Like, how did I leave Bangkok at 8 AM and arrive in LA at 8 AM the same day, both local time? Time travel.

  • BanMe@lemmy.world
    1·
    14 minutes ago

    There’s a box in my kitchen I can put dirty dishes and tomorrow morning they’re clean

  • NaibofTabr@infosec.pubEnglish
    38·
    11 hours ago

    We carve arcane patterns:

    into specially prepared pieces of rock:

    then apply energy and imbue them with instructions in specific, obscure languages to perform tasks for us. If you make any mistakes while uttering the instructions, the task fails.

  • nymnympseudonym@piefed.socialEnglish
    261·
    11 hours ago

    Honestly everything since electricity. The number of people we now support at a level of comfort that was unimaginable to even a king 250 years ago.

    Waking up at night in the middle of winter in a warm house instantly lit, getting up to poop on a warm comfortable indoor throne with fresh spring breeze scent in the air. The poop flushes away effortlessly and your hands and bum are quickly fresh & clean with running warm water scented soaps and dry with materials 10x more soft & absorbent than the famed Turkish towels. You decide to eat an orange (despite the fact they don’t grow within 1,000 miles of here) and heat a frozen snack in the microwave before heading back to bed.

    And, unlike most households for most of history, neither you nor anyone in your family currently has tapeworms

    • 「黃家駒 Wong Ka Kui」 | (aka: 鳳凰院 凶真 Hououin Kyouma)@sh.itjust.works
      7·
      11 hours ago

      My mom told me she woke up one night with some worm thing in her mouth and she had to get it out…

      Ewwww idk why she told me that story…

      Average farmer-villager life lol

      They told me there are also blood-sucking worms, that’d hurt like hell if they bite you, in the fields where my grandparents worked and my mom had to help out in the farm… (like from like I think she said 8 year old or something… she’d help grandparents as soon as she got home from school…)

      She makes me feel like I’m privilaged to not have to do manual farming work…

      I mean… sure… the hardest stuff I did at her age was file taxes for her and help her translate stuff from English… perhap I am “privilaged”?

      • nymnympseudonym@piefed.socialEnglish
        8·
        11 hours ago

        I’m privilaged to not have to do manual farming work

        We all are.

        There is a reason people flocked into cities even before we had electricity and civil sewage systems. Subsistence farming is even worse.

  • Velma@lemmy.today
    20·
    11 hours ago

    Cooking. Transforming raw ingredients into something tasty always makes me feel like a kitchen witch!

    Especially onions. Those fuckers are magic incarnate.

    • 5ibelius9insterberg@feddit.org
      3·
      7 hours ago

      Talking about Onions? Fixed that for you:

      Cooking. Transforming very tasty raw ingredients into something also a bit tasty always makes me feel like a kitchen witch!

      • Velma@lemmy.today
        2·
        7 hours ago

        I also love how versatile onions are. They can be spicy or sweet depending on how you prepare them. You can grow them easily, even from scraps. They’re a very magical plant :)

    • moondoggie@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      51 minutes ago

      The trick is looking for the little magic. In the midst of this past winter’s snowmageddon I had to keep driving to work. The windshield would be covered in salt spray and dirt most of the time. One day I must have gotten the bright idea to do the window washer when I got to work, before I went inside. My memory’s not the greatest and it was such a small simple thing that I had totally forgotten about it by the end of the day.

      It took me a few blocks to pick up on what was different, since it seemed like everything was. I could read the bumper stickers on the car in front of me. All of the houses and buildings were in sharp relief. I could make out the individual branches of each tree instead of just seeing a tall gray blob. It slowly dawned on me that all this was because my windshield was clean.

      My past self had inadvertently created magic for my future self. Not magic in finally having a clean window or somehow making the snow and sleet stop. Magic in those few brief moments when I could see things more clearly than any other time in the cold winters of my life. That brief moment was like walking out of a door right at the end of a summer rainstorm. Petrichor filling your nostrils and everything in front of you so sharp and full of color.

      Remember it’s probably not the world you’re unhappy with, it’s the people on it. Look past the people and find the magic in your surroundings.

    • sbv@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      51·
      11 hours ago

      I’m still fucking amazed that I can just put my phone on a fancy circle and it sticks there until I pull it off. I’ve had that thing for like a year and it still feels like magic.

      Also:

      • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        11 hours ago

        I mean, I was making an ICP joke:

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-agl0pOQfs

        But yeah, people freaked the fuck out over “lodestones”.

        Some Greek 8,000 years ago found out sometimes a very special rock will always point in one direction if you allow it to spin.

        No one had any fucking idea what was happening, but suddenly sailing all over the place exploring wasn’t dangerous. No matter what, you could get back home.

        Except there’s insanely rare areas that have magnetic anomlys where it suddenly goes crazy for reasons you have no way to explain.

        The man-hours over 8,000 years of various cultures figuring out magnets is probably higher than a lot of “big” discoveries, it took humanity forever to the point we can buy crazy strong temu magnets for $3 just to fuck around.

  • dan1101@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    9 hours ago

    The fact that all over the world we can drill a hole ~100’ into the ground and get fresh water. So far, but many factors are conspiring against that basic life-sustaining resource.

  • 「黃家駒 Wong Ka Kui」 | (aka: 鳳凰院 凶真 Hououin Kyouma)@sh.itjust.works
    10·
    11 hours ago

    I can use a slab of glass to summon either:

    1. A bunch of entities with weapons… (firebenders? metalbenders?)
    2. A bunch of waterbenders that can use a device on a self-propelled vehicle to move water from the ground to turn off a fire nearby
    3. Faries that could possibly save your life
    4. Transportation… in exchange for a deduction in your magical number
    5. Food… in exchange for a deduction in your magical number…
    6. Speaking of The Magical Number System… just hope your region of reigning Wizards/Witches don’t mess up the mana in the area… that could break the magic numbers…
  • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    5·
    10 hours ago

    Written language. It literally lets us communicate with people thousands of years apart and around the world. Most significant technological development in human history imo.