Thread by @wolfejosh

1/A story of PATIENCE
—and a brilliant perfectionist engineer

A perfectionist engineer wanted to inspire her daughter—
so she always built things at home + had her help.

It started with Legos, robots + coding

—BUT each had to be PERFECT
or the engineer mom would get upset...

2/ Wanting to teach her daughter a LESSON she went back to old roots of hand crafts & the creativity from limits.

They would build a golden well—using exactly 100 bricks

So they sketched plans, made calculations, designed angles to make a gold well using EXACTLY 100 bricks...

3/
They bought gold paint
carefully painted each brick
+ placed each one in its place

Just as they finished—the daughter held up 1 extra gold brick

The perfectionist engineer was confused + angry!

She grabbed the brick
& THREW it out the backyard
as high + far as she could—

4/ Every generation needs to be reeducated about supernatural gobbledygook.

Today to my dismay astrology is back.

There were a bunch of teenagers on a city bus.

They were noisily switching between making TikToks + Astrology apps + teaching eachother supernatural nonsense...

5/ Sitting across from the teenagers: a woman with a dog.

She complains about how loud the teenagers are
& how absurd astrology is.

The teenagers complain about the womans’ barking dog.

The woman grows angry
SNAPS
grabs two of their phones
and throws them out the window!

6/
Two of the teenagers grab the dog
+ throw it out the bus window

Everyone sits in shock

Finally the woman says
I cant believe i did that
I am SO sorry
The teenagers effusively apologize too

At the next stop
they hear commotion
look out the window
and WHAT do they see?!..

7/
You guessed it.

Running to them alongside the bus.

Is the woman’s dog.

And guess what it had in its mouth?...

8/ ...a gold BRICK.🍯 🧱

—a lesson...in PATIENCE.

9/ Inspiration came from last week’s Watchmen.

It’s an old trope called the Brick Joke with lots of variants using delayed punchline with a boomerganging misdirection—and a return.

And this EXCELLENT (no brick joke)

reveal of how an astrologer duped true believers....

10/ This astrologist was a 19yo student scientist—who basically got into it for money—and was intoxicated by the attention when coincidence made her clients think it was real...

11/ “modern astrologers use EARTH-CENTRIC charts....
that’s only the start of the scientific problems”

“Astrology is one big word association game”

“New Agers don’t build hospitals—they buy self-actualization at the cash register”...

12/ “Half the time I couldnt get a word in—it turned out what most people want is the chance to UNLOAD for an hour”

“...the range of problems is limited: romance, work, courage for change...”

“It’s UNCERTAINTY that drives people into ‘woo’—so i’m not surprised millenials do it”

13/ “A forecast: the VC funding astrology apps will make a fortune telling system that works, b/c humans are predictable.

...They’ll be hugely popular.

...Because if you sprinkly magic on top—you can sell people anything”

Source: theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2…