(This sign used to be outside a health food store on my way home from classes)
(I mean it won’t do that to humans, but that’s always my first reflex, too)
OBEY
The reblogs on this post are absolutely priceless.
Hall of fame:
And finally:
I don’t understand…
Cordyceps is a genus of fungi that parasitizes insects or other arthropods. One of them (Ophiocordyceps unilateralis) does that by having sorta mindcontrol powers.
Infected ants are driven to leave their nests or foraging tasks, climb up a thing until ideal fungus-growth-conditions are met, chomp down with their mandibles on the thing (usually the underside of a leaf) and then stay there while the fungus bursts fruiting bodies forward from their bodies, killing them.
It’s been nicknamed ‘zombie fungus’ because of that.
this post has fucked me up more than any other on this site
Okay but no, do you understand what happens to a caterpillar once it’s in its cocoon? It completely turns into goo. That’s right, GOO. The damn thing dissolves and the reforms into the butterfly. Even crazier, the wings of the butterfly are already inside the caterpillar, ready to go, just waiting to float around in some goo and then be a beautiful butterfly. The craziest part?!? A study was done where some caterpillars were exposed to a certain smell and then given an electric shock so eventually the caterpillar associated the smell with the shock. Well after those little hairy noodles came out of the their cocoons as butterflies, they exposed them to the smell again and the butterflies reacted super negatively, as if they were being shocked. A.K.A. not only is there wings floating around in that goo cocoon, there is also a brain, the same, unaltered brain as the caterpillar. The butterfly can recall its days as a caterpillar even after basically being turned into soup. And then it all somehow gets its shit together to be a stupid majestic little beast, and I can’t even remember where I put my damn phone.
THIS IS FUCKING CRAZY
Will humans come? Will they be out there? Will they be watching us?
A set of questions directed at me by a tiny four year old dancer, urgently whispering back stage, trying to figure out what a dress rehearsal is and what a recital is and whether or not there will actually be an audience at any point.
Instead, she sounded like the official representative of a race of diminutive alien invaders who are mostly here for the sequins and tule. They are culturally required to all hold hands when moving from one place to another, and will try to hold your hand if given even half a chance.
Suppose there was a species that was very peaceful, very good at diplomacy and just generally very nice— but they also happened to look really terrifying to humans. Sort of an opposite to that ‘humans are cute space orcs’ thing— species X is perfectly friendly, but just happens to look like they walked out of a human horror movie.
We don’t blame them for it, it’s not their fault (and we’re slightly too afraid to talk to them about it anyway) we just quietly avoid ships where they are stationed and stay away from areas where they live and, over time, it just becomes accepted that, for whatever reason, you don’t put humans and species X together. Captains turn down human applicants if they’ve got a member of species X on their crew and visa versa. They barely notice that they’re doing it, it’s just how things are done.
Then one day a human crewed ship breaks down in species X space so that one of their ships picks up the distress signal. Being such lovely people, they offer to help and the humans can’t think of a good enough excuse to refuse.
The repairs take about a week and, the whole time, the species X crew members are loving the human ship. It’s so spacious, you barely even see other crew members! (They don’t realise that all the humans are constantly ducking out the way whenever they see them coming.)
The humans, meanwhile, just spend the entire week in Hell. The species X crew members like to take shortcuts through the ventilation shafts, so you can constantly hear them skittering around above your head; the ship is full of this low key but very distinctive smell— rotting meat, the smell of death (apparently they give it off when they’re happy); half the crew have goosebumps, despite the temperature controls working perfectly.
The ones working in the engine room directly alongside the species X crew have it hardest though, they can’t run away— and it’s very hard to relax and do your job when, suddenly, you hear this noise above your head and a hairless, milk white creature with no eyes and a huge mouth filled with razor sharp teeth and long gangling limbs with fingers and toes that look human but like they’ve been stretched, leaps silently with catlike grace from the rafters, lands right next to you, flicks out a forked tongue, holds out a long taloned hand and asks “can I borrow your spanner?”
Ok yes I agree but you’re forgetting the type of human that loves creatures like that they’d probably fangasm upon netting species X and/or do their best to get one as a mate.
There’s an Arthur C. Clarke book that has a very similar premise, unfortunately to link it would be to spoil it X|
So one of my favorite themes on this site is the “Humans Are Weird To Aliens” thing. Most people realize that we could be considered unusually friendly or unusually tough to an extraterrestrial species.
Yet people don’t realize just how alien we might really be to them.
There are moons in our own solar system that will never see liquid water in normal circumstances. To aliens that evolved in this frigid climate of liquid methane oceans, we’d be exotic lifeforms that melt mountains down for a drink hailing from an infernal planet that would boil away they methane-soluble bodies within seconds of arrival.
Imagine an interaction with a creature that considers steel impossible simply because steel’s melting point would kill everyone that tried to reach that temperature.
Life in other planets could be so alien, that we’d never recognize it as life.
Look, I don’t believe in God, but I will not disrespect the Good Gentlemen of the Hills. That’s just common sense.
Between this and the Icelanders with their elves I do not understand what is going on above the 50th parallel.
My general rule of thumb: you don’t have to believe in everything, but don’t fuck with it, just in case.
^^^ that part
This is truer than true. Especially the Irish part.
Let me tell you what I know about this after living here for nearly thirty years.
This is a modern European country, the home of hot net startups, of Internet giants and (in some places, some very few places) the fastest broadband on Earth. People here live in this century, HARD.
Yet they get nervous about walking up that one hill close to their home after dark, because, you know… stuff happens there.
I know this because Peter and I live next to One Of Those Hills. There are people in our locality who wouldn’t go up our tiny country road on a dark night for love or money. What they make of us being so close to it for so long without harm coming to us, I have no idea. For all I know, it’s ascribed to us being writers (i.e. sort of bards) or mad folk (also in some kind of positive relationship with the Dangerous Side: don’t forget that the root word of “silly”, which used to be English for “crazy”, is the Old English _saelig_, “holy”…) or otherwise somehow weirdly exempt.
And you know what? I’m never going to ask. Because one does not discuss such things. Lest people from outside get the wrong idea about us, about normal modern Irish people living in normal modern Ireland.
You hear about this in whispers, though, in the pub, late at night, when all the tourists have gone to bed or gone away and no one but the locals are around. That hill. That curve in the road. That cold feeling you get in that one place. There is a deep understanding that there is something here older than us, that doesn’t care about us particularly, that (when we obtrude on it) is as willing to kick us in the slats as to let us pass by unmolested.
So you greet the magpies, singly or otherwise. You let stones in the middle of fields be. You apologize to the hawthorn bush when you’re pruning it. If you see something peculiar that cannot be otherwise explained, you are polite to it and pass onward about your business without further comment. And you don’t go on about it afterwards. Because it’s… unwise. Not that you personally know any examples of people who’ve screwed it up, of course. But you don’t meddle, and you learn when to look the other way, not to see, not to hear. Some things have just been here (for various values of “here” and various values of “been”) a lot longer than you have, and will be here still after you’re gone. That’s the way of it. When you hear the story about the idiots who for a prank chainsawed the centuries-old fairy tree a couple of counties over, you say – if asked by a neighbor – exactly what they’re probably thinking: “Poor fuckers. They’re doomed.” And if asked by anybody else you shake your head and say something anodyne about Kids These Days. (While thinking DOOMED all over again, because there are some particularly self-destructive ways to increase entropy.)
Meanwhile, in Iceland: the county council that carelessly knocked a known elf rock off a hillside when repairing a road has had to go dig the rock up from where it got buried during construction, because that road has had the most impossible damn stuff happen to it since that you ever heard of. Doubtless some nice person (maybe they’ll send out for the Priest of Thor or some such) will come along and do a little propitiatory sacrifice of some kind to the alfar, belatedly begging their pardon for the inconvenience.
They’re building the alfar a new temple, too.
Atlantic islands. Faerie: we haz it.
The Southwest is like this in some ways. You don’t go traveling along the highways at night with an empty car seat. Because an empty car seat is an invitation. You stick your luggage, your laptop bag, whatever you got in that seat. Else something best left undiscussed and unnamed (because to discuss it by name is to go ‘AY WE’RE TALKING BOUT YA WE’RE HERE AND ALSO IGNORANT OF WHAT YOU’RE CAPABLE OF’ at the top of your damn lungs at them) will jump in to the car, after which you’re gonna have a bad time.
If you’re out in the woods, you keep constant, consistent count of your party and make sure you know everyone well enough that you can ID them by face alone, lest something imitating a person get at you. They like to insert themselves in the party and just observe before they strike. It’s a game to them. In general you don’t fuck with the weird, you ignore the lights in the sky (no, this isn’t a god damn night vale reference, yes I’m serious) and the woods, you lock up at night and you don’t answer the door for love or money. Whatever or whoever’s knocking ain’t your buddy.
^ So much good advice in this post right here
I live in the south and… you just… don’t go into the woods or fields at night.
Don’t go near big trees in the night
If you live on a farm, don’t look outside the windows at night
I have broken all these rules.
I’ve seen some shit.
If it sounds like your mom, but you didn’t realize your mom is home…. it’s not your mom. Promise.
One walked onto the porch once. Wasn’t fun. But they’re not super keen on guns. Typically bolt when they see one.
You think it’s the neighbor kids.
It’s not the neighbor kids.
Might sound like coyotes but you never really /see/ the coyotes but then wow that one cow was reaaaaaally fucked up this morning. The next night when you hear another one screaming you just turn the tv up a little more. Maybe fire a gun in the air but you don’t go after it. If it is coyotes then it’s probably a pack and you seriously don’t want to fuck with that and if it’s the other thing you seriously REALLY don’t want to fuck with that.
So in the south, especially near the mountains, you just go straight from your car to inside your house, draw your curtains and watch tv.
If you see lights in the fields just fucking leave it alone.
Eyes forward. Don’t be fucking stupid. Mind your own business. Call your neighbors and tell them to bring the cats in. There’s coyotes out. Some of them know. Most of them don’t.
Other than that everything’s a ghost and they died in the civil war. Literally all of everything else is just the civil war. We used to smell old perfume and pipe tobacco in the weeks leading up to the battle anniversaries.
Shit’s wild and I sound fucking crazy but I swear to god it’s true.
In the Philippines, you laugh at us for pointing with our lips.
Trust me. It’s a thing every Filipino can do.
We don’t point because it is impolite. It’s a holdover from the provinces. You don’t point because Somebody Unseen will take offense.
When you walk in the fields, you always say “Tabi tabi po” (Pardon me, excuse me, just passing through) as a sign of respect. Especially if you need to answer nature’s call and there’s no bathroom to go to.
You never knock over little mounds because the Old Nuno lives there.
You turn your clothes inside out if you get lost walking in the woods or in the Mountains, because you know They are playing tricks on you.
You never mess with an old balete tree. It is Their home.
Faerie lives in the Philippines too. And we give them the respect they deserve.
just moving along like everyone else 