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What would it take for you to unironically think a gorilla lived in the apartment above yours?

Voltage

Voltage

OTTN5
is a Pre-Contributor
Hey Smogoff (soon to be renamed "I Hate Finchinator the subforum"), I need to preface this thread with the statement, this is an unironic question, it may sound like a shitpost, but I promise it's not.

My girlfriend and I were discussing what the made up movie, "The Big Thud" would be about, and she suggested that it's about a software engineer who lives in an apartment complex who one day discovers that his upstairs neighbor is actually just a gorilla. I then asked how this software engineer wouldn't have an inkling that a gorilla was living above him, and she responded "Maybe this gorilla keeps to himself." I couldn't accept that as an answer since gorillas don't normally just "keep to themselves" the way humans do. I argued that at some point in the time you lived in this apartment, you would probably unironically think "I think a gorilla is living upstairs", and then I had to sleep on the futon.

This morning I told her I was going to ask other people about this, since like, YOU'D HAVE TO KNOW, RIGHT? You'd have to at least have some small unironic thought "maybe a gorilla is living upstairs" assuming one is actually living up there. And also this assumes you've never seen it in real life aside from MAYBE a passing glance from a window when you were outside and gorilla was staring wistfully out from their room. You've never been to this apartment other than like MAYBE walking past it, and you've never asked the landlord about your neighbors. And don't give me that crap about how "Oh I don't lie in an apartment", you do in this hypothetical.

But you'd have to know eventually right? It's getting late and I'm really not looking forward to sleeping on the futon a second night in a row.
 
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if a gorilla lived in the apartment above me they passed all the checks I did and it would suggest an agreeable tenant, and the fact that they are a gorilla is none of my business and not my problem.

the vocalizations, the half chewed banana leaves, and the unmistakable smell I learned about from the zoo's gorilla enclosure might be a dead giveaway though.
 
right now i live in a 20 bedroom mansion in newport rhode island, but as you said this is just a hypothetical, so I can run the situation through my mindpalace

my mindpalace is incredibly vivid (potentially more vivid than real life) so i'll need about a minute to set it up

hmmm... imagining the decorations in my neo-modern art-nouveau home magazine prize-winning apartment... process now complete
hmmm... mentally simulating 50 years of cryptocurrency trades... process now complete
hmmm... imagining the tastes and smells of the 10 course buffet my apartment's chef would cook (the strength of my mindpalace is enough to satiate me in real life)... process now complete
hmmm... mentally simulating the calculations of my computer's rtx 4070 ti... process now complete

my apartment complex would hypothetically be only for very smart people (nobel prize winners, fields medal winners, gen 2 NU players, famous sciencetits like albert einstink, kid cudi), so the only gorilla who could live above me would be Winston from overwatch.

the dead giveaways would probably be the distinctive classical music taste (a strong preference for beethoven's later symphonies), the sounds of experimental energy reactors, and the occasional sounds of primate shrieking and destruction.

i would likely stop by his apartment on weekends to discuss the finer points of classical music, commiserate about the fate of harambe, and shriek and make gorilla noises myself

shutting down mind palace... process complete

a wonderful opportunity to exercise my mind palace. anyways, the dead giveaway was definitely the primate shrieking and sound of shattering fine china
 
I’ve certainly had noisy upstairs neighbors before. The real question is how to distinguish people that are just noisy from a full-on gorilla. I initially thought that the easiest way to make this inference would be from the volume of the person/gorilla above you walking around the apartment because like… gorillas have to be huge right? But it turns out that the average adult male gorilla only weighs 300 pounds. That’s pretty big for a person but not unreasonable… so we’re back to the drawing board.

We might still have something if we look down the noise route, because gorillas are probably going to be noisier than human neighbors. This is a big assumption, but one I think we can make because humans are more likely to care about disturbing neighbors than gorillas. That’s just a fact (I think) but I’d say the average human has more capacity for caring about what others think of them more than a gorilla would, so they would tend to keep quieter than a gorilla, who has no real concept of what others think of them. But other than the occasional vocalization (grunts, roars, etc) I think this is another tough one to say that you’d know immediately.

People have already brought up the smell so I think that could be a giveaway. Gorillas do groom themselves but they don’t bathe like humans do. I think that this would be true of our fictional gorilla as well, even though our gorilla neighbor is somehow finding a way to pay rent I don’t think that it would be taking a shower or anything like that. I do think that it would be able to figure out how to use the toilet, however, because gorillas are pretty smart and wouldn’t want to just shit all over the apartment. So the smell wouldn’t be tooooo bad. Besides, how often do you smell another apartment? It’d have to get pretty damn bad.

I think the best chance is getting a glimpse of the actual gorilla itself. Though even this is difficult without looking like a creep. Unless you’re friends with/already know some of your upstairs neighbors, how much are you actually on a different floor of your apartment building than the one you live on? I say not often. I’m assuming that the gorilla doesn’t leave the apartment much… it needs food for sure but it can’t go grocery shopping even if it had the money (it would freak other people out and be banned from the store) so I’m assuming it gets all its meals through something like Instacart. Maybe it has a human roommate do this for it, idk, because as far as I know gorillas can’t read/operate smartphones. So I think “the gorilla mostly keeps to itself” is a perfectly fine argument.

What I just brought up would make things especially difficult, because I think that there’s no possible way the gorilla lives alone. It’d be unable to get food or pay rent so I think the safest assumption is that it has a human roommate that does all that stuff for it. And if THAT’s true then the smell wouldn’t be an issue, cleanup wouldn’t be an issue, and catching a glimpse would be harder because you’d be seeing a human go in and out of the apartment too, making your gorilla assumption seem even more wild. I think then that the only way you’d have an inkling is if the human and gorilla roommates got in like an “argument” or something and you heard the gorilla roar/maul its roommate. Which would only happen if things got real tense. Hmmm…

tl;dr I think it would be very difficult to tell and almost impossible that you would unironically think a gorilla lived above you unless you have a wild imagination and/or heard it attack its roommate
 
CanineIllusionist said:
if a gorilla lived in the apartment above me they passed all the checks I did and it would suggest an agreeable tenant, and the fact that they are a gorilla is none of my business and not my problem.

the vocalizations, the half chewed banana leaves, and the unmistakable smell I learned about from the zoo's gorilla enclosure might be a dead giveaway though.
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See, this was more or less my argument, that after a while, I imagine you'd probably get the smell of a gorilla wafting through the vents and into your apartment as theirs is directly above yours. Even if the gorilla is just a gorilla that doesn't use a toilet or social media, you'd eventually have to think, "what the hell is that smell?" which might then lead to the thought "that smells like someone's shit" or something along those lines. I suppose it would maybe take some additional information, like catching a glimpse of it in a window or hearing gorilla noises if you walked past the apartment or heard it through the ceiling. All that's to say that, in my humble opinion you'd eventually know.

phoopes said:
I think the best chance is getting a glimpse of the actual gorilla itself. Though even this is difficult without looking like a creep. Unless you’re friends with/already know some of your upstairs neighbors, how much are you actually on a different floor of your apartment building than the one you live on? I say not often. I’m assuming that the gorilla doesn’t leave the apartment much… it needs food for sure but it can’t go grocery shopping even if it had the money (it would freak other people out and be banned from the store) so I’m assuming it gets all its meals through something like Instacart. Maybe it has a human roommate do this for it, idk, because as far as I know gorillas can’t read/operate smartphones. So I think “the gorilla mostly keeps to itself” is a perfectly fine argument.
Click to expand...

For context, in this hypothetical that I posed to my girlfriend, we came to the agreement that we wouldn't consider the logistics of how this gorilla got food. However, you do raise a good point that the food the gorilla eats might be delivered to the building in such way that you'd eventually notice something seriously off with the packages that are arriving, especially if one gets delivered to your door by accident. What I don't get from your post is how not posting on social media is equivalent to "keeping to oneself". I think from gf's position, keeping to oneself literally meant that it was absurdly quiet and didn't really make noise, which, like is a much more literal consideration of the behavior. And besides, I feel like a gorilla has never been shown to work a computer properly, nor has it been able to reasonably post on twitter/tiktok/instagram/reddit/smogoff/etc. (If someone can disprove this claim, please send me undeniable evidence, and don't use the low hanging fruit of "you posting on smogoff is akin to a gorilla using the computer, piss off).

Also fwiw, the futon was nice tonight because I turned on the heat, and had a very nice blanket. We'll see if it becomes three nights in a row.
 
What would it take for me to believe it?

Well, I live in Ohio, and Ohio isn't very nice to Gorillas, so it would take a lot for me to believe it. Last time there was a gorilla in Ohio was Harambe, and that didn't turn out well.
 
new plan: under United States and separately, United Kingdom laws - it's illegal to open other people's mail. So if you send a letter addressed to the gorilla living in your apartment complex and send it through your appropriate federally maintained mail service, and get a reply you know there's a gorilla living in your apartment complex.

If you receive nothing, it'll give credence to a likely lack of gorilla. The Royal Mail may even communicate an inability to deliver the letter. Though you can never disregard the possibility of the gorilla simply ignoring you... But it'd tip the scales well enough to sleep more soundly. If your neighbours weren't as loud as a gorilla.
 
I'd only be able to accept the idea of a gorilla living in the apartment above me if I heard thrashing noises for like half the day, it'd work because I'd be too terrified to make a noise complaint lmao
 
At the moment I live in a house and I can hear what I am almost certain are possums roaming about above my ceiling. It gets pretty loud. So I suppose if I lived in an apartment and I heard the same noises coming from above except 100 times louder I would unironically think a gorilla lived in the apartment above mine.
 
Maybe it’s actually a really quiet gorilla

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