Better Than It Sounds/Other

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

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• Black History Month: 28 days set aside during the year in order to placate a certain demographic of the American population who lost a good 250 years to involuntary service. On the bright side, not every poorly treated demographic receives such thoughtful consideration.
• Nuclear explosion: The process of destroying small pieces of matter in order to destroy vast amounts of matter.
  • Nuclear power: Someone was able to come up with a less destructive, marginally more helpful, and more gradual application of the above process.
• Braces: A painful, years-long method of skeletal readjustment and sometimes bone removal, resulting in permanent disfiguration, to which children are subject against their will. This is, for some, necessary to be considered attractive.
• 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.
• Britain: A twenty first century nation thinks it is still the thirteenth century.
• 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.
• Cheese: Solidified, pasteurized animal milk with a hint of salt. Some varieties are aged.
• Christmas: A baby saves the world after his parents are forced to take a vacation purely for bureaucratic purposes.
• College: 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 vasts amount 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.
• Coffee: A beverage that looks vaguely like oil. Some would say it tastes like it. Drinkers of that beverage will swear a blood oath upon any who mocks it.
• Computer: Billions of electronic switches turn on and off billions of times per second.
• Tim Curry: An actor whose most famous roles are that of a butler, a clown, talking smoke, and a transvestite.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
  • 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 the insects so that they will facilitate plant sex regurgitated by hordes of flying insects and used as 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.
• 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.
• Fiction and religion: 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.
  • Fairytales: 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. Despite that it has a high chance of winning awards, varied mileages are here, there, and everywhere.
  • 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 and Fan Dumb.
  • 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.
• 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.
• The Game: Ignorance is bliss. Stick figures claim the secret to victory.
• Guinness Book of Records (aka Guinness World Records): A massive list of who/what is best or most at something.
• Humans: Creatures which eat voraciously, destroy everything they can get away with, reproduce in spades, and are incredibly difficult to train to do anything, but stick around mostly because they're hard to fully dispose of.
  • Agriculture: Giving up hours of one's species' free time, along with 150,000+ years of tradition, and enslaving other species so your own kind won't go hungry.
• I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue Sensible people doing silly things.
• Jello: Wobbly substance made from the stock of sickly horses that is often fruit-flavored.
• 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.

( Eastern Animation: gray, choppy doodles flashed very fast that are not Western or Japanese in origin.

• Literature: Innocent trees are chopped up so that people can enjoy having their imaginary friends put into unpleasant situations.
• 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 exteremely prevalent, almost certainly lethal sexually transmitted disease.
• 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. And it's 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.
  • 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.
    • Arranged Marriage: Your family makes you move in with a person of their choice. The upside is that it saves you an awful lot of work. The downside is that they probably are choosing who will make your family richer not who will be more pleasant for you to live with. Cynics note that it has no worse a record than deciding for oneself.
• 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.
• Moon: A large, white, rounded stone that floats in the sky.
• 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.
  • 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.
• Horatio Nelson: A preacher's kid is worshiped by English sailors for giving them lots of rum and plunder.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
  • Dog: A loyal animal that can sometimes be stinky.
  • 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 centrifugal-force exercise mechanism.
• Philosophy: Endless debates between self-proclaimed geniuses that have been going on since the beginning of civilization.
• Piercings: Foreign pieces of metal painfully forced into parts of the body for the sake of (perceived) attractiveness.
• 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.
• Pregnancy / Childbirth: A parasite (or sometimes more than one) lodges itself within a woman and slowly grows over most of a year, affecting the woman physically and psychologically. Eventually the parasite(s) is ejected painfully from the body; however, it typically stays with the woman for years, and the woman may even be imprisoned if she abandons the creature. Despite the intense physical and emotional discomfort the woman is put through during this time, the growth and arrival of the creature is widely considered a beautiful and life-affirming affair.
  • Adoption: After its ejection from the body, the parasite is passed off to a surrogate host, who continues the process as normal.
• 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. Direct the "precursors" directly into a trash can.
  • Space Opera Ambition, Sex and Violence Recycled in Space. Normally involves contact with other species who are as addicted to ambition, sex, and violence as humans.
• JRR 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.
• 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.
• NASCAR: White guys in cars driving in a circle for three and a half hours.
  • Horse Racing: Short guys ride animals in circles for 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.
• Sleep: A state of semi-voluntary unconsciousness during which strange and occasionally disturbing visions may be experienced.
  • 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.
• 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.
  • Baseball: Hit a dude's ball with your rod and run home before his goons catch you.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
• Tea: Hot leaf water, maybe with some personal preferences like sugar and milk.
  • Dried leaves, boiled.
  • Coffee: Hot bean 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.
• Cars: A vehicle, 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.
  • Concept Cars: Models of the four-wheeled vehicles 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.
  • R Vs: A vehicle, 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.
  • 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: A motorized vehicle, similar to the aforementioned unstable device, which has a ridiculously low amount of safety precautions compared to the aforementioned four-wheeled vehicles.
• 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.
  • 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.
• Musicals: A bunch of fruity people continuously break Willing Suspension of Disbelief by at times randomly alternating the pitch of their voices in weird, unnatural ways.
  • Opera: Sometimes, this is all that they do.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
  • Fiat Currency: Government-issued material that is treated as money, despite its total lack of fundamental value and its nasty tendency to lose exchange value over time, sometimes very quickly and to extreme degrees. It is decorated with nationalist symbols. It divides people into exclusive groups and is sometimes given away independently of actual need, productivity, or talent. This system is so attractive to governments that almost all governments participate in this system.
• 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 BarbarianTribes 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.
• Science: A bunch of observations about what humanity can't do, how the universe doesn't need us (usually), and why we can't just make stuff happen.
  • Technology: By acknowledging and systematically studying all of the limitations mentioned above, people manage to find ways to work around them.
• 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.
  • 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.
• 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.
  • Easter: A yearly occurrence in which we wait for a large rodent 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.
  • Halloween: Strangely-dressed people come to your house and threaten you with pranks unless you poison them with fat and sugar.
  • 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 people honor their former leaders (mostly just 2 of them) by purchasing furniture and cars at reduced prices.
  • Valentines Day: A day where people celebrate romantic affection by giving each other dead tree slices, sweet confections, and plant genitals.
  • New Years Eve: People celebrate surviving a full year by slowly killing themselves.
    • 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.
  • Guy Fawkes Day: 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.
    • Englishmen celebrate a grudge they hold against someone they know nothing about who died hundreds of years ago.
  • 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 comsume illegal substances in celebration of... something. Ironically, people who the above group dispise also celebrate this day for a different reason.
• 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".
  • 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.
• Heraldry: An art of shield decoration intended to show who was greater than who.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
  • Politics: A contest in which people try to determine who's the better bald-faced liar among them. The best bald-faced liar gets to order people around for a while. In most circles, is considered VERY Serious Business.
• Skydiving: Jumping out of a perfectly good aircraft.
• The Netherlands: A place where most of the land lies beneath the sea but is somehow not flooded.
• Starbucks: Coffee is really Serious Business.
• Sun: A huge continuous explosion which can vaporise anything even a half a million kilometers away from its center.
• 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.
• Mira Furlan: A girl runs away from an obscure Balkan country to play Joan of Arc Recycled in Space.
• 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.
• Shipping: People obsess over the love lives of complete strangers who usually don't even exist.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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. Nowadays AKA Ass Pull — The Rarely Updated On-Line Series.
  • Hero Factory: Similar to the above entry, but Lighter and Softer. It involves Ridiculously-Human Robots who fight crime. Has a Cliché Storm cartoon.
• Milky Way and The Galaxy Girls: Teenage girls go rollerskating through the cosmos.
• The Internet: A medium in which computers send electronic signals to one another over a largely disorganised system.
• The Alphabet: A series of strange symbols used regularly, but rarely acknowledged beyond the very early years of human life and in basic education & business (under certain circumstances). If said symbols are arranged in a certain matter, 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 arrangement 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.
• 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 then it sounds.
• Greco-Roman Mythology: Inbreds with phenomenal powers being jerks and/or doing who-hoo to everything and everyone.
  • Norse Mythology: An 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 Cannot 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 makes Earth and makes love. The woman eventually dies from birthing a fireball. Afterwards, the man creates three siblings who makes up the sun, the moon and the oceans who then, starts 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Vaccines: Chemicals manufactured specifically to prevent certain organisms from feeding and/or reproducing with the explicit end goal of said organisms' extinction.
• 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 do this are for some reason treated as great heroes instead of being involuntarily committed, 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.
• Maple syrup: Refined tree blood used as a tasty topping.
• 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.
• Wikidata and triplestores: An electronic list of numbers that can be vandalized by anyone with an internet connected computer, often long and difficult to spell, including Q504697, Q177930, Q192424, Q188670, Q4879416, Q608 and Q8402. Supposedly, this is useful in automated reasoning. Actually, the use of two-place predicates instead of having verb valence ranging from one to six like in Lojban means you immediately need reification to express more complex statements, which is the use of a subject-verb-object triple as a resource, which can itself be a subject in other statements. This leads to absurd statements such as "The statement 'Boss Paulie Pintero (Q21282792) was killed by Thomas Bryan Reynolds.' was armed with a pistol." A statement cannot actually be armed with anything, and to claim otherwise is something of a category error.
• Lojban: The little-known aftermath of a catastrophically failed psychology experiment. It was designed with help from artificial intelligence and is based on first-order logic, but so far its use in AI is as-yet hypothetical. It only has attitudinals for things like respect and disrespect, but so far it treats family-friendliness as being biconditional with respect. Its tanru, actually genitive and adverbial constructions in all but name, and its dictionary being written in natural language means that the grammar is in fact precise and the vocabulary is supposedly precise, but this last part is not, in fact, true. Nice try, though.
• Cunnilingus: You eat uncooked meat in a smelly small to moderate depression created to channel water, hereinafter known as ditch, where if you do not use lots of sheeting, you could get a contagious disease. Yum.
• Peace, substantial reduction in military spending, and abolishing mass surveillance, strategic arms and most tactical nuclear weapons: A deeply unrealistic goal that deprives the military of countless major monuments and job creation projects, leaves many powerful supercomputers without their main purposes, and means that large amounts of weapons-grade fissile material and other parts for nuclear weapons are suddenly available, and breaks from military tradition. It destroys Department of Energy property, and the military opposes it. It involves negotiating with the nation's enemies and making concessions to them, abandoning the nation's allies abroad, and tolerating the nation's former allies that are now the nation's enemies. It also means having to admit that something the troops did was not quite necessary. It also means shutting down a major effort to fight the mafia. Also, this goal is so alien to most of humanity that even when they say they are its supporters, actually they are knowingly supporting a politician's rise to power, and the politician in fact lacks the intention and the power to carry out this goal. The people that come closest to wanting this usually also want to extend the ban on people with criminal records to forcibly disarming all other civilians.
• Human judgement, if there is such a thing: Having to suppress any desire for some sort of intellectual abstraction that promises greater chances of success, however accurate that promise may be. Often it means not doing things that appear sort of cool, fun or bad-ass. It means not taking alcohol, smoking, nor drugs, and for the same reasons. When you have it but the accident of your birth gives you people that do not, it means calling everything you're familiar with a load of nonsense. People say the loner, the rebel is cool, but actually if you do not do the "in" or "normal" thing, no matter how stupid the thing is, and if any part of your rebellion is not on the terms of stupid people, you'll be a weirdo. Sometimes, you'd be treated as an enemy for not going to Abilene - that's Abilene as in Wikidata item Q321283. You gain this in part from certain community college classes and you lose this when you're drunk or having sex.
• Backstroke of the West: Allah wants less freedom and more wars, so he tries to join the Presbyterian Church. Said church is made up of monks in brown robes, some of whom are played by real actors while others are done in CGI. This is not some clever satire of organized religion, instead all evidence points to the people who made the script genuinely not realizing how weird this all is.

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