• 3 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 6th, 2024

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  • This is pretty silly. Superhero movies constantly feature superheroes and supervillains causing mass property damage. Superman will be thrown through buildings. Cars will be used as throwing weapons, etc.

    It’s a deliberate cinematic choice. Superheroes just flying in the sky punching each other doesn’t convey the power involved in these characters. No, if you want to portray superheroes in a way that actually feels real to people, you need to show them interacting with our ordinary world. You show them treating things we experience as solid, indestructible, and immobile as mere tissue paper.

    This is just “show, don’t tell.” Sure, you could have some character verbally explain that “Superman has the strength of a million men!”, but if all you saw was Superman fighting in a cloud or an empty field, that wouldn’t really mean much. You can’t feel it. Watch Superman casually pick up a skyscraper, and suddenly your mind can actually grasp the scale of his power.



  • Go to your bank wearing an N95 mask. Wear a hoodie and put a banana in the front pocket. Keep your hands in your front pocket, grasping the banana. Walk up to the teller and ask them to put $100 in a bag.

    In tiny print at the bottom, include your bank account number. After they have a second to look at it, hand them your photo ID.






  • I propose the most practical option possible:

    Simply isolate the washing machine completely from the building. Levitate it entirely off the ground, suspended in the air via a massive toroidal superconducting electromagnet, 3 meters in diameter, cooled by liquid helium. (Which will need to be regularly topped off. It tends to slowly leak through solid walls.)

    The noise would be greatly reduced. As the machine thrashes about, it will do little but disturb the air around it. Little noise will be generated, except from the sound of the machine’s own parts acting against each other.

    Though, if you really wanted to optimize this for this setup, a different design is in order? Perhaps a non-standard design would better handle internal vibrational damping? Have you considered calling local stores and asking if they have any spherical washing machines in stock?



  • That’s why you prepare a hallway with like 20 of these alcoves. When one machine breaks, you simply pump it full of cement and plaster it over. It just becomes part of the wall. It remains there, entombed forever, like some latter-day washing machine Pompeii. Or maybe you don’t plaster over them at all. Maybe you proudly display them. “These are the washing machines of my ancestors…”





  • Stranger things have happened. I could see a timeline that goes like:

    1. The election in 2028 is blatantly stolen by Republicans, establishing a mask-off dictatorship.

    2. After a decade, they’re eventually ousted by a popular front consisting of civil society advocates, leftist organizers and activists, and religious movements.

    3. As the regime falls, the religious movement takes over everything and establishes an overt theocracy.