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.

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

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

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

“word shitting”. Lots and lots of words that say fuck all.

This is a great way to describe LLM-based AIs. I’ma use it.

I think the really wealthy old-money people would never say such a thing. Because such a thing just wouldn’t occur to them. And if someone said that to them, they’d just kind of smile and nod the same way they would to a toddler. Maybe say “Ah, yes, very good.” So that’s probably the best response.

But if I were writing a screenplay and had to come up with a one-liner I’d probably go with, “Just goes to show you can’t buy class.”

Hey fellow slrpnk.net refugees… if you’re looking to recreate your list of subscribed communities, here’s a good place to start:

(luckily I was posting this to newcomers whenever I had the chance…)

Sorry to hear that! My main account is on slrpnk.net. But don’t let it stress you out, “solarpunk” says “punk” which implies “DIY” which means this sort of thing happens. Much better to have an instance run by an admin who truly cares, rather than some soulless corporation.