I kinda like this variation on the theme:

They clenched around the world like a fist, each black as the inside of an event horizon until those last bright moments when they all burned together. They screamed as they died. Every radio up to geostat groaned in unison, every infrared telescope went briefly snowblind. Ashes stained the sky for weeks afterwards; mesospheric clouds, high above the jet stream, turned to glowing rust with every sunrise. The objects, apparently, consisted largely of iron. Nobody ever knew what to make of that.

For perhaps the first time in history, the world knew before being told: if you’d seen the sky, you had the scoop. The usual arbiters of newsworthiness, stripped of their accustomed role in filtering reality, had to be content with merely labeling it. It took them ninety minutes to agree on Fireflies. A half hour after that, the first Fourier transforms appeared in the noosphere; to no one’s great surprise, the Fireflies had not wasted their dying breaths on static. There was pattern embedded in that terminal chorus, some cryptic intelligence that resisted all earthly analysis. The experts, rigorously empirical, refused to speculate: they only admitted that the Fireflies had said something. They didn’t know what.

Everyone else did. How else would you explain 65,536 probes evenly dispersed along a lat-long grid that barely left any square meter of planetary surface unexposed? Obviously the Flies had taken our picture. The whole world had been caught with its pants down in panoramic composite freeze-frame. We’d been surveyed—whether as a prelude to formal introductions or outright invasion was anyone’s guess.

https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

Last I checked it was still catching up on federation… (checks again) Oooh, looks like it’s caught up!

History is Patrick Stewart playing Lenin sitting in a chair giving orders.

the bundles of sticks and an axe

Also known as fasces. Y’all may have heard that word before…

For all we know you could be a victim in an abusive family. I’m sorry to see that people are blaming you without further asking about your circumstances.

FWIW I think it’s a bad older-generation thing, to express your affection by criticizing someone and insulting them. I had one older relative tell me that if you wanted someone to know that you loved them, you had to be a little mean to them. There was even a saying “spare the rod and spoil the child” to justify physical punishment.

To be sure, sometimes you need to be direct and critical and rigid, but it should not develop into abuse. If you feel you are in an abusive relationship, please reach out for help.

Yeah… reminds me of a very valuable lesson I learned during my college years.

Guatemala is awesome. The countryside is beautiful and the people are descended from one of humanity’s major civilizations, the Mayans.

I realize OP is only half-serious, but they still come off as really ignorant.

Yeah, I didn’t realize that when I first heard it. I guess that’s why it’s a punishment. If they just hung a tiny parakeet off his neck, it wouldn’t be much of a punishment.

If it’s not in a song by Sabaton or Iron Maiden, it ain’t real history.

Most people hate school. Even the “smart kids”, what they really like is learning or knowledge, not school.

Rufus Sewell! Later played John Smith in Man in the High Castle.

much more fun than a plain flawless mirror.

yeah agreed! Back in the day I used to generate text for fun with n-grams and I never went higher than bigrams bc it was boring without those unexpected disfluencies. I thought of it being like an electric guitar, you want it to sound a little raw.

ska is from the '80s and '90s.

Ska is from the 50s and 60s.

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0ZrHMY5Cso
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ska
• !ska@lemmy.blahaj.zone

Homer listening to “Home” while watching “Home Alone” with the homies and a homing pigeon.

Original Illustration to Samuel Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, 1798 (not colorized).

That’s what I was gonna say. It doesn’t even have to be a religious thing. To a lot of people church/mosque/temple is a cultural thing.

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.

“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

History’s like that too. People took their best guesses, but nobody knew for sure.

Oh, it’s a Japanese cartoon. They use metric hours instead of Imperial hours. So you’ll just have to keep waiting.

ikr: do you dare to enter the bog? It’s really terrifying… in quality!