I shouldn’t be laughing, I feel awful, but I’m just imagining you addressing a person this way.

Don’t feel too bad, my physio lady was pissing herself laughing when I showed up. Everytime she tried to pull up my profile to talk about the appointment she’d devolve into hearty chuckling while apologizing continually for laughing at my expense.

And for anyone wondering she was able to ease a considerable amount of the pain. Even while occasionally breaking out into bouts of barely suppressed giggling.

fuuck

Some of my favourite Paul Keating insults for your enjoyment:

• You boxhead, you wouldn't know. You are flat out counting past ten
• I suppose that the Honourable Gentleman's hair, like his intellect, will recede into the darkness
• He's wound up like a thousand-day clock! One half more turn and there'll be springs and sprockets all over the building. Mr Speaker, give him a valium
• Oh, look, it's just Howard being Howard, isn't it, you know? The little desiccated coconut's under pressure and he's attacking anything he can get his hands on
• The Opposition could not manage a tart shop
• For John Howard to get to any high moral ground he would have to first climb out of the volcanic hole he's dug for himself over the last decade

And my personal favourite:

If there was a university degree for greed, you cunts would all get first-class honours

Best possible addition. This is a top-tier insight

@hotcheetohatred

The thing about "humans are space orcs" is it was originally conceived of as a response to science fiction tropes in which every alien species had its own special thing except humans, whose special thing was either Most Generic, Most Adaptable, or Most Je Ne Sais Quoi. Like, in a lot of science fiction, Klingons are Honorable Warriors, Vulcans are Logical Scientists, Romulans are Cunning Strategists, and humans are all of the above in a way that leaves us slightly less good than any of them at their shtick but better overall and able to triumph because of our lack of specialization and the assumption that we are, somehow, just destined to be the best. See this scene from Enterprise for what I'm talking about. There's a similar scene in Mass Effect where Mordin talks about how humans are more variable and adaptable and less predictable than all the other races in that setting, which is super annoying if you know anything about how much our species is defined by the genetic bottleneck we suffered during the Ice Age -- the generic bottleneck that has left us all so genetically similar to each other that we can do crazy things like donate blood and organs to each other, things other species can't tolerate.

@prokopetz proposed that humans ought to get something special of our own that isn't just "We are the bestest and specialist in some generic way that feels like a vague and unsettling metaphor for American superiority and manifest destiny amidst all the other cultures of the world," and settled on space orcs because "Pursuit predators with freakish endurance" was the ecological niche we occupied during our own evolutionary history up until we started doing the civilization thing. The assumption from the start was that every other sci-fi or fantasy species would each be freaks in their own way, and the point of humans are space orcs was to let us be our own sort of freak, too.

People who expanded on the humans are space orcs stories immediately turned it into a reason to write little stories where humans are the biggest freaks or the only freaks and we are, in fact, the specialest most manifest destinyest je ne sais quoi-laden metaphors for the superiority of American culture over all the other cultures of the world. I hate it I hate it I hate it.

Which is to say you've reinvented the point of humans are space orcs from first principles. That's pretty cool.

I think my mistake was failing to appreciate just how readily "humans have exceptionally high cardiovascular endurance due to our real-world evolutionary history as specialised persistence predators" could be twisted around into "humans have superior Will to Power", which is the other problematic special niche humans have historically been assigned in popular science fiction.

what pisses ME off about all this is that humans are not persistence predators. we're very sturdy travelers for being bipedal apes, but there are almost zero conditions in which humans willingly hunt by just... marathoning the prey to death. and exactly zero where that is the PREFERRED method. why? because it requires a stupidly expensive amount of calories and you end up with a dead wildebeest that's twenty fucking miles away from the rest of the tribe.

humans already have an expensive fucking organ that optimizes us to hunt more efficiently than any other animal on earth, and that's our brain. our other adaptation is our shoulder blades: while a chimp can rip a US marine in half, it can't throw a baseball any harder than our preteens. these two adaptations unlock the human thumb and let us throw spears.

In just about every human culture, we hunt from ambush, with lures and poison. We have bows, spears, nets, traps. If we were, biologically, built to be coursing predators, then our sport hunters would reflect that, and they don't. We do not end marathons by chasing even a symbolic horse to death, we don't go after rabbits like racing greyhounds. We compete with bows, guns, shotput, discus, javelin. We fish with lines and hooks just about anywhere there's water. When our kids play tag, the chaser doesn't practice steadily running their target into exhaustion: the kids take turns sprinting towards and away, stalking slowly, practicing sudden lunges, learning to lure their target close enough and then pounce.

We are not the mighty wolf or the noble lion. We are clever, opportunistic ambush predators that fashion a thousand kinds of trap, lure, and weapon. Our persistence isn't that of the dog, it's that of the monkey.

It really annoys me when people want to LIONIZE the human body, and the power of that body-- but ascribe to it the virtues it does have, because what we're really good at isn't 'heroic' enough. We are tricksters, omnivores, efficient liars, tool-users. We weave nets, we poison our spears, we lie in wait, and we eat so well we can spend a third of our calories just on thinking about our next trick.

I don't need to hear any more about man, the mighty hunter, charging relentlessly across the plane. Tell me about man, the cheerful fisher, sitting in his boat, weaving another net.

To be entirely fair to the pelican, I have seen humans do much, much dumber things with their infants. The park rangers in Louisiana ha e to regularly tell people to not put their babies on the ground next to the gators for a pic.

In fact, it could be argued that the peculiar grammar used by the pelican in the Put Baby In Pelican Mouth post is deliberate, like how phishers use major grammar errors in their messages so that people too smart for the scam (or smart enough to report them) ignore the emails and the scammer can focus on the most likely marks.

Regardless, the pelican is right: there is absolutely someone dumb enough to put a baby in its mouth because it asked politely. Probably dozens on that beach alone.

Put baby in pelican mouth for Instagram photo. Facebook photo of baby in pelican mouth for many likes and also happy asleep baby. So cute baby in pelican mouth for video on TikTok. Youtube short of baby so cute in soft pelican mouth for so many views to Youtube channel. Baby in pelican mouth challenge.

HAVE we seen evidence that an Avatarworld lunar cycle is 29.5 days like Earth's though? It's entirely possible that its moon travels a little slower, since the planet clearly orbits its Sun a little faster than Earth, as mentioned in the linked post. Could be a coincidentally convenient 30 day cycle with no need for leap days or months ever, at least not on the frequency that Earth's calendars do.

Here's what trips me up the most about the Avatar calendar though:

Since we never see planetary rings from the non-equatorial regions of Avatarworld, it's probably not that third planet from the sun. SO A.W. must be either the 2nd or the 4th planet from the sun. If Venus and Mars had better atmospheric pressures they'd be within Sol's Habitable Zone (Venus' is too high at 93x Earth's, Mars' is too low at about 0.02x Earth's) but their years are also very different (almost 225 days for Venus and about 687 for Mars.

Assuming Agni (I think it would be fair for the Avatar World's sun to be named after that setting's Spirit of Fire) is near identical to Sol, then those first four planets have got to be either REALLY tightly crowded around it for the 4th one to have an orbital period that's "only" 360 days, or the "rocky" planet neighborhood is really sprawled out for the 2nd one to have that kind of orbital period.

There ARE exoplanets out there with crazy tight orbits, I'm talking "years" that only last a couple hours. If Agni has a couple like that, it's not inconceivable that there's enough room at the edge of the HZ for A.W. to inhabit the 360 day niche at the 4th position.

Personally though, I think A.W. is a "far Venus" vs a "close Mars". Planet 2 is noticeably smaller than Planet 4, and with all the crazy acrobatics people are capable of (as well as Appa being able to haul ass ALL OVER the place in Book 3 of ATLA) A.W. has GOT to be the itty bitty one with less surface area to cover and less gravity to hold people down.

Guess we'll have to wait for Avatar Seven Havens, or its Firebending Avatar successor series, to see if technology improves to the point where they can visit the other planets in that solar system and confirm which it is.

Upon further thought, I also believe that if A.W. is a far Venus, Tui must necessarily be much smaller than Earth's Luna. It's obviously a similar apparent size in the sky, since otherwise the "ring of fire" wouldn't be visible during eclipses if it was too big, and it would barely block out any sunlight at all if it was too small.

But, if A.W. IS less massive than Earth, with correspondingly weaker gravity, then Tui cannot have similar mass to Luna or else Tui and A.W. would be tidally locked to each other like Pluto and Charon, and it wouldn't have phases. So Tui must be iron-poor compared to Luna, in order to have the right size without too much mass AND maintain analogous-to-Earth phase cycles and eclipse patterns.