Alien: You’re Telling Me That In Times Of Great Distress Humans Have Been Known To Suddenly Gain The

I have only once contained this much terror and confusion at a time,.and that encounter involved a Quag'snartian Fleshchanger.

how would aliens react to tattoos? like, some humans undergo large amounts of pain to have an image permanetly inked on their skin and sometimes the reason is no more than "eh, it looks cool"

“Human Tyler, you seem to have acquired pigmented particles under your skin.” Rytrinq began, trying to gain their attention at the same time as xe remained polite and considerate. “Do you wish time to cleanse yourself?” Xe asked, quite pleased with xemself for remembering the appropriate question.

“Fuck off, don’t be rude.” Human Tyler repeated, looking enraged for some reason. Granted, Rytrinq didn’t have the longest experience deciphering human mannerisms, but the wording didn’t leave much room for ambiguity. “This took a loot of time, and I’ll have you know I’m really happy with how it turned out.” They added, baffling Rytrinq further.

“You got dirt under your skin on purpose?” Xe asked, getting more confused each time Tyler spoke. Fortunately, it seemed they realised xe genuinely didn’t understand. Or at least they were willing to indulge him. 

“It’s not dirt. It’s ink, and yes. It’s called a tattoo. It’s art.” They said, clearly still angry, though they did look slightly less terrifying, which xe decided to count as progress. Xe had heard that human art came in many forms, but xe had never heard of one involving the human body itself.

“Human Tyler, that is immensely intriguing. How is it made?” Xe asked, relieved when they seemed to realise it was a case of cultural confusion rather than xem being purposefully rude.

“Well, you go to a tattoo artist, and they make the design and then make a sort of template, I guess you could call it. Anyway, they put that on the place you want the tattoo, and it transfers a bit of ink so the artist’s got something to guide them. And then they have this machine, which is basically a bunch of needles that pierce the skin with ink. Which the artist use to sort of draw on the skin, leaving cool art like this.” Human Tyler said, adding a pointed look for the last part while showing off the art. Rytrinq was however too worried - and quite frankly terrified - to think too much about it.

“It pierces your skin and drags the ink machine through your skin? Is that not painful?” Xe asked

“What? No, no it goes up and down into the skin. If you drag it without the needles getting up you’ll end up with big scars. It does kind of hurt, but it’s not that bad.” They answered, clearly believing that to sound better. As if getting stabbed multiple times was no big deal.

“What purpose does it serve? Is it a hierarchical or sociological requirement?”

“No, some people don’t even like them. Think they look unprofessional or whatever bullshit like that. But it doesn’t really have a purpose.” Human Tyler answered with a brief elevation of their shoulder area.

“Then why do you put yourself through the pain?” Xe wondered. They had to have some reason after all, right?

“Eh, it looks cool. I mean, I just really like daffodils, always have. They’re cool.” They said, once again reminding Rytrinq that xe would never fully understand humans.

“Humans are weird” idea

It seems to always be the case that aliens have names that are “unpronounceable by the human tongue.”  But, y’know, humans are actually really good mimics.  We can do impressions of anything, and some of us are really good at it.  What if that was a special skill of ours that was constantly surprising the aliens?

Alien talks about human like s/he’s not there, only to be shocked when its own language comes out of that strange little mouth.

Alien can’t figure out WHAT that noise onboard is, only to find human crewmate pranking it.  (“As soon as he leaves, I’m gonna do the sound of a failing hover engine, okay?  Just see where he looks first!”)

Alien hears a different noise and a thud, then “Sorry, I tripped.”  (”But you squeaked.”  “Yeah, didn’t mean to.  Sounded kinda dumb.”)

Alien is alarmed to hear the sound of two Dangerous Animals coming from the containment room.  Thinks the one has multiplied.  Runs in, find human yowling back at it.  (“It seemed lonely, so I was talking to it.  Reminds me of a cat I had once.”)

The away team is threatened by a Large Animal protecting its young.  Alien Captain knows what to do.  Shoves the human up front and points.  “Make the noises that the little ones are making.  This is your time to shine.”

More “wtf are humans, please leave the rest of us be” stuff:

Human reactions to fear!

No, I’m not talking about screaming or freezing in one spot and pissing yourself. I’m talking about the weirder, more specific-to-only-humans fear reactions.

Like singing.

Idk how many of you have watched people play horror video games, but a surprising amount of people start narrating what’s going on in a sing-song voice.

Imagine being an alien, walking in a horrific, dark tunnel with these weird gangly creatures, you’re all scared out of your wits and then one of them starts fucking singing.

In a dark cave. While everyone’s terrified.

“ ♫ ~We are all gonna fucking die, this is terrible and I wanna go hooooome~ ♬ ”

This seems important to you humans.

URGENT ALL AUSSIES!!!

i know!!! the stupid liberal government has decided on the plebiscite and even tho it’s a waste of money….. please vote!! IF YOU ARE GOING TO BE 18 BEFORE NOVEMBER 25 ENROLL TO VOTE!!! PLEASE DO NOT THROW YOUR VOTE AWAY THIS IS SO IMPORTANT TO ME AND SO MANY OTHERS!!!!!!! PLEASE VOTE YES ON MARRIAGE EQUALITY!!!!!! WE CAN DO THIS!!!!

Humans are Space Orcs

So I’ve been loving the “humans are weird” tag lately and I came up with one myself. Here goes…

Breathe in… Breathe out… The yoga soundtrack on Kenzie’s phone was interrupted by the nervous clicking of a member of the Ghrivak clan. Thnybux, a third-tier member of the clan, approached her on a swirling cloud, as was standard of the Ghrivaks.

“Human Kenzie,” said Thnybux, through the translator in her ear. “Human Kenzie, what are you doing? You will rip your flesh with those movements!”

Kenzie straightened from her yoga position and greeted Thnybux with the series of clicks common in the Ghrivak dialect. “This is called yoga. Humans actually need to move and stretch their bodies. It’s good for us.”

Thnybux regarded her with some confusion. “Do you know why the Ghrivak move only on clouds, Human Kenzie? It is because if we move our bodies too much, our bones will disintegrate from the forces of gravity on this planet. I do not understand this theory of movement. How exactly is it beneficial to your species?”

“Human muscles are connected to hard, quasi-living rods in our bodies called bones. These bones are created by specialized cells, and are both very lightweight and very strong. Our muscles are made of specialized cells, and when they are very minimally damaged, repair themselves so that they are stronger. If a human does not exercise, the muscles will die off, and the human will no longer be able to move.”

“Surely the force of these…muscles…on these living rods will shatter the rods?”

“No, our muscles are not that strong,” Kenzie laughed. “Our bones are much stronger than that. And humans break bones fairly frequently. It hurts but the bone just heals stronger. That’s kind of a theme in humans actually, when we get hurt we just heal stronger.” She returned to her yoga.

Thnybux hid xie’s fear from the human Kenzie, and took note of this new information. What kind of creature becomes stronger when it is hurt? Lesson number one: Do not anger the humans.

Not greeting someone this way is a sleight to their honor.

Whenever I see a post on tumblr suggesting aliens don’t have gender, I always think–‘but what if also the reverse. What if aliens also have some fundamental social construct we don’t’.

Like, they come and meet us and they’re like ‘hey this is an awkward question but what’s your gooblebygark?’

And we’re like what.

‘You know, the… the thing. Your goobledygark. The thing that dictates whether you’re gnarfgnoovles or brubledoopes’

What. What. What the fuck, those words don’t even mean anything??? What are you talking about?

‘Look, your ridiculous human languages don’t seem to have the words for these! But they’re totally a thing, they’re like, fundamental aspects of social life for our species, just… just let us lick you so we can know what verb tense to use when we speak to you.’

What does one thing have to do with the other??? That makes no–

‘UGH, nevermind, you’re totally brubledoopes, I can just tell, I don’t even need to taste your bacterial skin colonies.’

And then another alien overhears and is like ‘holy shit, you can’t stereotype like that, that’s SO NOT COOL’

‘yeaH BUT THEY WON’T LET ME LICK THEM’

Stahp

Reblog of you want my friend to stop hurting herself

I’m trying to prove to her that people still care and although the temptation for self harm is strong, she can fight it and she is not alone. Please don’t scroll past, please show her you care. ~Mod Aaron

I can assure you that I do not have a magnetic crystal in my brain. I also have yet to hear this "music".

What if there was an alien species who didn’t ‘get’ music? They have no sense of rhythm or anything like that, so from their perspective humans occasionally just randomly change the pitch of their voices while talking about random things. They find it insane that there’s a whole human industry devoted to making instruments and other humans fluctuate the pitch and speed of their voices into a recording device.

Eventually the humans explain music to them and they learn to just put up with it as another 'crazy human thing’.

Now imagine a ship where half the crew is human and half is this other species. There’s a bit of a friendly rivalry between the two species and they often play pranks on each other. So one week the humans hide magnets all around the ship, knowing that this messes with the magnetic crystals in the aliens’ brains that help them find their way around. The humans have great fun watching their crew mates keep bumping into things and the aliens swear revenge.

The next week some music is played over the ship’s intercom. But it’s not just any music. Every song that the aliens have ever heard referred to as “annoying” or “catchy” is played over and over. To the aliens it’s just white noise, to the humans it’s torture. It gets worse, however. For days after the incident, the aliens dilate their breathing flaps in amusement whenever they hear humans complain about “that stupid song!” They’d heard about the human concept of 'songs getting stuck in heads’ but didn’t think it would work so well…

Alien/Human Interactions

-Aliens seeing how many times humans declare war on each other throughout history and thinking that humans enjoy war as some sort of sport or spectacle -Aliens coming into possession of human sci-fi horror films and being worried that their human companions are afraid of them -Aliens coming into possession of positive human representations of aliens and forming huge crushes on Mr. Spock and ET -Aliens first discovering humans through stray TV broadcasts of the Brady Bunch, Grease, and other vintage tv shows. Intergalactic fashion suddenly shifts to favor clothing similar to 50s greaser jackets and sweaters -Aliens falling in love with human fashion and parading around in poorly applied makeup (the said aliens watched dozens of tutorials on YouTube), bonus points if the alien is traditionally masculine looking. “I look like your human goddess Beyonce and you cannot convince me otherwise, human Steve.” -Aliens falling in love with human languages and printing human words all over their clothing like Americans do with French words. However, they often mix up the languages by picking and choosing which words they like the best, so the phrases turn out like “C'est good, nyet?” -Aliens relating more to neurodivergent people because of how their brains work, bonding with humans over different strengths and weaknesses -Aliens seeing all the ways humans go thrill-seeking (rollercoasters, skydiving, bungee-jumping, water slides) and scolding their humans for putting themselves in danger oN PURPOSE -Aliens tasting spicy foods for the first time and and scolding their humans for eating FIRE -Aliens being worried that their human love interests find them unattractive and trying different things to look more human -Aliens being confused by human daydreaming and infant “pretending”. Why would humans want to be anything else? They are already perfect. -Aliens having the same weird fantasy of being “abducted” and “probed” by humans that we have of them -Aliens having weird 70s style videos on “Human Etiquette”, with incredibly inaccurate info on how humans actually act -Aliens first coming into contact with dogs and animals because we sent those into space first, assuming that humans are the same and attempting to placate them with tummy rubs and rubs behind the ears

Humans are ridiculous

I just want to throw my hat into the ring about the Humans Are Space Orcs trope that has been going around and I’ve been enjoying immensely.

You know how a large percentage of us have a fear of spiders? Even cripplingly so, like “kill it now I’m crying and breathing into a bag” kind of fear. So what if the aliens are monitoring our transmissions before making first contact, and see, for example, a bunch of Tumblr users discussing how scary spiders are? Put that with how badass humans generally are (seriously, we invented surgery before we invented anesthetic and consume literal poison because we like the taste), how freaked out would the aliens be to learn that there’s something we truly fear? I can see it going down like this: Human Steve: Tell us about FTL travel and your culture, we have much to learn from each other Alien: Yeah yeah in a minute tell me about the spider threat are we safe right now or

Even better would be if Human Steve is not one of those people who is afraid of spiders at all. Like, he has a pet tarantula and puts wild spiders outside safely when they come into his bathroom, if he bothers with them at all. And the aliens are VERY CONCERNED about the little guys and he’s like ???? They aren’t??? A threat???? But then they consult with Human Bill, and Human Bill is basically Professional Spider Hater and goes on for a weirdly long time about how spiders are the actual devil and how black widows are really dangerous and let’s not even MENTION Australia. He gets the heebee jeebies and starts twitching and itching as he begins to feel phantom bugs on his skin. Both Human Steve and Human Bill insist that the other is the weird one. The aliens are more concerned than ever.