I kinda like this variation on the theme:

They clenched around the world like a fist, each black as the inside of an event horizon until those last bright moments when they all burned together. They screamed as they died. Every radio up to geostat groaned in unison, every infrared telescope went briefly snowblind. Ashes stained the sky for weeks afterwards; mesospheric clouds, high above the jet stream, turned to glowing rust with every sunrise. The objects, apparently, consisted largely of iron. Nobody ever knew what to make of that.

For perhaps the first time in history, the world knew before being told: if you’d seen the sky, you had the scoop. The usual arbiters of newsworthiness, stripped of their accustomed role in filtering reality, had to be content with merely labeling it. It took them ninety minutes to agree on Fireflies. A half hour after that, the first Fourier transforms appeared in the noosphere; to no one’s great surprise, the Fireflies had not wasted their dying breaths on static. There was pattern embedded in that terminal chorus, some cryptic intelligence that resisted all earthly analysis. The experts, rigorously empirical, refused to speculate: they only admitted that the Fireflies had said something. They didn’t know what.

Everyone else did. How else would you explain 65,536 probes evenly dispersed along a lat-long grid that barely left any square meter of planetary surface unexposed? Obviously the Flies had taken our picture. The whole world had been caught with its pants down in panoramic composite freeze-frame. We’d been surveyed—whether as a prelude to formal introductions or outright invasion was anyone’s guess.

https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

Yeah… reminds me of a very valuable lesson I learned during my college years.

Guatemala is awesome. The countryside is beautiful and the people are descended from one of humanity’s major civilizations, the Mayans.

I realize OP is only half-serious, but they still come off as really ignorant.

Yeah, I didn’t realize that when I first heard it. I guess that’s why it’s a punishment. If they just hung a tiny parakeet off his neck, it wouldn’t be much of a punishment.

If it’s not in a song by Sabaton or Iron Maiden, it ain’t real history.

Yeah, I didn’t really like the genre for a long time either, until I was in a place where I kinda needed it.

Most people hate school. Even the “smart kids”, what they really like is learning or knowledge, not school.

I see it as an example of cozy slice-of-life. Kind of like Azumanga Daioh but in a deli with a bear and a plant.

Homer listening to “Home” while watching “Home Alone” with the homies and a homing pigeon.

Original Illustration to Samuel Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, 1798 (not colorized).

The cat knew he was in trouble and was like: OK, this ONE TIME I will come running to you.

That’s what I was gonna say. It doesn’t even have to be a religious thing. To a lot of people church/mosque/temple is a cultural thing.

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.

“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

History’s like that too. People took their best guesses, but nobody knew for sure.

Oh, it’s a Japanese cartoon. They use metric hours instead of Imperial hours. So you’ll just have to keep waiting.

Either that, or driving cars to the junkyard to be crushed.

The engineers design the gravel to turn into a powerful sedative/hypnotic but only if you run a truck into it at high speed.

“You don’t think it’s weird when YOU do it!”

That’s only if you haven’t blessed the rains down in Africa.

Since there’s no “Lord StarTron” in Star Trek, I’m guessing this is just a 0 mask. Why put it there?

• Your average normie’s gonna look at that and say: “Star Trek BS, I don’t wanna think that much,” and forget all about it.
• Your average Trekkie’s gonna mention it to every other Trekkie they know, and thus expand the reach of the flyer. Everyone has at least one Trekkie friend.
• The intended recipient’s gonna look up “Lord StarTron”, see nothing, and then out of desperation just add the birthday to the mask and try that number (which is the right answer)