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Dunno if you’ll like this one, but I ran across it:

“The thing about evolving on a death world is that you don’t really realize you’re doing so until you get the chance to leave it. Up to that point the presence of carnivorous monsters, venomous micropredators, extreme climatic conditions, geological instability, the most lethal cocktail of microbial and viral life forms in the galaxy and of course the crushing gravity, seemed entirely natural. Until we left Earth we thought ourselves rather weak, frail, defenseless creatures because we only had earth fauna to compare ourselves to. You can imagine our surprise then, upon joining the galactic community to find ourselves in fact to be enormous, robust and insanely dangerous in our own right.” – RecklessPrudence

The humans had literally gone all out to ensure T'reka’s comfort while she recovered from her broken leg.

They’d made her a nest-bed and a special ward where she had a panoramic view of the human town below. And they made sure she had access to their entire database and an ever-evolving translation app. And rechargers for her own technology.

They even invented a patch for her comms system so she could check in with her origin city.

Which was how T'reka found all the archived documentaries.

Su-syn found her staring in awe as David Attenborough narrated his careful and whispery way through explaining life on a coral reef.

“You is good?” she chirped. “You is not needing more calm-shots?”

“No, is good.” T'reka shook herself. Fluffing her feathers and resettling herself. “Am now knowing human secret.”

“Secret? We is no hiding true from you.”

“You is not knowing it is a true,” T'reka soothed. “You is living be on death world, before come here. Whole planet - deadly. Big thing, small thing, big risk, all time. You not noticing. Not knowing other way.”

Su-syn smiled. Uttered a brief laugh. “You is making jokes, yes? Earth no death world. Is where all human living.”

Yes. And that’s the problem. “Earth living four time tough than Hu'lu'a living. Human four time tough than Numidid,” she tried to explain. “All you big tame animal? Still big threat to me folk.”

Su-syn made a face like something smelled bad. “Even sheep? Even chickens?”

“All,” confirmed T'reka. “You folk many much tough than most others star folk.”

Su-syn sat down abruptly. She just folded her legs and landed solidly on the floor. “Is not shock, you folk is think we monster,” she murmured. “We is promise we try no be monster for Numidid.”

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[In a discussion about technically-proficient people (of any subdivision) and the lies-to-children told to those they have to interact with]

I think we know why wizards just act all cryptic and stuff…

I imagine they had to keep explaining their knowledge of the arcane to the average peasant over and over again until they just got fed up with it.

And that’s how we get wizards, mages and sorcerers who seem to delight in not giving a straight answer. – RecklessPrudence

Fragmen of stupri mauris. Quare non opus est? — RecklessPrudence

[AN: I ran this through a translator and got: “Piece of fucking shit. Why not work?” :D LOL ]

There’s working on repairs with trained technicians… and then there’s working with someone who’s learned certain things by rote as part of a holy ritual. Someone who - though she had the brains to work out that the rituals were supposed to be useful, and had successfully applied some of them in

Series of posts, each blank line denotes a new poster:

[Comparing real-life understanding of tech by the people maintaining it to a fictional universe] Of course, this is minus the stupid witch doctor rituals.

“Have you tried turning it off and on again?” comes to mind. And a lot of other rituals.

Doesn’t that actually help with a significant portion of callers?

[Fictional universe organisation] rituals work too, except when they don’t. Doesn’t make it any less

“On most airplanes, in an emergency oxygen masks will be deployed from above your seat. This is an Australian airplane however; in an emergency, we will deploy drop bears from above your seat.”

Either way, the lack of oxygen problem is quickly solved. – RecklessPrudence

“What? Why would you do something that barbaric?” Esterhazy boggled.

“Well, the oxygen systems are tied to the landing gear, see,” Shirl expanded without missing a beat. “If there’

The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there’s no good reason to go into space—each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision. – RecklessPrudence

Nobody knew what the natives called it. There were no natives to ask. Whatever had happened on this world had destroyed all but the simplest and toughest of organic life, but left the buildings and infrastructure to be slowly buried

“Wow, how’d you get it to work?”
“I ran a Physical Impulse Mechanical Stress Routine”
“Huh?”
“I kicked it.”
“Ahh.” – RecklessPrudence

It really only took ten minutes to fix, in the end. A little heat. And a lot of whacking with the right kind of maintenance.

She charged them an Hour for her work, part of which was a ‘luck tax’. As in, they were lucky they reached

I’ve made jokes about “Reboot… with steel toes” and “troubleshooting with a 12-Gauge - PULL!” plenty of times! – RecklessPrudence

A certain sign of doom amongst engineers is whistling backwards. It means something expensive is about to happen. When they hiss through their teeth whilst breathing in… there’s very little to be done.

“It’s bad, isn’t it?” asked Rael, off-the-books-apprentice.

“Eh,” the engineer currently in charge shrugged. “Pass me

“Yes, I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can find his way by moonlight, and see the dawn before the rest of the world.” - Oscar Wilde c/- RecklessPrudence

Everyone who met her knew that there was something wrong with Sai’dut. She would talk to herself, or stop her appointed tasks to stare at something irrelevant, she would grow forgetful or latch on to some asinine entertainment and learn everything that nobody wanted to know

An Outside Context Problem is the sort of thing most civilisations encounter just once, and which they tend to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encounters a full stop.
-“Excession,” definition of an OCP c/- RecklessPrudence

Thus it is that the Cogniscent Rights Committee has passed numerous laws to prevent them. Shipping through inhabited systems with recognised intelligent life native to them is generally forbidden until such time as that native population has regular and reliable space flight.

Google Maps is accurate. Apple Maps is the product of Dali and Picasso smoking a joint before painting the child of a canary and penguin with a frightened cat used as the paint brush, then selling the result as a map. – RecklessPrudence

There’s an old human saying, that there is no such thing as an accurate map. Maps lie.

For a start, they compress thousands of square distance units into flat expanse capable of -for instance- being held by

On a scale of one to “I will invent a time machine explicitly for murdering your parents,” how mad do you think [person] is? – RecklessPrudence

“Ambassador Z0rk? He’s always tetchy.”

“That’s tetchy?” Shayde boggled. “Remind me never tae get him PO'ed.”

“Pee… ode?”

“Pissed off. Angered. Riled. Bluidy furious.”

Humans. They were equally confusing in any temporal zone. At least she wasn’t mysteriously speaking

“But, how did you know that the file contained their secret plans for world domination?”
“Because it was labelled ‘secret plans for world domination’.” — RecklessPrudence

K’orvoth could not believe that the humans would be that stupid. Or stupid enough to lable said plans in all known languages where anyone could read it.

Or to leave such things on an unsecured commconsole in the open.

He could not believe this windfall. “Decrypt it at once,” he ordered. “We

First submission since the identification of an ableist slur. Edited from original form, thusly:

I love the image of his brain just clearly rebooting because too much ridiculousness and unbelievability is hitting it at one time. – RecklessPrudence

Harry stared up at the edifice that was Security Chief ‘Sherlock’. It was hard not to. Sherlock stood at 6'4" and she was a diminutive 5'2".

“…i know i’m in trouble, there’s no need