#Storytime?

[secondhandbagofholding]

In my early twenties there was this straight woman I was friends with. We got in fights regularly because she would start acting like we were dating. Now I can't fault her for defaulting that way. She had had a tough life and had lost a fiance (as in he died) and such, so I think I filled a role for her that I wasn't necessarily aware of, and that ended in friction. We'd end up in these huge fights where I would remind her we were not dating and her expectations of me could not be those of someone she was dating, and she'd tell me that I was being ridiculous and she knew we weren't dating etc etc etc. lather rinse repeat etc.

Zoom forward five years. I'd moved away and she was getting married, we'd barely talked for those five years, but I head to the wedding to be supportive and bury the hatchet so to speak.

On the way to the wedding (she drove me there) she turns and says, "So my fiance's sister recently got divorced from her husband, he turned out to be gay so they got divorced. And, what luck, I was able to share with her our experience, because while we weren't married, we definitely were kind of dating."

We are not friends anymore.

[scrunchiesandsquips]

throwback to when nine year old me managed to MELT A FUCKING PAN

[crenna]

today an online friend who i met like seven years ago and reconnected with a couple years ago brought up some old veeery old stories we wrote together and it brought back so many memories. i don’t remember who messaged who first, but i remember what a good time we had just fangirling over some fictional characters and writing crappy stories together and being weird and random and happy. and i just realized that that friend, along with some other online friends, really got me through middle school and i’m so grateful for them - the friends i interact with weekly or monthly, the friends that log in like once a year and it’s like no time has passed at all, the friends that i haven’t spoken to in years.

this is your sign to proudly love the books and movies that you like and interact with that cool person in the fandom, to do random things with your friends and laugh and make memories. online friends are real friends and it is sooo worth it to get past the initial nervousness and awkwardness and get to know some amazing people 💗

[dinosaursatemymom]

tfw your old bsf talks shit about you bc of a girl who is either jealous that you were friends with the bsf OR she has extreme ih and has a crush on you 😜

Tbh both of those are equally plausible

[silvermoon424]

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

[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!

[chaseerr0rcode]

When I was younger I was absolutely terrified of time loops. Despite the fact that majority of the time characters usually find a way to get the loop to stop at one point, I was always still terrified of the concept of time loops because what if the character doesn’t escape the loop?

What if they are forced to live the same day forever.

They would never know what would happen the next day, they wouldn’t be able to age or die. They’d just be stuck repeating and repeating and repeating.

There would be no end to it either.

And the thought of that absolutely traumatized me as a kid so whenever something had a time loop in it or time loops were even mentioned I would freak out.

I of course, now no longer have that fear. But it’s still interesting to think about.

[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.

[chloeworships]

I want to share something with you all that is NOT biblical, HOWEVER I do have to share it. It’s time.

I held back on disclosing this information because I didn’t feel the world was ready (and if I’m being honest I didn’t think I was either 😅😅😅😅) but something occurred recently that has prompted me to speak.

I feel extremelyyyyyyy nervous and it’s not like meeeeee but here goes nothing 🤷🏾‍♀️ then onto the not so good newzzzzzzzzzzzz

SN: Why do I feel like the time I had to tell my parents I was pregnant at age 21. Lawdddddddddddddddddddddddddddddd. It’s so weird but I gotta keep it 💯 with my babes.

[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.

[batbabydamian]

rooftop storytime with Dick and Damian

for fellow Dynamic Duo 2.0 enjoyer @gotham-snark!! wanted to complement her amazing art here!! 🥺💙

[thatnateguy]

Day 4 of working at the clothing store:

It's warm(er) outside and less crazy weather today. I've had one customer.

Some of my friends stopped by unexpectedly to check out the store. They did not buy anything.

Today's CD is jazz (the Dave Brubeck Quartet specifically), really fits the mood.

Worked on re-arranging a wall display that labeled the clothes as a "little black dress." Almost all of them were a small or extra-small. I think the naming was unintentional.

[sushiisiu]

What song is he serenading apollo with (wrong answers only)

[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

[moonlightduelist]

”this book is a reimagining of hades and persephone as-” it’s the final month of 2023 as a society we need to move on and fast.

[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!"