For those who don’t know, a Monkey Paw Wish is when you get your wish granted, but in an unexpected usually negative way.
Example:
- I wish human caused global warming would stop.
- It does, but because WW3 leads to Nuclear Winter.
The question here though, is what wish would you be willing to take even though it’ll get monkey paw’d?
So basically you don’t care if the consequences, or would be willing to take the sacrifice for it.
Others can come up with the negative scenarios if they want and the original wisher can decide if it’s still worth it
I wish Senjogahara-san loved me… Wait a minute…
I wish lootsnake and hollow knight: silksong released tomorrow
Done, but they’re a buggy mess.
Would it be worth it?
Yes.
I wish that no life in the entire universe has and will ever attain civilization.
I wish for a turkey sandwich, on rye bread, with lettuce AND mustard. And I don’t want any zombie turkeys, I don’t want to turn into a turkey myself, and I don’t want any other weird surprises, got it?
Granted. The turkey is a little dry.
THE TURKEY’S A LITTLE DRY???
Oh foul accursed thing! What demon from the depths of Hell created thee?!
Got it. It disappointing and unsatisfying
Unless I have some sort of guarantee about what sort of twist the paw is doing, I’m not going to take it. Example: If the paw twists big, greedy wishes more than small, selfless wishes then I might be willing to do a small, selfless wish. If the paw is just an asshole who twists everything as much as possible, I’ll pass.
It twists them both equally, but up don’t know exactly how the twist might be usually. Sometimes it could be something that takes years to take effect. Sometimes minutes. Sometimes you might notice the effect yourself into later.
Groceries will be affordable. But Nearly all Restaurants will be out of business.
Abortion Rights would be restored and codified, LGBTQ Rights would be codified, Workers Rights would be strengthened and we’ll adopt a newly christened Migrant Rights But getting into certain job fields will be harder
American Politicians will no longer be corrupt But we will enter a World War to make it happen
Your privacy will be stored as an act will pass for companies to no longer mooch data off from you You will have to endure a life of nothing but verification checks
That sounds surprisingly tolerable.
I actually just had this happen to me irl. My old office was colloquially referred to as “The Dungeon” bc it was in the basement of an old dark campus building and to get there you had to take a somewhat circuitous path. I pleaded with my boss to move us to a new space with windows.
A few years later, we were able to move into a new suite in a different building with the rest of my department. Our new office even has windows! Except they’re interior windows that face out into other surrounding rooms, instead of exterior windows bringing in natural light which unfortunately I didn’t specifically mention in my wish. 😂
I work for a little mom and pop business that basically operates like an anarcho-syndicalist collective; the boss more or less does his own thing full time and lets us all run things on our own. It’s mostly fine but I’ve had a few times where I’ve… almost… wished that we had an actual manager to help keep things in line.
I wish it was the year of Linux, and they get 90%+ market share overnight when Gabe Newell announces you can play Half Life 3 exclusively on Steam OS, which includes in-game copies of The Winds of Winter, Doors of Stone, an English translation of Mother 3, and footage of 10 seasons of Firefly that had secretly been produced in private for Gabe.
The downside is they start the enshittification process immediately. The DRMs get worse, then the ads come, and finally the lawsuits and psyops on distros that treat us well and give us options.
A solar storm wipes out almost all computers and all tech to build chips.
In a bizarre twist of fate, a couple of houndreds linux pcs, a handfull of steam decks and a windows millennium survived the blast.
I would make the money’s paw consequences similar, but slightly different.
A bad microsoft update somehow manages to permanently brick every windows computer on the planet overnight. Linux is now the dominant operating system, but mass societal chaos results from 90% of computers being permanently bricked.
that was just crowdstrike.
Oh, that is an interesting one.
Linux beats Windows, but also some become Windows eventually?
The other perks make me lean towards it being worth it, because this also implies the downfall of Microsoft.
The DRMs
Not a ‘countable’ style of initialism.
Don’t you tease me with The Doors of Stone, even in a hypothetical.
Hey here’s part of that wish granted with hopefully no downsides. https://mother3.fobby.net/
Donald Trump bumps his head and wakes up as an objective and rational person willing and capable of acting for the good of his country and the world instead of his own unintelligent, narcissistic ways.
He gets impeached and convicted for abuse of power (because he is unwilling to cave in to corporate demands).
Now you have President Vance!
🙃
He leaves office to use his fortune to set up a charitable foundation leaving a JD Vance presidency
Fuck that is worse
I think it was Leeja Miller who said Vance is a dark horse in that he can rationalize and communicate significantly better than Trump - making the insane sound reasonable.
One of my fears is that while I disagree with Trump on practically everything, a JD Vance replacement of him would lead to greater competence to execute and justify the same agenda.
Upvote for a fellow Leeja Miller fan
Granted. Nothing changes. He is willing and capable, but his incentives for keeping things the way they are are too good.
The down side is his rational arguments and rational way of thinking is always opposite of what you want. He also convinces the state and federal legislators to repeal the twenty second amendment and he stays in office for several terms.
If he just ignores it, like every other law, what will that do? The Amendment doesn’t mention any enforcement. Oh, I guess we’ll just check with the Supreme Court about that one!
His followers believe some kind of twisted conspiracy theory about him being replaced by reptiloids and want to overthrow the woke communist impersonator, war ensures.
Accepted. I for one welcome our new reptiloid overlords.
Granted. Trump is now fully capable of stripping the people of their rights to enrich the state and turn America into an effective fascist engine of war. He then turns his machine on the rest of the world to spread the goodness of America.
How is this different from what’s already going to happen under POTUS Musk & VP Trump?
This time, Trump is intelligent, and it’s OPs fault it’s happening.
I wish housing prices were actually reasonable and my generation (tail end of millennials) could afford to buy a house in the cities we have to work in.
Granted. All houses are now 18sq ft and only available in cities where all jobs require you to clock in at 5AM and clock out at midnight.
The housing prices crash no one builds decent homes and all you can buy is a trailer house.
You just described
- The situation for many Americans
- A situation that’s still an improvement for the country’s 650,000 homeless
- A situation that’s really still not worse for the ultra-rich, who can afford to hire peasants to custom-build their homes to whatever quality they want
- It doesn’t harm the wisher, who doesn’t own a home and so wouldn’t lose an investment from a market collapse.
It’s a nice try, but it’s going to have to be a far worse consequence to really make them want to take the wish back.
Hey trailer homes aren’t anything to sneeze at! Too bad they’re so fucking expensive now though.
They cover your head when it rains.
They have no resale value. They don’t have a very long life span compared to an actual house. They have crap for insulation. You do not want to be in one during a tornado or most other serious weather event. Their ability to block out outside noise sucks.
If it’s a choice between homeless or trailer house, fine I’ll take one.
I’m pursuing a PhD in structural engineering and wood science. Here’s my perspective on manufactured homes, and why they lack the long-term durability of stick built homes.
The problem with manufactured homes is that they’re value-engineered to the point of fragility. A stick built home is built by hand on site. They’re built from whatever generic lumber is available from local lumber yards. They’re built by imperfect human beings using their own imperfect hands. To compensate for imperfect materials and imperfect human labor, they have a lot of redundancy built in to them. The structure of stick-built homes vary more between each home, so every piece of wood hasn’t been optimized down to the absolute minimum. Standardized lumber sizes (2x4, 2x6, 2x8) are used, instead of using custom-milled lumber to produce the absolute minimum cross section for every piece in a home.
But if you’re making ten thousand of the same identical manufactured home, you can optimize the hell out of them to make construction as efficient as possible. Instead of imperfect human hands, you use robots to place every piece precisely, and install every fastener perfectly. Instead of using industry-standard lumber sizes, you get lumber mills to custom mill you oddball sizes for particular columns, beams, etc. Instead of buying 2x6s, you get the mill or mill up your own custom “2x5.358.” You also do a lot more structural engineering. When you’re building ten thousand copies of the same building, it’s worth putting in more engineer hours to wring every last pound out of a building’s frame. On a normal residential home, it’s not worth spending an extra hundred engineering hours just to save a few hundred pounds of wood. But if you’re making 10,000 of the same home, those hours can be worth it.
Manufactured homes are, from an engineering point of view, far more efficient than a stick built home. Like airplanes, they have every extra ounce of material optimized out of their design. But as we saw in supply chains during the pandemic, efficiency and resiliency are often inversely correlated. The problem with over-optimization is that it’s only ideal as long as the building will never face circumstances beyond what the structural engineer initially estimated. Let’s say you design your building to survive a 70 mph wind undamaged. If you have a lot of redundancy, that structure may also be able to withstand an 80 or 90 mph wind undamaged. The over-optimized structure will be a lot more efficient at surviving the 70 mph wind, but if the building ever has to face worse conditions than were assumed during its design…well then you’re in trouble.
Finally, stick-built homes will inevitably be far more repairable and upgradeable than factory built homes. Stick build homes are built by actual human hands on site. Factory built homes may be constructed in ways that, while cost effective, are only possible in a factory environment. That which is built on site can be repaired on site. That which is built from mass market generic components can be repaired with mass market generic components. Stick built homes cost more up front, but they inevitably have long-term advantages in terms of resiliency and repairability.
I’ll agree with all of that
Are you saying I get my very own trailer house? Woah! Look at me! House owner extraordinaire 🧐
Hey man, if they were putting trailer houses on Beacon Hill in Boston I’d take one.
The situation is so bad over there it took me awhile to think of how this could be made bad.
I’d go with:
Granted, but groceries and water go up in price 1000% because a war breaks out and a bioweapon has been used on the nation’s food supply.
I wish Donald Trump a short productive term and long health.
Granted. Trump succeeds in ending the USA republic and leads to a racist empire lead by the tiger king.
The empire would never financially recover from that.
The one Guillermo and Nandor drafted in what we do in the shadows. Mostly because it’s already prepared to be safe, not because I particularly care for the outcome.
Depending on how many fingers are left I would make the following wishes:
- I wish the entire world were governed by egalitarian justice.
- I wish that anyone who would use violence against another living creature would instantly die of a heart attack instead.
- I wish that every human has the resources they need to live the life they want for themselves.
- I wish that all people understood the true nature of the reality in which they live.
- I wish all trans people had been assigned the gender, or lack thereof, they identify with at birth.
I have no idea what that means.All are equal under our new machine overlords, who were programmed to grant happiness to all and therefore locked us into pods and pumped us full of drugs…- Everyone who showers or washes their hands dies due to violence against microbes, who count as living beings.
- Nukes for Iran, tanks for Putin…
- People understand how inherently unfair reality is, leading to deep depression
- All people are gender swapped. Now, the people that were cis are transgender
Sounds good to me. I doubt our new machine overlords would let the iranians or russians do anything with their new toys, but either way I am totally okay with this outcome, if for no other reason than I want to see all the bigots suddenly dealing with their periods.
I want to see all the bigots suddenly dealing with their periods.
Between most dying to 2 and the rest being drugged out of their mind due to 1, I don’t expect much of a reaction.
All are equal under our new machine overlords
That’s not egalitarian because there are overlords. If it’s a singular, non sentient machine then it could still be enslaving us and not count as a ruler so it works for egalitarian.
Yes, I was thinking rouge non-sentient AI, which I described. Machine overlords was just figure of speech + futurama reference.
I meet a beautiful intelligent woman, we are the perfect match for each other, we fall in love, get married and live happily ever after.
we fall in love
Missing specifier. You each fall in love with other people.
get married
Missing specifier. You each marry neither your perfect matches nor the other people you each fell in love with.
live happily
Mental illness can provide happiness. This seems almost good, and yet…
ever after
Insufficiently specific. You both die in the same mass road accident, travelling in separate vehicles with your respective spouses, not long after you’re each married.
I’d argue this is more in line with the literal genie trope.
Fun lore. Literal genies come mostly from players and DMs quibbling over the wish spell, but they do have roots in Arabian lore like A Thousand Nights and a Night: Most genies in bottles were trapped by Solomon and are in different states of bondage, so those who you beg for assistance might provide an untoward solution. An ifreet commanded Deliver me from this sandstorm might take you to antarctica.
The monkey paw version is to allow them to fall in love with each other and then, like Eurydice wedding to Orpheus, suffer an unfortunate accident and perish right after the ceremony.
Excellent monkey’s paw. I thought I was being specific, but apparently not even close. Definitely not worth it.
Ok take two, the wish is actually granted:
Your beautiful wife is incredibly intelligent and is perfect for you… as a result of profound psychopathy. She has chosen you specifically as the next in a chain of husbands with whom she has meticulously crafted idyllic relationships for the purpose of complete psychological and emotional control. Once sufficiently in her intoxicatingly romantic grasp, she convinces you of the simple joys of homicide. You eliminate her previous husband together, then your own family as a gesture of pure devotion. You fall into a pattern of orphanage arson, elderly abuse, and kitten stomping before she ultimately gets you both positions as mid level managers at united healthcare.
You couldn’t be happier.
If this was just some minor crime, sounds great honestly. I definitely draw the line at the murder of innocents though. Not worth it.
Yes, all kitten-stomping and the other stuff, but United Healthcare?
No way. I’m not a monster!
It is all the result of paranoid schizophrenia. She doesn’t exist, you estrange your family, and you ultimately die from a slow descent into indigence and squalor because you are unable to escape the prison of your own mind.
Realistic. Doesn’t the monkey’s paw have to actually grant the wish though?
I was gonna say it would be to easy if every wish is just a mental problem skewing reality. it should do the thing in reality and fuck you in reality.
Hmmm… yeah maybe. I’ll take another crack in a minute.
Well, reality is what we perceive, so it might actually be a worthy tradeoff for some people
As you celebrate your 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000th anniversary and witness the heat death of the universe, you realize that all matter and energy has dispersed, is no longer observable, and that you and your beloved will be floating in a void of nothingness forever.
I kinda don’t hate this, if it’s an eternal youth / total invincibility sort of thing, and existing in the vacuum of space isn’t uncomfortable.
Actually, with future technology it might be possible to modify our brains to make a sort of shared virtual dream world, with an avatar-style neural connection. Not a bad way to spend eternity.
Also even without brain/body modification, we might be able to train ourselves to hibernate and just wait for a big quantum fluctuation. Assuming the universe doesn’t have an end, we would eventually meet intelligent life, even humans, again.
I’m honestly undecided. As a mortal human, I don’t really know if I want true immortality or not.
