if i was a pirate captain i would get a movie projector and play a movie on the big sails every friday night for my boys to kick back and enjoy some time off unless we were under attack
Pirates legit did the 16-17th century equivalent of this. When things were slow, they would put on plays, act out dramas of stories they knew, or freestyle. The most preferred model of original productions was courtroom drama: “trying” each other for piracy. The “accused” would list off their many, dramatically and humorously embellished crimes, and be equally dramatically sentenced. Sometimes there was a daring escape, sometimes just a really maudlin death scene, but a good time was had by all.
So they kindasorta had roleplaying games crossed with LARPing?
to add to this “humans are weird” thing did you know that humans are the only species on earth with the ability to throw things with any significant degree of accuracy and force (apes can throw with about the force of a human ten year old, but cant lock their wrists well enough for accuracy)
and we just never really think about it bc its so easy and simple to us that pretty much all of our sports are based around the concept of throwing things accurately
so what if the concept of projectile weapons takes most species FOREVER to get the hang of, or even come up with in the first place. a human goes onto a ship and throws some trash into the nearest reclaimer, shouts “kobe!” and all the other aliens on board absolutely LOSE THEIR MINDS
I definitely didn’t know this about humans but it’s actually really neat
‘This place needs a dartboard.’ *darts is explained* ‘You… throw sharp objects at a tiny point on a circle with the expectation of hitting it and mock those who do not achieve this amazing feat.’ ‘It’s better if you’ve had a couple of beers.’ ‘You insist that you’re more accurate when partially intoxicated. I have seen you intoxicated. Fine motor control is not something I associate with intoxication.’ ‘The one sport where doping is actually encouraged.’ ‘Humans. How. Just how. ’ ‘You think this is hard, try throwing cards.’
I’m now super enchanted with the idea that there are all these alien racs out there that basically didn’t do projectiles until at least they had geometry and aerodynamics worked out– no throwing stones or slings and arrows, nothing range until catapults with some heavy maths calculations behind them because they couldn’t eyeball it. And some of them not even having that– going from hand-to-hand to computer-targetted bombs, pretty much. And then coming to earth and finding out about spears and bows and arrows and slings and skipping stones– and suddenly there’s a rush on their homeworlds of all these really bad pop-xenopyschoanthropology books about the effect of being able to kill at a distance on our pyschocultural development, how it effects our perception of ourselves and the universe – all these bad science, lurid explanations about how this has effected our strange alien minds to give us warped senses of territoriality or death or social-unit-bonding.
Of all the humans are weird I like this one the most. Feels mundane enough yet just weird enough without making us out to be supersoldiers because I dunno I guess aliens have weak constitutions now or something..
Most ‘humans are weird’ things try to focus on the things humans can do that most animals can’t, but like, they kinda blow it out of proportion. Like sure humans are sturdier than most animals but not by THAT much.
Personally, I’ve always like the combination of facts that A) We’re obscenely flexible compared to anything with else with bones B) We have crazy endurance and C) We’re DTF pretty much whenever. And whatever, for that matter.
Super soldiers nothing, I’m pretty sure Humans would be the Weird Sex Alien.
Those ones are also decent and reasonable “humans can be cool space alien planet of hat biological archetypes too!”
humans:
internal organs are full of acid
eats poison for fun
can throw things like woah
can run for a long time even when normally you would get tired
no but seriously I still get chills thinking about turning off my headlamp in the cave and The Hand That I Did Not Actually See, and it’s been twelve years since it happened
it’s such an unreal experience
like
you turn off your light in a cave and wave your hand in front of your face
and
you can see this shadowy thing moving in the black space where your hand is
it looks like the same shadowy thing you would see in your room at night if you waved your hand in front of your face, it’s there and vaguely hand-shaped, and your brain recognizes it as your hand because your brain is aware of where your hand is and what it is doing
But You Are Not Seeing Anything
Inside a cave, there is No Light. No matter how far your pupils spread, there is no light for them to draw in, no light to put an image on your retina.
But your brain just Fucking Assumes that because it knows where your hand is and what it is doing, clearly it can see it.
So it creates a shadowy thing for your eyes to be seeing.
Brain is like “there’s a hand there”
Eyes are like “yup sure thing brain I can totally see it”
Brain is like “nice”
but there is no hand, you cannot see the hand, you are seeing a literal actual hallucination in the cave because your brain thinks it knows best
Caves are awesome, but also terrifying. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
we once went spelunking, and a our guide said that once he was in a cave with a stream, so he could hear running water, and his brain was like ‘oh, running water? that means there must be Ducks out there’. and he saw like…low light shadows of ducks. that his brain just Put There.
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 love every single variation on this post, whenever it scrolls across my dash.
Although bipedal and nominally terrestrial, humans are also capable of highly efficient climbing, brachiation, and swimming without mechanical or technological assistance.
In times of plenty, humans will ingest surplus food and metabolize it into a form of stored nutrition which permeates their tissues and forms a protective, thermally insulating layer under their skin. Even a human with minimal ‘fat’ reserves can go for several Terran days without appreciable food intake.
Humans are highly neuroplastic, and retain the ability to learn throughout their life cycle. Indeed, geriatric humans rely increasingly on the synthesis and application of their accumulated knowledge as their physical condition declines.
The human olfactory system is notoriously insensitive, and scents which may incapacitate other species have no appreciable effect on them.
Humans are effectively psy-null. They possess no psionic abilities of their own, and attempts at one-way psionic contact have resulted in severe trauma to researchers due to the alien structure of human minds.
The human skeleton is composed of a hard, resilient mineral-biological composite. This renders them capable of withstanding heavy loads and impacts, and of delivering devastating blows with all extremities. Although somewhat brittle, the stone-based tissue of human bone retains the ability to heal when injured.
Carpathia received Titanic’s distress signal at 12:20am, April 15th, 1912. She was 58 miles away, a distance that absolutely could not be covered in less than four hours.
(Californian’s exact position at the time is…controversial. She was close enough to have helped. By all accounts she was close enough to see Titanic’s distress rockets. It’s uncertain to this day why her crew did not respond, or how many might not have been lost if she had been there. This is not the place for what-ifs. This is about what was done.)
Carpathia’s Captain Rostron had, yes, rolled out of bed instantly when woken by his radio operator, ordered his ship to Titanic’s aid and confirmed the signal before he was fully dressed. The man had never in his life responded to an emergency call. His goal tonight was to make sure nobody who heard that fact would ever believe it.
All of Carpathia’s lifeboats were swung out ready for deployment. Oil was set up to be poured off the side of the ship in case the sea turned choppy; oil would coat and calm the water near Carpathia if that happened, making it safer for lifeboats to draw up alongside her. He ordered lights to be rigged along the side of the ship so survivors could see it better, and had nets and ladders rigged along her sides ready to be dropped when they arrived, in order to let as many survivors as possible climb aboard at once.
I don’t know if his making provisions for there still being survivors in the water was optimism or not. I think he knew they were never going to get there in time for that. I think he did it anyway because, god, you have to hope.
Carpathia had three dining rooms, which were immediately converted into triage and first aid stations. Each had a doctor assigned to it. Hot soup, coffee, and tea were prepared in bulk in each dining room, and blankets and warm clothes were collected to be ready to hand out. By this time, many of the passengers were awake–prepping a ship for disaster relief isn’t quiet–and all of them stepped up to help, many donating their own clothes and blankets.
And then he did something I tend to refer to as diverting all power from life support.
Here’s the thing about steamships: They run on steam. Shocking, I know; but that steam powers everything on the ship, and right now, Carpathia needed power. So Rostron turned off hot water and central heating, which bled valuable steam power, to everywhere but the dining rooms–which, of course, were being used to make hot drinks and receive survivors. He woke up all the engineers, all the stokers and firemen, diverted all that steam back into the engines, and asked his ship to go as fast as she possibly could. And when she’d done that, he asked her to go faster.
I need you to understand that you simply can’t push a ship very far past its top speed. Pushing that much sheer tonnage through the water becomes harder with each extra knot past the speed it was designed for. Pushing a ship past its rated speed is not only reckless–it’s difficult to maneuver–but it puts an incredible amount of strain on the engines. Ships are not designed to exceed their top speed by even one knot. They can’t do it. It can’t be done.
Carpathia’s absolute do-or-die, the-engines-can’t-take-this-forever top speed was fourteen knots. Dodging icebergs, in the dark and the cold, surrounded by mist, she sustained a speed of almost seventeen and a half.
No one would have asked this of them. It wasn’t expected. They were almost sixty miles away, with icebergs in their path. They had a respondibility to respond; they did not have a responsibility to do the impossible and do it well. No one would have faulted them for taking more time to confirm the severity of the issue. No one would have blamed them for a slow and cautious approach. No one but themselves.
They damn near broke the laws of physics, galloping north headlong into the dark in the desperate hope that if they could shave an hour, half an hour, five minutes off their arrival time, maybe for one more person those five minutes would make the difference. I say: three people had died by the time they were lifted from the lifeboats. For all we know, in another hour it might have been more. I say they made all the difference in the world.
This ship and her crew received a message from a location they could not hope to reach in under four hours. Just barely over three hours later, they arrived at Titanic’s last known coordinates. Half an hour after that, at 4am, they would finally find the first of the lifeboats. it would take until 8:30 in the morning for the last survivor to be brought onboard. Passengers from Carpathia universally gave up their berths, staterooms, and clothing to the survivors, assisting the crew at every turn and sitting with the sobbing rescuees to offer whatever comfort they could.
In total, 705 people of Titanic’s original 2208 were brought onto Carpathia alive. No other ship would find survivors.
At 12:20am April 15th, 1912, there was a miracle on the North Atlantic. And it happened because a group of humans, some of them strangers, many of them only passengers on a small and unimpressive steam liner, looked at each other and decided: I cannot live with myself if I do anything less.
I think the least we can do is remember them for it.
A better story about leadership and emergent common causes.
A lot of ‘humans are weird’ posts play with the idea that humans are one of the few species that actually evolved as a predator and, as such, we are unusually strong and fast— but what if we’re not.
What if we’re tiny?
What if, to the majority of species in the galaxy, ten feet tall is unusually short— it basically only happens due to rare genetic conditions— and the average human is basically cat sized or smaller?
Instead of being terrified by our strength, the aliens’ most pressing concern is how exactly they’re going to communicate with us when we’re all the way down on the ground.
There are experiments, with aliens crouching low or humans standing on high platforms— but it usually ends up being either uncomfortable for the alien or dangerous for the human, or both, and just generally impractical for everyone.
But, while the diplomats and politicians are trying to figure out a dignified and simple solution, the ordinary people who actually have to work with the aliens have found one. Humans are, generally, pretty good climbers, and most species have conveniently places scales, feathers, fur or clothing that can act as a hand or foothold. Sure, some humans have a fear of heights, but those aren’t typically the ones going into space. Besides, climbing on a living alien often feels safer than climbing up a rock or something— at least you know you’ve got somebody to catch you.
Soon it becomes accepted that that’s the way humans travel with aliens— up high, easy to see and hard to tread on (there were quite a few… near misses, in the first few meetings between humans and aliens), balanced on somebody’s shoulder like the overgrown monkeys that we are.
Many humans see this as kind of an insult and absolutely refuse to go along with it, but they aren’t the ones who end up spending a lot of time with aliens— it’s just too inconvenient to talk to somebody all the way down on the ground. The ones that do best are the ones who just treat it like it’s normal, allowing themselves to be carried (at least, it’s ‘carrying’ when the aliens are within earshot. Among themselves, most humans jokingly refer to it as ‘riding’), and passing on tips to their friends about the best ways to ride on different species without damaging feathers, or stepping on sensitive spots (or, in at least one case, ending up with a foot full of poisonous spines…).
The reason they don’t feel patronised by this is that they know, and they know that nearly everyone else in the galaxy knows, that humans are not just pets.
After all, you’d be surprised when a small size comes in handy.
Need somebody to look at the wiring in a small and fairly inaccessible area of the ship? Ask a human.
Need somebody to fix this fairly small and very detailed piece of machinery? Ask a human, they’re so small that their eyes naturally pick up smaller details.
Trapped under rubble and need somebody to crawl through a small gap and get help? Ask a human— most can wriggle through any gap that they can fit their head and shoulders through.
If you’re a friend, humans can be very useful. If, on the other hand, you’re an enemy…
Rumours spread all around the galaxy, of ships that threatened humans or human allies and started experiencing technical problems. Lights going off, wires being cut— in some cases, the cases where the threats were more than just words and humans or friends of humans were killed, life support lines have been severed, or airlocks have mysteriously malfunctioned and whole crews have been sucked out into space.
If the subject comes up, most humans will blame it on “gremlins” and exchange grim smiles when they’re other species friends aren’t looking.
By this point, most ships have a crew of humans, whether they like it or not. Lots of humans, young ones generally, the ones who want to see a bit of the universe but don’t have the money or connections to make it happen any other way, like to stowaway on ships. They’ll hang around the space ports, wait for a ship’s door to open and dart on in. The average human can have quite a nice time scurrying around in the walls of an alien ship, so long as they’re careful not to dislodge anything important.
Normally nobody notices them, and the ones that do tend not to say anything— it’s generally recognised that having humans on your ship is good luck.
If there are humans on your ship, they say, then anything you lose will be found within a matter of days, sometimes even in your quarters; any minor task you leave out— some dishes that need to be cleaned, a report that needs to be spellchecked, some calculations that need to be done— will be quickly and quietly completed during the night; any small children on the ship, who are still young enough to start to cry in the night, will be soothed almost before their parents even wake, sometimes even by words in their own tongue, spoken clumsily through human vocal chords. If any of the human are engineers (and a lot of them are, and still more of them aren’t, but have picked up quite a few tricks on their travels from humans who are) then minor malfunctions will be fixed before you even notice them, and your ship is significantly less likely to experience any major problems.
The humans are eager to earn their keep, especially when the more grateful aliens start leaving out dishes of human-safe foods for them.
This, again, is considered good luck— especially since the aliens who aren’t kind to the humans often end up losing things, or waking up to find that their fur has been cut, or the report they spent hours on yesterday has mysteriously been deleted.
To human crew members, who work on alien ships out in the open, and have their names on the crew manifest and everything, these small groups of humans are colloquially referred to as ‘ship’s rats’. There’s a sort of uneasy relationship between the two groups. On the one hand, the crew members regard the ship’s rats as spongers and potential nuisances— on the other hand, most human crew members started out as ship’s rats themselves, and now benefit from the respect (and more than a little awe) that the ship’s rats have made most aliens feel for humans. The general arrangement is that ship’s rats try to avoid ships with human crew members and, when they can’t, then they make sure to stay out of the crew members’ way, and the crew members who do see one make sure not to mention them to any alien crew members.
The aliens who know, on the other hand, have gotten into the habit of not calling them by name— mainly because they’re shaky as the legality of this arrangement, and don’t want to admit that anything’s going on. Instead they talk about “the little people” or “the ones in the walls” or, more vaguely, “Them”.
Their human friends— balancing on their shoulders, occasionally scurrying down and arm so as to get to a table, or jumping from one person’s shoulder to another, in order to better follow the conversation— laugh quietly to themselves when they hear this.
Back before the first first contact, lot of people on Earth thought that humans would become space orcs. Little did they know, they’d actually end up as space fae.
the universe: okay, you’re a human. I gave you free will and a conscious mind, so you’re free to do whatever you want. So what do you wanna do?
human: GO FAST
the universe: well, you’re a perfect pursuit predator but if that’s the way you want to evolve, go ahead.
human, climbing on a horse: GO FAST
the universe: wait what
human, inventing the carriage, the car and the bullet train: GO FASTER
the universe: I IMPLORE YOU TO STOP
human, trying to figure out lightspeed travel: FAS T ER
human:
THEORETICALLY MAXIMUM FAST
the universe:
How will the people in the ship not get gibbed?
Because the warp drive doesn’t actually accelerate the ship, it just makes the space in front of it smaller and the space behind it larger. Or something.
it works like this
Objects cannot accelerate to the speed of light within normal spacetime; instead, the Alcubierre drive shifts space around an object so that the object would arrive at its destination faster than light would in normal space without breaking any physical laws.
A WRINKLE IN TIME IS COMING TRUE
We gonna be surfing gravity waves!!
COWABUNGA SPACE DUDES!
I love how mankind’s solution to ftl is just to bend to rules of reality a little.
Universe: ok human, with the physical laws as they are you can’t go faster than the speed of light.
Humanity: ok, let me just figure out how to manipulate space time so I can go FASTER!
everytime I hear about children of the corn I think about the guy I met at comic con who actually lived in the town they filmed that movie at, and on the farm where they filmed in the corn.
he was a teenager at the time and him and his friends would get drunk on moonshine and rustle the corn and let the air out of the tires of the production team’s trailers and shit.
and now there’s Wikipedia pages about how the children of the corn set was haunted and they thought they angered god but it was really just drunk hillbillies
I don’t like adding to posts but I also have a funny story like this, so I was watching the movie the Blair witch which takes place in burkettsville maryland, which to me is so funny because that is were my grandfather lives and the town is literally just old people and cows with their main street consisting of a post office. Well anyway he told me that after it came out people were coming in like bus loads to the town to find the witch and my grandfather lives up in the Mountain area and people were up in his property trying to find the witch and it made him angry so he went out and hung up stick people and stacked rocks and it freaked the people out so they started thinking something was out there when really it was my 80 year old Italian grandpa who wanted people out of his woods.
We had ghost hunters come to a historic house in my town to film and if you think every high school kid in town respectfully stayed at home that night instead of going to fuck up that filming you’re dead wrong.
this is comforting, actually, sometimes paranormal things are just a bunch of bored people dicking around in the woods.
hey fellas last night i took a medication which is more or less the anxiety equivalent of a horse tranquilizer & essentially enterred the fifth dimension of sleepwalking in which i awoke but enterred a dissociative fit so strong i was really confused why my loving girlfriend was not my good friend and fellow viking bjorn, who i had to bring some furs to. also i might’ve cried about this. don’t remember
was informed i left out the best part of this 3am experience which was the bit where i, in tears, gestured to our dog and shouted, “i don’t know what this is!”
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