#I'll tell you: insanely hard

[turtlecleric]

Hey cleric? Random ahh thought but you got recommended to me

What should I expect?

Hello dear! Oh. Ummmm.

1) Being insane about Symphony. I'm deeply, deeply unwell over it.

2) Very short fics (if you'd even call them that) and imagines that sometimes occur multiple times a day but more often are very spread out

3) A fair amount of dark (?) content, including non con/dub con, somno, yandere behavior, and anything and everything angsty (mind the warnings, tread carefully)

[hercarisntyours]

imaginary friend

[knotst3r1l3]

curse these wretched organs vro what the Fuck man !!!!!!!

[silusvesuius]

g*lmar rly has to be the best skajrim character on the real like even if you don't like him he just is . literally The best one i think......... on dat note i also imagine that he and ulfr*c despite being fairydust BFFs for lyfe genuinely have the worst communication skills ever seen

[averlym]

whshdfhfjf.,,,

[bangcakes]

.

[schizononagesimus]

i was never one of those "succeed because they wanna see u fail" ppl bc it didnt feel like anyone wanted me to fail... everyone was just indifferent to my success (which was weird in its own way). but strangely, ive just realized that right now im actually facing a group of people who... do? want to see me fail? and that's actually bizarre. like why do you want me to not get this phd so bad. everybody keeps acting like and actually TELLING me that i need to fail, like that's gonna teach me something? and they keep telling me that im gonna have to learn eventually that i cant get everything i want? actually, fuck you guys, i think i totally can get what i want. NOW im gonna do this shit out of spite, and actually i wonder if i'll end up holding some weird grudge against the people who actively told me i need to learn some sort of lesson :)

[orcelito]

Ykno the suckiest thing about being broken up with for someone else is that like. Well I'm doing generally fine, all things considered, but I Am kinda sad thinking about the things I've lost and all the casual affection that I can't have now.

But she's out there having all the affection she wants from her coworker, and it's just like. Damn this feels so skewed and SO unfair.

[girl-please-study]

Watch me catch up with 4 semesters material

[patriciavetinari]

I genuinely don't know what's wrongn with me. I'm trying to fogure this our. First I thought I was wronged and now I feel ashamed of my horrible luck with people. People who call themseves my friends all seem to have out of sight out of mind attitude with me.

Noone in rela life seems to remeber I exist. If it's not me trying to organize a meetup – they don't text me, they don't ask me to their houses or to have a coffee on a weekend. And if it is me tugging on them and suggesting things – in most cases they are Busy even if I text a month in advance or they are hanging out with Better Friends.

It's not even about getting set up for a date anymore. I'm genuinely freaking out that I'm secretly a horrible person that noone wants me unless it's work-related where most my acquaintances these days come from.

Is it me not being on social media? Is it me not being able to give them my insta where they could comment on my photo of a coffee I'm getting? Is it me being opinionated?

I'm doing fucking everything I ever heard as an advice on being personable charming agreeable people-person. I notice their interests, I smile and give compliments and give praise when warranted and make sure all proper people get proper credit for their achievements, I recommend things I know about and am curious about things they can recommend, I've had one person not believe me saying I'm a lonely introvert, I look at baby pictures and congratulate people sincerely on getting their house or having their wedding, I have colleague who shares stories about her teenager kids and I listen and I offer advice and symathy. I'm fat and have been fat as a child so I had to be a clown to be accepted so I can make people cry with my jokes and I know it's not faked and it doesn't matter.

And yet none of those people want me elsewhere. Even if we have each other on whatsapp and with some we are even in group chats, but if it's not me tugging and timidly asking if they'd like to go somewhere sometime, maybe check out that new coffee place – it's radio silence. I try to start a concersation on how Someone is – I get an answer that they're fine, busy, and nothing else, not even a question back, no details, no offer to discuss over a drink or even have a bloody phone call just to chat away.

Noone tugs on me, noone asks me out, noone wants to make plans, noone wants me at their houses or in their existing friend groups, noone even sends any memes or anything. Nothing that I was told would happen if I learned to make friends.

I don't understand what is so horrible about me or what am I doing wrong or not enough of. Do I need an instagram account to be considered easier to reach or what? What is the secret that I'm missing?

[slippery-minghus]

lmfao-ing at my coworker who had a running-away-from-her-desk-in-tears meltdown when she didn't credit for something she didn't do.

okay bestie 💅

[artekai]

I like how the wiki simply takes her word for it

[autism-corner]

wait i might have actually lucid dreamed. wait.

so i was having this dream and it started at work. after a bit I began to notice something where the furniture wasnt right, like two coffee machines or my literal own personal wardrobe just. standing there. then, somehow they said it was friday evening, which isnt possible since i KNOW i have important irl stuff then. So i was trying to figure out if i was correct in the incorrectness. i started telling the supervisors that this wasnt correct and that the dates are wrong (not really the best decision in hindsight i think). they were looking at me like i was stupid and insane, so i just tried to wake up. which actually worked. wth.

[isekyaaa]

To be honest, I think the thing about wanting to be liked by people, but not getting the validation you'd like about being a likeable person is like... people assume that people should like them for who they are. And when faced with this dilemma is that most people go in two opposite directions. They either stick adherently to the person they believe themselves to be or they change themselves into what they assume is the person most people would like.

The truth of the matter is that neither of these routes will get people to the place they want to go. When you stick to the first route, you become inherently self-absorbed. You show no consideration to the feelings and thoughts the people around you, what they are and are not comfortable with, etc. If you go the second route, you essentially become a robot following a preprogrammed path and responding in a preprogrammed way. Nothing you say is truly you.

I'm not going to say there is a magic formula to being the most likable, but the more you stray to the edges, the more conventionally unlikable you'll become.

I think the most difficult thing here for people is that the key to finding a good middle ground is confidence. It is only through confidence in yourself as a person that'll help you to stick to what your beliefs when you differ from others, but also being able to relax such convictions when there's no need for them.

Taking a chance by taking a step in the opposite direction of where you currently stand is scary. But you will never get anywhere if you stand still. All journeys start with the first step, as they say. But there's no rush. Everyone has the right to go about it slowly. But it will be worth it.

[inbabylontheywept]

The Motherfucking Lizard King

No one at work trusts my boss. 

He's smart. He works hard. He's not trustworthy. He hasn't actually fucked anyone at work over, but he's ruined his last two marriages with affairs, and got dumped by his third fiance when he wouldn't sign a prenup. The fact that we all know this is just a hazard of working in a small town. 

Anyway: The thought process of the people in the lab is that if he screwed over his first wife, and his second wife, and was probably planning on screwing over his third wife, it would be insane for him not to screw us over. After all, what kind of idiot treats their employees better than their spouse? 

I dunno. His kind, I guess? He's had a few chances to fuck us over, and he hasn't taken them. Opposite really. When our parent company was doing furloughs, he stayed in the office almost a hundred hours, talking and talking and talking his way up the corporate ladder. And in the end, no one at our site got furloughed. 

He's pulled strings like that before. And it baffles me, right? Because it really does make zero sense. He'll move the heavens and the earth for us, but his wife and kids are afterthoughts. It feels like any moment, he's going to look into the mirror and realize how stupid that is. It feels like I'm betting on him making the same stupid mistake again, and again, and again - like it would be less cynical to believe he was, eventually, going to stab me in the back. But he hasn't yet, and as far as I can tell he's been making that mistake for close to fifteen years, and it's already cost him everything it can. If he was going to learn, he would have by now. 

So my position on him is that if he wanted to date someone I cared about, I'd warn them off. I don't trust him there. But I tentatively trust him to be my boss. Maybe one day he'll stick the knife in and twist, and everyone will say Ah, Babs, we warned you, but for now, I accept that he's doing a very predictable, very irrational thing, and I've made my peace with it. 

---

My job has glue traps. 

No one likes the glue traps, but we don't have a lot of options. Poison's banned by state law, spring traps are banned by company safety, and several non-lethal options tried in the past failed to work. The mouse problem can get pretty bad if it's ignored, and there's some real health hazards in that. Our site has never had a positive hantavirus test, thank God, but the big base about a half hour away has. That guy's gonna be on oxygen the rest of his life. 

If a mouse gets caught, we just euthanize it. But more than mice get stuck. Lizards can wander into those traps too, and the people working there have different feelings about the lizards. They don't pose nearly the same kind of risk mice do. They're chill little guys, and they keep the moths away, and they're just 

You know. They're friendly. There's something to be said about walking into a room, and hitting the light switch, and seeing two little guys on the wall start to do pushups as soon as they see you. 

People used to just euthanize the lizards too, but I had pet leopard geckos as a kid and I couldn't take that so I wound up googling how to free animals from glue traps. Now, when a lizard gets stuck in a trap - which happens once or twice a week - I get some vegetable oil from the breakroom, and a little plastic fork, and I'll spend fifteen to twenty minutes just kind of gently prying the little guys out. 

I have a team of technicians that help me operate one of the larger machines. They're real blue collar guys, ex-airforce, and they make me look like a little kid. Being an engineer means they'll look to me as a leader sometimes, which is a wild experience. And I started helping the lizards for my own conscience, but one of the crazier consequences of it has been that it seriously boosted my leadership cred. Because those guys see me, and they go: Hey. If he's willing to fight for a lizard, he's gotta be willing to fight for me. 

I cannot overstate how nice that is. Most engineers that want to make a change to a maintenance practice, or try an upgrade, they have to work their asses off to get the techs to buy in. But I can just ask. They already trust me to do good. They know I'm new, and they know I'm not the smartest engineer in the building, but they also know I'm the one who gets lizards out of the glue traps. 

And just because of that, they're willing to follow me. 

---

My boss has a meeting every month or two. It's typically basic house cleaning stuff - reminders about routines we've gotten lazy on, and updates on future projects. Maybe some warnings about problems coming from higher up in the company.

People are, in my opinion, a bit too cynical about the meetings. It stems from people not trusting our boss, which again, I understand, because it would make so much more sense if he wasn't trustworthy. It's a testament to the man's incredibly unhealthy priorities that he is. But as we made it to the end of the meeting, one of bullet points was: 

Do NOT mess with animals in the building. 

So I looked at my techs, and they looked at me, and when he got to the point, he was so scathing I actually just wanted to crawl under a rock and die. He said basically that he'd heard some reports about someone in the building handling animals that found their way in and got stuck, and that he just wanted to emphasize how insanely inappropriate that was, not to mention dangerous, and that if he needed to speak to anyone about it again, there would be severe consequences. 

I was willing to just take the shame and move on. I was. But one of my techs is old. Old enough he could've retired two years ago. And his actual literal goal is to one day get angry, yell at someone, and storm out. That's how he wants to retire. So instead of biting his tongue like everyone else, he stood up and said: I hate the glue traps. You hate the glue traps. We all hate glue traps. But we've all sat here for years, ignoring the little things that get stuck in them, watching them die, and then Bab's comes in, and he is the first person in decades to give enough of a shit to start pulling the lizards out. And I don't want him to stop. 

Get humane traps or shut up but we are not going back to the old way of just letting things starve. 

And my boss actually froze up. He got all wide eyed and stared at Marc, and then the other techs jumped in, and there was a very small but intense rebellion in the meeting and my boss kept trying to interrupt while getting absolutely bowled over by this gang of angry middle aged air force vets, and eventually he just went 

I will speak with Babylon about this afterwards! After! And then he will speak with everyone else, but I have more points to cover. 

So they went silent, and my boss rushed through the last five minutes, and we all adjounred. The techs really didn't like that I was going in alone - they thought our boss was going to try and shout me into compliance. Marc in particular was like, Look, if he tries bullying you, stand your ground, and if he threatens anything, just come get us, and we'll give him hell. 

So armed with that, I went to my boss's office. I sat in the chair across from him, and he kept his composure for maybe five seconds before just flopping back into his chair. 

I had no idea you were saving lizards, he said, but I'm glad you are. I always hated seeing them die in the glue.  

I wasn't expecting that. I was about to ask him what the comment from the meeting was about then, but he answered that before I even got the chance.

A snake got into the building last week, and - someone picked it up and chased a coworker around. Turns out that coworker was severely afraid of snakes, and now it's a shitshow. We're a small site, and now I can't ask those two to work together anymore, to say nothing about how the snake fared after all that. Being upset about that is a reasonable thing, right? 

And he gave me a look like he actually wanted an answer, so I said Yeah, totally, chasing a coworker around with a snake is a dick move. Especially if that coworker is already afraid of snakes. 

And he said Exactly! and then we sat there a few moments longer. He looked so incredibly tired that I did, actually, feel kind of bad for him. And then he somehow managed to sink even further into his chair, and said

Look, I know I'm not a good guy. But I'm not evil. I'm not some sort of crazy asshole that's going to demand that everyone watch lizards starve to death. When you go back downstairs, could you try to pass that on? That I'm not evil? 

I said Sure because it wasn't a hard request, and he looked relieved. I actually made it halfway out before I realized I had a question. 

Who grabbed the snake? I asked. 

Not supposed to talk about it, he said. But whoever comes to mind first is probably right. 

ThatGuy? I asked. And he looked me in the face, nodded his head yes, and said No. 

---

The techs seemed a little disappointed that they didn't get to storm the boss's office, but were otherwise in good spirits. They were actually a little bit embarrassed to hear about the snake story - apparently, it wasn't much of a secret. It'd just slipped their minds because it happened three weeks ago. 

We did maintenance after that, the same basic repairs we did every week. The meeting had been stressful and it was a relief to work with my hands. When the parts were reinstalled, everything cleaned and smooth and ready to go, Marc found me again. 

You know what the lesson of today is? he asked. And there were quite a few answers to that that I could have taken - from don't assume the worst of people to be careful with how you spend your trust - we all need it more than we think. 

But instead I said what? because I wanted to hear what his answer was going to be. 

That I got your back, he said. Then he clapped one very, very large hand on my shoulder, gave it a good squeeze, and walked back to dosimetry lab.

---

The next day, Marc gave me a package and told me to open it in my office. I was suspicious, but I followed the request.

Cardboard gave way to a small baggie, obviously full of fabric, which opened to reveal a t-shirt that read

"I Am the Motherfucking Lizard King."

I looked at it, I loved it, and then I got an idea. I went to my boss's office and knocked on the door. When he opened it, I asked him if he would be willing to allow something very unprofessional to happen for morale building purposes.

How unprofessional? he asked. I held the shirt up in answer. He gave the shirt a short look over and snorted.

You can wear it on weeks without customers, he said. Which just so happened to include that week.

I'll pass on that it came with your blessing, I replied, and he looked oddly relieved.

Thanks, he said. And then I went downstairs.

---

The techs were very, very happy to see the shirt. And while my boss's reputation remains in tatters, and probably will be until he moves (or dies), the next time there was a meeting, there was quite a bit less complaining about how mere presence. Which is, I guess, a start.

We'll see if he squanders it.

[allylikethecat]

NEW ALLY LORE UNLOCKED 🔓

YOU HAD A NIPPLE PIERCING?????

HAHAHA yeah 😂 only for like a year though because I took it out for my sinus surgery and then was too much of a wimp / waited to long to put it back in and it closed. Sometimes I think about getting it redone (it was my party nip!! because I only had one done) but then I remember how badly it hurt and I don't. I'm also not nearly as shameless as I was at 21 🤣 my roommates and I all went and did it together it was a great bonding moment lol. I'm sure there are pictures of me somewhere where you can clearly see it through the skin tight body suits I used to wear clubbing with no bra in the freezing cold 😂 I'm very boring now though, I work in the software industry and wear like... Alo and Lululemon like a suburban soccer mom even though I have no children and no plans for that to ever change haha But yes new lore 😂 (see!! I used to be fun!!)

I hope you are having a wonderful Tuesday and a fantastic rest of your week!

❤️Ally