It seems to always be the case that aliens have names that are “unpronounceable by the human tongue.” But, y’know, humans are actually really good mimics. We can do impressions of anything, and some of us are really good at it. What if that was a special skill of ours that was constantly surprising the aliens?
Alien talks about human like s/he’s not there, only to be shocked when its own language comes out of that strange little mouth.
Alien can’t figure out WHAT that noise onboard is, only to find human crewmate pranking it. (“As soon as he leaves, I’m gonna do the sound of a failing hover engine, okay? Just see where he looks first!”)
Alien hears a different noise and a thud, then “Sorry, I tripped.” (”But you squeaked.” “Yeah, didn’t mean to. Sounded kinda dumb.”)
Alien is alarmed to hear the sound of two Dangerous Animals coming from the containment room. Thinks the one has multiplied. Runs in, find human yowling back at it. (“It seemed lonely, so I was talking to it. Reminds me of a cat I had once.”)
The away team is threatened by a Large Animal protecting its young. Alien Captain knows what to do. Shoves the human up front and points. “Make the noises that the little ones are making. This is your time to shine.”
this is fucking brilliant I am so down for this
Yes Good now add Parrots and Corvids :> It’s the Mimic Apes from Mimic World with their teachable Mimic Birds :> :>
A lesbian couple gets a shocking surprise one day when God (played by Laverne Cox) shows up at their door. Upset at how humans had turned her message of love and acceptance into a message of hate and discrimination, she decides it’s time to send Jesus back to earth and wants the lesbian couple to raise Jesus. Hilarity ensues.
No need for homophobic or transphobic jokes when you can have exchanges like “Ma’am your son turned the water fountain into wine again and got all the other students drunk” “Jesus Christ.” “….. I’m not sure if that’s suppose to be you responding to me or you requesting to speak to him.”
Also jokes about infinity-“Ask your mom”.
Kid: “Mom, can I sleep over at John’s place?”
Mom #1: “Oh, I don’t know, sweetie. Ask your mom.”
Kid: “Mom, can I sleep over at John’s?”
Mom #2: “I don’t know, have you asked your mom already?”
Kid praying: “Mom, can I sleep over at John’s place?”
God: “Have you asked your moms already?”
OH MY GOD YALL ARE KILLING IT
Title: Jesus, Mary & Josephine
FUCKING YES
I kind of don’t care if I’m going to hell. This is hilarious, and I would watch it.
this totally made me think of this post
He found them gambling and there was no table to flip
And there are no jokes or anything at Christianity’s expense, and some of the (what we now call) LGBT stuff in the Bible can be included, like the centurion and his servant are their next door neighbors or something.
Plenty of jokes at the expense of Mainstream “Jesus loves everyone uwu but if you are in any way different from me you deserve to die” Christianity tho
Exactly. And it debunks myths like that.
That’s the dream for the sitcom
if you wanted the preds to win stay out of the hockey tag right now
I’m a bit obsessed with these tweets right now. In my headcannon Holster takes it much harder than he lets on, maybe even only Bitty realizes how hard it is for him, because he’s kind of been there before. Ugh, someone write a fic! Maybe I will…
Someone referenced this series of tweets once and focussed on ‘haha holster is bad at folding laundry’ and completely missed the point that Holster is so upset because Rans is hooking up with someone in their room. I was a believer of Ransom + Holster = adorable bromance UNTIL I read Bitty’s twitter… There’s actually quite a bit to suggest that at least Holster has some more than bromantic feelings for his fellow dman. Awesome illustration of the scene 🙂
Despite the best efforts of everyone involved, something truly nasty escaped Earth. They call it giardia, a microscopic organism that their Planetary Protection Officer called “pretty dumb” and “not too bad, really, a week of digestive upset and then it’s over.”
Yes, Earth has a Planetary Protection Officer. They have a Planetary Protection Office, and have had one since they were sending probes around their own solar system. Doctor Ma-et had found it a bit silly, like a child concerned about the cleanliness of their toys, until she learned that the job of the Planetary Protection Office had always been protecting other worlds from Earth.
i love this individual piece of writing, and i also love the narrative tumblr has been developing around Crazy Primates From The Death Planet Just Want To Love You. it feels so real and so US. it feels like maybe if genuine contact happens, this is how it’ll go down.
we’re too young, as a species, to do any galactic business of our own. we’re barbaric and awkward, still fighting amongst ourselves for resources. we’d probably make the galactic powers very nervous. but the thing is, there is nothing more dangerous to a human than another human, and hasn’t been for centuries, and this is on a world where half the ‘habitable’ environments regularly kill people and the rest only kill people on occasion with floods and stuff. we make buddies with our predators, we make our diseases brew us chemicals and fuel. we turn everything to our own use, and would bloom through the universe like a horrible all-consuming plague – except that we already sorta did that a little bit on our own planet, we were THAT powerful, and we learned not to.
we are the infant titans who, having seen our siblings eaten, swore to protect instead of consume. we police each other – and ourselves – at the deepest levels, down to the bones of our spirituality. even the most vicious warmonger knows, KNOWS, in their heart of hearts, that what they do is not right, and will not be allowed to go on.
more advanced species didn’t have to learn this lesson, because they weren’t violent to begin with, or learned it a long slow way under the tutelage of older powers. and here we are already, these holy fools, who hold death itself in our hands, and have the hunger for infinity in our eyes, and they ask us what we plan to do with this power, and we say: “where can we help?”
“and also, can we pet your dog?”
I love this meta so much!
The other half to Space Australia, in my mind, is that it’s an exercise in looking at us – our culture, our environment, our habits, our very selves- and saying “hah, that’s so weird!”
And that’s not just an exercise in mockery or self-parody. That’s putting ourselves in incredibly different shoes, considering ourselves and the universe at large from the perspective of someone not at all like us. That’s empathy, which is kinda important.
We are weird, when you get down to it. Phage medicine is a thing that exists, and has since before we even knew about DNA or what a virus even was. Experimenting on ourselves is basically a tradition, and much to Ma-et’s dismay, we have celebrations in which we blow things up for the sake of blowing things up.
And being able to acknowledge that – to see what we’re about and why we’re weird, is so very important. The western white hegemonic culture I exist inside is so very hard to see sometimes, it’s so very easy to normalize it as “that’s just the way it is”, and it’s not. It is a culture, with all the trappings of every other culture out there.
This is what the anthropological side of Space Australia is about. Who are we? What do we look like to outsiders? Why do we do things the way we do? What should we maybe be thinking about fixing?
Science Fiction creates the future. Verne dreamed of going to the moon, Star Trek predicted flip phones and 3-D printers and tablet computers and arguably the cloud, Google happily borrowed the idea for Earth from Neal Stephenson. Our dreams of tomorrow shape tomorrow, in incredible and unknowable ways.
I dunno, I love that by telling these stories, we’re working to make humanity the sort of species that looks beyond its differences. I love that by telling these stories, we’re working to make humanity the sort of species that would look at a galaxy in pain and say “we are going to fix this.”
And, of course, we will totally see a galaxy full of fluffy puppies and we’re going to pet all of them.
absolutely. sci-fi doesn’t just predict technology, it predicts culture.
Me: WHAT MEDIA YOU WILLINGLY OR EVEN ACCIDENTALLY CONSUME IS NOT MY PROBLEM. YOU ARE NOT MY RESPONSIBILITY, I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR YOU, I OWE YOU N O T H I N G.
this just in: basic levels of caring for other people no longer a thing
media doesnt exist in a vaccum, take proper measures to ensure your work doesmt harm people (tagging it, flagging nsfw blogs as such, etc). if your work is going to be harming people regardless of any cautionary steps, maybe you should take a long hard look at what youre creating and why
I tag all of my works and encourage others to do so as well, because that’s proper Internet etiquette, but, also, it’s still not my responsibility to look after someone else’s kids or to take care of someone else’s mental health issues.
I’m a mentally ill CSA survivor, and I do what I must to take care of myself. I know my limits, I know my triggers, and I’ve even taken the time to think of things that I haven’t been triggered by yet, but that might trigger me, so that I can proceed with caution.
It isn’t a content creator’s job or responsibility to worry about how their fanart or fanfiction might impact EVERY SINGLE HUMAN BEING ON PLANET EARTH. It’s the job of Internet browsers to browse responsibly.
This isn’t about “not caring for people,” I care quite a lot for people. It’s about content creators being harassed by people who think it’s their responsibility to see to the needs of every individual on the Internet.
I’m going to post my nasty guro porn all I want, and I’ll tag it, but if someone sees it regardless, that’s not my issue. I’m sorry if it triggers them, I’m sorry if it upsets them, but all they can do is unfollow me or blacklist my trigger tags. I’m not going to stop posting my artwork and stories just because a handful of people managed to stumble upon it (or willingly subjected themselves to it) and were upset by it.
It’s my fucking blog, Karen.
THIS. i’m too damn busy living my life to live somebody else’s. i’ll be ethical and give people fair warning where appropriate as often as i can, but i won’t even attempt to anticipate and tailor myself to a random hypothetical stranger’s media needs. go read a pet blog instead. i promise it’ll be ok.
What if your work’s absence will be harming people?
Or do we no longer care about the people who needed to see a thing?
You know what saves lives? Art that some people really, really, need to never see. Because other people really, really, need to see it. Representation matters. The biggest driver of suicidal despair in abuse survivors is the feeling that they’re alone, no one will understand, what happened to them is unique and probably their fault. Finding out that it’s a thing that people are familiar with and write about and make art about saves lives. Lots and lots of lives.
You can’t prevent anyone from getting hurt ever. You can try to minimize the harm while maximizing the benefits.
hey, random perspective injection here. i’m in a super delicate place right now mentally. like at the moment i can’t take ANY fictional suffering or conflict.
usually, i write adventure fiction involving hails of bullets.
my current state is temporary, thank god. but due to life trauma, i’ve become the emotional equivalent of a raw burn. and being introduced to media – or even offhand jokes – involving suffering or animal cruelty or violence, right now, genuinely triggers me in a bad way.
so i’ve got kind of a weird perspective on this. on the one hand, my actual livelihood is producing violent media. on the other hand, violent media triggers and hurts me.
what i can provide from this viewpoint is the fact that ‘is this media allowed’ is the absolutely wrong question. it’s inside-out and backwards. the reason people can’t get any closure on the topic is because we’re coming at it from the wrong end.
what we need to focus on is, how do we make it easier for people to avoid what they need to avoid, and find what they need to find?
for instance, tagging is currently all about warnings, and usually based on parental moral guardianship issues traumatic events. but what if there were positive tags that sorted fics into a similarly few-and-simple categories of tone? like ‘gentle’ and ‘dramatic’ and ‘sad’ and so forth. idk, questions like that.
this isn’t a moral question here, my loves. we actually agree on the moral question. we want people to feel safe but we don’t want to sacrifice freedom of speech. we’ve answered that one! now it’s an engineering question.
just moving along like everyone else 