this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2026
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.

Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:

Rules

  1. All posts must be showerthoughts
  2. The entire showerthought must be in the title
  3. No politics
    • If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
    • A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
  4. Posts must be original/unique
  5. Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS

If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.

Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.

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[–] cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I’m 46. I can’t tell you hour long it’s been since I heard these terms. They’re completely unimportant outside of a very niche science (but, not entirely useless knowledge).

The stuff about Nutty Putty Cave plummeted my interest in caves to absolute zero (tl;dr caver ends up trapped upside down and his remains are still there and the cave has since closed, real nightmare fuel and not even the only cave it’s happened in).

[–] dfyx@lemmy.helios42.de 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Your tl;dr makes it sound like they found his body, never bothered to recover it and put a „do not enter“ sign in front of the cave.

It’s much worse than that. He was found while he was still alive and over a hundred rescuers tried to get him out until his heart couldn’t handle it anymore and he died after 27 hours. Only then they decided to leave him there, used explosives to collapse the passage to where he was stuck and then blocked all entrances with concrete.

Yeah, I know...

Sadly that's the point of a tl;dr, it misses the nuance for people who can't be arsed to read a whole paragraph.

I will also add that he died because of positional asphyxia. It's not just that his heart couldn't handle it. The way we breathe really only works if we're right side up or laying down. If you're upside down for a long period of time, your lungs are pushing against your guts and other organs that are pressing down on your lungs. It's trivial to do for an hour or two, but beyond that, you're breathing against physics and it just gets harder and harder. He also didn't have much energy since he worked so hard to get in there. Even if they were able to pipe him sustenance, he couldn't beat the physics and it was just a matter of time.

They also tried a few things to get him out, but because of the angle he was at, I think they broke one of his legs trying to pull him back out and he told them to stop trying. They were able to lower a phone to him and he was able to speak to his wife and children and tell them he wasn't coming home, so that had to weigh on him as well.

It's tempting to think about digging him out. He was underground, so you think "okay so dig." But it's rocks, so you can only use demolition (explosive). Explosives push things away, so if you used demolitions to get at him, you'd be crushing him. There's no magical black hole bomb that just vaporises the rock. You break rocks with explosives by blowing them apart (pushing them away from you). The only way you could use demolition to get where he was would be to drop the explosives in with him, to make a bigger hole. Unfortunately he would be killed in the process and his body destroyed.

So yeah, fuck caves.

[–] tpyo@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

Worse than that, they did get him out some but an equipment failure dropped him into a more compromised position