Like, how did I leave Bangkok at 8 AM and arrive in LA at 8 AM the same day, both local time? Time travel.
How shitposts travel across the world in an imperceivable amount of time. On a technical level, I know how computer networks work, but it still feels like an incredible achievement.
Identifying birds with apps like Merlin. That thing is amazing.
I ducking love Merlin
This thing in my hand that’s like 20% larger and 138% heavier than a cassette tape according to Duck AI, yet it has all my music, access to hundreds of movies (via plex, hosted on my Mac), not to mention I use it to answer stupid quotations and sometimes it changes what I type. Yeah, that.
Fucking magnets, how do they work?
And I don’t wanna talk to a scientist
I’m still fucking amazed that I can just put my phone on a fancy circle and it sticks there until I pull it off. I’ve had that thing for like a year and it still feels like magic.
Also:
I mean, I was making an ICP joke:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-agl0pOQfs
But yeah, people freaked the fuck out over “lodestones”.
Some Greek 8,000 years ago found out sometimes a very special rock will always point in one direction if you allow it to spin.
No one had any fucking idea what was happening, but suddenly sailing all over the place exploring wasn’t dangerous. No matter what, you could get back home.
Except there’s insanely rare areas that have magnetic anomlys where it suddenly goes crazy for reasons you have no way to explain.
The man-hours over 8,000 years of various cultures figuring out magnets is probably higher than a lot of “big” discoveries, it took humanity forever to the point we can buy crazy strong temu magnets for $3 just to fuck around.
Yeah fam. That’s exactly the point of Insane Clown Posse’s song Miracles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GyVx28R9-s
Lol came here to post that. Fucking juggalos, so gross yet so wholesome…
uh… thanks…? Yeah. Thanks.
Nothing but love for my faygo drenched, face painted, grimey little buddies!
Honestly everything since electricity. The number of people we now support at a level of comfort that was unimaginable to even a king 250 years ago.
Waking up at night in the middle of winter in a warm house instantly lit, getting up to poop on a warm comfortable indoor throne with fresh spring breeze scent in the air. The poop flushes away effortlessly and your hands and bum are quickly fresh & clean with running warm water scented soaps and dry with materials 10x more soft & absorbent than the famed Turkish towels. You decide to eat an orange (despite the fact they don’t grow within 1,000 miles of here) and heat a frozen snack in the microwave before heading back to bed.
And, unlike most households for most of history, neither you nor anyone in your family currently has tapeworms
My mom told me she woke up one night with some worm thing in her mouth and she had to get it out…
Ewwww idk why she told me that story…
Average farmer-villager life lol
They told me there are also blood-sucking worms in the fields where my grandparenrs worked and my mom had to help out in the farm…
She makes me feel like I’m privilaged to not have to do manual farming work…
I mean… sure… the hardest stuff I did at her age was file taxes for her and help her translate stuff from English… perhap I am “privilaged”?
I’m privilaged to not have to do manual farming work
We all are.
There is a reason people flocked into cities even before we had electricity and civil sewage systems. Subsistence farming is even worse.
Computers. How can a bunch of switches do this stuff?
I can use a slab of glass to summon either
- A bunch of entities with weapons… (firebenders? metalbenders?)
- A bunch of waterbenders that can use a device on a self-propelled vehicle to move water from the ground to turn off a fire nearby
- Faries that could possibly save your life
- Transportation… in exchange for a deduction in your magical number
- Good… in exchange for a deduction in your magical number…
- The magical number system… just hope your region of reigning Wizards/Witches don’t mess up the mana in the area… that could break the magic numbers…
I can also summon titties with it
I choose titties.
Anything to do with computers.
I used to not understand how they worked and it was magical. Now I understand a little bit about programming and coding and its even more magical. You literally write some spells and stuff starts to happen. Write some spells, click some buttons and you have a song or a animation. Plug in a machine, write some spells and you can make that machine slap you or your friend in the face.
We carve arcane patterns:
into specially prepared pieces of rock:
then apply energy and imbue them with instructions in specific, obscure languages to perform tasks for us. If you make any mistakes while uttering the instructions, the task fails.
Enchanted rocks, inscribed with runes, imbued with lightning.
Magic!
Nah, just tricked a rock into thinking by running current through it
Rocks don’t think.
Not naturally, until humans came along and tricked them into it.
Wireless everything. Its magic. RF magic.
Picture a rock getting thrown into a body of water and its ripples. Now just scale that up to 3 dimensions and all materials and you have RF!
I notice that my wireless internet still works when I move. The signals my device receives are everywhere.
We’re surrounded at all times by invisible porn.
I took graduate courses in RF physics.
It’s magic.
I studied electronics, and today I work in IT, specializing in networking. I have no fucking idea why RF, let alone wifi, works. I understand how it works, but the why-part is magic, trust me.
The “how” part gets murkier the deeper you dig.
The “why” is because we like magic things.
I worked with someone that’s been designing RF circuits close to 4 decades. They reckon it’s only about 50% magic.
They are a wizard and they are lying
They are a wizard, yes. Nobody in their right mind would want to do it for so long.
They also reckon the other 50% is trying to harness the magic by randomly tweaking stuff in the hope it doesn’t blow up in their face…
Written language. It literally lets us communicate with people thousands of years apart and around the world. Most significant technological development in human history imo.
Computer programming.
We created entire schools of magic (programming language) that all have their unique syntax and rules. Each school of magic has it’s own spells. We type the magic words (commands) into a spell book (software) that was created by magic words to create new software.
Straight up fucking magic.
The fact that all over the world we can drill a hole ~100’ into the ground and get fresh water. So far, but many factors are conspiring against that basic life-sustaining resource.
I just am not happy enough with the world for anything to feel magical anymore.
The trick is looking for the little magic. In the midst of this past winter’s snowmageddon I had to keep driving to work. The windshield would be covered in salt spray and dirt most of the time. One day I must have gotten the bright idea to do the window washer when I got to work, before I went inside. My memory’s not the greatest and it was such a small simple thing that I had totally forgotten about it by the end of the day.
It took me a few blocks to pick up on what was different, since it seemed like everything was. I could read the bumper stickers on the car in front of me. All of the houses and buildings were in sharp relief. I could make out the individual branches of each tree instead of just seeing a tall gray blob. It slowly dawned on me that all this was because my windshield was clean.
My past self had inadvertently created magic for my future self. Not magic in finally having a clean window or somehow making the snow and sleet stop. Magic in those few brief moments when I could see things more clearly than any other time in the cold winters of my life. That brief moment was like walking out of a door right at the end of a summer rainstorm. Petrichor filling your nostrils and everything in front of you so sharp and full of color.
Remember it’s probably not the world you’re unhappy with, it’s the people on it. Look past the people and find the magic in your surroundings.
