Fluburtur

sometimes, often times, people in positions of vast wealth and power are complete, absolute fucking idiots

musk has decided that he likes the image of the genius scientist

but he is not responsible for the labors of his engineers

this is a man who tried to sell us all on the idea of the hyperloop, despite it being pointed out over and over and over by expert after expert after expert that it was completely and totally 100% unfeasible as a transit system because its carrying capacity is vastly too low for the size of the infrastructure commitment and its ridiculous cost

this is a man who greenlit sending a car into space without even sanitizing it first, which is standard practice for space programs around the world to avoid the potential of destroying undiscovered microorganism ecosystems on other celestial bodies

this is a man who got himself investigated by the fucking SEC because he tried to manipulate his own damn stock prices for the sake of a fucking weed joke

this is a man in his weird super long mid life crisis calling himself a fucking "meme necromancer" to try to be a cool kid

the man is a fucking idiot. buying himself the title of "chief engineer" does not magically grant him engineering ability or knowledge

buying a company with daddys blood money does not make him a competent or savvy CEO

tesla is a nightmare company for potential investors

I’m a pilot, and thus like 85% of my friends are ALSO pilots and one of them is just this delightful older guy that named Bruce. Bruce is a man of simple pleasures, he likes mediocre bbq and to take his vintage J3 Piper Cub out like, every other week just to have the old girl not look so sad in the hangar. We also live about 30NM south of an air base and, according to him, there was a squad of fighter planes out and they wanted some guys to go up in their planes for intercept practice (with pay, obviously) so the guys could get real time practice looking for unfamiliar aircraft.

Bruce, a man who doesn’t need it but wants to say he flew with some fighter jets, takes them up on their offer and takes the old girl up for them. Now, if you’re unfamiliar with a J3, this thing is slow as shit. Like, horrendously slow. And there was a decent headwind that day blowing in off the coast and Bruce gets the brilliant idea that he’s going to do something they can’t. So Bruce turns that old cub into the wind and just flies slow enough that he’s genuinely flying BACKWARDS and the next thing he knows are these three jets screaming past him, wings wobbling something fierce as they’re all about to stall, and the pilots yelling over the radio like “How are you DOING THAT” 

callout posts in 2015: this user is stealing bones from cemeteries for witch rituals!

callout posts in 2016: this user Actually A Nazi

callout posts in 2017: this user watches an anime I don’t like

callout posts in 2018: i went through this user’s youtube like history and found a video from JonTron that they liked in 2012, proving that they’re a bad person

callout posts in 2019: this user plays E-Rated Video Games, which are meant for children, which seems pretty sus to me idk :/

like back in my day, the day of online forums, learning how to trick someone in to getting themselves banned was an essential skill. if you could tell someone was a chud, you would ask them short, leading questions and watch them get frustrated and post longer and longer rants until they said something that would catch a mod’s attention and get them banned and/or at least publicly humiliated. 

and guess what? that’s the exact same tactics the alt-right use now. these people are exclusively acting in bad faith. every interaction these people post online is done with the intention of getting someone to respond to them so they can screenshot the massive paragraphs of text and laugh

so, what’s the solution?

dare ‘em to post dick pics.

don’t acknowledge the content of the stuff they post. if you see someone trying to engage you in bad faith just dare them to post pictures of their penis until they either get frustrated and leave or get frustrated and do it. either way they lose. 

Beyond the fact that I know how to use both a phone book and a rotary phone and can read cursive (as long as it’s not too horrifically messy), I think it was the attitude of “Oh no, we’ve got you because you couldn’t possibly figure out how to use something that’s new to you” that really made me snort. But I think that’s the key to this and similar memes that I’ve seen.

They don’t think we could figure out how to use something new to us, because they can’t do it. 

Like, if you presented a millennial with a rotary phone or a phone book and they had never, ever used one or seen one used before, I can guarantee pretty much any millennial could figure out how to use it. Because that’s what we do: we adapt. We’ve been through so many variations of technology and seen so many new forms of technology emerge that we’ve had to learn to adapt swiftly and fluidly. It’s second nature to us.

Put a boomer in a room with a smartphone, laptop, and tablet however, and well…different story.

You know, the recent popular trend in participatory entertainment in which thousands of millennials literally go out and pay money to voluntarily be locked in a room where they have to solve puzzles under a time pressure, often using antiquated or analog technology, secret codes, and mechanisms they don’t yet understand, all without using their phones/the internet. For fun.

For many of us, that’s not panic-inducing, that’s just our idea of an enjoyable Saturday night out with some friends!

I was grading midterms and this one girl. She was so nice and I think she was a business major. Fuck. The question on the midterm was to draw a diagram of the solar system and this poor girl. This fucking girl had drawn a Mars-centric solar system. As in every planet and the sun were orbiting Mars. I now actually have a custom Cards Againsy Humanity card I got at a con that says “A Mars-centric solar system”

I had a boy argue with me that there was liquid water on the moon (this was around when they had found liquid water on Mars in ~2015) and he wouldn’t believe me that he likely meant Mars and not the moon. After I marked his answer to the relevant lab question wrong, he took it to the department head who had promptly laughed him out of the office.