“I will watch and catch you if you should fall.” Delenn, Babylon 5
I’ll watch and record.
“Can you fly, Bobby?”
How is this wholesome? Chances of you falling is much much higher than spontaneously being able to achieve flight as a human.
Yeah weirdly reads like encouraging suicide?
Wait is it just me? Oh no.
Me: It was a metaphor!
Them, falling rapidly: Would’ve been nice to know a few seconds earlier.
I feel like context matters here.
Could be a more subtle version of the gambling advertisements plaguing the world
Is a moth
I took it as a bird shoving babies out of the nest.
Flight or die bitch! Either way get the fuck out little birdie!
You mean that this is on a billboard that can be climbed? Yeah.
Narrator: but ofcourse she fell
what if I get shot by an anti aircraft missile?
Always follow your dreams, unless those dreams are in Russian or Iranian airspace.
Considering I can’t generate lift or have aerodynamic body shape, I’m going with the first one. 😐
The key to flying is to miss the ground. Try distracting yourself the moment you lose your balance.
Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy reference? I think it was Arthur who flew by “jumping and failing to fall”.
I need to read that series again
Or Discworld?
Now consider the tortoise and the eagle. The tortoise is a ground-living creature. It is impossible to live nearer the ground without being under it. Its horizons are a few inches away. It has about as good a turn of speed as you need to hunt down a lettuce. It has survived while the rest of evolution flowed past it by being, on the whole, no threat to anyone and too much trouble to eat.
And then there is the eagle. A creature of the air and high places, whose horizons go all the way to the edge of the world. Eyesight keen enough to spot the rustle of some small and squeaky creature half a mile away. All power, all control. Lightning death on wings. Talons and claws enough to make a meal of anything smaller than it is and at least take a hurried snack out of anything bigger.
And yet the eagle will sit for hours on the crag and survey the kingdoms of the world until it spots a distant movement and then it will focus, focus, focus on the small shell wobbling among the bushes down there on the desert. And it will leap… And a minute later the tortoise finds the world dropping away from it. And it sees the world for the first time, no longer one inch from the ground but five hundred feet above it, and it thinks: what a great friend I have in the eagle.
And then the eagle lets go. And almost always the tortoise plunges to its death. Everyone knows why the tortoise does this. Gravity is a habit that is hard to shake off. No one knows why the eagle does this. There’s good eating on a tortoise but, considering the effort involved, there’s much better eating on practically anything else. It’s simply the delight of eagles to torment tortoises.
But of course, what the eagle does not realize is that it is participating in a very crude form of natural selection. One day a tortoise will learn how to fly.
You gotta throw yourself at the ground, and miss.
And crucially:
You have to have your attention suddenly distracted by something else then you’re halfway there, so that you are no longer thinking about falling, or about the ground, or about how much it’s going to hurt if you fail to miss it.
Now there’s a hoopy frood who knows where his towel is
And his girlfriend too.
And yes you absolutely do.:-)
Choosing to read this in Astarion’s voice.
“But what if you fly Southwest?”
Do people even fly Southwest anymore? Didn’t that airline become an absolute shit show? You no longer have first come first serve seating, and they charge a premium for literally everything. All this after the company was acquired by a billionaire asshole.
Jump! (??)