I got a package the other day from an online order I had made. My wife asked what it was and I joked and said it might be a bomb, some dust with poison or a virus or something. We laughed at the thought but it got me thinking of all the packages I just open without thinking all the time. I would never know it was a bomb until after it went off in my hands.

just a flag with a photo of a pizza. because pizza is awesome

Credit to Stephen Wright.

At least they do not know the exact reason, if they are even aware that they are dying. Just thinking of some war video footage and my own experience of the crash that broke my neck and back and almost killed me. And those that I have seen die. Some of this is a matter of mental state of awareness, or sudden onset of unknown factors to the individual, while others is a matter of an unseen assailant.

Opening up a can of tuna yesterday I was wondering 'where has the rest of this tuna ended up? How long will it be before the whole fish is eaten, and how much will be wasted'?

It's almost as if capitalist billionaire sports team owners in the US believe that doing everything possible to ensure all parties have equal chances at success is worthwhile and benefits the whole system, and conversely, that allowing completely unrestrained economic competition would lead to ruin. 🤔

Revenue sharing

Revenue sharing is a business tool used by North American professional sports leagues to redistribute revenues from wealthy large-market clubs to less wealthy small-market clubs.

Salary caps

In professional sports, a salary cap (or wage cap) is an agreement or rule that places a limit on the amount of money that a team can spend on players' salaries. It exists as a per-player limit or a total limit for the team's roster, or both.

Drafts

A draft is a process used in some countries (especially in North America) and sports (especially in closed leagues) to allocate certain players to teams. In a draft, teams take turns selecting from a pool of eligible players.

To encourage parity, teams that do poorly in the previous season usually get to choose first in the postseason draft, sometimes with a "lottery" factor in an attempt to discourage teams from tanking.

NO promotion or relegation

Promotion and relegation is used by sports leagues as a process where teams can move up and down among divisions in a league system, based on their performance over a season.

An alternate system of league organization, used primarily in Australia, Canada, Singapore, and the United States, is a closed model based on licensing or franchises. This maintains the same teams from year to year, with occasional admission of expansion teams and relocation of existing teams, and with no team movement between the major league and minor leagues.

Think of the relationship between "optimism", "pessimism" and "realism":
generally, those words are respectively interpreted as "focusing on the good things", "focusing on the bad things" and "ignoring (or trying to ignore) personal biases on the topic at hand".
In a way that makes sense, the universe defines our perception on things, not the other way around.

However, let's suppose you just had a reality check, at least as my terminally online ass knows the term as.
That means something happened to you, that forced you to realize something about yourself - be it your body, your psyche, your knowledge about anything. A realization so undeniable, that, despite your lizard brain's psychological self-defense mechanisms' censorship attempts, made you realize you've been wrong about something.

The reality check brings your mood down in the short term, and possibly pushes you to improve yourself (or, alternatively, to [concoct a workaround to the tyrannical laws of the universe]) in the long run, but... that's not truly neutral, is it?
It may be a "bad" feeling possibly followed by a good outcome (see: cognitive dissonance), but it is never a GOOD feeling followed by a possibly bad outcome. The latter case is a confimation bias, if anything - the opposite of a reality check.

Going back to the first paragraph: if someone says "I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist" you may conflate that person for an pessimist, but not an optimist.

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There's a toilet paper ad where they claim they were voted number one product of the year.

Shouldn't they prefer to be number two?

https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ

Waffle stomp instead of mazel tov

You can only escape this room if you watch every sponsored ad in this YouTube video essay