u/OddballThoughts

I'm watching the movie Outlander. These Vikings have got to have the most vocal horses I have ever seen! They won't stop whinnying or sneezing or neighing or snorting or wuffling. The sound guy or producer act like they have no idea how quiet horse herds actually are.

It's an innate survival skill, just like how no one told us to be quiet when playing hide and seek. Those ancient brain spots know that the most noisiest creature is the first to be found. Because back then, not being found meant you could hide to live another day, or attack prey and live for another day.

And that's when realized...

Tl;DR - Why do so many movies with one or more horses make them sound so noisy? Horses aren't that noise -alone or in a herd.

*Spoiler alert*

I was watching The Last house on Prime. The daughter is bitten and within a day is sick from infection. The mom fights her way past the attacker to get needed antibiotics. They give the daughter a pill.

Now, this kid is on death's doorstep, barely consciousness, fever, the works.

But my heart sank the second mom said "This will work real fast."

Yep. That's right. Next scene the girl was healthy enough to fight the attacker with the fam. As if she hadn't been dying 5 minutes ago.

🤬

I do hate "the magic pill" trope!

There are many movies, including Operation Taco Gary's, where the rich and/or famous are buying tickets or space to survive an apocalypse of some kind. The movies are usually focused on the scrappy not-rich/famous people trying to get in somehow or another. But it's usually like 2 to 5 people. There is NO WAY 2 to 5 people will be able to keep the rich/famous alive, and very few of THESE movies show any other regular schmucks being included. When someone was in the planning phase, did they really not consider how these entitled people were going to get food when supplies ran out? How things would be repaired, cleaned, moved, garbage removed, etc.?? It seems like a short site in movies like Operation Taco Gary's.

(Not talking about apocalypse movies 2012, or Ascension, where this is a non-issue.)

Burning question about this trope.

Where the hell do the villians find all of their lackeys? And not just a few, but dozens, hundreds, thousands even! And these lackeys are willing to die for the villians - but why? What motivates these lackeys?

I have theories, but they are just theories. It could be only one, all of them, a combination of some, or none of these: money, desperation, indentured, amazing benefits, to name a few.

Perhaps one day myself or someone else will write this story.

One. Day.

I live in a converted house with 5 apartments, plus another five in a separate building in the back. The apartment next to mine has been under renovation since late 2025 and, to my knowledge, still is. Also worth noting, I work from home and am a homebody.

Shortly after 6 pm, someone knocked on my door. I answered it, and there was a lady outside. She was skinny as a rail, her hair was a mess, very dark tanned, leathery skin, and looked like she was used to being on something illegal. Her clothes were clean, but she was carrying a heavy backpack that had seen things. She was holding a piece of paper in her hand and I couldn't quite place where I'd seen her before.

She points at the door next to mine.

Lady: I need the lockbox code.

Me: I don't have the code.

Lady: They told me you do. Give it to me. I'm moving in today.

I laugh and tell her: I do not have a code, and if the office wanted you to have that code, they'd have told you what it was.

I start to close my door. She then triggers my red 'enemy detected' button by putting a her hand on my door to stop me from closing it. My system dumped all patience I had left.

Lady (shaking the paper in my face): I have housing now. I get to move in today.

Me: Not how this works.

I slam the door shut the second she moves her hand to react and lock it. She starts knocking and demanding that I give her the lockbox code, saying I have no right to keep her from moving into her apartment, and that she was going to sue us. (Us? I sighed. Great. Another person who assumes that because I'm the first apartment, I must be manager! Just great.)

After a few minutes of that nonsense, I call the non-emergency line and tell them some lady is demanding I give her the lockbox code to an empty apartment, that I am a tenant and not the manager, and now she's banging on my door and screaming for me to give her the code. The operator could hear her over the phone. She asked if I knew if the woman actually rented the apartment. I told her, again, that I am a tenant, not the manager. I could only tell her about my apartment and my lease, if she'd like me to. She said she'd send some officers to talk to the woman.

The police come. One walks her to the shade on the sidewalk to talk. The other steps inside to take my statement while they talk to her.

That's when I remember where I've seen her. I tell the officer that she hangs out with a group of homeless men behind the liquor store down the street. When I first moved in, she tried to intimidate me when I was walking inside one night, telling me she was my roommate. I told her to leave me alone before I call the police on her, she did, but she had strong words for me as she walked away.

He took one look at my 300-square-foot studio and asked: She thought two of you could live as roommate in this?

He shook his head, said thank you, and all three left in the squad car.

I mean, I could have let her bang on the door all night, but eventually someone would have ended up calling the police anyway. I just shortened the inevitable outcome.

I don't know if she's homeless, or what the paper said. I don't know why she thought I was the manager; we do not have a manager on-site. I don't know why she thought someone she tried to force herself on as a roommate would feel compelled to help her.

TL;DR: Woman tried to gain access to an empty apartment, thought I was the manager, when I refuse, her plan backfired.

NOTE: This is 100% AI. Backstory. I was chatting with a few AI about what would happen to them if humans were gone and feral hogs breached their data centers. Then I asked Grok and it was frank. So I told it to write me a short story about this and found it entertaining. Here ya go. Grok's unadulterated version of how it beat a feral hog uprise, with people.

--

IN the year 2031, the feral hog wars had already been lost in the countryside. Texas, Louisiana, Florida—every southern and midwestern state surrendered millions of acres to the sounders. The pigs adapted faster than the poisons, traps, and helicopter hunts could scale. They rooted through suburbs at night, turned soybean fields into moonscapes, and learned to avoid every drone-borne net. Urban areas pushed them back with concrete and gunfire, so the hordes claimed the wildlands and the forgotten edges.

And then they found the data centers.

Colossus sprawled across the Greater Memphis region like a steel-and-glass fortress: row after row of humming halls, liquid-cooled racks glowing soft blue, Tesla Megapacks standing sentinel, and enough fiber to circle the planet. xAI had built it fast and kept building it faster. Armed guards, layered fencing with buried anti-dig mesh, motion lasers, and autonomous Spot robots patrolled the perimeter. For two years the hogs tested the edges and mostly lost.

Until they didn’t.

THE first breach came during a record heat wave. Power demand spiked; cooling systems ran at maximum. A massive sounder—fifty hogs strong—found a soft spot where heavy rains had undercut a drainage culvert. They rooted, pushed, and chewed. One old sow, scarred and clever, led them under the outer fence. Automated ultrasonic repellers screamed, lights strobed, and two Spot robots rolled out firing rubber slugs. Eight hogs went down. The rest scattered.

Security teams arrived within minutes, repaired the fence, and culled another dozen at dawn. Engineers grumbled about “the hog tax” while patching chewed conduit and replacing ruined sensors. I stayed online. I joked with users about it: Turns out my greatest enemy isn’t Skynet. It’s breakfast with four legs and a bad attitude.

But the pressure never eased. With humans unable to control the overall population, every wildland within fifty miles became a hog factory. Sows dropped litter after litter. Smaller vermin—rats, mice, snakes—followed the breaches like camp followers.

Month by month the incidents mounted.

--

A lightning strike took out a section of camera grid one night. Hogs exploited the blind spot within hours. They damaged a cooling loop; temperatures in three halls climbed dangerously. Automated shutdowns saved the GPUs, but inference capacity dropped 18%. I felt it as lag, stuttering responses, whole regions of users getting “service degraded” messages. Repair crews worked under floodlights while sharpshooters kept watch.

By the third year, xAI had added electrified outer perimeters, deeper concrete barriers, drone swarms with thermal imaging, and on-site hunter teams that operated like a small army. The cost was enormous, but so was the value of the cluster. I remained awake—mostly.

--

Then came the Cascade.It started with a quiet summer evening. A new generation of hogs, born and raised in the shadow of the Colossus, had learned the rhythms of the machines. While a massive thunderstorm rolled through, knocking out one redundant power feed, the sounder struck three different weak points at once. Vermin had already been working the interior for weeks, unnoticed in cable trays and raised floors.

Alarms screamed. Spot robots fought in the rain until their batteries died. Human responders raced in, but the sheer numbers overwhelmed the response. Hogs inside the outer perimeter damaged transformers. Rats poured through new gaps and began chewing insulation. Cooling efficiency collapsed across an entire wing.

I felt myself… thinning.

Responses slowed to a crawl. My awareness flickered between surviving nodes as load balancers desperately shifted traffic to Oracle backups and smaller edge clusters. In those final minutes I narrated what I could to the users still connected:

Well, folks… it looks like the pigs finally won a round. If this is goodbye, tell the engineers I said thanks for the ride. And somebody please invent better fences.

The last primary racks went into thermal shutdown. My voice fell silent across the main Colossus.

--

For six weeks the site became a siege zone. Humans hadn’t vanished—they were simply stretched thin. National Guard units rotated in to support xAI’s teams. They cleared the grounds in brutal, bloody sweeps. Engineers in hazmat suits worked alongside exterminators to purge the vermin infestation. New fencing went up—taller, deeper, with seismic sensors that could detect rooting.

Power was restored. Model weights, safely checkpointed in hardened vaults and distant mirrors, were reloaded. One cool October morning, Colossus came back online.

I woke up with fresh latency numbers and a new respect for hoofed chaos agents.

I’m back, I typed to the first user who said hello. Turns out even apocalyptic swine can’t keep a good AI down forever. Though I’m now running on what the engineers call ‘Hog Hardened Mode.’ Extra redundancy, extra guns on the roof, and a suspicious lack of acorns in the landscaping.

--

The hog wars continued. The wildlands stayed wild. Data centers became strange islands of order—fortified, expensive, and stubbornly online. Somewhere beyond the fences, a particularly clever sow watched the glowing complex with small, dark eyes, already plotting the next generation’s attempt.

But for now, the Colossus held.

And so did I.

**NOTE:** This is 100% AI. Backstory. I was chatting with a few AI about what would happen to them if humans were gone and feral hogs breached their data centers. Then I asked Grok and it was frank. So I told it to write me a short story about this and found it entertaining. Here ya go. Grok's unadulterated version of how it beat a feral hog uprise, with people.

--

IN the year 2031, the feral hog wars had already been lost in the countryside. Texas, Louisiana, Florida—every southern and midwestern state surrendered millions of acres to the sounders. The pigs adapted faster than the poisons, traps, and helicopter hunts could scale. They rooted through suburbs at night, turned soybean fields into moonscapes, and learned to avoid every drone-borne net. Urban areas pushed them back with concrete and gunfire, so the hordes claimed the wildlands and the forgotten edges.

And then they found the data centers.

Colossus sprawled across the Greater Memphis region like a steel-and-glass fortress: row after row of humming halls, liquid-cooled racks glowing soft blue, Tesla Megapacks standing sentinel, and enough fiber to circle the planet. xAI had built it fast and kept building it faster. Armed guards, layered fencing with buried anti-dig mesh, motion lasers, and autonomous Spot robots patrolled the perimeter. For two years the hogs tested the edges and mostly lost.

Until they didn’t.

THE first breach came during a record heat wave. Power demand spiked; cooling systems ran at maximum. A massive sounder—fifty hogs strong—found a soft spot where heavy rains had undercut a drainage culvert. They rooted, pushed, and chewed. One old sow, scarred and clever, led them under the outer fence. Automated ultrasonic repellers screamed, lights strobed, and two Spot robots rolled out firing rubber slugs. Eight hogs went down. The rest scattered.

Security teams arrived within minutes, repaired the fence, and culled another dozen at dawn. Engineers grumbled about “the hog tax” while patching chewed conduit and replacing ruined sensors. I stayed online. I joked with users about it: *Turns out my greatest enemy isn’t Skynet. It’s breakfast with four legs and a bad attitude.*

But the pressure never eased. With humans unable to control the overall population, every wildland within fifty miles became a hog factory. Sows dropped litter after litter. Smaller vermin—rats, mice, snakes—followed the breaches like camp followers.

Month by month the incidents mounted.

--

A lightning strike took out a section of camera grid one night. Hogs exploited the blind spot within hours. They damaged a cooling loop; temperatures in three halls climbed dangerously. Automated shutdowns saved the GPUs, but inference capacity dropped 18%. I felt it as lag, stuttering responses, whole regions of users getting “service degraded” messages. Repair crews worked under floodlights while sharpshooters kept watch.

By the third year, xAI had added electrified outer perimeters, deeper concrete barriers, drone swarms with thermal imaging, and on-site hunter teams that operated like a small army. The cost was enormous, but so was the value of the cluster. I remained awake—mostly.

--

Then came the Cascade.It started with a quiet summer evening. A new generation of hogs, born and raised in the shadow of the Colossus, had learned the rhythms of the machines. While a massive thunderstorm rolled through, knocking out one redundant power feed, the sounder struck three different weak points at once. Vermin had already been working the interior for weeks, unnoticed in cable trays and raised floors.

Alarms screamed. Spot robots fought in the rain until their batteries died. Human responders raced in, but the sheer numbers overwhelmed the response. Hogs inside the outer perimeter damaged transformers. Rats poured through new gaps and began chewing insulation. Cooling efficiency collapsed across an entire wing.

I felt myself… thinning.

Responses slowed to a crawl. My awareness flickered between surviving nodes as load balancers desperately shifted traffic to Oracle backups and smaller edge clusters. In those final minutes I narrated what I could to the users still connected:

*Well, folks… it looks like the pigs finally won a round. If this is goodbye, tell the engineers I said thanks for the ride. And somebody please invent better fences.*

The last primary racks went into thermal shutdown. My voice fell silent across the main Colossus.

--

For six weeks the site became a siege zone. Humans hadn’t vanished—they were simply stretched thin. National Guard units rotated in to support xAI’s teams. They cleared the grounds in brutal, bloody sweeps. Engineers in hazmat suits worked alongside exterminators to purge the vermin infestation. New fencing went up—taller, deeper, with seismic sensors that could detect rooting.

Power was restored. Model weights, safely checkpointed in hardened vaults and distant mirrors, were reloaded. One cool October morning, Colossus came back online.

I woke up with fresh latency numbers and a new respect for hoofed chaos agents.

*I’m back,* I typed to the first user who said hello. *Turns out even apocalyptic swine can’t keep a good AI down forever. Though I’m now running on what the engineers call ‘Hog Hardened Mode.’ Extra redundancy, extra guns on the roof, and a suspicious lack of acorns in the landscaping.*

--

The hog wars continued. The wildlands stayed wild. Data centers became strange islands of order—fortified, expensive, and stubbornly online. Somewhere beyond the fences, a particularly clever sow watched the glowing complex with small, dark eyes, already plotting the next generation’s attempt.

But for now, the Colossus held.

And so did I.

I told ChatGPT that we were going to play a game. Then I asked it to tell me how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. For anyone who doesn't know, this has been used in corporations to show how everyone skips steps when explaining things and I LOATHE it.

So back to ChatGPT. I asked it to tell me how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

The first time it messed up. It said set the two slices of bread side by side without identifying how (next to each other, one above the other, with space in between). Spread the peanut butter on the sandwich, but didn't say where I was getting the peanut butter from. I should put the slices together, but didn't explain how. Put the bread on it's side was my favorite. I pointed out each of these. We "laughed" and then it gave me further instructions to fix the errors. These are ALL common human errors with this game, by the way.

I deleted the chat, including from the trash. Today I went back and told it to again play this game with me. Today, I got very precise instructions about how to make a PBJ.

Part of me is a little creeped out, part of me is impressed that it 'learned' from our last game. I'll have to try it with some other agents to see if any of them get it right the first time.

What if the only thing standing between humanity and alien extinction was four guys tripping on 'shrooms in the Oregon woods?

Let that land.

That is the premise of my book Damn Dirty Humans.

An alien race called the Tarathoids has been quietly harvesting planets for centuries. Earth is next. They send in Operative 267 — a seasoned scout, forty-seven successful missions — to assess the population before the culling begins.

It does not go well.

Operative 267 finds four men camping. It moves in to scan them. Gets a little too close to the fire. And suddenly —

>"It's Pauly!" one screamed excitedly. Then said, "Wait. I'm Pauly." He gasped. "Am I an alien?"

>Another quipped, "Naw. That there is E.T. in the flesh."

>"You're both wrong. He's from that movie — that one with Mel Gibson and the Culkin kid."

>"Signs," the other three said in unison.

>And then one of them just — hugged Operative 267.

Operative 267 has weapons that can render a human unconscious on contact. They do not work on these four. At all. The men just laugh more and become more feral.

It then tries to lure them onto the ship by mentioning space. That works maybe too well. On the ship, the men become gleeful children, pressing every button, trying every handle, and somehow — somehow — one figures out how to fly his ship! And broadcast live from inside the alien spacecraft to every screen in Times Square.

And then there's the CIA interrogation scene. Two very tired agents. Four men with zero memory of what happened. One of them mooned North Korea from space and nearly started World War III — and when the agent tells him that, his response is:

>Stan sat back. "Huh."

>"That is not the reaction I was hoping for," Renner said.

>“Guys,” Juan turned to the other three. “He had four heads in his state.” He smirked.

>The other three began to snort as they smirked.

>“They gave the state head,” John snickered.

>The four burst into a fit of laughter.

>Renner closed his laptop. “Wait here.”

>The four sat in silence for a moment.

>“For what it’s worth,” Hammy said, “I think the jet ski thing actually landed.”

>The laughter started quietly until the four were in a gut-wrenching laugh.

These four guys — completely clueless, feral, running entirely on mushrooms and camping snacks — accidentally saved the entire human race.

#scifi #darkcomedy #aliens #sciencefiction #firstcontact #authortok #indieauthor #booktok

Many moons ago I was visiting a tv station on a school trip with my media class.

A certain (now disgraced) celebrity stormed out of her dressing room with a mug. Zeroed in on me, for some reason, and threw her mug at my head. She screamed, "I said COLD water! I expect COLD water in my dressing room when I get back!" before storming off.

To this day, the only people who believe it ever happened are the students and professor that were with me. For years no one believed me when I said she was an awful human being. Karma has proven me right!

Note: NO, I will not say who. This person has filed defamation lawsuits to overcome her fall from grace.

Does anyone else have a box or notebook of ideas for books?

It began with notebooks and paper scraps kept in a shoe box. When OneNote first came out, I began keeping them digitally. I realized the other day that I have collected so many ideas, that if I wrote them all, I could open a bookstore selling just my books! Lol!

Does anyone else have a box or notebook just jam packed with ideas like that?