so there’s a pretty well known minecraft server called 2b2t that was originally made by facepunch/4chan idiots at least five years ago with the goal of creating a server that 1. has no moderation and 2. never changes maps. naturally a lot of idiot griefer players were attracted to this concept and basically turned the server into a lawless hellworld where any new player is at the mercy of the griefer warlords. the griefers built a colossal, monolithic cobblestone wall around the worldspawn so new players with no items wouldn’t be able to escape from it, allowing griefers with powerful equipment to spawnkill new players as much as they liked. new players punched dozens of tiny little tunnels through this wall which created a way to escape the worldspawn area if you explored enough
one time in july of 2012 i heard about this server and decided to explore it a bit. that’s what the huge wall around the worldspawn looked like from outside the worldspawn. the worldspawn was basically the epicenter of a massive radius of uninhabitable land where stuff like trees and animals had all been stripped away by griefers to make it as hard as possible to survive. i managed to run fairly far away from the worldspawn and reach an area that looked relatively normal and uninhabited so i dug a small underground bunker at the bottom of the world and planted a couple farms and logged out. i kind of forgot about it after that and didn’t log back in until i randomly remembered the server existed again in march of 2015 and decided to see if my little bunker was still there which is when i discovered that it was and saw this REALLY good sign somebody had left after discovering it
at that time in 2015 i just kind of laughed and took that screenshot and explored my bunker a bit and saw that people had come and destroyed the farms i had built and holed up the entrance to my bunker but otherwise left it in tact, which made me pretty proud. i logged out and forgot about the server again until just now (august of 2017) when i logged back in again. my bunker was pretty much the same as in 2015 except that funny sign had been removed by someone. i didn’t go back up to the surface when i had logged in in 2015, so decided to dig myself back up and see what it was like
when i originally dug down in this area in 2012, it just looked like any other naturally generated tundra/forest biome in minecraft. what i found when i came back up to the surface just now five years later was a strange massive manmade cobblestone structure and several giant fountains of lava. there weren’t any other players nearby. someone had spawned four withers nearby which seemed to (thankfully) be stuck in a ditch like area and were just blowing shit up indefinitely. i wandered around and found another underground base near mine which happened to have some melons growing in it, so i took a few to resupply the melons in my griefed farm. i got a bit lost but finally found the hole leading back to my bunker and buried myself again and planted my melon seeds. i can hear the wither explosions from my bunker now, which is kind of worrying. i don’t really feel like doing anything else in here so maybe i’ll log back in and 2020 and see if my little bunker with the melons is still there then
He’s engraved in stone in the National World War II Memorial in Washington, DC – back in a small alcove where very few people have seen it. For the WWII generation, this will bring back memories. For younger folks, it’s a bit of trivia that is an intrinsic part of American history and legend.
Anyone born between 1913 to about 1950, is very familiar with Kilroy. No one knew why he was so well known….but everybody seemed to get into it. It was the fad of its time!
At the National World War II Memorial in Washington, DC
So who was Kilroy?
In 1946 the American Transit Association, through its radio program, “Speak to America,” sponsored a nationwide contest to find the real Kilroy….now a larger-than-life legend of just-ended World War II….offering a prize of a real trolley car to the person who could prove himself to be the genuine article.
Almost 40 men stepped forward to make that claim, but only James Kilroy from Halifax, Massachusetts, had credible and verifiable evidence of his identity.
“Kilroy” was a 46-year old shipyard worker during World War II (1941-1945) who worked as a quality assurance checker at the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts (a major shipbuilder for the United States Navy for a century until the 1980s).
His job was to go around and check on the number of rivets completed. (Rivets held ships together before the advent of modern welding techniques.) Riveters were on piece work wages….so they got paid by the rivet. He would count a block of rivets and put a check mark in semi-waxed lumber chalk (similar to crayon), so the rivets wouldn’t be counted more than once.
A warship hull with rivets
When Kilroy went off duty, the riveters would surreptitiously erase the mark. Later, an off-shift inspector would come through and count the rivets a second time, resulting in double pay for the riveters!
One day Kilroy’s boss called him into his office. The foreman was upset about unusually high wages being “earned” by riveters, and asked him to investigate. It was then he realized what had been going on.
The tight spaces he had to crawl in to check the rivets didn’t lend themselves to lugging around a paint can and brush, so Kilroy decided to stick with the waxy chalk. He continued to put his check mark on each job he inspected, but added ”KILROY WAS HERE!“ in king-sized letters next to the check….and eventually added the sketch of the guy with the long nose peering over the fence….and that became part of the Kilroy message.
Kilroy’s original shipyard inspection “trademark” during World War II
Once he did that, the riveters stopped trying to wipe away his marks.
Ordinarily the rivets and chalk marks would have been covered up with paint. With World War II on in full swing, however, ships were leaving the Quincy Yard so fast that there wasn’t time to paint them. As a result, Kilroy’s inspection “trademark” was seen by thousands of servicemen who boarded the troopships the yard produced.
His message apparently rang a bell with the servicemen, because they picked it up and spread it all over the European and the Pacific war zones.
Before war’s end, “Kilroy” had been here, there, and everywhere on the long hauls to Berlin and Tokyo.
To the troops outbound in those ships, however, he was a complete mystery; all they knew for sure was that someone named Kilroy had “been there first.” As a joke, U.S. servicemen began placing the graffiti wherever they landed, claiming it was already there when they arrived.
As the World War II wore on, the legend grew. Underwater demolition teams routinely sneaked ashore on Japanese-held islands in the Pacific to map the terrain for coming invasions by U.S. troops (and thus, presumably, were the first GI’s there). On one occasion, however, they reported seeing enemy troops painting over the Kilroy logo!
In 1945, as World War II was ending, an outhouse was built for the exclusive use of Allied leaders Harry Truman, Joseph Stalin, and Winston Churchill at the Potsdam Conference. It’s first occupant was Stalin, who emerged and asked his aide (in Russian), “Who is Kilroy?”
To help prove his authenticity in 1946, James Kilroy brought along officials from the shipyard and some of the riveters. He won the trolley car….which he
attached to the Kilroy home and used to provide living quarters for six of the family’s nine children….thereby solving what had become an acute housing crisis for the Kilroys.
The new addition to the Kilroy family home.
* * * *
And the tradition continues into the 21st century…
In 2011 outside the now-late-Osama Bin Laden’s hideaway house in
>>Note: The Kilroy graffiti on the southwest wall of the Bin Laden compound pictured above was real (not digitally altered with Microsoft Paint, as postulated by some). The entire compound was leveled in 2012 for redevelopment by a Pakistani company as an amusement park….and to avoid it becoming a shrine to Bin Laden’s nefarious memory.
* * * *
A personal note….
My Dad’s trademark signature on cards, letters and notes to my sisters and I for the first 50 or so years of our lives (until we lost him to cancer) was to add the image of “Kilroy” at the end. We kids never ceased to get a thrill out of this….even as we evolved into adulthood.
To this day, the “Kilroy” image brings back a vivid image of my awesome Dad into my head….and my heart!
For the first time ever, stygiomedusa gigantea, a gigantic jellyfish was caught on video by scientists in the Gulf of Mexico. There have only been 115 sightings of this deep sea jellyfish in the past 110 years.
STYGOMEDUSA MY FAVORITE DEEP-SEA LADY!! It’s OK, she lives so far down that humans never get stung by her.
character being all “you expect me to do X?” Gilligan Cut to character doing X
the squad gets captured and interrogated separately, and they’re all telling equally terrible, completely contradictory lies
people completely missing the completely unsubtle, very visible dangerous thing in the room with them
alternatively, people absolutely seeing the completely unsubtle, very visible dangerous thing in the room with them and just not giving a shit
bonus points if it’s a beleaguered minimum wage employee who just goes about their business like “yep same shit as always”
someone pretending they don’t know another character is eavesdropping, only to casually reveal at the end of the scene that they know (*leaving* “tell tom that he can come out now” *tom drops from the ceiling in spy gear, irritated*)
choosing to deal with the villain by just leaving them alone in a room with another character
the “hands go down” trope
example: “any questions?” *everyone’s hands go up* “…that AREN’T sarcastic?” *everyone’s hands go down*
how could all y’all forget “ACT NATURAL!”
These are all great but let’s not forget two characters giving extremely biased flashbacks to the same event that each paint the other as an incompetent loon
i would like to respectfully add: scenes where a character walks into a room, sees something scary, and turns around and walks out with no reaction or change of expression
Bonus points if he DOES react, but it’s to close the door and tell his buddy “it’s for you.”
I love them so much because they’re about as sharp as a baseball and their anatomy is ridiculous to the point of them literally being classified as plankton for years because they just sort of get blown around by the ocean and look confused, but because they lay more eggs than ANY OTHER VERTEBRATE IN EXISTENCE, evolution can’t stop them
Why is no big predator coming and gnawing on them?
Their biggest defense is that they’re massive and have super tough skin, but they do get hunted by sharks or sea lions sometimes and they just sort of float there like ‘oh bother’ as it happens
Even funnier, because they eat nothing but jellyfish they’re really low in nutritional value anyway, so they basically survive by being not worth eating because they’re like a big floating rice cracker wrapped in leather.
So basically the only reason natural selection hasn’t taken care if them is because they are the most useless fish
yes, they’ve perfected uselessness to the point of being unstoppable
a true inspiration
I bet they are secretly thinking some big fish thoughts.
*Angela Ziegler voice* cosplay?? nah don’t be so absurd that’s— [trips] [hundreds of photos of herself in various fully functional battle cosplays spill out of labcoat] w-what a fuckign joke i these arent mine im just [gathering them up frantically sweating] listen i just listen fuck [thousands of professional grade pictures of herself scatter across the floor] shit fcuk im holding them for a friend just listen
Initiative Archival Network 