#a story post

[lesbxdyke]

I could think of no better way to share the news than this!

So when I was 17, my cat went missing and I'd given up hope of ever seeing him again.

Until on Monday, 27th of May, 2024, my friend sent me a FB post asking 'isn't that your mother?' about the person named on the microchip.

Here he is! 16 years old, and found safe, twelve whole years after he went missing!

Yesterday (Tuesday the 28th of May, 2024) I went to the rescue that had him, and I reclaimed my boy, renaming him Artie! (He'd originally been called 'Cat' because my mother and I couldn't decide on a name)

He's home safe with me now, currently inhabiting my bathroom and purring up a storm every time someone goes in there!

I'll be doing slow introductions between him and my current cat to give them the best possible chance of living in harmony!

Here's some pictures of Artie once we let him out of the carrier:

[ered]

Here’s my take on the whole audio books vs. reading:

Oral tradition of storytelling predates written ones by millennias, and honestly, which one you like is just a personal preference.

The actual difference is

when listening, you have no idea how to write characters’ names

when reading, you have no idea how to pronounce characters’ names

hope this helps!

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

License to Kitty.

[jesncin]

"Who Is Superman? A Private Interview with Lois Lane" a fancomic about hope and connection. I've had this story in mind for so long and I'm very excited to be able to share it at last. Thank you for reading, and happy Lunar New Year!

[aesethewitch]

When I was a kid, we moved into a house that had a huge lilac tree out front. It was mostly rotten, and it needed to be taken down before it fell. It took a while, but eventually, it was gone.

Mostly. A couple years later, little lilac babies popped out of the ground in its place. My mom was determined to get rid of them, because she'd planted a beautiful flower garden there, and the lilac trees would overshadow and kill the whole garden. I insisted on saving at least a few saplings. She said fine, but I had to dig them out and put them in pots myself.

So, I did. I spent days digging little lilac bushes out of the ground and putting them into pots. Some couldn't be saved, but some could. When all was said and done, I had five brand-new lilac saplings. Seven or eight years old, and it was my absolute pride and joy.

Three died due to sun scorching, severe drought that no amount of watering could save, and perhaps just being moved from their place in the ground. But two survived, and I was awfully proud of them! I'd go out and talk to them every single day. I watered them by hand and made sure they were fertilized properly. I learned all about their favored environments, and I was determined to make sure they lived.

One of my mom's friends saw what I was doing with the lilacs. She asked if she could have one to put in her backyard, and I agreed on the condition that she take very, very good care of it.

It's now fucking enormous. I'm talking ten feet tall and bursting with beautiful purple flowers every spring. My mom still gets updates each year as they start to bloom, which she forwards to me. And all I can think is, "That's my friend! Thriving some twenty years on, there it is."

The other tree nearly died, too. It lived in a pot for far, far too long. I wanted to plant it somewhere in my parents' yard, but my mom was reluctant. Eventually, we agreed to put it in the far back garden. It grew okay for many years, despite the shade, but in all these years, it's never bloomed.

Last year, the massive tree casting massive shadows over the lilac and the garden cracked in half and fell. It tumbled into the garden, crushing part of the nearby shed and destroying a few plants beneath it.

It missed my lilac by inches.

The clean-up is long done. The rest of the tree has been cut down, and my lilac has full sunlight for the first time in fifteen years. It won't bloom this year, I know. But it's got new shoots up. It's taller than ever. I spent half an hour a few weeks ago praising it for surviving all this time, dreaming about its future and telling it how I believe it'll become the tall beauty it's always been meant to be.

I think next year, I'll see flowers.

[inbabylontheywept]

bad dating stories time: the shoe incident

so in highschool, my best friend wasnt allowed to go on dates unless there was another couple there to keep an eye on him. part of this was his parents being insane, but also, part of it was him being insane. in a problem with no reasonable parties, there are no reasonable solutions.

at some point in my junior year, my sorta-gf broke up with me, and i just wasnt feeling dating, which was bad for my friend, because he had a good thing going with a girl he met in court.

he kind of hounded me about it. kept pushing me to just put me feet back in the dating pool and i wasnt real thrilled about it, because i knew he was pushing me for his own benefit, not mine, so i kept telling him to fuck off, and after a few weeks of being told that i would date when i was damn well ready, he eventually said: okay. what if i paid for the date AND found you a blind date AND all you had to do was show up?

and i shouldve said no, i know, but i let him wear me down, and i will own my fault in that. a date starting on such a stupid premise could never have gone well.

but he still managed to find a way to make it worse.

i dont know how long he tried to set a blind date up. it couldve been multiple attempts. he couldve stooped to this immediately. but what happened in the end was that he called a girl from the ward he attended - a girl that he knew had a giant, mushy crush on him - and he said: hey! how would you feel about going on a date this weekend?

(you know, implying it was with him, but never actually saying it.)

and she said YES WOW I WOULD LOVE TO and he said great! and then he called me up and said he found me a date.

i did not learn about his crimes until several weeks later. i will die swearing before god almighty that i would never have allowed this travesty to happen if i had known.

that was on a monday. the date of the date rolled around that friday evening, and im sorry to confess, i really phoned the whole thing in. i showed up in my favorite comfy outfit, which was also a fashion crime: basketball shorts and flipflops and a baja hoodie. it was super comfy but it made me look kind of crazy. i picked him up first, and then i picked up his date next, and then we went to pick up my date, and thats where you're gonna get the play by play.

i arrived, walked across the yard, and knocked on the front door. she opened it almost immediately, like shed been waiting right by it, and i could see her expression go from OMG IM SO EXCITED to super disappointed, then disgusted and finally pissed. and because i didn't know about my friends sins, i thought it was from my outfit. which seemed... harsh. like, hey, im allowed to be quirky, fuck you. also its a blind date, i thought the deal was that we were both going to be sad broken sacks of mortality.

anyway, we looked at each other for several seconds before she slammed the door in my face.

i looked back at my friend. he was sweating bullets. i dont know what he expected from this, but there was this big long pause where we both tried to figure out what to do, and then the door opened up, and her dad invited me in, and he said she was gonna need a few minutes to finish getting ready, and that in the meantime we could sit and talk.

we did not talk. we did sit. i sat down on the couch, and he sat down in a chair across the couch, and then instead of talking he cleaned his pistol on the coffee table. i wasnt actually sure if it was a threat, or if it was just a fidget thing for 40+ year old republican men, but when i tried to help he got snappy so i just watched him put a pistol back together.

he was okay at it.

eventually my date came downstairs, still mad as hell for reasons beyond my ken, and i felt pretty guilty for being such a mess because i thought that was why she was so angry. i tried to make up for by walking her to the car and getting the door for her, just generally trying to be extra polite, but before i could make it back to the drivers side, her dad called me back to the door. so i flipped around, went to the door, and immediately regreted my decision.

soon as i was within range, her dad got waaaay too close to me, leaned in, and said "whatever you do to her, i will do to you," and my brain went into overdrive making three consecutive realizations.

realization one was, damn, the pistol thing was a threat. that sucks. what an asshole. realization two was, wait, im autistic and even i know theres a 0% chance me and my date even hold hands, least of all boink. does this guy actually think there's even a 1% chance of anyone in that car getting laid tonight? is he an idiot? and then realization three went through, which was wait, is this guy threatening to fuck me? and unfortunately, with my brain doing so much processing, my mouth was left to run amok, so somewhere between realization 2 and 3, i said:

"i can't get pregnant"

which, i swear, wasn't actually me trying to be a smartass, it was just me pointing out that he couldn't actually follow up on that threat. it just wasn't possible. we do not live in the omegaverse and im not scared of you.

still, it was an insanely catastrophic thing to say, and the moment we both heard it, we bluescreened. that single sentence obliterated both of our momentary streams of consciousness like a saltine in front of a sand blaster. problem was, he'd probably gone his whole life not even realizing someone could say something that stupid, and making that realization was going to cost him a lot of thinking time. me though? i had been saying shit like that for 17 years, i didnt have to rewrite my expectations of human nature, i just had to plan an exit and start striding. so i was already halfway back to the car before i heard "hey. hey come back. Hey. Hey. HEY. HEY WAIT. HEY GET BACK HERE. HEY-"

and then i was in my car, and i drove away.

if this happened today, he'd have called her, and the whole thing wouldve imploded then and there, but back then, there were still a decent number of teenagers without cell phones. especially the teenagers of insane, gun toting parents. so she just said: whoa what was that all about? and i said: dont worry about it, he'll tell you about it when you get home.

and she said: ok and went back to staring daggers at me and my friend.

WHICH SURPRISINGLY isnt even how the story ends.

we went to an improv comedy show, and it was a disaster. it shouldve been like, 7/10 tops, but between my date being mad, and my friend having a good time, and me having the existential terror of knowing that a guy with a pistol was probably waiting outside his house for me to come back, it was easily 11/10. i laughed way too hard at everything. especially the jokes that flopped. id sit there in this mostly silent room and laugh until i dry heaved a little, and my date was absolutely disgusted, and even my friend was a little embarrassed, which would just make me laugh harder. i laughed so hard that night i could barely talk the next day. and then the show ended, and my friend said, you know, that was a good time, but i think we should maybe do something a little chiller? who wants to walk around the park? and his date said yeah, and my date said no, and i finally had mercy on the poor woman so i said, look, im gonna drop you off. and i am so, so sorry about this, but im dropping you off like a block away. super duper sorry.

do talk to your dad about the pistols thing if you dont want this happening more in the future tho.

and she said: okay. so i dropped her off, and she walked a block down, and that was that.

then i drove my friend and his date to a park that was good for wandering. i figured they wanted something more private, so instead of following them around point blank, i chose a park with this 30 foot rope tower, and i climbed to the top and i said: hey i can see you anywhere from up here, you are officially chaperoned from a distance. get panopticoned idiot. except my friend really is an idiot, and he didnt really get the whole 'now i dont have to third wheel so insanely hard with you guys' thing so he climbed up the tower too, and then his date followed behind him, so there are three people basically sitting together on top of a telephone pole.

and then they started making out.

i was close enough to hear it.

i didnt really know what to do so i was just kind of sitting there, dissociating, when some college kids came around and started shaking the tower. my friend's date went aaaaaaaaaa im afraid of heights :( and my friend went oh, dont worry, ill hold you tight ;) and i went hey, im gonna climb down and ask them to stop.

so i did climb down, and i did ask them to stop, and they flipped me off, which i wasnt even mad about. at that point i was i was like yeah, it would be weirder if this wasnt a mess. gods plan has been to fly this day like a 747 into my metaphorical twin towers and brother he is close enough for me to see him grinning through the cockpit window. still, eventually the college students got bored, so they climbed up the tower, which gave my friend and his date a window to climb down, and together we walked back to my car.

now, i cant explain why this is, but sitting back in the drivers seat was my carriage-back-into-a-pumpkin moment. i'd been chill about all the chaos, just rolling with the punches, but sitting down made me realize how much of a shitshow the day had been, and while i couldnt go back and fix all of it, i could go back and fix one thing.

so i told my friend and his date, hey, you two, stay here and don't do anything weird. don't. then i walked back to the rope tower, and i started picking up the shoes the college students had left at the base in order to climb.

about halfway through this, i realized that if i took all their shoes, they might think i was in it for the money, and i actually wanted them to know i was in it specifically to spite them. fuck those guys. so i put all the right shoes back, gave myself a 100 foot headstart, yelled "nice shoes, assholes", did a little jig, and started running.

my advice to everyone is that college students are faster than you think. even with the headstart, and the whole climb down the tower thing, i was still only fivish seconds ahead of them by the time i got to my car. i flung the door open, looked in the backseat, didnt see anyone, flung the stolen shoes in the backseat, heard two "ow"s, took that as proof of presence, jumped in and pealed out of the lot.

my friend and his date popped up a few seconds later. they were, uh, doing something weird in the back seat. my one request - obliterated.

they climbed up to ask where the hell all the shoes had come from, and i was like yeah i stole them from the college students, and they were like oh. cool. hope you had fun. and i was like, i did. i did. but speaking of fun, what were you doing back there?

and for the first time in my buddies life, i think he was actually embarassed.

[horrorlesbians]

sorry I liked your post a second after you posted it I don’t have a life

[crowkip]

yeehaw, baby!

[emberfaye]

You know what?

I love you, fics that take months to update. I click on the newest chapter and have no memory of this place and get to go back some chapters and rediscover how much i love everything about this story.

I love you, fics that take years to update. I think of you fondly, and know your names, go search for you and see an update from this year and scream, diving in uncaring of any missed details (i will finish the update and read you in reverse because this is a treat you have bestowed)

I love you, fics that probably will never update again. Thank you for being a roman empire for my mind, thank you for teaching me about the ephemeral fandom experience, for inspiring a thousand million what if-s, for being a comfort read and a nostalgia read and a reread.

I love you fic writers, who jump into projects and stories with enthusiasm. I love you when you succeed in pumping out those chapters and that love doesn't go away when you stop.

I love you fic writers who post and then get in your own head and never feel confident enough to update, whether it's at all or whether it's just that one story.

I love you fic writers, who have a fandom or media hurt you to the point of abandoning or having a hard time with their WIPs.

I love you fic writers, who lose interest or have life changes or illness or bad memory. Thank you for being part of the fandom, a core part of the fandom. Thank you for the time spent in the fandom.

I love you, fic writers who try out something new and then stop. You're so valid.

I love you, WIP fics that may or may not ever get finished. Thank you for brightening my day in the way only you could have.

[captainkirkk]

At least once a month I remember that Ozai ruled for ~3 years. That's shorter than one presidential term. That's nothing. In comparison Zuko - who suffered so much cruelty and was made to feel worthless under Ozai - ruled for ALMOST 70 YEARS. That's more than 22 times the length of Ozai's rule - and he will go down in history as one of the most influential and well loved Fire Lords of all time

[gallusrostromegalus]

Might I inquire as to what, precisely, a Mustain't is? (Aside from a string of letters I hesitate to Google in that order.)

In October 2014 I went on a road-trip to the Dryest Place In America.

I was having a rough year, very depressed from having dropped out of college for the third time. I decided a road trip was in order to re-set my brain and get a little distance. Being that it was October, and therefore all the campgrounds in the American Southwest were filled with people who have the good sense to camp in reasonable temperatures, I elected to take my parent's minivan so I could car-camp anywhere suitably isolated, and looked up some of the southwest's geographic extremes- the highest place I could drive to (Pikes Peak), the lowest place (Badwater Basin), and for fun, the Dryest Place in the continental US, which turned out to be the Pinacate Volcanic field just west of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. It gets rain maybe twice a century and has no standing water, despite being less than 100 miles from the gulf of California.

It's a startlingly beautiful and alien place. The ground is a deep chocolate brown to black volcanic sand, and in mid October, the rabbit brush is turning bright yellow as it shifts to autumn, the organ pipe cacti are a dark green and stand, partially concealed in the brush at exactly human height. The air is alive with birds and insects and bats at night. The stargazing is like looking into the eyes of God.

You get there by driving down a little dirt road called "El Camino Del Diablo", or "The Devil's Road".

I drove out about three hours from Glendale, AZ to get there, arriving at sunset, and felt a profound sense of peace. I stargazed, listening to the bats hunt and sing, and slept peacefully for the first time in months.

I stayed out there for three days, sketching and painting the landscape, taking strolls through this almost alien landscape, and enjoying the light and sound and total absence of human intrusion besides myself.

On the fourth night, it was a new moon, and I awoke in the middle of the night. Something was amiss, and it took me a while to realize it was because I could NOT hear the bats. I was sleeping inside the van with the rear windows rolled halfway down rather than trying to set up the tent, so I when I sat up, I looked out of the van's reflective windows to discover what at first appeared to be A Horse.

It was something between pale gray and bright white in the starlight, standing maybe a dozen feet from the van, sniffing curiously. It made sense- I was in the middle of mustang country and there was quite a bit of foliage in the area for it and it did look like a truly wild horse- lumpy where the bones were jutting out, dusty about the hooves and face.

I was instantly seized by the sort of paralytic fear Sleep paralysis is made of. I couldn't move. It wasn't quite looking at me because it couldn't quite see through the windshield into the shadowy into the shadowy interior, but I had the distinct impression that if I looked away, it would know, and get me.

I already had problems with horses. My beloved Aunt Helen's Prize mare tried to kill me on two separate occasions, and the year before I had to carry my sister-in-law backwards out of a slot canyon whilst reciting the Saint Crispin's Day Speech as loudly as possible to keep a mustang from trampling us to death.

This is approximately what it should have looked like:

Instead, it was... off. like trying to draw a horse from memory.

The waist tapered in.

The legs were slightly too long or the torso slightly too short, probably both.

The ears were Triangular.

The head wasn't quite right- Too narrow and the jaw wasn't heavy enough.

The tail was too long and arced unnaturally away from the body.

The neck arched.

The nostrils were too high and close

The mouth too long.

Whatever this is, a Mustang it Ain't.

I watched it from the back seat as it sniffed around the front of the van, curious with about the side mirrors. It moved around the van, nibbling experimentally on the front door handle. It came up to the side windows, sniffing like a dog, and it's breath didn't fog up the glass.

Finally, it came up to the rear window, which was rolled halfway down to let the fall night air in. Not even half a pane of glass and two feet of air between us, and I could clearly see it's bright blue eyes.

Horses have Elongated pupils to give them a wide field of vision, and eyes that rotate sideways in their sockets so the pupil remains parallel to the ground. Rather creepy to watch, especially the ones with blue eyes.

A real horse that was curious about the interior of the van would have come up to the window more or less sideways, and looked at me with something like this:

Instead, the damn thing walked up and faced the back window head on, staring back at me with this:

I'm not sure how long we watched each other like that, eyes locked. My eyes burned. I couldn't blink. My mouth was dry. I couldn't swallow. My throat began to ache. I couldn't make a sound. My skin began to twitch, like I was severely dehydrated. I couldn't move. My lungs burned. I couldn't move. I couldn't move. I couldn't move. I couldn't move.

Something was touching the side of my hand on the seat next to me. It's my water bottle.

The realization must have broken the terrible paralysis in the lower parts of my brain first, because by the time I consciously realized I could move again, I was already flinging my water bottle out the window at it.

The top was open, and splashed out the window at the Mustain't.

I've never heard such a scream out of an animal. Something halfway between the sound of unquenchable rage vibrating in someone's chest and the way rabbits cry out to God when the dogs catch them.

It jumped back, pivoting away from the van, snarling at the water bottle. I don't think you're supposed to be able to see All of a horse's teeth at once, no matter how angry it is.

I watched it run into the night for some distance, it's pale body visible against the black sand and the dark gray shadow of the ancient volcanic cone it was headed for.

When the blood stopped pounding in my ears, I could hear the bats again.

I debated leaving right then, but I didn't want to get out of the van with that thing in the area, nor litter by leaving the water bottle out there. I also had the awful idea that if I left now, it might somehow be able to follow me home. I ended up staying up three hours to watch the sunrise, shaking and trying to figure out if I'd woken up from a vivid dream, if my meds had stopped working, or if that had really happened. I didn't dare move until I actually felt the temperature rise, before stepping out of the van to grab the bottle. I had my camera ready- I was still using a DSLR back then- to take pictures of the hoofprints, to show how close it had gotten to the van.

No hoofprints.

Beetle tracks in the soft sand around the van, and the clear foot-and-wing prints of a bird that had hopped around then taken off. But no hoofprints.

I went over the entire campsite with the tent broom, to make sure I removed every scrap of evidence I had ever been there, including my footprints, grabbed my water bottle, and drove the three hours back back to Glendale, then decided to do seven more hours of driving to Moab, Utah just to put more than 500 miles, the state line and at least nine things that could be considered "running water" between me and the Mustain't.

-

I still have that water bottle. It has a dent in the bottom from hitting something, but that could have happened at any time. Strange thing though. I can't drink that bottle dry. I'll have it on me, drink whatever I've put in there- water, juice, iced coffee- and eventually feel like I've drunk the whole think and that it's empty. But I open it up and it's still at least a quarter full. I drink that. I get thirsty. I open it up again. ...and there's always a mouthful left.

Not sure what the side effects of drinking from a bottle cursed by a Mustain't to always have some left are, but it lives in the Emergency Breakdown Kit in my car now, just in case I meet another one.

---

(I'm a disabled artist and make my living telling stories, please consider supporting me on Ko-Fi or Pre-order the Family Lore book on Patreon)

[troythecatfish]

[liquidstar]

Yes, Greece still exists, we didn't all die 2000 years ago. Yes, people speak Greek. You people are so fucking stupid for real. So many of you claim to love ancient shit but can't even acknowledge the actual living culture of the people whose mythology and classics you romanticize. You keep leaving annoying comments about how you just forget Greek people still exist, thinking you're being quirky because you love ancient stuff soooo much that you forgot about the people it came from. You think about it so little you don't even realize that an actual Greek person has to read this shit, making it clear how little you actually care about the culture beyond the romanticized (and westernized) mythology. Don't claim you love Greece, don't use our mythology anymore if you can't acknowledge that we're still around without making it about how little you think about us. It's mind boggling that you'd think a Greek person would read this and think you're anything but obnoxious. Explode.

[fromcainwithlove]

author’s notes today: hey guys so just a warning there isn’t 100% explicit verbal consent even though they’re both really into it so remember this is FICTION, also they don’t use a condom :((( but in real life safe sex is important!!! please be safe out there everyone

a/n back in the day: kept thinking about ____ stabbing knives through both of _____’s hands to pin him in place while they fucked so here you go lol =P

[lady-of-the-spirit]

"Canon divergence" but it's giving characters the close friendships I think they would have had if canon had expanded a little more.