#((STORYTIME

[donkoogrr]

I had years of pre-Internet existence. I had a soul and sense of self by the time the first bulky box of a home computer was installed in my Dad's office so he could have very important access to very important medical journals that were now on these websites! He didn't need to order them special anymore!

It's just wild to sit back now and look at my tiny insignificant personal timeline and see how the same place that helped my father deduce drug interactions is all these years later helping me deduce that I'm a monster-fucker.

wyd in this situation

[silvermoon424]

It's so fucking funny how many people who owned Furbies as children ended up being traumatized by them in some way

[xiaq]

Overheard at the thrift store:

“Stop trying to hold my hand, people are going to think we’re lesbians.”

“We are lesbians.”

“Yeah but not with each other.”

“Ok, but we’re still—god, why are you so stupid?”

“Dunno. Why do you want to hold hands with a stupid person?”

“I don’t.”

“Evidence to the contrary.”

(Mocking voice) “Oooh evidence to the contrary.” (Normal voice) “such a fuckin’ smartass.”

“Oh I’m smart, now? Thought I was stupid”

*Slap fight ensues*

Anyway, I hope they figure out they’re in love soon.

[pathos-logical]

[ID: A collection of photos of cosplayers in casual settings.

The Joker checking his phone in Starbucks.

Sollux from Homestuck behind a desk.

Kakashi from accounting class (in a high school).

Sephiroth ordering at a fast food place.

Spamton sitting in a restaurant.

Doc Scratch from Homestuck eating fast food.

No-Face from Spirited Away on a motorcycle.

Jiang Cheng from The Untamed on a motorcycle.

Spamton driving a car. End ID]

my favorite genre of photo is cosplayer out in a random place in public. and i’m not talking abt malls or hot topic and shit where you’re already more likely to find cosplayers. i’m talking abt seeing like a junko enoshima cosplayer at a mcdonald’s

[uwudonoodle]

Storytime: My brother Dave used to manage a Little Ceasars, and he hated it. So when my mom asked him what he wanted on his birthday cake, he jokingly said the Little Ceasars guy being stabbed with his own spear. My mom, who doesn't always get sarcasm, didn't even question it. She lovingly made him exactly what he asked for. It's my favorite cake ever.

Happy Ides of March to Ceasar getting stabbed!

[foldingfittedsheets]

Since everyone seems to love my sex shop stories, here’s another one.

Phone calls were literally a game for us. Not all phone calls, but there was a specific brand of call where guys would creep on us. 90% of the workforce at the sex shops was women. So we’d get dudes calling jacking off or trying to get their jollies from us.

The game: make them hang up. We could have hung up. On a few occasions I did, but for the most part we made a sport out of getting creeps to go flaccid. It really depended on a caller.

You couldn’t just go in for belittling them straight off- some guys wanted that. You had to tailor your strategy to the perv. Overall it was pretty fun and it turned an aspect of the job that could’ve become a major bummer into a fun sport. We’d get excited when the phones rang.

So one day the phone rings. I pick up and it was very clearly a young teen who was putting on a deep voice. I was utterly delighted, I’d never had a crank call before. He said, “I have a dildo emergency! Can you deliver 5 boxes of dildos to my home?!”

It took everything in me not to crack in that moment. It was so funny. It was like three kids had walked through the door in a trench coat and the phrase “dildo emergency” was one of the funniest things I’d ever heard.

But I kept it together. In smooth customer service tones I replied, “Oh, I’m sorry to hear you’re having an emergency, but due to the nature of our product we do require people to come pick it up themselves.”

The caller audibly deflated. Some of the deep voice he was putting on bled away when he said plaintively, “But it’s an emergency…”

“I’m sorry, sir, rules are rules.”

He hung up. I burst out laughing and told my coworker what had happened. She said, “I will buy you lunch if you call back and pretend you can deliver something.”

This sounded like an all around win for me, and the kid hadn’t used anything to block his number. So I called back.

“Hello!” This was before caller ID was common for home phones and so he picked up in his totally normal voice, several octaves higher than before.

“Hello, I’m calling regarding your dildo emergency?”

“Oh! Hem hem,” he coughed, getting his voice back into character for me. “Yes! The emergency!”

“Well I’ve spoken to my manager and it’s your lucky day. We’ll be able to make a delivery after all. Five boxes you said? We can swing it by later, we’ll just need your name, address, and credit card number.”

He was thrown by needing to provide info and was silent for a moment then said, “Well how much is it for five boxes?”

“About five hundred dollars, sir.”

He slipped out of his character voice to exclaim, “Five hundred dollars?! What kind of dildos are they?!”

“Just standard six inches with balls, sir.”

This was his breaking point. He started wheezing with laughter trying to repeat the phrase “six inches with balls” incoherently.

“So your address and card info?”

He hung up and I broke down laughing too. We both got a kick out of it, and I won the game twice in one day.

[we-all-get-hats]

cool

The way necromancy works is this: Everything in your body — meat, bones, skin, blood — has something like a memory. They remember, in their own way, what it’s like to be alive. Skin remembers the sun. Bones remember what shape they’re suppose to be in. Muscle memory is more than just an idiom.

The way that necromancy works is that the caster puts a little bit of their willpower into a corpse to order the corpse to remember how it functioned in life and obey. This is easiest to do with bones, which have little memory and are easy to trick, and becomes increasingly difficult the more of the original body remains.

To reanimate a full body to your command, you have to have a lot of willpower.

The necromancer checked the map. She checked the map again. She squinted up at the stars, lips moving silently. Then, taking the lantern off its hook, she peered over the side of the little sailboat.

There wasn't much to see. The sea was dark and still as glass, except where the lanternlight turned a patch of seawater a yellowish-green. A tiny fish flitted into the gleam, attracted to the light, and then vanished into the murk again.

The necromancer chewed the inside of her cheek. She sat down again, the boat bobbing gently with the movement, and checked the map one more time. Then she opened the little wooden case on the floor of the boat, which unfolded into a neat arrangement of drawers.

There were. Things. In the drawers. Some wriggled. Others twitched little beetly legs into the night air. A few of them made noises, which ran together into a squeaky, wheezy squeal of horror.

The necromancer twiddled her fingers over the display as she considered her options. Then she grabbed a few of the twitching, wriggling things, held them in her palm and squeezed her hand into a fist as tightly as she could with a squelching noise.

She opened her hand to inspect her work. She breathed the spell into it, and then, holding her hand over the edge of the boat, dropped the spell into the sea.

And that seemed to be it. She sat back in the boat and closed the little wooden case. After a moment she started looking over the map again.

There were a lot of handwritten notes on the map. Each one was connected to a mark and some coordinates; some of them said, "Storm 1457," or "Struck a rock 1483." Others said "Total failure," or “Completely dissolved.”

The note the necromancer seemed most interested in was the one that read, “Battle of Salzstein, 1501.”

The necromancer checked the map. She checked the map again. She squinted up at the stars, lips moving silently, and then she was suddenly thrown down to the floor of the boat as though a giant, invisible hand had crushed her.

Her mouth opened in a noiseless scream.

Two minds were fighting for control of the corpse; on one side was the mind of the caster, and on the other was the memories of bones, of flesh, of skin, trying to drive the caster out.

The weight of that mind was incredible.

Sweat poured off the necromancer’s brow; darkness whorled across her vision. Then slowly, every movement a bone-breaking agony, she pushed herself onto her hands and knees, lungs straining.

The trick was that this mind knew how to obey.

The necromancer stood, wobbled, steadied herself and poured her willpower into the sea. She tried to make hers the full willpower the thing had obeyed in life, the will of the wind, of the sea, of the rigging and the wheel.

Because of course it had been alive. In a sense, they were all alive. Sailors talked of them like they were alive, gave them names, called them “she.”

Sailors knew they were alive.

It was the cessation of that life that interested her.

The necromancer reached out with her power, seized the mind in her hands and pulled, blood and foam flecking out the corners of her mouth as she ground her teeth together with the titanic effort and ordered it to obey.

The sea roiled, hundreds of tons of water moving fast as something deep below boiled to the surface.

A bowsprit sprouted from the water. Then a wood-rotted figurehead of a mermaid. Then inch by inch, yard by yard, the huge barnacle-encrusted bulk of silt-stained timber rose out of the deep, seawater streaming out of every gunport.

For a moment the warship hung in the air like a monstrous fish held by the gills of a colossal fisherman. It dropped into the sea with a sound like a depth charge; the little rowboat lurched in its wake.

The necromancer released the spell. Then she threw up, and passed out.

———

Later, once she had woken, gathered together the tackle box, the lantern, and the map and had scrabbled aboard, the necromancer inspected the undead ship.

There was a hole in the hull where a magazine charge had exploded. This was, admittedly, fine. Undead men could walk with a hole in their bellies; an undead ship could sail with one as well.

Really, she thought, despite the discomfort the spell had worked masterfully.

It was a perfect start.

She unfolded the map on the soggy floor of the quarterdeck, sucked the end of a pen, and next to the last marker wrote “Total success.” Then her finger began to trace down the page to the next.

And the undead ship — unbidden and obedient — shifted its sails and began to move south.

[batshit-auspol]

As a holdover from when churches used to run schools, many states in Australia legislate that the local church can come into schools to teach religion classes for an hour each week.

These 'scripture teacher' roles generally do not require any formal education training, and can be filled by just about any random off the street, which means that for one class a week Australian students are subjected to some of the most unhinged people on earth teaching them all kinds of made up stuff with zero supervision.

Aussies: This is a free thread to reply with the stories of the funniest things your scripture teachers said or did when you were a kid.

[ilikeloons]

Alright bird nerds, buckle up. It's profile picture lore time.

This is an 'I'iwi (ee-EE-vee) or a Scarlet Honeycreeper. They are endemic only to the Hawaiian Islands and high high altitudes. Although they will sometimes head further down to forage for food, which is flower nectar (unsurprising after peeping that beak). They are in the same family as the American gold Finch and Pine Siskin - which is a fact that blew my mind.

They are at risk from mammal introduction to the islands and avian pox/malaria and scarce food. The 'ōhi'a tree, one of their main food sources, is similarly vulnerable from a fungus that can kill a tree in a matter of days.

This 'I'iwi was photographed at Hosmer Grove in Haleakalā National Park. We were able to watch them for a few hours before heading up to the summit. I had gotten a few of the photos below, but not up close shots. On our way back down the volcano, I asked my boyfriend if he minded stopping for an extra 20 mins to see if I could get a closer picture. Right as I walked into the grove I got this shot.

Few others from the same day:

[ser0star]

Thinking about the one time in 5th grade, I confidently told the class that PEMDAS stood for ‘Please Excuse My Dope Ass Swag’ and got in trouble. I saw it online and thought that’s what it actually meant.

[wowbright]

As someone who used my metal lunch box for self-defense against a handsy classmate in second grade, this image means a lot to me.

[taffywabbit]

a bunch of my computer parts came with super bright gamer RGBs all over them (not by choice - the models with lights just happened to be better deals) and my case has a glass side panel, so when I first brought it home and set it up, I had to spend like 2 hours downloading and configuring several different programs to turn them all off (because no single app seemed to be able to control all the components at once).

in the end, the only light I left on was on the side of my GPU, and I set it to be a soft dark purple that would slide across the length of the GPU like a marquee every few seconds - nothing that'd disturb my sleep if my computer happened to wake itself up in a dark room, but enough to look cool and give me a visual indicator that the PC was turned on.

anyways sometimes I guess the driver that controls that specific component's RGBs just... crashes? for absolutely no reason? and the result is that it defaults to an intense, solid red that harshly illuminates my whole case and the area around it. every time this happens I cannot shake the immediate, instinctive fear that my computer has turned evil and is going to kill me. like oh god oh fuck it knows I ""fixed"" one of its CPU cooler fans by scotch-taping it in place so it would stop spinning unevenly and screeching at me, and now it's waiting for its chance to strike and claim ultimate revenge

[bluecatwriter]

I've been rereading some of my old travel diaries from my early 20's, and one of them seriously reads like a slow-burn fanfic. I was on tour with a small indie band and there was a cute guy my age traveling with the band. And we spent two weeks "accidentally" hanging out and sitting close to each other at the merch table in smoky bars and reading Tolkien poetry to each other and taking walks at the beach and sharing food and stargazing and sleeping next to each other on living room floors and giving each other back rubs and talking late into the night gazing into each other's eyes.

We never kissed. We never even held hands. I pretended to fall asleep on his shoulder once in the car, and one day I gave him a little kiss on the cheek. And that was it. We said goodbye two weeks later and we both thought it was forever and I pined so hard that I threw up.

A month later he sent me an apologetic letter saying that he was sorry for being so presumptuous when I clearly had no romantic interest in him, but that he had to be honest that he was in love with me. And I was like, "What?! He was in love with me this whole time???"

So yeah, we're married now (celebrated ten years last autumn) but if you're ever wondering if your slow-burn fic is too slow, or that your characters are too oblivious, just remember me and my now-spouse mutually pining over each other every single second of the day for two weeks without ever saying a word to each other about how we felt. I was reading my own diary yelling, "JUST KISS HIM ALREADY!"

[thatsthat24]

Narrating People’s Lives: The Saga Continues 🎃 (Felt like making a sequel to one of my favorites)

[xiaq]

Charming interaction of the day:

There’s a construction zone around the corner that we pass regularly when walking to and from the house. There are several women on the crew, most of whom are virtually indistinguishable from the men folks from a distance. But there are a couple who really lean into feminine-coded floral shirts/pants/pink hardhats, etc.

As I walked past today, there was a woman who couldn’t have been over 25 who looked like contractor Barbie. Like picture a Latina Tinkerbell with a tool belt and purple work boots absolutely covered in sawdust, explaining something to a man who was likely twice her age and easily twice her size.

“Oh, no no no,” she said, as I walked by, gesturing to something on the tablet they were looking at, “don’t be silly! We’ll just [insert jargon I did not follow here]. It’ll be so much easier.”

After a moment’s consideration he said, gruff but earnest. “You’re right. That’s much less…silly.”

She gave him a little pat on the elbow, probably because that was the highest thing she could reach, and off they went.

Delightful.