A Series of Unfortunate Shitposts

DeepLeffen is a Twitter bot trained on r/smashbros and Tweets from professional Smash player Leffen. It randomly generates Tweets based on prompts it is fed.

Safety warnings have been getting wilder as our world becomes more intricately dangerous. I've spoken about this before: fifty years ago, most warning signs were like "don't put your cigarette out in this." Nowadays there's a ton of cautions about radio interference with your Xbox controllers if you eat a cupcake the wrong way after having major dental surgery.

Part of this is because the demands of the customer have become more sophisticated. Every day, we're doing shit that would have pissed off a NASA scientist, and not even thinking about it too hard. Last week, I got mad that the free wifi on an airplane wasn't very fast. My buddy made some kind of special collar that lets us hear the thoughts of dogs, and then he threw it out with the other clutter on his desk when his in-laws were visiting.

Unfortunately, human brains are still basically the same as fifty years ago. Most of us would still be considered "kinda weird" in the 70s. There is a much wider gap of knowledge that has to be expressed to your average run-of-the-mill ding-dong in order to explain to them just how much trouble they are in. That's where the warnings are coming from: you practically have to include an undergraduate lecture to get people up to speed with the concepts involved, before you tell them not to put those concepts in their mouth.

We stood in the Roman ruins that, like patchwork, stitch so remarkably through the village of Caer-went, and dutifully read the information boards. The Romans had forcibly built and established Venta Silurum with the intention of Pacifying the Silurians, the local tribe.

“I think I feel weird now, about the Doctor Who aliens being called Silurians,” I said, “it’s sort of uncomfortable having ‘lizard people from the dawn of time’ being named after Celts. Tips into that bad-faith lizard-person space.”

“The BBC would have only been thinking of the Silurian period,” Dr Glass said neutrally. “That’s a fair siting for a ‘dawn of time.’ The Cambrian would’ve been uncomfortable and impractical.”

“Was the geological period of Palaeozoic life named after the tribe?” I said. “Hey, given that the Cambrian period is the Cambrian period! It must’ve been.”

“Haha - wait - look - look at the north!!”

“Damn! The whole-ass Ordovician period?!”

“Over to England for the Devonian,” Dr Glass, who claims Devonshire heritage on one side, said thoughtfully. “Permian, that’s Perm - probably the mountain range.”

Anyway, this proceeded to amuse me for a few days, and will be required to enjoy these jokes