side by sudden 50 mph crosswinds… which, because of freak weather conditions, are perfectly timed to whisk away the roof debris but stop just as suddenly before the descending cloud of mac & cheese can be blown aside.
Four seconds later there is a moist mighty THLUPPPPnoise as ~50 gallons of half-cooked, badly mixed mac & cheese & diesel fuel land in a soggy mess within your bathtub.
Ding! Your bathtub full of mac & cheese? Probability 100%.
Also: two dead truck drivers, untold collateral damage from the explosion, a wrecked roof, dangerous storms trashing the neighborhood, and a disgusting inedible mess in your bathroom.
Oh wait, you wanted it perfectly cooked, ready to eat? Too bad… you didn’t specify that. And if you had, imagine the FURTHER ridiculous unlikely events required to make that happen.
Because you’re not just wishing shit into existence. You’re shifting realities.
Which, if you’re selecting for a very improbable circumstance means moving a LOT of existing reality out of the way – which takes energy. Because reality has inertia & momentum just like a river does, and does not want to be diverted.
This might be the most terrifying super power ever, just from its side effects.
“The truth isn’t easily pinned to a page. In the bathtub of history the truth is harder to hold than the soap, and much more difficult to find…”—Terry Pratchett, Sourcery (via sy5starplaty)
People still think of Lando as “The Guy Who Betrayed The Trio” and that’s some grade A bull.
I mean what would you do if you had people to protect and Darth Vader, Scariest Dude in the Galaxy, comes marching up to your door with a whole battalion of soldiers? Like? How much choice do you think he actually had here? Not much because Vader literally changes the rules on him every scene they’re together so the deal goes from “Trap the smuggler and his friends” to “Han’s being tortured and frozen in carbonite and taken away and the others that were supposed to be left untouched are also being taken capture indefinitely right now” and Lando has all of no control over any of it.
And then the second he realizes what’s happened he risks everything to help Chewie and Leia out. Leaves his cozy home to help them. Joins the Rebellion? Frees Han? Blows up the second Death Star?
But sure he’s just that sleaze ball who betrayed the gang. Sure.
I do not trust people who rag on Lando.
Seriously? Did they just sleep through Return of the Jedi?
Also, “They showed up here just before you did” gives us context to when Han arrives unannounced, and Lando tries to get Han to lose his cool and book out?
“ Why you slimy, double-crossing, no-good swindler. “
Lando opens with giving Han an excuse to say “Same to you Bantha herder, Chewie, we’re out”. Lando insults a smuggler known for his pride, hoping to get a rise and a reaction and risks his life to try to insult Han off the trap
“ You got a lot of guts coming here, after what you pulled!”
Also, assume that Lando’s just been ambushed by the Empire, and told that Han Solo is headed here, and that it’s the same Han Solo who just ran a blockade on Hoth, and Hoth is within non-hyperdrive flight range of Bespin.
Lando literally opens with a coded “You ran an Imperial Blockade and now you’re flying in openly at the nearest system?”
If the Han Solo of ANH and, as recently as Hoth base (Who’s scruffy looking?), had been as a hot headed as Lando expected, he would have walked back up the ramp and flown off in a huff. Lando tries to salvage the situation from before we even know there’s a problem
Lando was administrator and responsible for tens of thousands of lives. From the radio play “You should have looked around more, Han. You’d have recognized a lot of faces. A lot of people here are at the end of their ropes. This is their last chance for any kind of life.”
Yup. Lando’s actions are “Try to get Cloud City out this, try to get his friends out of this, try to get out of this himself, got out? EVACUATE THE CITY. Then save friends and self”
He could have flown off quietly, Lobot could have been instructed to prepare the escape vehicle. No, Lando gives the evac signal by announcing it’s him, and announcing the Empire has control of the city. Yeah, way to paint a target on your back there. No “Hit the fire alarm” button and run, no sneak off in the night.
Lando Calrissian was trying to save the most people possible without being willing to simply sacrifice his friends for the most efficient gain
Lando Calrissian is one of the most ethical characters in the original trilogy. He was stuck between a rock and a hard place, but he also turned on Vader/helped Leia and Chewie as soon as he could do so. We last see him in Empire setting off to help track down where Boba Fett took Han.
We see him next in Return of the Jedi, saving Han. And then volunteering for a possibly suicidal mission. Lando’s proven himself a hundred times over.
I told my students that they can come to my office hours only if, from down the hall they shout “Gondor calls for aid,” so I can reply “And Rohan will answer!”
Was reading up on the rise of cremation in Victorian England when I came across this sentence : ‘The debate became more heated’. I see what you did there.
If you ever feel like you’ve screwed up, just remember that in 1348 the Scots thought it would be a good idea to invade England because the English were weakened by the Plague. They subsequently caught the plague themselves, went back to Scotland, and killed half their own population.
I hate linguistic anthropology. Why? One of the most influential experiments in linguistic anthropology involved teaching a chimp asl. One of the most influential linguistics is named Noam Chomsky. You know what the chimp’s name was?
Nim Chimpsky.
Fucking monkey pun.
And this is in textbooks, in documentaries, everywhere. And everyone just IGNORES THIS GOD AWFUL PUN cause of how important the experiment was. But
BUT LOOK AT THIS SHIT. FUCKING NIM CHIMPSKY. I HATE THIS WHOLE FIELD.
Its not just the linguistic anthropologists.
There’s a group of very important genes that determine if your body develops in the right shape/organization… they are called the hedgehog genes, because fruit fly geneticists are all ridiculous. The different hedgehog genes are all named after different hedgehogs. And then someone decided to get clever and name one “sonic hedgehog” because this is just what fruitfly geneticists do.
Well sonic hedgehog controls brain development, and now actual doctors are stuck in the position of explaining to grieving parents that their child’s lethal birth defects or life-threatening tumors are caused by a “sonic hedgehog mutation”.
And this is why no one will invite the fruit fly people to parties.
Biogeochemical scientists, upon discovering the complex mechanisms that govern the storage and use of molecular iron on our planet, decided to call this cycle “the ferrous wheel”. We groaned about that for at least five solid minutes.
The phenomenon of sneezing when exposed to sudden bright light is called an Autosomal-dominant Compelling Helio Opthalmic Outburst. ACHOO.
Half a byte of data is a nibble.
I LOVE US
And don’t forget the particle physicists.
While trying to figure out what the hell our universe is almost entirely made out of, one theory they came up with is that it’s a bunch of Weakly-Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs).
So naturally, they followed that up with MAssive Compact Halo Objects (MACHOs) and Robust Associations of Massive Baryonic Objects (RAMBOs).
AU where people age until they reach 18 and then stop aging until they meet their soul mate so they can grow old together.
i’d never die
but imagine already being in a relationship at 18 and then at 22 you’re both sitting there looking at each other and realizing that you both haven’t aged a day
imagine platonically moving in with ur best friend at 18 and then realizing a few years later that you’ve been aging together
imagine purposely never finding your soul mate so you can reign eternal
holy shit i think we may have stumbled upon the greatest romance/adventure concept ever
What if you killed your soul mate so you’d make sure you never aged.
This just makes me really want a story where the main antagonist is someone who has been killing their soulmate for centuries whenever they find them, and the main protagonist is the newly re-incarnated version of their soulmate
okay but you guys dont realize the potential.
imagine meeting a handsome young man who’s seen as a player and sleeps around a lot and you notice a scar along his arm and ask where he got it. he just look down at his feet and said “i used to be a soldier in world war one”. He’s been sleeping around and hooking up so much cause he’s been trying to find his soulmate for years but hasn’t yet.
Imagine going on your first date with someone and you really hit it off and then the next day you notice a grey hair and call them on the phone excitedly screaming and they both just sit on the phone hysterically crying and laughing.
Imagine sitting in silence with your partner and having them say out of the blue “i feel so old when im around you… but… in a good way” and thats the moment you know that they love you.
imagine having a dog thats 18 in human years and it starts to get gray patches of fur because they loves you so much.
imagine noticing you look older and freaking out but then stopping and getting super confused because “im not dating anyone right now…. which of my friends is my soulmate… WHICH ONE IS IT!?!?!?” and then they hopelessly date everyone they know in order to find out which one it fucking was. it was the pizza delivery guy the whole time. they went on 27 dates that all ended in confusion and heartbreak and it was the god damn pizza delivery guy from a month ago the whole fucking time.
imagine someone dating their partner for 5 years and then having an affair. only after the affair do they start aging.
imagine nuns who start to age after they ceremoniously “marry god”
imagine people getting surgeries to look older cause they dont want people to think theyre alone.
imagine having parents who wont let you date anyone but they start to notice you aging and then you have to have a terrifying “surprise im gay and i have a boyfriend haha oops” conversation
imagine seeing couples with teenage kids and the couple both looks 18.
since I’ve never seen someone actually post the song on tumblr
OKAY. GUYS.
When this came out and I saw it for the first time I was FLOORED. Little me was IN LOVE with the sparkly red dress, the intensity, and how she belted this song out.
I replayed it a thousand times and tried to sing along, and to this day it’s stuck with me and still inspires me in little ways and it’s like my dream to sing this in front of a crowd, THIS VERSION. It’s the best cover of this song ever made and I’m so glad it exists. I will listen to this song forever and ever.
Me listening to “study music” while working : Meh… this is distracting. Me listening to nature sounds while working : Is that rain, or bacon frying ? Me listening to horror music while working : Let’s get typing !
i don’t like fantasy books where someone is like ‘but i don’t want to be king!’ and their gandalf-figure says ‘ahhh… but that makes you Super Qualified’ listen putting people in positions of leadership simply because their heart is pure is no way to run an empire!!! i would rather stick with someone who was kind of evil but knew how to run the national health service, not Michael the Virtuous who is really aces at slaying dragons but a bit rubbish when it comes to international trading partners, thankyouverymuch.
