me as a kid reading Dune: I appreciate the detailed world-building that justifies why everyone fights with swords and has mental powers, but the idea of a Butlerian Jihad against computers is pretty silly
me in 2025, trying desperately to find the three (3) places you need to go to to disable the latest helpful AI assistant that’s inserted itself into my work chat and is advising me to do things that would be a breach of federal law: Oh Now I Get It
True. Most Irish people, as Norwegians do with Trolls, will happily let the ‘fairies’ be a thing to make tours for tourists and idle threats to make children behave. Most Irish people will have a very normal and mature explanation of fairies as a common folk mythology that expresses some dimension of Irish culture but are not, obviously, to be taken literally.
And most Irish people, if you ask them to move a stone from a fairy circle will immoveably, flatly respond with 'absolutely fucking not’.
Construction projects have had to halt and be abandoned for it.
Recently heard an Italian phrase which roughly translates to “It’s not true, but I believe it.”
[ID: Screenshot of a tweet by @/okahomadude says, “My Norwegian grandma says ‘Everyone knows trolls aren’t real, but everyone also knows they aren’t fake’ which I think is real.” In reply, @/Bubblenoma says, “This is how Irish people feel about fairies.” End ID.]
My philosophy is thus: you don’t have to believe in everything, but better to not fuck with it just in case.
Yknow what I LOVE about the Star Trek fandom? It’s ANCIENT. I had a talk with a nice old lady at the old persons home that my great grandma is in and she noticed my Spock shirt and was like “oh I love that show I thought the premise was lovely” and you all know THE PREMISE is trekspeak for spirk and I was like “do you accept the premise because I do” and she looked at me with the eyes of someone who is reliving their otp moments and she said “the premise is all I wrote about, dear” and we just talked about spirk for a hella long time and I just love how age doesn’t matter in this fandom you can be ninety and still be the biggest spirk bitch ever how rad is that
I was today years old when I learned that particular euphemism
I was also today years old. Fandom codes man
Reblogging to spread knowledge about the Premise, because I absolutely love that bit of fandom, and I want to make sure that it survives. (and yay to everyone who is part of today’s 10,000!)
The reason it was called “The Premise” was plausible deniability. Because homosexuality was still criminalized then, and admitting to shipping a couple fictional dudes together could get you in serious trouble if you said it to the wrong person, but fans wanted to be able to find each other, and discuss their fandom in semi-public spaces safely. And so, “The Premise” became code. If someone didn’t know the code, they’d assume you’re talking about the literal premise of the show (that is, the idea that humans will have faster-than-light space travel in the future and travel around meeting aliens and having adventures), and respond accordingly.
It’s exactly the same concept as how, if you tell some random person who doesn’t tumblr that you like their shoelaces, they’ll be like “uh, thanks?” and then you know they don’t tumblr while they also have not been informed that YOU tumblr. But if they respond “thanks, I stole them from the president”… you both know. Except with higher social stakes for making sure you aren’t outing yourself as a Spirk shipper to the wrong person. It’s fine NOW of course, but it wasn’t always.
I am a simple woman. I see Star Trek content, I reblog.
I can’t find the original post, but one of the Humans Are Space Orcs posts was about how maybe it would be absolutely unhinged that the average human can just approximately judge mass and velocity and distance with eyes and muscles, and throw objects with moderate to high accuracy. Like, no planning, binocular vision only, no triangulation, just toss stuff. They go apeshit over human sports, because that’s like if a worm wrote a novel or something, practically a bloodsport.
On the flip side, the fact that most humans can’t in any way explain explain mathematically what’s happening in a game of catch is infuriating. “What do you mean you just kinda figure it? But it’s not a guess?”
The practical result is that it turns out that humans can do the same thing with interstellar travel and skip a starship across the universe without any math, although you want to make sure you don’t build anything to close to the approximate landing site.
my favorite thing is when murderbot has too many things going on and replies to a question with a canned buffer phrase. its so funny to me. you stressed out this poor robot so much it had no choice but to go into customer service mode.
