Better Than It Sounds / Real Life

You thought fiction was weird? Think of all of the bizarre things we, as humans, have actually done!

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• The Alphabet: A series of strange symbols used regularly, but rarely acknowledged beyond the very early years of human life and in basic education and business (under certain circumstances). If said symbols are arranged in a certain manner, they form the identification of various objects, subjects, and the connections between the two. The incorrect arrangement of these is detested by many; so much so that programs in computing are designed to point out said incorrect arrangement. However, a single object/subject/connection can have many different arrangements of these symbols, though the meaning is the same, as long as one understands the different symbol arrangements in the object/subject/connection. Many societies have different forms/arrangements of these symbols, often leading to confusion when these two societies meet.
• The American Revolution: Several thousand people on the Northwest Atlantic shore challenge their homeland on the other side for their independence. Set apart from other revolutions in that it was actually spawned by the rich.
• Ancient Rome: A bunch of hick farmers build a small hamlet and manage to become Shrouded in Myth by killing everyone else. They also discover how to build giant bureaucracies. Then various Barbarian Tribes subject them to a mixture of Rape, Pillage, and Burn and peaceful entry. At roughly the same time an obscure cleric sets up shop here and gives orders to all the other clerics. Two thousand years later, another cleric uses this place gives orders to Russia. Poland is pleased about this turn of events.
  • Roman Army: A bunch of farmers dress in exotic clothes so that they can kill people, work on roads, and star in movie productions.
• An Appetite: A compelling force that possesses every living thing, including you, that makes you want to greedily consume the flesh of other living beings with no regard for creatures that may need this flesh to satiate this urge as well.
• Apple Macintosh: An expensive computer that runs less software than its main competitors.
  • iPod: An underpowered computer with a tiny screen and limited input options, which can only play music.
  • iPhone: An expensive phone that wastes its battery power by doing things that computers are supposed to do.
  • iPad: Similar to the aforementioned phone, but larger, and it doesn't work as a phone.
• Bees: Hairy striped creatures that help plants have sex and vomit all over their homes. They do this literally until they die. If you get too close, they may stab you with a spike in their butts.
• Braces: A painful, years-long method of skeletal readjustment and sometimes bone removal, resulting in permanent disfiguration, to which children are subjected against their will. This is, for some, necessary to be considered attractive.
• Breathing: Having to constantly suck down common materials because eating food apparently wasn't enough.
• Napoleon Bonaparte: Short guy from Corsica attempts to conquer a vast majority of Europe by force. Later gets exiled to a British dependency off the coast of Africa.
  • Later, it's discovered that he wasn't short. This doesn't stop him having a complex which involves short people named after him.
• Brain: A three-pound lump of meat consisting mostly of fat.
  • Alternatively: An immobile but (usually) disproportionately intelligent pilot of a Gundam made out of meat that also serves as the pilot's life support system.
  • Alternatively Alternatively: A muscle that thinks. There was and still is much debate about how it does this. The one in humans is so smart it named itself and is able to create complex technology, yet so primitive it’ll probably take hundreds of thousands of years to be able to use the tech without thoroughly fucking itself up (you’re guilty of it as you read this sentence). Known to cause extreme misery if it doesn’t work how it’s supposed to, which happens often enough that there’s an entire industry around fixing these issues.
  • Psychology: It tries to find out how it works, to varying degrees of success.
    • Sigmund Freud: All your problems are because you want to have intercourse with your mom.
  • Emotions: It responds to various stimuli by causing the organism connected to it to experience a range of different arbitrary chemical changes, ranging from pleasant to unpleasant. The organism prefers the pleasant ones, so it takes extra care to only experience those ones. This process is somehow supposed to keep it alive. Because humans like to over-complicate things, they associate these with other senses, such as a series of noises in a unique order, and different wavelengths of light.
    • Happiness: Many humans consider this to be the most desirable chemical reaction, going out of their way to experience it, which often results in getting an undesirable one instead. Associated with the colour of a ball of gas in the sky. Can be triggered by consuming the organism’s preferred nutrient, or spending time with other organisms whom they share genes with.
    • Sadness: In comparison, this one is thought of as the opposite of the desirable one. People have arguments over whether it’s valid to experience or not experience this in certain situations. Associated with the colour of what makes off most of earth’s surface. Triggered by loss of what is considered property, or loss of those with similar genomes.
    • Depression: For whatever reason, some Homo sapiens lose the ability to feel most of the chemical changes except the undesirable ones. It often results in the humans who are victims of this being heavily misunderstood. Not having the pleasant chemicals often causes the creature to be so miserable it would rather not exist. Probably not a lot better than it sounds.
    • Fear: The organism in question feels as if it is about to die, and reacts appropriately, although in humans, it’s a false alarm 99% of the times it happens. Results in loss of the desire to consume nutrients, taking extra air into the two chambers inside the chest, and inability to use the hunk of meat in a sensible way. No wavelength in particular is associated with this. Triggered by many things, depending on different factors.
    • Anxiety: Humans who have this feel as if they are about to die a lot more intensely, and in inappropriate situations. Can also result in the aforementioned loss of ability to feel pleasant chemical changes.
    • Phobias: Reacting to various objects and situations with extreme shock and fear, ranging from understandable ones to downright ridiculous ones. No one has found an explaination as to why this phenomenon occurs, except past incidents involving the object or situation.
    • Anger: The hunk of meat decides that its creature has to start acting violently. Associated with the wavelength that can be seen on the liquid inside long tubes in the body, which is also how the creature’s face may appear when experiencing too much of this. Mostly triggered in humans by other humans with undesirable traits.
    • Bipolar Disorder: A human’s hunk of meat may occasionally not have the ability to decide which chemical reaction in particular to experience, resulting in passages of time where they have a dangerous amount of the pleasant ones, only to suddenly get the same but with the unpleasant ones.
• Breathing: The constant repetition of an act that intakes what could be made a deadly and addictive poison by consuming in excess, can cause internal bleeding and hemorrhage if done improperly, and significantly increases the carbon footprint of every person who does it. The completion of any attempt to stop results in painful and invariably fatal withdrawal.
  • Oxygen: A gas that, when inhaled, makes one feel better than when they weren't. After a short period of time any completed attempt to abstain from this gas will kill slowly and painfully. Often force fed to old people and hospital patients. When combined with many substances, results in their deterioration and destruction.
• Buddhism: What to do if you just really hate living and would rather stay dead than come back to life.
• Bugs: Creatures that are almost universally considered terrifying despite being very small and usually harmless, and sometimes adorable. Unless you live somewhere where they kill people on a regular basis.
• Capsaicin^note  Chemical found in chillies which makes them spicy: An irritant chemical found excessively in Indian and Mexican food, and is often inserted into the mouth, despite having the ability to cause burning sensations, pain, difficulty breathing, nausea, vomiting, and diarrhoea. When concentrated, it requires protective goggles, respirators, and hazardous material-handling procedures in order to be dealt with safely. It is sometimes sprayed into the eyes of humans who have done naughty things. Consumption of this substance is often used as a way of gaining status with young males, while refusal to consume it is seen as emasculating.
• Cars: A metal cage, usually with four wheels arranged in a rectangular pattern, which travels on flat surfaces unless you have a model designed for use on rough terrain. Owning an expensive, rare and/or old one will cause people to envy you while simultaneously praising your supposedly good taste.
  • Alternately, a moving box powered by dead dinosaurs
  • Concept Cars: Models of the four-wheeled cages which are either a) produced in exceedingly small numbers, b) are unique, or c) only exist as a digital or artistic representation. These vehicles are designed with varying degrees of "futuristic" aesthetics and features, but will inevitably look ridiculous in 50 years. Despite this, people would gladly buy the vehicles if not for the fact that they will never be sold to the public.
  • RVs: A cage, usually with four wheels arranged in a rectangular pattern, which travels on flat surfaces despite being associated with rough terrain. Owning one will cause people with tents to envy you, although these vehicles use so much fuel that this jealousy is quite dulled.
  • Trains: A chain of boxes on wheels traveling along predetermined paths.
    • Passenger Trains: A chain of boxes on wheels containing people, traveling along predetermined paths, and which cannot be boarded or exited except at predetermined places and times.
  • Bicycle: A device that is so unstable it must be traveling at speed to remain upright on its own. People, especially young children, fall off them frequently; as a result, many places have laws requiring specialized safety gear to operate them.
  • Motorcycles: The unstable device gets motorized - and has a ridiculously low amount of safety precautions compared to the aforementioned four-wheeled cage.
  • Carseats: A technology designed to allow babies and other small humans to be hurtled along the ground at over a hundred feet per second before coming to an abrupt and unexpected stop.
  • Air travel: A gigantic metal tube with hundreds of people trapped inside moves at great speed through a lethally cold environment several miles above ground.
• Chemistry: People mix things with other things and hope something cool happens.
• Christianity: Your parents have bad taste in fruit. Now say you're sorry.
• Circumcision: Men cut a small piece of skin from their sex organ in order to please an Eldritch Abomination.
• The Civil War: Eleven states form their own nation to keep slavery alive. When another nation's fort is attacked by them, the latter's twenty-plus other states fight for four years to stop slavery. Two states in particular fight for both nations.
  • Reconstruction: The former eleven states give up slavery after the war ends, but business is extremely slow due to the death of the Illinois lawyer mentioned below.
  • Jefferson Davis: Mississippi Senator and former cabinet member who served as leader of the above eleven states during the four-year conflict.
• Clothing: Plant fibres, animal skin and polymers made from crude oil woven into sheets. Humans use these to cover their bodies due to their lack of hair and dislike of nakedness. Every few years, indecisive people change their minds about which sheets are considered to make humans look attractive. This causes many humans to waste money on new sheets. There is a long, complicated list of rules about which sheets should be worn at certain places and for certain occasions, though these rules are rarely explained to anyone and seem to have no useful function in society.
• The Cold War: Two nations prepare for nuclear conflict but never actually get there.
  • The Iron Curtain: An imaginary line in Central Europe showing all but two nations on the eastern half of the continent under one of the above nation's control or influence.
• College/University: You work for years to get good grades, do tasks you wouldn't otherwise do, and then beg and plead for an institution to take vast amounts of money off of your hands. If you're really, really good, and keep giving them money, you might get a piece of paper that might help you get a job to pay off all of that money you gave them. If you'd rather, you can also gather with like-minded individuals to drink alcoholic beverages while dressed as ancient Romans.
• Colors: A series of arbitrary visual feelings which your brain uses to categorize different wavelengths of light.
• Computer: Billions of electronic switches turn on and off billions of times per second.
• Cross-Stitch: Sticking short lengths of thread through cloth, first one way diagonally, then the other, over and over and over and over and over and over until hopefully you get a picture of some sort out of it.
• Tim Curry: An actor whose most famous roles are that of a butler, clown, talking smoke, and a transvestite. However, his self-professed favorite role is that of a pirate.
• Crying: Secreting fluid from two body parts as an emotional response. Some people think it makes you look weak,and doing it too much will make said body parts swollen and sore.
• Dating: Someone you don't know, whose intentions you can't predict, showing you an inordinate amount of attention.
• Death: Kind of like sleeping but more permanent.
• Dihydrogen monoxide a.k.a. Water: A chemical that is the largest contributor to acid rain and fatal when inhaled in large amounts. Despite this, it can be found in almost any home and certainly any chemistry lab. No organized movement to make it illegal has ever gathered enough support to be successful.
• Dinosaurs: Some giant reptiles which were the dominant creatures on Earth until they eventually learnt to fly.
• Disney Theme Parks: You pay hundreds of dollars so you and your family can stand around in the hot sun for hours, watch severely abridged versions of a bunch of movies you've probably already seen several times, and get the autographs of professional cosplayers. The more days in a row you do it, the more that some people will envy you.
• DNA: A substance that exclusively records a very difficult, unstructured, and non-imperative programming language that contains little or no comments. This programming language places a mess where modern technology would use SPARK, Erlang or a hardware description language. External factors can change code, sometimes resulting in unrecoverable malfunction in safety critical, non-stop applications.
• Eating: Stuffing solid and liquid matter into an orifice, grinding the solid matter up with bones that protrude from the inside of said orifice, and using internal muscles to pull the liquid and ground solid matter into a sac inside the being undertaking the whole process. Can result in death if the wrong matter is used or the matter goes the wrong way at a fork in the biological tube leading to the sac (correct direction) and an organ designed to intake gaseous matter (incorrect direction). Not doing this will eventually lead to death when an acid in the sac eats through the sac walls or the being not undertaking the action dies due to lack of energy intake.
  • "Bathroom Usage": The whole above process leads to the expulsion of liquid from one orifice (in a rather draining experience) and solid matter from another, both of which are considered unsanitary to come into further contact with and must be disposed of via special systems that provide clean water and dispose of dirty water. Despite the fact that "unsanitary matter" is in the dirty water, the dirty water is put through a process involving toxic chemicals and put back into the system as "clean water".
• Thomas Edison: An inventor who cheated his rival out of $50,000, stole his ideas, and invented the electric chair just to mock another rival.
• U.S. Presidential Election: A ritual in America to decide who is worthy to be given the power to destroy the world. This process involves several celebrities going before the public eye and giving insults to each other that would get you shot in some countries; for it is rightfully agreed that anyone willing to destroy other people's reputations with the required callousness would probably be willing to blow up the world if needed. The celebrity most successful in ruining the reputation of every other celebrity while leaving their own least harmed is thereby considered worthy to be awarded the prize of spending four years being insulted by everyone else in the entire world.
  • The chief argument in favor of this ritual is that it is considered superior to the ritual known as coronation see below.
    • Coronation: The descendant of some barbaric warlord a thousand years ago comes before a cleric wearing impractical clothing no sane person would wear in other circumstances. He then spends the rest of his life devoting himself to spouting off platitudes and being adored by the public for so doing. In their gratitude at his beneficence his loyal subjects will take an absurd interest in his private life that would be considered stalking if applied to an ordinary person.
    • Tyranny: A loud and obnoxious person convinces people that they are tired of one or both of the two above rituals. He therefore replaces them with his own personal command shedding copious amounts of blood in the process. Once this is done the practicer of this spends several dozen years bullying his subjects. May or may not attempt to attempt to subject the subjects of his neighboring rulers to mass murder and armed robbery, but will likely not be terribly competent at that as his neighbors often fight back. After a while this tyrant will grow old and his subjects grow weary of him. Whereupon either they will kill him or he will run away to an expensive villa in the Mediterranean. Actually, it is even worse than it sounds.
• Employment: People engage in a series of tasks, usually of a routine and often repetitive nature. Although the routine in which these tasks are undertaken varies from person to person, for many people this involves getting up very early in the morning and undertaking them for several hours at a time, usually until the day is well and truly over. Despite the fact that few people (unless they're lucky) can truly claim to enjoy this routine, those who do not undertake it are often looked down upon and are widely disadvantaged in society.
• Ethanol/Alcohol: A flammable chemical consumed in large quantities by many humans, particularly young males, despite causing nausea, vomiting, confusion, unconsciousness, impaired memory and judgement, and permanent brain and liver damage, among other things.
  • Whisky: The longer it sits in a mouldy barrel for, the more it costs.
• Evolution: A process that primarily consists of copying things. But it keeps getting it wrong. Most of the time this ends in the sad consequence of its mistake dying but sometimes it instead results in something it made earlier dying instead and the mistake living fractionally (in the grand scheme of things) longer. Turns out if you keep doing this long enough you eventually get things smart enough to know that they are going to die but they still can't do anything about it and apparently that's progress.
• Eyeglasses: Pieces of glass worn on your face so that two of your malformed organs function the way everyone else's do.
  • Contact lenses: Semi-circular pieces of plastic that are poked into some very important organs daily to correct a genetic or acquired defect. Side effects can include discomfort and severe infection that can lead to permanent damage to the organ in question.
• Farting: The introduction of solid and liquid matter into a being's upper frontal orifice also prompts the billions of smaller living beings residing in the tube connected to the lower back orifice to further process the introduced material, creating gas in the process. After its buildup, the gas exits the lower orifice, either silently or accompanied by a trumpeting sound. This can lead to uncontrollable laughter, embarrassment, denial, a remarkably different quality of the nearby air or the desire to hold a flame-producing artifact near the orifice during the discharge to create a bigger flame.
• Fiction: People make stuff up; it's sometimes based on truth, but it's often complete make-believe. This results in the formation of vast industries, varying degrees of fame and fortune for those doing the making-up, and numerous and often intense discussions about it.
  • Historical Fiction: Fanfiction about real life.
  • Fairy Tales: Impressionable peasant children are taught lots of horrific stuff by their loving parents in the hope that they will enjoy it. Wanderers from cities hear of this custom and write them down so that children from the city can have the same experience.
• Film: A sophisticated (but not really) method of showing you a bunch of pictures that resemble one long moving picture. It was very primitive at first; it then gained color, sound, and the ability to depict the most outrageous and impossible events. It has become a very lucrative industry.
  • Action Movies: A body of work dedicated to the belief that the world's problems can only be solved by doing things that will get you at least life in prison.
  • Drama: A body of work that is either considered brilliant or a stupid bore.
  • Comedy: A body of work that requires timing and improvising in order for hilarity to ensue.
    • Romantic Comedies: A body of work dedicated to the belief that mature relationships are the result of hilarity ensuing.
  • Epic Movies: A body of work with an inflated sense of ambition and importance (and budget). A source rich in Hype Backlash.
  • Science Fiction movies: A body of work dedicated to the belief that the ridiculous, the outlandish, and the outright impossible are simply are a matter of retuning your Visual Effects programs, or a matter of some old guy in a convention costume.
• Fireworks: Explosives which make pretty colours and unpleasant noises. Usually used by drunken idiots to celebrate a number of events, though many people know nothing of note about said events and even fewer care about them. Notorious for causing injury and property damage; despite this, they are readily available for purchase and use by the general public.
• Flowers: Genitalia used to show affection, sympathy, or as a major ingredient to make sprays with no other purpose than to make the wearer stinky.
• Food: Items you put in your mouth even though you probably do not know where it came from and how it was handled.
  • Cheese: Solidified, pasteurized animal milk with a hint of salt. Some varieties are aged and some are mouldy.
  • Eggs: Birds defecate pods that can never fulfill their reproductive function and are used as edible foodstuffs.
  • Fruit: Engorged plant ovaries used as edible foodstuffs.
    • Pineapple: A group of said ovaries formed into a clump which is spiky on top. People like to have arguments about whether it should be put on tomato-covered bread or not.
  • Vegetables: Plant parts that plant breeding or random chance make edible.
    • Fruit and Vegetables Underpaid migrant farm-workers in terrible conditions harvest these for your good health.
  • Honey: Odorous secretions designed to attract insects so that they will facilitate plant sex and produce edible foodstuffs.
  • Yeast: Some are tiny critters that pee and belch in your food and then become part of your food; others cause human illnesses.
    • Leavened Bread: A block of nutrients for human consumption that requires some of the above-described tiny critters to pee and belch in it and become part of it prior to human consumption.
  • Meat: The flesh of animals. For some reason, this often does not include the flesh of fish. Often ground up and stuck back together again in flat strips. Sometimes stuffed inside an intestine casing and burnt in oil.
    • Bacon: The flesh of a type of creature stereotypically considered unclean and greedy; despite this, it is often considered to be the most sacred of all the animal flesh. Opinions differ on the proper form of this flesh. Some believe it should contain strips of fat, while others abhor this, and destroy of any fatty tissue they lay their eyes on. Attempts to mimic it are often met with horror and anger, despite these other options often being cheaper and easier to produce.
  • Vanilla: The yield of a flower that blooms for an hour but at random times, then withers, requiring farmers to constantly check up on the plants, day and night, to manually pollinate them, because no pollinators exist in most places where it's grown. It's so labor-intensive that it goes for a ridiculously high price, but it's also so sought after that not only do people buy it at that price, but the farmers are armed and sleep where they keep their yield due to it being a frequent target of theft. The plant belongs to a taxonomic family of over 28,000 species, yet is the only one grown and harvested on a large scale due to the insatiable demand for it. Despite all of this, the word for this foodstuff is also synonymous with "bland" and "basic."
• Funfairs: A place where people go to enjoy motion-sickness-inducing rides, and games whose GMs have a reputation for being cheating bastards, and buy inflatable containers of alpha and beta radiation.
• Mira Furlan: A girl runs away from an obscure Balkan country to play Joan of Arc Recycled In Space.
• The Game: Ignorance is bliss. Stick figures claim the secret to victory.
• Get Rid of Cable: When something adverse related to cable occurs, you trigger a series of strange and illogical events. Don't let the last of such events happen to you.
• Gold: An element too soft and dense to be useful for building anything out of. It is quite an effective conductor, but is usually too expensive to be used for that purpose. Additionally, if its atoms had just one more proton in them, it would instead be a deadly poisonous fluid.
• Guinness Book of Records (aka Guinness World Records): A massive list of who/what is best or most at something.
• Hair: Dead cells forced out of your body through microscopic holes. Frequent maintenance is required to keep it from getting out of control.
  • Dreadlocks: The result of not maintaining the aforementioned dead cells frequently enough. Often associated with dirty people and consumers of illegal substances.
  • Haircuts: The dead cells are removed by a specialist in complicated patterns. Occasionally, pigmentation is added to any remaining cells.
• Halloween Horror Nights: People pay good money to go to a crowded place, run around in the dark, look at simulated blood and gore, and have other people scream at and pretend to attack them.
• Jim Henson: A strange kid from Mississippi devotes his life to giving his many imaginary friends physical bodies of foam rubber, fur, feathers, and ping-pong balls.
• Heraldry: An art of shield decoration intended to show who was greater than who.
• Hiccups: Involuntary contractions of the diaphragm, which often cause pain. These spasms produce a characteristic squeaking sound, which may be the cause of embarrassment or amusement. Many people like to offer remedies for this condition, though these have almost never been scientifically verified and may cause harm to the person who attempts them. It has been suspected that the main reason people offer these 'remedies' is for their own amusement.
• Holidays: Days that are no different than any other except for the fact that a single circumstance in the distant past usually guarantees a day off from work and/or a big meal.
  • Christmas: A yearly occurrence in which we stand plants up in our houses, cover them in various objects, and wait for an ancient man to break into our house at night through the tube filled with soot and leave things scattered around the area in boxes. This event corresponds to the birth of an ancient religious leader.
    • Alternately: A baby saves the world after his parents are forced to take a vacation purely for bureaucratic purposes.
    • Alternately: People around the world hold a birthday party for someone they don't actually know personally. Nor is it actually his birthday.
    • Santa Claus: The aforementioned man who breaks into your home also eats your food, dumps stuff he doesn't want, and leaves before you ever realize someone was there. A surveillance organization jointly run by the United States and Canadian governments tracks his presence in response to popular demand. In spite of (or perhaps because of) all this, children around the world look forward to him and his break-ins every year.
  • Easter: A yearly occurrence in which we wait for a large lagomorph to leave brightly-colored fowl menstruation scattered around our yards. This event corresponds to the death of an ancient religious leader who failed to stay dead.
    • Alternately: The very first zombie in history supposedly got revived at this date. We celebrate it with unfertilized avian ovuluses. It originated as Passover, a celebration of a genocidal deity arranging ten plagues in Egypt.
    • In some countries, this occurence also involves young furries coming to your house to practice witchcraft in return for unhealthy food.
  • Halloween: Strangely-dressed people come to your house and threaten you with pranks unless you poison them with fat and sugar.
    • Or: Cosplayers roam around begging for food. Scarring gourds and presenting them is one way to show you're willing to provide it. No, the gourds are almost never eaten, just thrown away when everyone's finished.
  • Labor Day: A day where people honor the people who spend their days laboring by not doing so.
  • Memorial Day: A day where people honor fallen warriors by eating cooked animal intestines and ground up bovine.
  • Martin Luther King Jr. Day: A day where people honor a hero by purchasing furniture and cars at reduced prices.
    • President's Day: A day where americans honor their former leaders (mostly just 2 of them) by purchasing furniture and cars at reduced prices.
  • St. Valentine's Day: A day where people celebrate romantic affection by giving each other dead tree slices, sweet confections, and plant genitals. A symbol based on the shape of a woman's bottom is very prevalent. This event corresponds to the clubbing to death and beheading of a Roman holy man.
  • New Years Eve: People celebrate surviving a full year by slowly killing themselves. Explosives are launched over populated areas as a huge ball hurtles down over New York City.
    • New Years Day: People follow up the above event by waking up next to someone they may or may not know with no recollection of the events that lead up to that point.
  • Thanksgiving: People celebrate a group of people having a feast by spending a day with people they rarely communicate with, consuming copious amounts of cooked fowl covered in meat juice, and watching large men physically assault each other for a ball.
    • Black Friday: The day following the above where people go to large warehouses at ungodly hours of the morning and get into unarmed combat with each other over items they want to obtain for a different holiday.
  • Columbus Day: A day where people celebrate a man for proving that the world was round even though almost everyone actually knew that for a long time.
    • Alternately: A day when people celebrate a man for discovering a continent which he never actually landed on and which had already been discovered, by trying to find a more viable trade route to an entirely different continent by going in the opposite direction that said continent was in.
  • The 4th of July: People celebrate freedom by getting drunk and using pyrotechnics. Explosives are launched over populated areas on this day too.
  • Guy Fawkes Day/Bonfire Night: People stay up late to set things on fire and watch said things exploding in the air as they are being blown sky high. They do this to celebrate the failure of a religious terrorist to blow up a building. Nowadays though, thanks to a famous movie, the religious terrorist is now just as often seen as a hero.
  • St. Patrick's Day: People celebrate a religious icon by wearing the colour green and turning into stereotypes. People who don't wear green are often physically assaulted.
  • April 20th: A day wherein people consume illegal substances in celebration of... something. Ironically, people who the above group despise also celebrate this day for a different reason.
• Holidays/Vacations Humans stuff a small a small proportion of their possessions into bags and boxes, possibly damaging them in the process. They then leave their home, which they have designed to suit their needs, and go and live in a different building where they can't where anything is, and are separated from the majority of their belongings. The humans are often not suited to the climate and terrain the new building is situated in, and they often find themselves unable to communicate with the local residents of the area. After a couple of weeks, the process happens in reverse, with the humans ending up back at their original dwelling. Despite its apparent lack of purpose, this process can be extremely costly, and many humans deprive themselves of money in order to be able to afford it. Generally, the further away the human gets from their home, the more expensive the operation is, and the more excited the human becomes.
• Hong Kong: An overcrowded city born from tea, trade, war, and drug abuse.
• Human: A violent, arrogant, entitled creature that believes itself to be superior to all other lifeforms on its home planet, despite the fact that it goes out of its way to harm other members of its species over the most minor genetic differences, and takes a ridiculously long time to mature compared to said other lifeforms. It likes to make up imaginary rules and any who do not follow them will be subjected to the aforementioned harm. Most of the activities it does include questioning why it wants to figure out how to figure itself out, and pretending that the universe is more complex than it is. It doesn’t itself know why this is the case, and thinking about it too much results in an arbitrary feeling brought on by the chunk of meat in the creature’s uppermost body, causing it to feel unpleasant.
• I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue: Sensible people doing silly things.
• The "If by Whiskey" speech: A politician waffles humorously.
• The Internet: A medium in which computers send electronic signals to one another over a largely disorganised system. An unknown but unquestionably-large portion is comprised of pornographic content.
• Israel: A small country that, despite being located in the middle of a desert, is apparently indestructible, considering that over the past 10,000 years or so, every attempt to destroy it has failed. Strangely though, it has spent a lot of time...defeated at one point or another. Took a break for a few thousand years, but reappeared in the late 40's.
• Japan: A bizarre island nation that either out of sheer braveness or sheer stupidity challenged the west to a fight and is now one of America's closest allies though they have proven their aloofness by jailing an American woman for importing prescription drugs from abroad and covertly replacing America as the lead Great Power in the Pacific and the Middle East.
• Jello: Wobbly substance made from the stock of sickly horses that is often fruit-flavored.
• Jigsaw Puzzle: Someone draws a picture or takes a photo, then cuts it up into tiny pieces. Other people spend hours putting the picture back together, only to take it apart again later.
• Laughter: A series of uncontrollable high-pitched coughs, sometimes accompanied by crying, convulsions, loss of control over one's limbs, and inability to breathe. It can be transmitted via touching or communication, is extremely contagious and can, on occasion, be fatal.
• LEGO: Toys that come unassembled in their packages, with the buyer having to go through the trouble of building them. As hard as they are to piece together, the products may fall apart during extensive playing sessions. Can cause pain to your fingers and feet, but not as much as to your wallet! What is more, they are immensely addictive.
  • BIONICLE: A Merchandise-Driven story of robots and cyborgs (whom you also have to assemble yourself — watch out for breaking parts) being wrong, told through so many forms of media that one might feel the urge to give up on trying to follow it. Eventually, you'll have to, since they left it hanging.
  • Hero Factory: Similar to the above entry, but Lighter and Softer. It involves Ridiculously Human Robots who fight crime. Has a Cliché Storm cartoon.
• LGBT+ Community: a massive amount of people get together to form support groups and hang out. Members are identifiable by the garish symbols and hyperspecific terminology with accompany puns that (usually) voluntarily replace forms of identification among denizens of the internet, occasionally reaching the point that it is their sole identifying characteristic. considered The Dreaded across the web due to habits of preemptive incendiary carpet bombing.
• Life: A state of being in which those who experience it go through years of slow deterioration of bodily parts and have nothing better to do than talk about random things in places like this, release fecal matter, and participate in the world's slowest and least flashy MMO.
  • An extremely prevalent, almost certainly lethal sexually transmitted disease.
• Literature: Dead sea creatures printed on dead trees used for varying purposes.
  • Fiction Books: Innocent trees are chopped up so that people can enjoy having their imaginary friends put into unpleasant situations.
  • Non Fiction Books: The same as before, but for acquiring information. Using them will make you look smart.
• Lord of the Dance: A shirtless man in tight pants stomps his feet in complicated patterns, accompanied by about 100 Irish people in funny dresses who also stomp their feet in complicated patterns and hardly ever move their upper bodies.
  • Riverdance: Many people in funny dresses who also stomp their feet in complicated patterns and hardly ever move their upper bodies.
• Love: Staking your happiness on another person, often making you miserable, crazy and evil. It's often involuntary and not always returned.
  • Some forms can be partly described as a weird trick nature plays on humans to help keep the species going.
  • A common form of addictive drug. Causes such side effects as obsession usually, though not always, with a member of the opposite sex, corroding of the reasoning capacity and reckless behavior. Forbidden or discouraged in some countries. Commonly sold by dealers at bookstores, and theaters. No known cure exists.
  • Marriage: Because of the above (and possibly the "exhausting, dangerous, messy and uncomfortable activity"), two people move in together. Many things can go wrong (including results of the "parasite generation") and lead to an end where one tries to extort as much from the other as possible. Almost always ends in either heartbreak or death (death is the "good" ending, unless one partner gets really fed up with the situation).
  • Marriage: A relationship that turns scandalous behavior into honored behavior through the application of ritual and mutual monopoly.
  • Aromanticism: The inability to experience this, more specifically the form that’s supposed to keep the species going.
• Maple syrup: Refined tree blood used as a tasty topping.
• Mathematics: A method through which people attempt to learn more about entities not of this dimension, entities that cannot be directly experienced and yet still closely model much of this universe. Many practitioners of this method are known to have mental illness, and childhood exposure to this method leaves many people in the world traumatized to the point of doing anything to avoid it. The vast majority of its practitioners claim to discover absolute truths in it.
  • Algebra: A subset of aforementioned practice in which grown adults pretend letters are numbers.
  • Pi: Irrational number used to represent a ratio.
  • Trigonometry: Discipline that allows its practitioners to divine a great deal of information about the physical world by finding and staring at triangles. Where there are no triangles, you are encouraged to draw your own by or around the target of your divination.
  • Numbers: Symbols used to reflect quantities of things. Can also be represented using groups of different symbols, though what symbols are used and in what order varies around the world. Many people think they have magical properties for no apparent reason. There is an infinite amount of them, and many of them, including some of the most important ones, are imaginary.
• Matter: 99 percent empty space punctuated by unimaginably tiny balls all held together by mutual electromagnetic force.
• Billy Mays: Advertiser with a really hammy personality. Commonly ridiculed along with what he advertised, including a white powder using the air we breathe and a bathroom cleaner that shares its name with the sound made by some explosions.
• Medicine: An already sick or injured person is usually made to be very uncomfortable, and sometimes deliberately put in pain, at a very large cost. If done perfectly, may help the person with a malady. Only in fairly recent history has it done more good than harm. So close is it to torture that strict ethical provisions are in place to only use it if absolutely necessary and will benefit the person.
• Methane: A colourless, odourless gas which the majority of humans are dependant on for heat and electricity. This, however, often goes unappreciated, with people preferring to accuse it of being an odourant, and use it as the butt of fart jokes.
• Thomas Midgley Jr.: First reduced the average IQ of people in the US by several points, then gave everyone skin cancer. He then accidentally strangled himself to death.
• Milky Way and the Galaxy Girls: Teenage girls go rollerskating through the cosmos.
• Money: A uniform substitute for all else that exists only to be traded. It is so desirable that some people are willing to harm others, either directly or indirectly, in order to obtain it. Some say that the love of it is the fundamental cause of all evil.
• The Moon: A large, white, rounded stone that floats in the sky.
• Mountain Climbing: People with an unusual surplus of time and money on their hands expend it by suffering extreme amounts of danger and incredible discomfort in getting to the top of a large pile of dirt for the purpose of proving that said pile of dirt is in fact "there" instead of somewhere else. Those who engage in this are for some reason treated as great heroes instead of being subjected to compulsory psychological treatment, perhaps because it is believed that this activity will be of benefit to the producers and distributors of the expensive equipment required for this activity.
• Mount Rushmore: An art museum with one exhibit (the larger-than-life busts of four deceased political leaders).
• Music: A series of sounds which need to be heard in the right order and by the right person to be appreciated; otherwise, it's noise.
• Musicals: A bunch of fruity people continuously break Willing Suspension of Disbelief by at times alternating the pitch of their voices in weird, unnatural ways.
  • Opera: Sometimes, this is all that they do.
• Mythology: Stories that are passed on to others to explain circumstances despite the fact that there may not be any validity to them.
  • Greco-Roman Mythology: Inbreds with phenomenal powers being jerks and/or doing who-hoo to everything and everyone.
  • Norse Mythology: A one-eyed jerk, some guy with a hammer and a shape-shifting asshole among others tries to stop the end of the world. In the end, everyone will eventually fight each other since You Can't Fight Fate anyway.
  • Egyptian Mythology: Animal-headed freaks with phenomenal powers must kill a giant serpent every day. After that, one of the animal-headed freaks starts being a jerk to everyone.
  • Hindu Mythology: One creates, another preserves and the last one destroys.
    • The Mahabharata: Kingdoms fights each other, almost everyone dies.
  • Celtic Mythology: The psychotic badass with a funky spear overshadows everyone else.
  • Chinese Mythology: A weird creature creates the world and then leaves it to a world-sized bureaucracy.
    • The Fengshen Yanyi: A king angers a powerful goddess. Said goddess sends three evil spirits to end the king's dynasty without harming anyone else. One of the spirits manages to do this by making the king even worse.
  • Japanese Mythology: Two lovers make Earth and love. The woman eventually dies from birthing a fireball. Afterwards, the man creates three siblings who make up the sun, the moon and the oceans who then start hating each other. The ocean god eventually gets kicked out of heaven and then kills a snake.
  • Aztec Mythology: You must sacrifice this many people to keep the world running.
• Horatio Nelson: A preacher's kid is worshiped by English sailors for giving them lots of rum and plunder.
• The Netherlands: A place where most of the land lies beneath the sea but is somehow not flooded.
• Nostradamus: Wild Mass Guessing: The Person.
• Nuclear explosion: The process of destroying small pieces of matter in order to destroy vast amounts of matter.
  • Alternatively: Something interesting happens when you break something really small.
  • Nuclear power: Someone was able to come up with a less destructive, marginally more helpful, and more gradual application of the above process.
• Organized religion: People around the world argue and kill each other about various books, most of which are driving at the same point, which is to not kill people.
  • Organized religion: The ideal business. There is little need for customer testimonials, as most of those against whom the business reneges are conveniently dead. The business makes great claims, but insists on being paid almost entirely ahead of time. The business never has to give any scientific proof or even scholarly arrangements of any of its core claims. It can make money on many of the various literal interpretations of its ancient texts, and countless figurative interpretations are available for making even more money. Customers don't have to agree with each other to remain customers, even of the same shop.
  • Monothieism in Christianity isn't. There's supposedly one main guy, but in fact there is a main one-child nuclear family and countless lesser figures, some of them adopted from its rivals that for historical reasons fell to Christianity.
  • Jesus Christ: Celebrity who The Empire executed for supposedly "conspiring" to overthrow the government under pressure of local religious leaders. Became far more popular centuries after his death.
    • Or: A man is nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change.
    • Or: A pacifist of whom more people have killed and waged wars in his name than anyone else.
  • (Christian) God An old man who is believed to have made a universe, thrown some kids out of his garden for eating fruit, and sent his only child to be killed to redeem said kids' families. He now lives in another dimension with some winged people who play trumpets. In the future some dead people will be tortured for a while and then go and join him, before learning to eat with badly-designed cutlery.
• Paintings: A piece of fabric, or possibly a thick slice of dead tree, covered in oily substances. Some people have been known to go insane while creating them or even to create them.
• Penis: A tentacle like appendage that can be either flexible or rigid, and emits microorganisms and waste products.
• Pepto-Bismol: Treat your upset stomach by ingesting a radioactive substance with an unnaturally bright color.
• Pets: Creatures which eat voraciously, destroy everything they can get away with, reproduce in spades, and are incredibly difficult to train to do anything, but are kept around mostly because they're cute.
  • Cat: A small, cute fuzzy animal with an independent side.
    • A carnivore with sharp claws & teeth who sometimes play-bites as a sign of affection as a result of having their mom carry them by the back of the neck with her teeth and the males of this species have some of the stinkiest urine if not neutered.
  • Dog: A loyal animal that can sometimes be stinky.
    • An Extreme Omnivore that will sometimes goes as far as to eat its own poop, has sharp teeth, and depending on the dog can be very aggressive.
  • Rabbit: A small, cute fuzzy animal that has been known to freeze in place when scared.
  • Fish: An aquatic, scaly animal that does nothing worthwhile.
  • Hamster: A tiny, fluffy rodent that is known for running for hours on a centripetal-force exercise mechanism.
  • Rat: An Extreme Omnivore that indirectly killed tens of millions of people, can chew through metal, and is intelligent enough to figure out how to escape containment.
  • Snake: A creature which has no legs, but can open its mouth wider than its body.
• Phage Therapy: People try to cure people infected by pathogens by injecting them with more pathogens.
• Philosophy: Endless debates between self-proclaimed geniuses that have been going on since the beginning of civilization.
  • Edmund Gettier: A guy who upset many people by writing a very short paper about people who may or may not get a job, may or may not own Fords, and may or may not be in Barcelona.
• Piercings: Foreign pieces of metal painfully forced into parts of the body for the sake of (perceived) attractiveness.
• Pinball: A small metal ball zips around a large box made of glass, metal, plastic, and wood, and funny sounds are made when the ball hits certain parts of the box. When new, these boxes can cost as much as a new car despite being about the size of a coffee table. Although these boxes were meant to be used in public, the majority of sales in North America are to people who want one to use all to themselves. Collecting these boxes is Serious Business. For people who own them privately, using them is also Serious Business.
  • Centaur: You are asked to kill a mythical creature for no good reason.
  • Taxi: An old man dressed in red, an actress, the then-leader of the Soviet Union, a vampire, and a robot from space get in a car together. That's it.
  • FunHouse: A boy makes fun of you at every opportunity he can. The key to outdoing him is to stay alert past his bedtime. The boy is voiced by the creator of Mortal Kombat.
  • Twilight Zone: A gumball machine does not actually dispense gum. Disorienting spiral patterns are everywhere.
  • Fish Tales: Pretend to talk about animals you've encountered.
  • Als Garage Band Goes On A World Tour: The manufacturer's CEO imagines himself as a world-famous rock star. Unsurprisingly, people don't take to it.
  • Tee'd Off: A rodent infuriates an athlete.
    • No Good Gofers: Two rodents infuriate an athlete, except from a different company and a few years later.
  • Popeye Saves the Earth: A well-known seafarer decides he wants to be more like Captain Planet while his main rival becomes extremely rich. This large box lost the manufacturer so much money that it would not only go out of business a few years later, but take nearly all of its competitors out with it.
  • The Simpsons Pinball Party: An entire town's citizens mock you relentlessly as you try to sit on a couch.
  • America's Most Haunted: Four people go around looking for ghosts using special equipment. You can tell this is not Ghostbusters because the ghosts are poorly drawn.
  • Whoa Nellie! Big Juicy Melons: Take a trip to the world's most misogynistic farm. The creators got a lot of backlash from this one so they made a Palette Swap of it, this time based on a beer most people consider a joke.
• Pizza: Flat bread covered in pureed tomatoes and shredded solidified milk. Toppings include small thin slices of meat that was stuffed in intestinal casing and then cured and spiced, acidic bulbs that grow in the ground, edible fungi, and tiny fish, the last of which that many people don't find appetizing.
• Poker: A contest in which people try to determine who's the better bald-faced liar among them. The best bald-faced liar wins. In some circles, is considered VERY Serious Business.
• Pornography: People get naked and are filmed doing the below described exhausting, dangerous, messy and uncomfortable things, some of which are unusual in real life and very strange.
  • Also, it's far too expensive, sometimes.
• Pregnancy / Childbirth: A parasite (or sometimes more than one) lodges itself within a female and slowly grows over most of a year, affecting the host physically and psychologically. Eventually the parasite(s) is ejected painfully from the body; however, it typically stays with the female for years, and the female may even be imprisoned if they abandon the creature. Despite the intense physical and emotional discomfort the female is put through during this time, the growth and arrival of the creature is widely considered a beautiful and life-affirming affair.

  • The popular "parasite" notion is now being brought into question by modern science.

  • Adoption: After its ejection from the body, the parasite is passed off to a surrogate host, who continues the process as normal.
• Presidents of the United States of America: Men who rule a certain North American nation between two others. Examples include:
  • George Washington: War veteran known for bad teeth and cutting down plants owned by his father.
  • Thomas Jefferson: Talented Virginian who won in a tie and doubled said nation's size. Famously authored a document stating that a new nation would exist.
  • William Henry Harrison: War hero who served a very short time by making a very long speech.
  • Abraham Lincoln: Illinois lawyer who never gave up despite constant defeat. Selected as the leader despite the majority of the country voting for somebody else in a four-way competition. Known for literally Growing the Beard, giving a speech with rather antiquated language, and getting killed by an actor in a theater. May or may not show up at gay bars.
  • Andrew Johnson: Racist tailor from rural Tennessee who was the successor of the above Illinois lawyer and almost got removed from office after he fired a member of his cabinet.
  • Ulysses S. Grant: War hero who knew more about his career than the office he was holding.
  • Grover Cleveland: Fat lawyer from Buffalo who held this position twice before and after the grandson of the second war hero above.
  • Theodore Roosevelt: Cowboy from New York, known even in his day for acts of extreme manliness. Has a toy named after him, using a nickname that he hated.
  • William Howard Taft: Genial chubby guy from Ohio who allegedly got stuck in a bathtub. Didn't really want this job, later got one he really liked, saying what the law should and shouldn't be.
  • Woodrow Wilson: College professor auditions for politics. He fails to persuade said nation to join an alliance that will stop all wars after suffering from paralysis.
  • Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Polio-stricken lawyer in a wheelchair who held the office four years longer than normal. He dies near the end of an important war.
  • Harry Truman: Failed businessman who never graduated college and lived with his parents well into adulthood ends the deadliest war in history by using the deadliest weapons in history. Also determined where buck stops. Unexpectedly won a second term even after newspapers declared his opponent the winner. Much more respected nowadays.
  • John F. Kennedy: Bostonian whose father was a bootlegger, frequently cheated on his wife, got killed in a large Texas city, and shares a lot in common with above Illinois lawyer.
  • Gerald Ford: Kansas-born Michigander, a former college football player and male model most famously known for that one time he fell down the stairs.
  • Ronald Reagan: Illinois-born actor who once co-starred in a movie with a chimpanzee. He defeats a peanut farmer in his first election and the farmer's former assistant in his second (the latter with the most votes in American history at that time). Almost got killed by a guy with a heavy obsession for Jodie Foster.
  • Barack Obama: Born and raised in Hawaii, lived in Chicago, not much experience other than being elected once to the US Senate (and that was a bit of a fluke since his original likely opponent had to quit the race after a scandal erupted about his sex life with his ex-wife, a beloved actress from a popular TV franchise). People either loved him or hated him. Really good at giving speeches and shooting hoops (even though he never advanced any farther in the latter than being a backup point guard on his high school team). Only one of them with a Grammy.
  • Joe Biden: The oldest one ever, known for saying goofy things every once in a while, being a meme, and wearing his heart on his sleeve. Agenda frequently compared to the guy with polio.
• Professional Wrestling: A bunch of half-naked men under false identities pretend to throw each other around a roped-off platform for the amusement of the masses.
• The Senior Prom: A social event most people view with a good amount of fear, either because they won't get anyone to attend with them, and/or they might get embarrassed in front of all their friends, who will likely never forget about it.
• Peter Sellers: Actor known for playing multiple roles in many of his films. One of his best known roles portrays him as an inept French policeman who mispronunces virtually everything as if it were French.
• Rainbow: A beam of electromagnetic radiation split into its constituent frequencies.
• Sewerage: A system which selfishly transports the main food source of countless living creatures far away from where they live. The food is then poisoned to kill any stowaways.
• Sex: An exhausting, dangerous, messy and uncomfortable (physically and emotionally) activity that can cause disease and in some extreme cases even death but which is nevertheless is widely enjoyed, greatly sought after by many (especially those who have not yet done it) and is in fact considered healthy. It is so dangerous and messy that its practitioners must use thin plastic bags to avoid killing each other with deadly viruses. Despite its widespread popularity, undertaking it in front of other people is widely disapproved of and can be embarrassing. It is the leading cause of the aforementioned parasites.
  • Male masturbation: the unholy alternative of the above activity, which involves the ejection of precursors of said parasites within your body. A deviant practice looked down upon by many religions. Often used as an insult towards people seen as pathetic and unattractive. Can also be very addicting and messy.
  • Orgasm: A highly sensitive part of the body begins spasming and spurting fluid. Considered the end goal of the "exhausting, dangerous, messy and uncomfortable" activity mentioned above.
  • Sex (Again) & Masturbation: Connecting and/or touching organs that dispose of waste.
  • Asexuality: Not feeling any compulsion to perform the above described act, often to the confusion of those who desire it. People who this applies to have built a culture around prioritising the aforementioned items you put in your mouth over it.
• Plato: A man who famously envisioned people who disagree with him as blind troglodytes.
• Shellfish: Big Creepy-Crawlies that most people not only eat, but find delicious.
• Shipping: People obsess over the love lives of complete strangers who usually don't even exist.
• The skeletal/muscular system: No matter how you're positioned, half of the meat in your body is going to be stretched tightly to dense mineral deposits in your body. If you move, that half relaxes, but the other half stretches. All this meat is stretched tight enough that if you were able to cut them, they'd snap.
• Skydiving: Jumping out of a perfectly good aircraft.
• Smiling moving the skin flaps covering an orifice into a roughly semi-circular shape. This can indicate anything from being happy to being completely insane.
• Sneezing: Forces beyond your will seize control of your body, forcibly evacuating a complex mixture of substances required for survival en masse through your face. Muscular contortions are experienced in synchrony with this process, causing abnormal facial expressions and temporary blindness. Victims of these forced spasms, should they attempt to avert them, find themselves with virulent organic contaminants on their palms or clothing. Close bystanders may also become saturated with these dangerous particulates, yet feel compelled to wish good tiding upon the source of their own contamination.
• Sleep: A state of semi-voluntary unconsciousness during which strange and occasionally disturbing visions may be experienced. Often related to a ritual in which a person will put on a certain clothes (or in some cases simply strip completely naked) and lay atop furniture for extended periods of time until the visions take hold.
  • Dreams: A set of variably bizarre hallucinations happening daily if you're doing it right. They contain material which everyone can see but would be banned in anywhere on the world to show in their unchanged forms.
    • Lucid Dreams: Exactly the same as the above, but the person experiencing it is aware that what’s happening to them isn’t real, despite it being even more vivid. Those with enough practice inducing these can become Dimension Lords of the world that they are hallucinating and use them to experience things they can’t in real life.
  • Insomnia: The inability to experience said unconsciousness. For some reason, this is treated as a health problem rather than a positive trait.
• Slugbug: Physical violence is justified by the presence of a certain automobile.
• Soap: A foul-tasting chunk of fat and toxic chemicals that people sometimes rub on themselves.
• Space, aka The Cosmos: Literally, a great, big, hulking vat of mostly nothing. Most of what is there can be categorized as one of three things: giant explosives that will kill you merely by proximity, impossibly tiny rocks that will kill you merely by proximity, and giant rocks that serve no purpose whatsoever.
  • Alternately: A possibly infinite void full of incomprehensibly massive balls of superheated gas which emit deadly radiation in all directions. These death balls are surrounded by smaller balls of much cooler gas and even smaller chunks of rock. For whatever reason, lots of children want to visit this place when they grow up.
  • Astronauts: People who go through vigorous physical training in order to be shot into said nothingness at high speeds in a metal container with just enough fuel and may put them in mortal danger if anything goes wrong, usually for purposes of boring research. Many kids aspire to be one.
    • Alternatively, people who attempt to throw themselves off a large rock with the help of a skyscraper made of explosives.
• Space Opera: People try to escape from the violence, ethnic hatred, power politics and corruption in modern Earth by watching violence, ethnic hatred, power politics and corruption in space several hundred years in the future.
  • Alternately: Ambition, Sex and Violence Recycled In Space. Normally involves contact with other species who are as addicted to ambition, sex, and violence as humans.
• Speech: Moving various parts of your mouth and upper respiratory system in order to make a series of sounds with an arbitrary relation to real things. Can lead to fatal choking, and depending on the real or assumed referents of said arbitrary sounds, other fatal consequences.
  • Spoken language: A series of sounds which need to be heard in the right order and by the right person to be understood; even then, it's often just noise.
• Sports: The distillation of war into various forms for fun and profit. More fun than war, because the rules are easier to follow and far fewer people get killed. You are not considered to be a real man if you do not enjoy it and are often accused of homosexuality, despite the fact that most of these activities involve sweaty, muscular men exerting themselves, displaying their physical fitness, wearing spandex and grabbing balls.
  • Wrestling: A form of the above, with two half-naked men grabbing at each other.
  • Athletics: People who like to run, throw and jump.
    • High jump\pole vault: People run toward a lifted bar and try not to bring it down. (alternatively: reverse Limbo)
    • Long\triple jump: People rush toward a sandbox. A misstep can mean a loss.
    • 400+ metres: People run in circles on a rubber track.
    • Throws: People hurl deadly weapons into an empty field.
    • Racewalking: People endure an endless Silly Walk.
    • Marathon Running: Older Than Feudalism, this activity baffles everyone but those who do it. While most people do it when there is no alternative (i.e. there is no Travel Cool method available) some do it Just for Fun, even though the entire point is elevated heart levels, lactic acid levels so high it can cause cramps in your shoulders, and the near depletion of the body's energy supplies. Some have died doing it. Of course, for those who do it, that IS the fun.
  • Baseball: Hit a dude's ball with your rod and run home before his goons catch you.
    • Or: A man fights for the right to run around in a circle.
  • Cricket: You and someone else hit a dude's ball and run until his goons catch you, a simple structure takes damage, you break a rule, or the same happens to everyone else on your side. Can go on for days.
  • Kickball: Kick a dude's ball as hard as you can and run home before his goons catch you.
  • Dodgeball: Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Sometimes doubles as a real life equivalent of Bullet Hell.
  • Association Football: Men (and sometimes women) kick a ball around a field for 90 minutes. Often for longer.
    • Alternately: 22 people run after a ball, and in the end, the Germans win. The ball is made from a dead cow.
  • American Football: Men ramming and chasing each other in an attempt to grab a ball. Should one of the muggers bring the ball to their base they get points. Then they get to kick it.
    • Rugby: As above, but with less padding for the players.
  • Ice Hockey: People with knives on their feet try to stop their opponent by ramming them into a wall and physically assaulting them. Players may once in a while attempt to slap a small disc around an icy room in an attempt to get it in a net.
    • Alternatively: Twelve guys, one puck.
    • Or: 12 men engage in unarmed combat on a sheet of ice. Occasionally one of them attempts to get a rubber disc into a net.
  • Basketball: Giant, spindly men run around a room attempting to slam a ball against a board and into a hole. Causes men in suits to stop working for a month.
  • Surfing: Swimming out into the ocean on a float, then getting back to land without swimming.
  • Skiing: Strapping two planks of wood to one's feet prior to hurling oneself down a mountain.
    • Biathalon: As above, but also shooting at things.
  • Snowboarding: As above, but with one plank rather than two. Participants also face sideways and, on occasion, backwards.
  • Skateboarding: As above, but the plank isn't strapped to one's feet.
  • Water Skiing: As above, but on water, being dragged by a speeding boat.
  • Ice Skating: Strapping two blades to one's feet prior to going on ice. There are competitions for people who can do it quickly, and for those who can do it prettily.
  • Swimming: Racing on all fours and with limited breath.
  • Boxing: Two guys without shirts beat each other with their fists until one or both of them is near fatally injured. This is great fun.
  • Diving: Fancy falling into a pool.
  • Volleyball: People do great jumps, dives and hits with the sole intent of hitting a ball on the floor.
  • Curling: Some of this involves sliding things. Most of it, however, involves sweeping dust off the floor.
  • Billiards (snooker, pool, etc.): Push balls around by poking one with a stick.
  • Horse Racing: Short guys ride animals in circles for hours.
  • Polo: A combination of the previous two activities.
  • NASCAR: White guys in cars driving in a circle for three and a half hours.
  • Formula One Racing: Some people build a very expensive car. Some other people drive it around in a figure eight for hours.
  • Rodeo Bronc Riding and Bull riding: Guys hold onto very strong animals while being flung around for a few seconds, before getting flung off.
  • Competitive Eating: People who are unable to do any of the above due to lack of stamina attempt to commit suicide by giving themselves fatal heart attacks by stuffing copious amounts of meat-like substances wrapped in animal intestines down their throats in record times. There are no winners in this game.
  • Australian Rules Football: 36 people (many of whom are descended from prisoners) kick a pineapple-shaped ball around a cricket pitch and often get downright brutal in their efforts to gain possession of it. To score points they have to kick the ball between absurdly tall goal posts that make it so that it's really hard to not make a goal, and even if you miss you typically still get awarded a point.
• Sun: A huge continuous explosion which can vaporise anything even a half a million kilometers away from its center.
  • Alternately: An unstable nuclear furnace that modern civilization (read: most if not all life) is terminally dependent on.
• Tachyons: Subatomic particles which travel unimaginably fast and could be used to build a phone which violates causality. Fortunately for humans, they probably don't exist.
• Tag: A game where a person is cursed and everyone else avoids them. Should they manage to make contact with one of the others they pass the curse to that person and they become normal. If a normal person is at a certain location they are immune until they leave, but can be forced if the cursed person utters a certain incantation, which can be countered by another one. A popular activity on playgrounds.
  • Ghost in the Graveyard: Humans wander around a dark area while being stalked by ghosts. If a human is caught by a ghost they become one too. If the ghosts manage to kill all the humans they gain their lives back and the game starts over.
• Tea: Hot leaf water, maybe with some personal preferences like sugar and milk.
  • Dried leaves, boiled.
  • Coffee: Hot bitter cherry juice, maybe with some personal preferences like sugar and milk. Many people are unable to start their daily routine without drinking it.
    • Or the meaning of all existence.
• J. R. R. Tolkien: A curmudgeonly English professor writes very long works telling how much he likes English farmers and how much he dislikes highly talented jewelers and goldsmiths.
• TV Tropes: Literate Internet users all over the world sit around for hours trying to remember imaginary (and sometimes not so imaginary) things they either saw or heard many years ago. Although these people could conceivably all be together at a given time, it can take days, weeks, or even months for them to respond to each other, especially if the traffic is bad. Also, their fingers get really sore.
  • The cumulative works of people who are either procrastinating or have too much time on their hands write so that other people can procrastinate more effectively.
• Vaccines: Chemicals manufactured specifically to prevent certain organisms from feeding and/or reproducing with the explicit end goal of said organisms' extinction.
  • Alternatively: Dead pathogens injected into bodies in an attempt to possibly kill live pathogens at an unspecified time later.
• Video Games: The distillation of war, but with all the physical aspects that may actually result in exercise removed.
  • Alternatively, a form of addictive substance that's mostly legalized and don't even have to be ingested. Just manipulate some buttons and switches.
  • Alternatively, people pretend to be fictional characters or caricatures of themselves by pushing buttons, or, until recently, flailing their limbs. An invention that replaced the telegraph has since been reappropriated for this activity.
  • Online Multiplayer FPS games: An activity where a group between 2 and 100 simultaneously pretend that they are engaged in heavy combat in a war, with no reason for the battle to occur, only to be gruesomely murdered repeatedly. The avatars that last longest are continuously abused for a lack of skill, but those who lack skill involved in the activity become attached to their avatar to the point where when they are assassinated they complain that they died. This cycle repeats constantly for years.
• Washing machine: A heavy metallic drum filled with soapy hot water and rags spins very fast inside a box with many electric wires. It is sealed only by a glass hatch that can open suddenly and violently if not closed correctly and the machine's contents will spill all over the floor. It's in your house, if you're lucky.
• Wine: Juice that expired years ago. Some people pay good money to drink it. The longer it's been expired, the more expensive it gets. As a result, drinking it makes you appear sophisticated.
  • Relatedly Vinegar: really spoiled and sour grapejuice that's still used as food.
• World War II: Space Opera Recycled on Earth. Became a cult classic for fans decades after but was widely disliked by critics at the time. Despite this it attracted many viewers. Rated NC-17 for extreme violence.
• YouTube creators and celebrities'': Panhandlers who use advanced technology.

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