thread for being struck by how a commonplace thing is actually crazy

are you like me, do you get those occasional epiphanies about how some ordinary thing is in fact kind of insane if you take a second to think about it? maybe it is just me and this will not be much of a thread but goddammit i am going to start it anyway. disclaimer: no i am not high

inspiration: butterfly life cycle. pupae? gtfo of here with that shit, what even

what's the deal w/ capitalism???

http://blog.kevineikenberry.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/seinfeld_jerry.jpg

blame dutch people dude. fuck those guys.

actually find the evolution of capitalism more explicable than the pupal stage of insects but can get my head round both

I sometimes think it's very weird that I have a pair of friendly animals who live in my house for no obvious purpose.

They live there to love you!

thing is, if i think about most commonplace things
for more than a few mins they seem crazy

x-post - And for you to love them!

the fact that we mostly put up with shovelling away all the prime years of our life in exchange for the basic necessities of existence whilst having the piss taken out of us at every turn is a headscratcher

that is true. realizing how we find ourselves in a certain pattern of behaviour that seems easy to break but also unbreakable at the same time is a particular type of this

fingernails! huh! good god yall! what are they good for? absolutely nothing!

They live there to love you!

― Airwrecka Bliptrap Blapmantis (ENBB)

Bah, they love my food providing abilities. I have to admit I'm fond of them though.

xxp god yus so much of my "behaviour" is genuinely, pathetically crazy

x-post NO THEY LOVE YOU FOR WHO YOU ARE. They told me so.

No one's mentioned how we live on a ball of rock with fire in the middle that is floats in literally nothing which we don't fall off because it has magical sticking powers.

Literally everything. Everything. Incomprehensible.

Fucking Magnets, How Do They Work?

^^

Surprised how long it took to get to that.

My answer? Elevators. Crazy how you can just stand in one place, press a button and move to different planes without exerting any effort. I get how they work, it's just kinda crazy when you think about it too much.

Also music. Music is nuts.

Yeah, that's what I kept thinking. Molecular vibrations in the air, how do they make me so insanely happy and emotionally stimulated?

And intellectually challenged!

smoking. Hey let's dry out a plant and light it on fire and suck the smoke into our lungs.

http://www.heatworthy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/bob-newhart-tobacco-heatworthy.jpg

Yeah, I never understood how those ruffled collars caught on, but they're everywhere.

bitcoins!

clapping, it's just fuckin weird. i just got out of an all-staff meeting where we clapped after each speaker. what a weird and arbitrary way of showing applause

also television, i just don't understand how it works

Economics in general.

xposts

It's funny how clapping is completely non-culture specific. They do it everywhere afaik. Which was the first culture to come up with clapping?

Also: Neckties. Yes, a long bit of cloth dangling from my neck will make me look smart and professional.

i think apes clap too?

I guess maybe it's the most efficient way to make a loud sustained noise?

mushrooms - how many people died before they figured out which ones were okay to eat?

clapping, it's just fuckin weird. i just got out of an all-staff meeting where we clapped after each speaker. what a weird and arbitrary way of showing applause

― marcos, Friday, February 28, 2014 5:18 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This weirds me out, too! Why is clapping the thing that we decided to do to express our pleasure at a public performance?

Also Mordy, capitalist-questioning Jerry Seinfeld made me actually sputter-laugh with liquid in my mouth, just like people always joked about in the early days of the internet.

Anyway this thread is like doing bong hits in my dorm room with a bunch of liberal arts majors.

My 1 year old daughter really enjoys clapping and automatically does whenever she's excited about anything, because it's one of the few things she can do well with her hands. It's not that hard to imagine why this is a universal thing.

i wonder about the smoking thing too. your euro explorers return from the new world with newly "discovered" cash crops and and they're like yeah you dry this one and smoke it, and this one you grind and make a drink, this one you coat one side of a digestive with

It always kind of weirds me out when I think about how completely humans have so completely and radically changed their environment in only a couple of thousand years. These huge cities used to be forests full of wild animals for millions of years before we decided that civilization was the way to go.

i don't understand how i am composed of billions of tiny cells yet i have consciousness as a single entity

maybe you don't...

xxp

i was having that discussion with my wife the other day when we were imagining what the united states looked like 300 years ago and how it looks now and while being amazed we were also like 'oh shit we're all doomed aren't we.'

smoking. Hey let's dry out a plant and light it on fire and suck the smoke into our lungs.

― christmas candy bar (al leong),

This! It just seems like the worst drug delivery system ever invented.

you know how the lungs are structured right?

like, if i want to get a narcotic into my bloodstream with maximum rapidity it's a pretty good route to go

xps and the couple of pounds of bacteria each of us couldn't live without.

contact lenses, really i think about that occasionally when i put mine in. a flexible transparent piece of plastic that you place right on your eyeball and leave it there all day? nuts!

i think this about a lot of food dishes. like how the hell did bread come about in the first place? carl otm, i feel high just thinking about this.

@ NV - Yeah, I know it's efficient, but the side order of particulates and tar and junk seems so gross.

When I was a kid and my mother was still smoking, she took a drag of her cig through a paper towel and showed me the spot on the towel and said "this gets on the inside of my lungs every drag on a cigarette I take -- please don't ever start." It was a really effective deterrent.

I just got my first Kindle and finding it incomprehensible how small books are as data, like 600+pages transfers in a second and takes up 1.5 mb. I was asking the dude in the 2nd hand gear shop if there was an expansion slot and thought he was bullshitting me when he said "you don't need one". It took me about 10 years to start taking mp3 players for granted, I used to think they were some kind of miracle.

I sometimes think it's very weird that I have a pair of friendly animals who live in my house for no obvious purpose.

this, at least once a week i'm struck by it and say to my girlfriend 'hey look, there's an animal in our house.'

i wonder why we haven't domesticated squirrels. then all their nuts would belong to us.

Having a labrador in your house = not weird and totally ace. Keeping birds in cages = sadistic cruelty, weird.

The weird part about animals-in-the-house is why do dogs think we're so fucking wonderful? Every other small mammal is indifferent or scared of humans.

I think that is because we have a long association with dogs, recently I read in a book that some shepherding dogs would carry on doing their thing long after us disappearing from the scene. Cats are fucking weird, fucking serial killers who seem to only kill their prey to keep themselves sharp, because they are clever enough to know that we won't be around to feed them processed slop forever.

Driving a car.

trees

australia

signatures. why is it important for me to write my name badly?

Australia is weird cos it is so fucking old. Story the other day about a 4 billion year piece of zircon found on a sheep farm.

old

Riding animals like horses, donkeys, camels, elephants. Makes me wonder if there are any animals that we could ride but just never did.

Scottish Ned culture. The way some people dress and speak being so utterly bizarre and at times incomprehensible to other Scottish people yet also being very normal. That they generally consider themselves so normal is just incredibly weird, yet they look so strange to most of the world of similar cultures.

kissing

i mean thrust(ing) a part of your body inside another person at least has a biological purpose; kissing makes as much sense as budget aliens rubbing their antennae together

i like it tho

I get this when I'm on the runway and look out my window and see a plane achieving lift-off. That's when the reality of "I'm going to be 30,000 feet in the air in a 20-ton metal tube, fuck" hits me.

Clapping and kissing both OTM

flour

don't chimps kiss? I seem to recall video of them displaying a similar behavior. if so, we come by it honestly.

On Zing keep on thinking this thread is called 'thread for being struck by another's jet'

ew

Breast feeding

I sit here and freak myself out about how we can wear clothes and use money but we're just animals. Also I'm feeding a tiny human with my bodily fluids.

Kissing also OTM.

I think about the unlikeliness of coffee a lot.

And sex is frankly hilarious.

Money is ridiculous. My biggest memory from school is first day of class in whatever grade was the first that we got our own books and had to read from them, open to the first couple of pages to read that something physical that you buy is called a Good and something that someone does for you is called a Service. I had heard of these words before, but on this day I was introduced to the glory that is Capitalism, and it made absolutely no sense to me at first.

Later on I realized it was blatantly transparent propaganda. Something you buy is called a GOOD. It is GOOD to buy things. Yes, buying things is GOOD.

Pretty sure that is not how etymology works.

https://www.thecheeseshopva.com/catalogimages/Details/512350.jpg

the pretzel has peanut butter inside of it

about once a day i think about how weird it is that i keep a basically wild animal (cat) in my house and she likes hanging out with me and tries to talk to me by squeaking

that's fucked up, sufjan grafton

I always felt insulted that john goodman would think I would buy into his blatant propaganda

I'll be the judge of that, you arrogant fucker!

very true. very true. also, drinking the milk of other species. and continuing to do so well into one's adulthood.

my grandparents and dad will drink milk with every dinner. fucking spaghetti and meatballs with a tall glass of milk.

Milk with dinner is so weird and something I've never understood. Also, coffee with anything other than breakfast food.

I think about the unlikeliness of coffee a lot.

― Orson Wellies (in orbit), Saturday, March 1, 2014 9:45 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

So do I! This is my smoking things idea. Like how did the first person decide to make coffee with those beans?

This really is like every stoned conversation I've ever had including the one a couple weeks ago where I pondered if dogs in the 70's were allowed to eat chocolate like pregnant ladies were allowed to smoke and drink.

ah, io had already brought up milk i see. coffee is definitely crazy, too.

Milk does a body good, you guys.

I can't believe alcohol is legal, to be honest. Stuff has ruined more lives than the US gov't.

Someone said neckties above.

I've been thinking about making a thread about ideas of being an "adult" or "grownup" because I often think those things have very little to do with being intelligent or mature, but couldn't be bothered if it turned into a heated discussion. Some in my family think I make too much a fuss over not wanting to ever wear a suit and tie for certain occasions because I loathe wearing them and I don't understand how so many awful people wear these clothes (I know how sophomoric this can sound) but they still look respectable in many peoples eyes.
It just bewilders me how someone can get fired for not wearing a tie at certain jobs.

Also general ideas of what an adult/grownup should be, why people stop/start doing certain things with no real justification; why some things seem more mature than others out of received wisdom. I live in what most people would call an extended childhood, with admittedly many of the bad things that come with it, but there are other things older people do more openly now that really shouldn't be solely enjoyed by young people.
The only good thing I associate with adult/grownup behaviour that I can readily remember is responsibility. But am I wrong to think that most adults learn the bare minimum they need to not appear like an outcast? That being an adult is more about fitting a certain narrow way of life?

i delight at the nature of matter when i put a bag in my coat pocket, and then later put the coat in the bag.

scanners.gif

relieved to hear that the "coat in bag" "bag in coat" thing are separated in time

Recursion

a burrito, inside another burrito, inside THAT SAME BURRITO

http://inform-fiction.org/manual/html/s24.html#s24_2_1
" Some objects are contained within other objects in what is sometimes called a tree, meaning that: (i) an object can either be contained in one other object (called its “parent”), or not contained in any; (ii) there is no “loop” of objects such that each is contained in the next and the last is contained in the first. The pattern of containment changes frequently during play but (i) and (ii) always hold."

"Infocom world models all included rule (ii) but their implementations made no systematic effort to enforce this, so that Infocom were perpetually fixing bugs arising from putting two containers inside each other."

drinking the milk of other species. and continuing to do so well into one's adulthood.

And relatedly, the fact that were you to suggest we instead drink the milk of our OWN species, people are viscerally disgusted!

Or any closely related species! Nobody suggest dairy farms composed of chimps or orangutans.

For a brief time in the 80s, a David Lynch show is the most popular thing on TV, and this show is not ALF (though there is a disturbing connection between this show and ALF)

Sneezing.

That basically anyone is allowed to drive vehicles. People of varying skill having control (or not) of a couple of thousands pounds of steel.