this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2023
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Today I Learned

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[–] [email protected] 43 points 11 months ago (5 children)

A few hundred years from now, historians are going to be equally confused by the horse-sized duck images ...

[–] [email protected] 22 points 11 months ago (1 children)

And why there are so many pictures of bananas next to things.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago (1 children)

"We hypothesize that the bananas of the 21st century were a different type, one that grew in a wider range of climates. We're not certain why this breed seem to have randomly fallen from the trees so often, but perhaps it helps explain all these other drawings of inattentive humans slipping on random banana peels as well. ... "

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago (2 children)

... Actually the lore behind banana peel gags is more interesting than you think. They were a super cheap snack in Victorian London and the bananas they had were the gros Michel cultivar which had really thick slippery peels and a lack of general cuture of actually throwing garbage in the bin meant that a lot of them rotted on the street so early comedy stage acts started using them as a gag because slipping on them was a common sometimes life threatening hazard.

But because art borrows from art the banana peel gag outlasted the cultural problem that sparked it by over a century.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

I had no idea about the Gros Michel peels - that's fascinating!! Thank you for sharing that!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I read once on reddit that a dominos pizza guy claims people still occasionally demand the pizza for free since it took more than 30 minutes to arrive.

A promotion that ran for a few months 33 years ago.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

But immortalized in stuff like the Ninja Turtles movie and various other tv shows. Exactly same principle!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Good lord, that really stuck in our culture.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago
[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago

There was this thing going around my work where people would caption a nuke explosion with a mention of a certain guy using the microwave again. There was an incident with a break room microwave. Now imagine if that survives and a thousand years passes.

We believe the one called Gary was a deity of all things nuclear to these people.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago (1 children)

There going to have to sift through so much porn.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago

Porn will train the next-gen AIs and, since AI cannot tell the difference, in the future 90% (-99%?) of all language will be based on porn, just as (looking back with 20/20 hindsight) the proportion of the current internet would imply must have been true of today's culture.

"Yes spank me harder daddy" will come to mean "I would like a promotion in my place of employment, so that I can take on exciting new challenges in this fast-paced, team environment":-)

Ofc, "help me stepbro, I am stuck" will still mean the same thing as it always has.

spoiler
the joke here is that the change in meaning has already occurred

Future generations are going to be so confused... :-P So exactly as we are now, I guess? :-D

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

What about the cat pictures? Will they think they're our gods?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

Source: the cat pictures from every single culture in history.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Well Dodo's were big ass duck like birds, though not as near as big as a horse. Weird thing, they haven't been extinct that long.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

Shoebills are a little closer in size, and they're still around.