Tag: funny

mostlyharmlessdesigns:

darthmelyanna:

ekjohnston:

ironychan:

Thousands of years ago, somebody looked at a flock of sheep and went, “well, they aren’t cold.”

Guys. Guys.

It’s so much better than that.

So once upon a time, goats and sheep were essentially the same animal, and all of them had hair. Now, you can do some stuff with hair, but you can’t do a lot, so mostly sheep/goats were kept for meat and milk.

Except then a mutation showed up, and some of the sheep/goats had WOOL instead. And someone realized that 1. you could spin that shit, and 2. then you could WEAVE that shit, and 3. IT GREW BACK.

Generations of selective breeding ensued. Two visibly discrete species emerged, one primarily for meat and milk, and the other primarily for wool. They also have different behavioural characteristics, because independence was not helpful in a sheep, so it was bred out of them. Sheep remain one of the few non-draft animals that we farm even though they are not delicious.

The most similar part of sheep and goats that remains today is their skeleton. On an archaeological dig, you find THOUSANDS of bones and bone fragments that can only be identified as “sheep/goat”. It’s incredibly frustrating, but also kind of hilarious after you’ve spent enough time in the sun.

ANYWAY, human beings have always been smart and surprisingly good at changing nature because they want a sweater.

The entire knitting community needs to hear this.

I love this version of this post! 

enourmo:

cool-ghoul:

hikikomomo:

nerdgerhl:

lyinginbedmon:

lesbophobes:

gaypet:

paxamericana:

The epidemic began on September 13, 2005, when Blizzard introduced a new raid called Zul’Gurub into the game as part of a new update. Its end boss, Hakkar, could affect players by using a debuff called Corrupted Blood, a disease that damages players over time, this one specifically doing significant damage. The disease could be passed on between any nearby characters, and would kill characters with lower levels in a few seconds, while higher level characters could keep themselves alive. It would disappear as time passed or when the character died. Due to a programming error, players’ pets and minions carried the disease out of the raid.

Non-player characters could contract the disease but were asymptomatic to it and could spread it to others.[2] At least three of the game’s servers were affected. The difficulty in killing Hakkar may have limited the spread of the disease. Discussion forum posters described seeing hundreds of bodies lying in the streets of the towns and cities. Deaths in World of Warcraft are not permanent, as characters are resurrected shortly afterward.[3] However, dying in such a way is disadvantageous to the player’s character and incurs inconvenience.[4]

During the epidemic, normal gameplay was disrupted. Player responses varied but resembled real-world behaviors. Some characters with healing abilities volunteered their services, some lower-level characters who could not help would direct people away from infected areas, some characters would flee to uninfected areas, and some characters attempted to spread the disease to others.[2] Players in the game reacted to the disease as if there was real risk to their well-being.[5] Blizzard Entertainment attempted to institute a voluntary quarantine to stem the disease, but it failed, as some players didn’t take it seriously, while others took advantage of the pandemonium.[2] Despite certain security measures, players overcame them by giving the disease to summonable pets.[6] Blizzard was forced to fix the problem by instituting hard resets of the servers and applying quick fixes.[3]

The major towns and cities were abandoned by the population as panic set in and players rushed to evacuate to the relative safety of the countryside, leaving urban areas filled to the brim with corpses, and the city streets literally white with the bones of the dead.[7]

please read the full wikipedia article

Orgrimmar during the incident.

This is legitimately one of the most fascinating events in online and/or gaming history to date.

This post leaves out the most incredible part, which is that the CDC straight up contacted Blizzard and asked for all the data they had on the Corrupted Blood Plague for the purposes of refining their models of epidemic behavior in real human populations. 

Is this a real life thing

Yup! Scholars still look at it to this day.

Corrupted blood will probably always be my favorite gaming story.