#he is packing his little bindle and he is running away

[bcdrawsandwrites]

So uh, no cover for this yet, but I wrote this an age ago and figured now was a good time to post it.

Bindle

Fandom: Inanimate Insanity Rating: K Genre: Angst Characters: Toilet (plus references to other characters like MePhone and MePad) Fic Description: Mister Phone had told him to leave, so it was time to go. Beta Readers: @jaywings and @mephoj Notes: I know the subtitles spell it "Mistah Phone," but since he's being referred to just in prose here and not in dialogue (with Toilet's accent), it's just "Mister Phone."

---~~~---

He didn't much remember what he'd packed.

Everything had happened so fast, and he could hardly think past the burning and dizziness in his tank as he hopped away to gather what little he had. The only thing to bring him out of his haze was the sudden spike of frustration at how hard it was to tie a knot without hands, especially when he wasn't focused.

Toilet found himself biting down on one corner of the red handkerchief, trying to tug at the knot with his invisible grip. It wasn't a very good knot and Mister Phone wouldn't have been terribly happy with that kind of shoddy work but he managed to secure it to the stick he'd apparently found. The bindle was not a big one, but he slung it behind his tank nonetheless.

Mister Phone had told him to leave, so it was time to go.

While his earlier actions had been performed in a furious, tear-blurred haze, he hopped through the contestant grounds with a great deal more slowness, thumping against the soft grass and feeling heavier with each step. After a moment he paused, turning around to take in the view.

By now, the area was cast in soft moonlight, and it was hard to see everything from where Toilet stood at the edge of the grounds. If any contestants were still out and about—probably celebrating their immunity and the fact that they got to spend more time with Mister Phone—he couldn't see them from here. Maybe a speck of light in the distance indicating Hotel OJ, but that was it. He didn't even get to have one last look at the people he'd been working with for the past several months.

It struck him that he didn't even get to say goodbye.

Something gave a terrible yank in his plumbing, and he jumped up into a frantic hover.

"GOODBYE EVERYBODYYYY!" he called out into the night. His voice echoed briefly, and he landed on the ground, waiting a moment. When nothing happened, he jumped into a slightly lower hover, shakily adding: "I-I love you...!"

Again he landed, waiting a moment longer for a response. Maybe someone rushing out to ask him what was going on, or where he was going. Or someone calling "goodbye" back. He'd even take Mister Phone telling him to shut up.

Nothing.

He was leaving this place for good, and no one cared.

Something tugged in his plumbing again, and he spun back around, hurrying away as his vision blurred with tears.

But no, no, maybe they didn't know yet, he argued to himself as he charged past the edges of the contestant grounds. Maybe they hadn't noticed—the last challenge hadn't ended that long ago. It had to be that, right? Maybe later they'd be looking around for him and saying "Hey, where did Toilet run off to?" They would miss him, Mister Phone would miss him, they had to, they had to, they—

His porcelain struck a rock he'd failed to notice, and he tumbled forward, splashing water on the ground and inadvertently slinging his bindle ahead of him. It clattered down softly in the grass, the handkerchief coming untied, spilling some of its contents.

"Ah!" he cried, hurrying up to the pile of items. While some were still covered by the handkerchief, several colorful cards had been scattered across the grass.

Toilet rushed to gather them up, but took a moment to stare at each one as he picked it up. The first was a cat drawn in marker and glitter on a blue card, while the next was... Microphone? He'd drawn her shouting with a bunch of sound waves coming out around her. Next was Baseball and Nickel—he'd drawn them on the same card since they seemed to like to hang out—and then there was Balloon, and Fan and that funny egg, and some more cats, and Marshmallow, and Mister Phone, and...

...Oh, right. These had been for him.

He'd nearly forgotten, after everything that had happened. He'd drawn these the other day when he'd found Mister Phone unconscious by the painting of the corn man. He'd had that weird message on his screen—something about memory—so Toilet had decided to try drawing a bunch of "memory cards" to help him jog that memory. He'd drawn all the contestants, even the eliminated ones, so Mister Phone would remember the game show and be able to get back to it. But then MePad had come along and—

Toilet paused.

On the last card, he’d drawn MePad next to Toilet himself.

I do not intend on being superior to you at all. I consider us equals. We both serve a different purpose, is all.

He stared down at the drawing, at MePad's screen colored in purple ink and shimmering glitter.

The last time he'd seen that screen, he'd been staring into it imploringly, waiting for MePad to back him up, to support him as he always had. Mister Phone was upset and not acting very rationally, but MePad could talk Mister Phone down and convince him that he didn't need to fire Toilet.

But when MePad had met Toilet's gaze, he'd only looked away.

"Equals…?" Toilet muttered, glaring down at the drawing. "Good to know that was a bunch of hogwash!" He punctuated the last word with a splash of water, soaking the card and causing the ink to run, the glitter to wash away. For a moment he felt a twinge of regret, but only for a moment, and he turned back to the fallen bindle with a huff.

As he moved part of the handkerchief aside to put the stack of cards back in, he wound up uncovering the rest of its contents: a bundle of wires in a rainbow of colors.

Oh.

That’s right… Mister Phone had asked for them so often, he'd finally gone out one day to gather a variety of them to have ready. He hadn't really asked for them since, but Toilet had hung onto them, just in case.

Maybe Mister Phone would need them again—need him again—and call him back.

Shaking himself, Toilet quickly gathered his possessions again and tied the bindle back together, making sure the knot was extra-tight this time. Slinging it behind his tank, he continued his journey, noticing the grass beneath him slowly transition into sand. Up ahead, water lapped against the otherwise-silent beach.

It struck him that he had no idea where to go from here. He'd been working here for so long, ever since Master Adam had hired him to—

...Wait, that was it!

Mister Phone had only gotten so angry after he'd mentioned Master Adam. It had to be something to do with him, right? If Mister Phone was angry at Master Adam, then Master Adam must've done something awful!

Where was Master Adam, though? Toilet had never met him in person—they'd only ever spoken over the phone. But Mister Phone had also mentioned the corn man, so maybe Master Adam was working for him? Funny he'd never seen him when they visited the Cloud, though. If he'd known, he would've stopped at his office to say hello.

Well... maybe he could give his office a visit, then, but not for a friendly chat.

Toilet strode across the sandy beach, a goal finally set in mind.

He was going to get to the bottom of this, and figure out what was bothering Mister Phone once and for all.

And… and then maybe Mister Phone would want him back.

…Maybe?

…please?

[wronglennon]

mb thank youuuuu

When Howard packed his rucksack at eleven-years-old and filled the pockets of his school uniform with Ryvita crackers and raisins, Vince had been right beside him in his driveway, bindle threatening to bowl him arse over kettle. Granted, they had only made it to the end of the road before the enormous weight of Vince’s wardrobe, extensive even then, had left him stranded on his back like a turtle. Howard had hauled him onto his feet and said that maybe they should run away after tea, because he still had some geography homework to do, and he wouldn’t want to leave any unfinished business behind. Clean break, he had said, nodding as if he were the one who needed to be convinced. Vince had shrugged and agreed. It wasn’t like he was in any great rush to get out of there — it was Howard’s plan, as were (are) most of the hare-brained schemes they found (find) themselves involved in. When Howard hadn’t brought it up again, Vince didn’t question it.

Mostly, he just went along with Howard’s whims. Howard says that he’s easily led, changeable and naïve. Vince has never really understood why that’s so bad. He’s easygoing where Howard is anal. If they were both so choc-a-block full of neuroses, they’d never have any fun. Howard likes to charge blindly into trouble and Vince likes to lackadaisically bring up the rear. It’s how they’ve always worked. Vince has never had a problem following Howard. Most of the time, it’s the easiest thing in the world.

But every once in a while, Howard Moon needs a little push. A nudge. A jog in the right direction.

based on a concept for an episode they never ended up doing! little under 3k so far and i might go back to it i like the premise well enough

[dreamofbecoming]

auntie is cruel and unyielding (wouldn’t give him any of my dumplings)

[mikkeneko]

when discussing a potential Lan Qiren-Lan Wangji relationship dynamic for @cerusee fic purposes, I got to speculating on what a baby Lan Wangji tantrum would even look like

And I decided that little Lan Zhan is a lot like a cat, in the way where if you do something they like more than one (1) time, they will decide that This Is The New Rule Forever, and be quite  put out with you when the thing fails to appear on time

so I was picturing, say, maybe Lan Qiren spent a few evenings playing music for his nephews, and from then on Lan Wangji expected a concert every night.  right on the dot of the hour he would be seated at the qin, looking up at his uncle with the weight of heavy expectation because it is music time now, shufu, get with the program.

and when he is refused! oh! the pouting! lan zhan was not a child to indulge in loud tantrums, but they’re no less stormy for all that. a-zhan cannot thrive in this household! he is packing up his floor harp in his little bindle and running away forever to seek a kinder land!

(lan qiren catches him three miles down the road to Caiyi)

[mandareeboo]

Re-watching a few SU episodes and man “On the Run” still hits hard. 

Like. Imagine being Steven. You’re thirteen and you know, vaguely, that bad shit is going down. You know the ‘monsters’ you’ve been fighting were just like the people closest to you once. You know Gems aren’t from Earth, but you still haven’t quite connected the dots on them being invaders. 

Your three moms come home with a bunch of Bad Balls and tell you that other Gems wanted to hurt the Earth. That sounds pretty messed up. Amethyst spent a lot of time with Steven one-on-one when Garnet and Pearl were busy- she’s a lot sometimes, but she’s so familiar to you, and when she agrees to run away with you you’re stoked. Adventure time!!!! Gonna be on the road!!!! You pack up some bindles and head out.

After some trial-and-error, you find yourself in the Kindergarten. We’ve been so normalized to them now, but imagine seeing an empty cavern of death, holes and old Gem tech everywhere, and Amethyst is just running whole hog in. She’s excited to tell you how she grew up there, how she was alone for so long, and Steven’s been left alone a lot and knows how hard that can be.

You’re starting to piece some things together when Pearl comes in and instantly draws lines. I’m not blaming Pearl for that. She was running damage control on a very dangerous situation. But instantly she’s pushing between Steven and Amethyst, instantly she’s scolding Amethyst for sharing her birthplace, instantly she’s trying to apologize for Amethyst bringing him here, and you can see the conflict on his face as he struggles to understand why she’s being so mean about where Amethyst comes from. Shouldn’t it be cool that they’re both Earthlings? It’s not like the Bad Gems are around to harm the planet more?

And Amethyst just. Breaks. Her birth has been a dirty little secret to Steven his whole life. And now one of the people he loves most is in his face and calling herself a parasite. Saying that the Bad Gems made her to be Bad. That there’s thousands of Amethysts who could be just like her, and he’ll probably never meet him, because the rebellion drove them all away.

And, yeah, Pearl and Amethyst have always had their differences, but now Steven has to bear witness to them fighting. Attacking each other. And each line is another line engraved on his head. Amethyst hates herself. Amethyst thinks they all see her as an embarrassment. Amethyst knows she can’t win, but she doesn’t care, doesn’t worry at all about what may happen to her afterwards. And it all jumbles into this horrifying near-death experience he has to try his best to move on from, now with the added knowledge of how Gems are made, how they work, and how Amethyst was left behind.

[spirit-small]

14!!! (-might-be-tiny-gt)

It's late. It's dark. Phoenix is walking at a leisurely pace around the office. Mia's office. Or at least... it used to be.

It's time to think. Things have been kind of non-stop since she was murdered. It was just earlier that day that he and Maya actually caught her real killer in court. Which means... it's over. It seems like his career ended as quickly as it began. "Career" used rather loosely here, that is. Either way, it's done. No more Mia to take him to court, and it's not like Maya's gonna be accused of any more crimes any time soon, what are the odds of that?

So all he can do is pace around the room in silence. He comes to the spot. The place where he found her dying body. The last time he saw her alive. There's still a faint smell of her on the air, her blood still soaked into the carpet. It feels like a lifetime ago, but also too recent. It all happened so quickly that part of him still thinks she'll come in through the door any minute, as though it was all a dream. As though, maybe, if he hopes hard enough, she'll come back.

Because, of course, she already did.

"I... I don't know if you can even hear me right now, but...I'll miss you. I don't... I don't really get how this whole spirit medium thing works, I don't know if you're, like, a ghost just sort of wandering the world, or if you get to choose where you can go, or if you even have the ability to look upon the world of the living at all- let alone if you would even care enough to check up on me, but... Just... in case you're out there, Chief... I miss you." Phoenix leans against the wall and slides down it, sitting down next to what he can barely make out as the faintest outline leftover from the investigation. He holds his head in his hands, crying a little bit. Mia always said a lawyer can't cry until it's over. Well... now it's over.

"Mia... Edgeworth... Dahlia- is it me? Am I just, cursed? Why is it that every bean I meet gets ripped away from me, right when I think I might have a chance to be happy, to be something more..."

Phoenix throws his head back, wiping tears from his eyes on his sleeve. He stares at his arm for a moment, before quickly taking off his jacket and balling it up, tossing it aside.

"Everything reminds me of her...." he mutters. "Maybe I should just... leave. It's not like there's any shortage of buildings to borrow from... The Gatewater, if I can just manage to cross the street... hotels are full of little nooks and crannies to hide in... so much food no one would ever notice if any went missing... Yeah... yeah!" Phoenix jumps to his feet. "And that way, if I leave now, nothing horrible has to happen to Maya from associating with me!"

Phoenix rushes toward his nest under Mia's desk and starts packing up a bindle with just the necessities. A day's worth of food, a grappling hook, a few feet of thread, anything he can manage to carry- he's gotta work fast, he has to get downstairs and across the street before morning or he's donezo for keeps.

Before he's even packed up, he hears the sound of a gust of wind rustling Charley's leaves. It startles him, thinking there must be someone there... but no. The room is as empty as it was all night. The only peculiarity he can find is a glint on the floor where he swore there was no glint before. Unease, curiosity, and the inherent borrower urge to hoard shiny objects take over, and he cautiously approaches the glint.

An attorney's badge.

He picks it up, turning it over, running his hands along its engraved surface, reading its identification number.

Mia's attorney's badge.

Phoenix sighs and drops his bindle. He sits down, holding the badge in his lap and looks up, out the window, at the moon.

"Real subtle, Chief." Phoenix laughs. "I better not regret this."

[pollylynn]

XOXOXO—A Dedicated, Too Sequel (Caskett Post-Ep for Eye of the Beholder, 4 x 05)

Title: XOXOXO—A Dedicated, Too Sequel   WC: 1600

A/N: A few years ago, I wrote this schmoopy mess. I had always thought about writing a brief sequel. Recently someone on AO3 commented on the story, saying it was about time for the sequel. So, here it kind of is. If you don’t want to read the first story, all you really need to know is that Castle insists that Beckett give him a business card at the end of The Dead Pool (3 x 21) because he’s jealous that she gave Alex Conrad one.  

It was love at first sight for him. Really. It's stupid. It's cliché. It's childish, schmaltzy, revisionist history. 

But it's also the truth. 

He'd run head long at it right away, that instantaneous, earth-shaking desire. He had launched himself at it with no method, no finesse whatsoever, because–hey, a one-night stand, right? Maybe a once-in-a-while-night stand if he could manage to play his his cards right. But that’s what he’d figured on, because he was so over the very idea of being in love by the time he met her. 

And then it had simply been a matter of sticking around to meet the challenge. She had proven to be formidable opponent, and honor demanded that he give it his all—that he not fight the duel left-handed, as it were. He’d held on to those delusions a while, variations on a theme that had served him well for a good long while—intermittently at least.  

There had been times, even from early on, that the truth had surfaced, painfully and otherwise—with the throb of empathetic misery the first time she told him her mother’s story, and the sharp sizzle of jealousy when Sorenson John Wayned his way on to the scene, to say nothing of the sheer disbelief and indignation he’d felt upon learning that he—that clown—had walked away from her. With the absolute emptiness he’d felt watching her walk away from him, knowing he had no one but himself to blame, the truth that it was love at first sight had surfaced, and the pain was shocking. 

So he’d told himself again that he was done—forever and ever, Amen, done—being in love, and with good reason. Love, inevitably, brought pain, and he was so over that. 

And he’d spent a year cultivating his image as an utter rascal, who’d happily undertake a tumble with her, should she find herself so inclined—no messy, emotional strings attached. He’d spent a year pretending that he lived for nothing more than the certainty that he’d have his prize—he’d wear her down, and in the end, she’d be thoroughly glad that he had. 

He’d spent a year playing at all that, keeping the truth at bay. And for his trouble, he’d stumbled on to another kiss with another Dudley Do-Right, because for some damned reason, Rebel Bex not withstanding, that had seemed to be her type. And the things he’d pulled after that—the way he’d whipsawed from geuinely trying to win her away to sauntering off with Gina so that she would know what she was missing—he still dies a little inside every time he thinks of all that.

Because it’s been a mess since then on, honesty. It’s been a mess. From Gina to not Gina, from Josh to . . . not Josh, and smack in the middle of that the question he’ll carry to his grave—what might it have changed if he’d simply told her he loved her that night in her apartment. What might they have averted if he’d picked up the gauntlet she’d thrown—What about you, Rick?— and told her in no uncertain terms that he had loved her from that exact first moment at the book party?

It has never been an easy truth—never. He has sat with it, alone in one way or another, each and every summer that he has known her. And now, it has hardly been any time at all since he has had to sit alone with it for the most sustained, painful stretch of his life, utterly unable to push it away, explain it way, live in the shelter of his delusions about being done with love. It’s hardly been any time at all since the cryptic conversation on the swings, where she said—he thinks she said—that she might not remember, but she knows, and there’s hope.  

It feels like there’s been nothing to do but wait since then, nothing to do but mark time. But in his more honest moments, he knows it’s not simply that. It’s work on his end, just as it is on hers. It’s learning to run headlong at the fact that he loves her—for real this time—and accepting that this is going to hurt, often and for the rest of his life, because love requires that. It requires vulnerability and offering up and risk and he is . . . working on that. 

He’s working on that when Serena Kaye sashays into his life, the temptation to end all temptations. Because he is single, in theory. Because Serena Kaye is interested and precisely  his speed, historically. Because she—Kate—has staked no claim on him, technically. And when she is suddenly the one stumbling upon a kiss, things are not just complicated, they’re impossible—impossible. 

Serena is the safe choice. She is the nuke it from orbit and save yourself choice, and he could be done being in love. He could be safe and . . . reasonably satisfied, and no one looking on at the situation could say he had done a damned thing wrong. 

But he doesn’t want to be safe, and as it turns out, he seems to be too far gone to be good to anyone for one-night-stand purposes—for once-in-awhile-night-stand purposes. 

So Serena Kaye sashays out of his life and Kate is made bold by recent events and it’s happy ever after, right? 

It is, in large part. She—Kate—is flirty and shy in irresistible combination. She is imperious and solicitous and, beneath it all, a little scared. She has some intermittent rabbit pulse going, and a part of him that’s a little mean—that feels a little hard done by—is glad about that, except not really, because he’s scared, too. 

He’s so scared by all of this that it’s hard to enjoy what’s pretty inarguably a date that she’s taken him on. It’s hard not to feel on the verge of doing something catastrophically stupid to save himself the pain. 

It’s hard, but it’s not impossible. He does enjoy it. So does she, right up to the point that it’s time to argue about the check, and things kick into high gear.

“You’re destitute, Castle.” She’s twisting around in her seat trying to catch the waiter’s attention, but the kid is terrible, and it’s no mean feat. “I assume you’re going to have to ride the rails after this, so the least I can do is make sure you do it on a full stomach.” 

“Fine,” he says, playing up the surrender. “I’ll go powder my nose, then.” 

He slips from the booth before she can say anything. He hunts down their paper-hatted, clip-on-bow-tie-wearing bundle of resentment and moves to settle the tab quickly before she arrests the two of them. He reaches for his wallet . . . and comes up empty. He turns the inside pocket of his sport coat out—like a cartoon hobo—in utter disbelief. 

He pivots, orienting immediately to her on pure instinct and sees her at the counter, pushing bills back across it to the nominally older teenager who is obviously the responsible party for the night. He drifts toward her, seething, delighting, loving her with all he’s got. And she waits, the magnet pulling him in, grinning, holding up his wallet in triumph. 

“Be more careful with that.” With a brisk flip of his lapel, she drops the wallet back in his inside pocket. “No telling what someone might get up to if they got their hands on that.” 

He abuses her with utter good cheer all the way to the corner where it’s time for them to part ways. She struts alongside him, crowing and enjoying her coup to the fullest. They slow their steps in unison. They linger under the streetlight, but it’s late. It’s late. 

“Well,” he’s the one to say, “I guess I’d better get home and pack that bindle.” 

“Guess you’d better,” she agrees, smiling down at the sidewalk. She pauses and gives him a sideways look, as if she’s about to say something more. She changes her mind, though. She presses her lips together and he sees her change her mind before she says simply, “Try to hold on to that wallet, Castle.” 

He does. He makes his way home with his fingers curled around his lapel and his palm braced over the weight of it in his inside pocket. There’s something about the parting admonition—something about the teasing you never know that she tossed his way back at Remi’s. So he holds on to it, and by the end, he’s rushing—into the building, up the stairs, into the loft, and into the comparatively safe confines of his bedroom. 

He flips open the wallet, prepared to ransack it absolutely in search of a clue. He doesn’t have to, though. The disturbance is immediately obvious. A business card is out of place—her business card, soft and creased with handling, has been extracted from one of the deepest recesses and tucked defiantly in one of the outermost slots. 

He pulls it out with his heart pounding and his stomach doing adolescent, so-totally-in-love loop-de-loops. He flips the card over to trace her name–the signature he’d insisted on so that his card would be better than the one she’d slipped to Alex Conrad to drive him crazy. He flips the card over, and there beneath the bold strokes of her name, an addition: XOXOXO. 

A/N: So dumb and gross. 

[internutter]

Can we get a story where non Baby!Angus Ango does something that crosses enough of a line that Taako and Kravitz have to punish him? (Like ground him out put him on pooper-scooper duty at Magnus')

It was quite the crime scene. The miasma of burned sugar and almonds filled the house. Half a cake lay under a cover of preservation. Some blackened blobs of... something... lay on a baking tray. Bubbles were frozen in the blobs’ surface, and Kravitz noted with alarm that there was no parchment nor any baking paper between them and the tray, which meant that the tray was essentially ruined.

Opposite the cake and the tray was a spread of marzipan fondant, patterned with candy canes and snowflakes, as evidenced by the rolling pin with embossed shapes on it. There were holes cut in the layer, yuletide shapes of gingerbread men, snowmen, trees, and bells. There were those shapes of cookie cutters laying nearby, as well as a large spreader knife.

This was not a Taako experiment. This was... a series of bad assumptions.

The house was quiet, save for the pleading mewls of the household cats. It was past their dinnertime by nearly half an hour, so they were clearly starving to death. Wait. Not quite silent... there were two separate sets of sobbing.

One in Angus’ room, one in Taako’s.

Kids came first.

He found Angus trying to pack to run away from home. He had an umbrella, which he was clearly planning to use as a bindle stick, and a large scarf upon which he was laying out what he thought of as the essentials. Since he was actually only three and a half, those things were mostly toys and favourite books. And a family portrait.

“Packing to leave?” asked Kravitz.

“I have to,” sniffled Angus. “...’m evil now.”

Um. What? “Nobody turns evil overnight, kiddo... Tell you what... I’ll talk about this with Apa. I don’t know what went wrong,” he could guess, but... “Just like Caleb Cleveland, I need all the facts.”

Taako was in a depression ball inside one of his terrible Candlenights sweaters. The one with the googly-eyed reindeer on it, which he utterly despised.

“Dove? Is there anything you need?”

“...jar of super-crunchy peanut butter an’ a jar of fuckin’ peanuts.”

Aaah, crap. This was bad.  He had to be stern with one of them, and Taako was obviously the toughest. “Dove... Taako. I need to know what the fuck happened here. At least come out enough to talk to me.”

He’d let his glamour go, and his makeup run, and his hair tangle. This... was fucking terrible.

“He thought... my marzipan fondant... was sugar cookies. And he tried t’ bake ‘em... while I was on the Stone to Marvellous Magic Magazine. I told him to wait... He didn’t wait... Do you know how long it takes to make marzipan from scratch, Krav? Do you know how long that takes?”

Kravitz could guess ‘more than a little while’ and moved on to the next obvious question. “Why were you making marzipan from scratch, love?”

“Fucking Suzan and her gods-damned neighbourhood Candlenights’ party. Like fuck am I using anything store bought for anything I bring there.” He shuddered and sobbed. “And worse, that baking tray is fucking ruined... It was one of our wedding gifts...”

Kravitz wrapped around him and let him cry it out. “So our boy made some bad choices... In his defence, we had been making sugar cookies all week...”

A shuddering breath in. “I know...”

“He probably thought he was trying to help.”

“I know...”

“So what’s the real trouble?”

“I dunno what t’ do about this,” Taako whimpered. “I might’a overreacted...”

“Angus did tell me he was evil now... and was trying to run away from home.”

“...oh gods...” Taako broke down in incoherent blubbering, but the gist of his teary babbling was that he never wanted any baby to feel unwanted. He never wanted to make Angus feel like he was hated, that life sucked. He was a bad parent and so on and so forth.

Kravitz carried Taako to Angus room so they could both bawl out their apologies to each other under his wing. In this case, literally under his wing... because the shelter of his wings hd always helped both husband and son feel safe.

They finally wound down to coherent words. “I’m sorry I didn’t wait. I wanted you to be proud I could do it all by myself.”

“I’m sorry I overreacted, baby. You’re not evil. And you’re not... anything else I said, I swear I don’t remember a lot of it, and I never meant a word. Apa got way too upset about a silly mistake.”

“All right. Now for a new house rule. You cause a mess, you at least try to fix it.”

“Guess that means tryin’a scrub burned marzipan off’a the baking tray,” mumbled Taako. “I’ll put all your stuff back to rights. Then we all learn Fabricate because fuck making marzipan from scratch after this meltdown.”

Taako could re-order Ango’s room on his own, but Angus would need supervision to at least try to get rid of burned marzipan. It was hard work, for sure, and Angus was not allowed to use Prestidigitation to clean it. He had to understand how much recovery was involved in a mistake like this one.

Angus managed to chip most of the bubbly blobs off and scour two burned marks off the surface before Taako declared, “Okay. That’s enough. You’re gonna wait when I tell ya from now, aren’t you, Ango?”

“...’essir.”

“M’kay. Lesson learned. Now for a fun one. Fabricate...”

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[motleyfuckingcruee]

I'm Bad At Life (Nikki Sixx x Reader)

Requested:

@lauravic

Summary:

Could you do a one-shot of Nikki and his girlfriend (they started dating before his fame) and after Motley Crue takes off she’s beginning to get left behind and they end up breaking up after she’s had enough with the drugs and his cheating. Could end happy if you want like with them back together or just a sad angsty end.

Warnings:

Language, angst, drugs, abuse

Song the title is based on:

I'm Bad At Life

REQUESTS ARE OPEN!!!!

COMMENT IF YOU WANT TO BE ON A TAGLIST! OR GO TO MY BIO TO ADD YOURSELF TO ONE!

//

You sigh as you sit on the couch in your and NIkki’s shared apartment. He hasn’t been home in almost a week and you have no idea where he went. For all you know he could be on another one of his drug binges somewhere in upstate California. He left you here alone with your dog Whisky that you guys got a few months before. Nikki is so strung out that he forgot that he got Whisky for your birthday. In fact, he forgot your birthday. And your anniversary. That’s the first time he’s ever forgotten something that involves you. He always claimed that he loved you too much to forget something about you.

He’s been slipping away recently. From you and even Tommy. He’s not been the same Nikki you knew back in 1981. It’s now 1987. He’s been different. Angrier. His mood can switch in a second. You’re fucking tired of it. He’s been treating you like shit. He gets mad when you ask where he was or what he’s doing. Later he’ll apologize and say that he’s just stressed trying to write more songs for the Girls album. You know that’s bullshit.

He won’t even let you go into the bedroom anymore.You soon found out why.

You decided to go into the bedroom as soon as Nikki left that morning. You knew from the way he was acting that he wouldn’t be back for a while. So, you took your chances. You pushed open the heavy, gothic door that Nikki picked out himself. You scrunched up your nose as the smell of shit and body fluids meet your nostrils.

Everything seemed to be normal. Pages of crumpled paper laid on the ground. His clothes were stacked in a piled heap in the corner of the room. A worn out journal sat on the desk in the corner of the room. You knew that was his journal. You respect his privacy, so you didn’t read it. You aren’t the nosy type of girlfriend. You were about to leave when you noticed something on the ground in front of the closet. Nikki’s gun. You walked over and picked it up. Your eyes widened as you realized it was fully loaded. The safety wasn’t on either. You quickly put it on, your heart was pounding. Was he thinking of hurting you?

That’s when you opened the closet. You gasped at the sight. Nearly melted spoons, dirty and used syringes, bindles of cocaine, little baggies of smack littered the ground. He’s been injecting heroin, again? That definitely has been what’s wrong with him.

Blow was one thing. Hell, you used to lines with Tommy all of the time before the band got big. You all were wild and carefree. But, you grew older. You got responsible while Nikki still thought he was twenty one. You thought that after he overdosed on Valentine’s Day the year before, he would have stopped smack. You were horribly wrong. This looks worse than it did when you helped him throw it all away the year before.

Now, you’re just waiting for Nikki to come home so that you can confront him about his unhealthy addiction. You don’t know how this is going to go down. He might even hate you. You hate thinking that, but that’s how Nikki is now. Spiteful. He blames everyone but himself. Nothing is ever his fault according to him. He’s said that to your face a few times.

You truly never thought that your sweet Nikki would turn into what he is now. He used to be so loving towards you and even the band at times. Now he’s rejecting their phone calls, getting mad at them when they won’t do drugs with him, not showing up to the studio to work on music. You talked to Tommy about it and he agreed that Nikki is not the same person that you knew.

Yes, Nikki was always an asshole, but not to this extent. He won’t even say that he loves you anymore. Used to he would tell you every time he looked at you. He felt lucky to have you. You guess that’s not the case anymore. Sometimes he barely acknowledges your existence.

You jump as the slamming of the front door pulls you from your thoughts. Whisky starts barking because it startled him from the deep sleep he was in. Nikki rounds the corner, looking worse than you’ve seen him in days. His hair is extremely wild and tangled. Nothing like his usual hairstyle. His clothes are hanging off of him dramatically. His ribs are prominent through the once skin tight t-shirt. He’s gotten worse in the matter of days.

“Nikki,” You say calmly. You know that if you say the wrong thing he’ll go off on you. He’ll say things he can’t take back, and he won’t even be sorry for it. He locks eyes with you. His eyes just look like dark voids. They’re not the once vibrant green that entranced you.

“What?” He nearly barks at you.

You stand up, walking over to be closer to him. You rub your hands on his shoulders and down his arms, then back again. “Why didn’t you tell me you were on smack again?”

He scoffs, pulling away from your touch. “I never stopped.”

You furrow your eyebrows. “Nik, I thought you dying would stop this. We threw everything away.”

Nikki rolls his eyes. “I still have contact with my dealers. Besides I’m fine.”

You shake your head, fearing for your fiance. “No you’re not. You’re practically a skeleton, baby. You need help.”

His eyes grow bright with anger at your words. Before you can even register what’s happening, NIkki has you pinned up against the wall. You’ve never been scared of Nikki. You knew that he wouldn’t do anything to hurt you. However, in this moment, you won’t doubt it if he punches you.

“I don’t need help, you understand me?” He growls, his grip tightens on your wrists. You know for sure that it’ll leave bruises tomorrow. “Stay the fuck out of my way (Y/N). I’d hate to have to hurt you.”

Somehow you manage to push the man off of you. You have a feeling that he’s too weak to pack in a great punch like normal.

You grab Whisky by the collar and turn to Nikki one last time. You know exactly what to do. This is what’s best for both you and Nikki since it seems your only in his way.

“Fuck you, Nikki Sixx,” You growl. “We’re fucking done. I’ll be by to get my things tomorrow.”

With that you pull Whisky out to your car. You open the back door and Whisky jumps in immediately. You get in the driver’s seat and revv up the engine. You just want to get away from the Heroin House. Nikki stands on the porch.

He just watches you leave. No emotion on his face. For the first time since you’ve met him, you can’t tell what he’s thinking. You think you see a flash of hurt and regret on his face, but it’s gone as soon as it came.

Oh well, he’s not your problem anymore.

The only problem you can think of is where you’re going to stay. Your mind immediately thinks of Heather and Tommy. They’d take you in. You’re close with Heather and Tommy. You’ve always been closer to those two.

You turn down the street that leads to Tommy’s place.

Tears run down your face. You guess that you and Nikki are really over. Seven years of your life have just been wasted. You were always faithful. The bad part is that you know that on tour Nikki wasn’t faithful.

At this point, you barely believed that he ever loved you.

Tags:

All fics: @the--blackdahlia @sugar-content @sharon6713 @siliwanoel @charlyallise @lo-bells

Nikki: @moon-beame @slutfor-sixx @2dead2function @horrorpxnk

[trainthief]

@ambientwitch SDJF after his friend goes home stuart spends hours stressing out over what his dads are going to do when they see the hole and he starts packing a tiny little bindle on a toothpick to run away from home so they cant be mad at him but when they get home from work they dont even notice cause its so fucking small 

[wander-verse]

Fool’s Errand 1/2

He came home from the woods, age eight, to see Mother weeping on the doorstep. A magistrate’s wagon was carrying his father away under a shroud.

There was an accident while he was playing that day. A hired hand, a thresher, swung his scythe directly into Papa’s chest. It was an accident. The thresher was run off the farm by the neighbors, anyway.

That winter the rest of the wheat rotted in the fields. Who in their right mind would harvest it? Nobody would harvest cursed plants. Nobody would bake with tainted grain. It was the first death Azar could remember, and the hardest above the rest.

--

A man in a uniform came to the farm and took count of everyone present. Mother seemed afraid, but the man in the uniform barely said anything to her. He did, however, ask for the oldest child’s birthday and age. He made sure the child’s bones were strong, that the child’s vision was good, that the child could hear and run and climb. Then the soldier left. Azar was twelve years old.

Just before his fourteenth birthday, a magistrate’s messenger came from town and passed him a stamped, sealed paper. It was the year three-hundred forty-seven, in a season that Turkans would later call The Spring of Empty Houses.

He was a familiar face, the messenger; Azar recognized him as the gangly man who delivered forms from the town granary, as well as his mother’s tiny inheritance. The child tucked the paper under his arm and invited the messenger in to say hello to Mother and his baby sister, who took great joy in playing with the messenger’s long ringlets.

But the messenger shook his head. He insisted that Azar open the letter immediately. He had to return with a response.

Inside the letter was King Osman’s seal and an order. Report to the quartermaster at the Throne in the South as soon as possible.

Azar wasn’t stupid. The letter didn’t need to announce itself as a conscription order for him to know. Word in town was that you would know your assignment based on the reporting site: the magisters if you were selected for siege service, the guard academy for cavalry and archery recruits, the quartermaster for infantry. If you were to be excused for health or merit, you weren’t sent all the way to the Throne in Tiguerout.

Mother knew something was wrong when she returned from the peach grove. One of the twins was in the kitchen, sitting beneath the table and crying. She comforted the abandoned toddler and later found Azar in the wheat fields, tears streaking his dusty face.

Mother stopped his crying, stiffened his lip. She helped him pack up clothes and dried fruit and bread for the trip and sent him away with enough money for the ferry rides to the mainland.

--

Innsmen gave him free lodging in Passenso and Diban. Nobody seemed to ask why such a young child, so dirty in the face and with a farmhand’s clothes, was travelling somber and alone towards Tiguerout. The Dibani Arms owner gave him a free dinner and set him up in a tiny room on the second floor; at the Minstrel Inn in Passenso, a barmaid took him silently to a chamber out of the way of the other customers. He didn’t ask questions.

It was much the same in Ouaïnnkanou, the southernmost mainland city. There were choices of inns here, but most buildings had hand-painted signs advertising free rooms to young men heading for Tiguerout. He wandered into one near the edge of town and was sent to a room crowded with others. That night, he slept on the floor between a crying boy not much older than himself and a father who spent half the evening folding and unfolding a letter.

From Ouaïnnkanou to Tiguerout he rode in a wagon carrying hay and men. The farmers didn’t seem bothered by bindle-carrying travelers who hopped on the backs of their wagons without warning, so he stepped up onto one and held on tight. It was a rocky ride, but it was much faster than walking, and easier.

The child trained up quick, like all the other soldiers. There was, in that year, no time for long drills and specialization. The border dispute with Ketharous turned bloody in the earliest days of spring, and Turkos dealt with the blood in the only way they could at the time: young bodies, maybe not primed but armed and zealous. Azar’s training class was together for just under two months before they shipped north to Béla Crava for their final orders. The day after the company set out, Azar turned fourteen.

--

Caravans of soldiers, rations and weapons left Tiguerout on the ill-maintained northeast road that skirted the Oxspine mountains and wound along the coast of Turkos. This far east there weren’t many cities, just small fishing villages and scattered groups of sheep-farming nomads—the coast was ill-guarded and very few people settled in the region for fear of invasion by sea. Sometimes at night, though, when they passed along the shorter mountains, the company could see smoke from fires and radiant light from the cities along the Turkan steppe to the west.

Azar marched with the ration cart, rear left corner, a cloth over his face to keep out the dust and the cold. At first he tried to trot to keep up with it, but he soon learned to hang onto the side instead, sword drawn and ready for bandits and wolves. On the second day he fell off and couldn’t catch up for almost an hour. He did not fall again.

By night he stayed close to the ration cart and hid behind a wheel, rubbing his dust-dried eyes and trying to warm his hands. A rotation of men, young and old, joined him with blankets, thicker coats, stories, tears, but never the same person twice, never the same sad story told a second time. He collected their words and, with a scrap of paper in his tunic pocket, wrote them down in a letter to Mother.

It took nearly two months to reach Béla Crava from Tiguerout, two months of nighttime raids from wild boars and teary stories from strangers and choking dust that coated Azar’s tongue until all food tasted the same. They marched triumphant through the city as if they’d won some battle, banners flapping and brass calling around them, attended by townspeople who’d long since learned to see through the pageantry. An old lady, grumbling a language he didn’t know, handed him a delicious-smelling roll. He nibbled at it, but it tasted still like dust.

--

Company Twenty-Seven, the poster read, reporting to Colonel Youssein in Halflight Valley, at the outpost by the foot of Mount Egri. He knew the word Halflight. He knew the stories about men ripped apart by the Kethars. Azar tried to rub his eyes and reread the poster, but the words were the same: Company Twenty-Seven, Halflight Valley, Mount Egri outpost. The other soldiers broke down their caravan and headed for their supply trains and scouting companies and field hospitals, and he followed his company to the front.

--

It was October, with a chill settling into the wood of the pikes that surrounded their camp, when Azar ran from his first battle. A Kethari scouting team set explosive powder in the crook of a hastily-built guard tower and set it alight. The guards leapt down before the tower collapsed in on itself, and the horsemen rushed to cut off the scouts before they could escape.

Somewhere distant, Colonel Youssein called for the infantry to attack. From the ditches and the tents and the wagons, men bolted for the tower and the Kethars at the base.

Hours later, First Lieutenant Hokka found Azar cowering under the ribs of a dismantled wagon. She reprimanded him for cowardice and assigned him to night watch for two weeks.

In another life, First Lieutenant Hokka thought, I’d comfort him. A child, terrified under a wagon, watching soldiers twice his age torn to shreds. But the King’s offices don’t believe in children from the Eastern Isles, only men.

--

The next day, his bunkmate left for Béla Crava in a wagon attended by medics. They covered his pockmarked body in a wool cloth and waved thick, choking incenses around the camp. Kethar Rot, the whispers said, and anyone nearby could be struck the same. It lived in the water and the air and only Kethars themselves were immune. One of the artillerymen, a native of Meshullam, offered Azar a sticky salve and a prayer, but he shook his head, indicating the Sign of the Empty that his mother had sent along. No absent gods would spare them of the rot.

--

Two more skirmishes came and went, and the time between fights got shorter. They saw prowling Kethari scouts behind trees and rocks and in the distant hills to the east, even on days when nobody came running from cover with weapons raised. Wounded horses and camels littered the field around the camp (one with Azar’s knife in its ribs, earning nothing more than a stern nod from First Lieutenant Hokka), some draped over their crying riders. One of the Casthan soldiers, a pale man with very little skill in Turkan, wandered the fields at sundown silencing the horses and their trapped riders, but Azar was still sure he heard them crying at night.

The third skirmish bled into the night. Colonel Youssein called for reinforcements the first moment he could spare a horse; the messenger bolted silent into the night mere minutes before another wave of Kethars spilled down the steep hills, leaping over the bodies of their kin.

Azar was quick. All the youngest soldiers were. The Turkan armor was far too big on his body, so he had left it in his tent hours before; that night, weaving through abandoned cannons and falling bodies, he was glad for the light tunic. When their reinforcements arrived from the Bohula contingent, he found that the remainders of the Twenty-Seventh were all unarmored as well.

A Bohula contingent officer, ushering the sodden and exhausted survivors to a field hospital behind the camp, told him the battle was near over, that he’d done his service and his mother would be proud when she saw him. He said the dregs of the Twenty-Seventh would return to Tiguerout as heroes, adorned in garlands of rare flowers and sent back to their homes with as much silver as they could carry. This was the payment for their terror. A day later, the same officer took them from the hospital and sent them back to the smoke-choked field.

He rotated in and out of battle for two more days before the Kethari finally ran back into the hills, dragging dying officers behind them. Colonel Youssein’s final orders, taken from his jacket before his body was burned, directed the last thirty soldiers of his regiment to the Twenty-Ninth in the Siperm marsh. He watched Hokka’s dead eyes as she read their orders aloud, watched the light fade around her as they marched north.

--

The night watch shrieked, and Azar was the first to move. Ever since they left Mount Egri, he hadn’t slept at all; every tiny noise made his hands clench tight on his wool blanket, so he’d given up on sleep entirely.

He leapt up to see only one Kethar, midnight-black paint cutting his face into ribbons, the campfire glinting gold on the bronze tip of his spear. Azar found the night watcher’s knife stuck blade-down into a log, found it in his hand and flying easy, whistling, through the air,

found it in the Kethar’s throat,

found the Kethar on the ground

dead, eyes wide.

First Lieutenant Hokka didn’t say a word when she awoke. The Twenty-Seventh were silent. Nobody made a move to stop him when he snatched up his blanket and a flaming branch from their fire. Surely someone would report this, the whole incident, the scout and the single enemy casualty and the clear hints at a diverted raid, but not for quite a while.

He ran, and he didn’t look back.

[heeeatofthemoment]

Destruction x Reader Fic

Fic number three in my Endless x reader series. I’m still convinced I have no clue what I’m doing, but here goes I guess... Hope you like it! :D

This was the last thing you wanted to do, but you were desperate. After walking for so long and having to spend numerous nights in a tent, it was relieving to see some form of civilisation, even if it came in the form of a small log cabin.

You eyed it from a distance, looking for signs of an occupant. Staring closely, you notice muddy boots on the front porch that looked recently worn. Scanning over the windows you don’t see much, but you catch a brief glimpse of a figure move past one.

Someone was definitely home. You considered this both a good and bad thing. Good because if they were nice they might offer you some food, maybe even a place to sleep for the night. Though bad because he might be a decent human being and try and get you home.

After your last encounter with another friendly bystander, you know that some people try and “help” runaways like you get back to where you belong. But since then, things have got a lot different.

First you made your way along the motorway, hitch hiking when you could. Then you were ambushed by some guy who made off with some of your food. You had to talk your way through a conversation with a policewoman who almost worked you out as a runaway. Eventually you make your way to this wood, and you’ve been wandering it for two days now, sleeping in a tent each night and you were almost at the end of your limits. So, upon seeing the cabin, you had caved.

Mustering your courage, you walk up and knock on the door, mentally preparing the story you will go for. As soon as your fist meets the wooden entrance, you hear a sudden clattering of something from inside. Clearly the occupant doesn’t usually get visitors.

The sound of heavy footsteps on the hard floor walk up to the door, before it swings open and you are met with the man who lives here.

He looked like he was in his forties with a with a scruffy ginger hairstyle and even scruffier boxed beard. His body was quite muscular and he wore a simple white t-shirt with khaki cargo trousers. As soon as his hazel eyes looked down to you, he seemed to relax a small amount.

“Well hello there, are you alright?” he asked you, his voice bearing a higher-class tone to it. He addressed you the same way a chivalrous knight would.

“Yeah, I’m kind of lost and was wondering if I could help me?” you replied in as innocent a voice as you could, without trying to sound like you were a threat to this man. He looked you up and down, quickly assessing you and your gear before answering.

“Of course! You also seem quite hungry so please come in!” he stood to the side and waved you in. You nod and accept his invitation, silently surprised that he let you in so easily. Shouldering your pack and removing your shoes, which you place to the side in the entrance, you walk in.

The interior to the cabin isn’t anything special. Though there were various projects around the room, ranging from sculptures to paintings, to models and piles of paper with scripts and other creative works. There was a faint smell of some form of bakery in the air too, which was heavenly to you after living off petrol station food for days.

“Please take a seat. You’re just in time, my latest batch is almost finished,” the man said, rubbing his hands together and making his way to the kitchen area. He gestures to the living area, where there is a sofa for you to sit.

Taking a seat, you relax, making yourself more at home than you probably should considering it isn’t your place. You just couldn’t help it. It had been so long since you had a chance to properly loosen up, and you oddly felt at home here, at least more so than your actual home.

Whilst the man was busy, you had a closer look at your surroundings. Behind a couple of boxes, you made out a dog bowl that was caked in dust, which meant it mustn’t have been used in a while. You could just about make out the name “Barnabas” on the side.

Leaning against a wall nearby was a picture frame with a sword in it, which looked beaten and used, though you couldn’t tell what from. In front of you there was a simple fireplace. It was unlit, and on the mantle, there lay a bindle. An honest-to-goodness stereotypical hobo pack, complete with stick and red and white chequered cloth tied at the end. You almost snicker at how cartoonish it was. Your observations are interrupted by a sharp ‘ding’ from behind you, and you gaze over to see your host holding a baking tray of steaming hot brownies.

“And they’re done!” he exclaims triumphantly, presenting them to you.

“They look good,” you respond, oddly amused by the genuine joy from the man. Grabbing a couple of plates and forks, he slices up two pieces for each of you and brings them over, taking a seat next to you.

“Please have some, you have to tell me how they are!”

You accept the food, and immediately take a bite. As soon as you put it in your mouth, you are overwhelmed with bitterness. Feeling bad though, you keep a straight face and swallow the mouthful, resisting the urge to shudder.

“Well?” he says expectantly, “how was it?”

“Um… yeah it’s actually quite good,” you respond, not convinced with your own lie. He eyes you for a second, before arcing back and letting out an enormous laugh. The unadulterated guffaw in his exclamation almost makes you jump. He eventually quietens down and wipes away a tear.

“Ah I appreciate the kindness, but after living with my family, it’s easy to see when one isn’t telling the truth. After all, I can’t get better if you don’t give me criticism, and it’ll be nice to hear genuine critiques rather than the condescension I’d have gotten from Barnabas”.

You pause before answering. Wasn’t Barnabas the name of his dog?

“Well, to be honest I think you went overboard with the cocoa powder,” you respond, shy at first.

“Really? But I figured that would make them more chocolatey?” he asks you, puzzled.

“Not quite how that works unfortunately”.

“Ah well, better luck with the next batch then I guess”. He takes your plate and puts to one side. “Now then, what is your name? Since we seem to have skipped formalities”.

You almost respond automatically with a fake name you came up with weeks ago. But you stop yourself, as you feel kind of safe around this person.

“It’s (Y/N),” you answer. “You?”

“You can call me Destruction,” he says simply, though he doesn’t seem pleased when saying it.

“Um… no offence but that’s an odd name”.

Destruction chuckles in response. “Yes, well it’s actually more of a title, but at this point it’s pretty much become my name. Now, is there anything I can help with?” he asks, smiling as he does. Not in a creepy way. But a warm and friendly way, as if he were long last father.

“Yes. I’m kind of lost and a little bit tired, so if it’s ok can I rest here a little while? Then could you offer me some directions?” Unintentionally you put on your ‘lost innocent child’ voice, which you feel bad for because there was no need to guilt trip this guy. Despite this he answers.

“Of course! I know this wood can turn you around occasionally, and you’re welcome to stay a few hours if you wish”.

“Oh, thank you!” you respond.

“However, I will need something in return”.

You tense up slightly. Though he didn’t have any cynicism in his voice, you couldn’t help feel sacred. You’d seen enough films to know where this could go.

“And that is?” you ask, showing your nervousness a bit too much.

“Calm child, you won’t come to any harm here. I only wish to hear your story,” he tilted his head slightly, regarding you as if you were a new book.

“My story?”

“Yes. It’ll be refreshing to hear something new. Don’t spare any details either, tell about what you enjoy and hate, and more importantly why you’re running away,” he says this simply, but it hits you like a beanbag to the stomach. Your brain goes into defensive mode.

“Who says I’m running away?” you retort, narrowing your eyes at him.

“It takes one to know one,” he counters, smiling with a wistful melancholy, “And I as I said, I’m good at telling when someone is withholding the truth”.

There is a moment of quiet between you. You’re trying to judge whether or not you could trust him. He could have called the police and they could be on their way here to drag you back home. Then again, Destruction hasn’t done anything to suggest he would do something like that. Even though you’ve known him minutes few, you felt like he wasn’t here to make fun, or anything of the sort. Taking a deep breath and a sigh, you tell him. You describe how your mum died when you were young and how it affected you dad. How he became more and more unstable, slowly neglecting you more and breaking down in anger or sadness. Eventually you couldn’t take it. You didn’t know how to help and you were scared. So, you ran. As you described it all, Destruction took in every detail. To his credit he was a good listener, not interrupting once or breaking eye contact. He didn’t make any indication as to what he was thinking. You hadn’t realised how long you had been talking after a while. You spoke about your life in school and how you had one best friend. You mentioned the sports you played and the writing you did. Despite being an introverted person, you found yourself venting quite a bit. So much so that you eventually stopped and noticed a single tear was streaming down your face.

“Sorry…” you mumble.

Destruction produces a small handkerchief from his pocket and passes it to you.

“It’s ok, but please, finish your story”.

You give him a confused look. “But I’ve told you everything, up until today”.

“Yes, but has the story ended? No, you’re still going. So, tell me, where are you going? What are your plans?”

You open to your mouth to answer, but you realise you don’t have an answer. “I don’t know I guess. Just away at the moment. I don’t really have a plan”.

Destruction went into a far-away gaze. “Much like you, I ran away, though for a different reason. I had a job, some may have called it important,” he shrugged. “I however… disagreed with it”.

“What was it?” you asked.

“Directing all the destruction in the world,” he said simply, with an expression as if he’d eaten something bitter.

You were left speechless however. Only able to muster a simple, “Ok?” in response. “So, what exactly? You built weapons or something?”

“In a manner of speaking. Any form ruin, damage or annihilation in the world, I had orchestrated. Every building that collapsed, any fire that scorched, any weapon that killed, I was the one that set it into motion”.

Despite his unthreatening tone, you couldn’t help but feel uneasy. Was this guy crazy? What did any of this mean? You must have had a dark expression on your face because he chuckled suddenly.

“You need not be afraid (Y/N), I’m not that man anymore,” he said, smiling with a clear pained melancholy.

“So… you were a…” you pause for a second, at lack of a better term, “a god?”

Though you gave your question in a serious tone, Destruction laughed slightly.

“Hardly. In fact, I might have the gall to say I’d be above what you consider a god, but frankly that is a very deep and difficult to answer concept that isn’t important right now”.

Once again, he simple waved aside this comment. ‘Above… a god?’ you thought to yourself. ‘What does that even mean?’

“Right, and you were responsible for all destruction?” you ask. He nods in response, giving no emotion away.

“So, things like the plague? The sacking of Rome? The Spanish ransacking the Aztecs?”

Destruction closes his eyes and grimaces. “Yes, I was”.

“What about the two world wars? The atomic bombs and-”

“No! I refused to be involved in that in any way!” he said suddenly, with a sternness in his voice that didn’t seem possible from him when you first met. The hearth-like warmth in his eyes had been replaced with a heat that you might experience in the immediate aftermath of a nuclear detonation. You recoil slightly, scared of the different person who stood before you. Seeing your reaction, he seems to scold himself.

“I… I’m sorry. I had nothing to do with these sort of events as of late,” he begins, having calmed down and was back to his usual gentle tone. “I saw that the path of destruction would eventually lead up to atomic weaponry, and the other inventions that would come about as a result of your human ‘age of reason’. Seeing this, around about three hundred odd years ago, I decided to quit”.

You decided to gloss over the ‘three hundred years ago’ statement. “So, who took over from you?”

“No-one. Usually when one of my kind is killed the universe replaces us with another, but I didn’t die and I kept my symbol, so that no-one else had to bear the burden of my task. Now, the world creates its own destruction,” he explains, after which there is a long silent between the two of you. Though this felt like a world shattering stuff to hear about, you oddly only felt sorry for him. Having to be tasked with such a degrading thing must be horrible.

“What do you do now then?” you break the quietness with your small voice. The question seems to make him happier.

“Well, at the moment, as you’ve seen, I’m trying to learn to bake. It something that keeps alluding me when I try”.

You can’t help but laugh at this statement. “You’re an all-powerful being and you’re struggling to bake?” you tease.

“Well my sole purpose was to destroy, so creating is a challenge, even it is something simple. But I won’t stop me. I have had several hobbies over the years as you can see,” he gestures to all the clutter of various projects around the cabin. “I’ve found a purpose to aim for, which brings me to my original question, where are you going?” he fixes those warm eyes on you again.

“I don’t know, I’m just running at the moment”.

He sighs, much like that a chastising father would. “Running for the sake of running isn’t good for you. It can help in the short term, but eventually what you’re moving from will catch up to you”.

“No-one is going to find me,” you mutter.

“We both know that isn’t what I mean”.

You stare him down, frowning at his statement. “Then what am I running from then?”

Destruction lets a sigh. “You aren’t running out of fear of your father, or out of grief for your mother’s death. You’re scared of having to deal with the responsibility of saving your father, and scared of people viewing you as a broken.”

The words hit like a punch to the gut. Not out of offense, but because it shocked you to hear someone else say it. You kept convincing yourself in your own mind that it wasn’t that. That it was simply out of fear and grief. But being confronted by those words you couldn’t deny it. Destruction lays his hand on your shoulder.

“It is your life, you can decide what you want. It isn’t responsibility to do anything you don’t want to, I’m proof of this. However, running won’t solve anything unless you have a goal”.

You are slightly confused by his advice. “You… don’t think I should go back?”

Destruction shakes his head. “Stop thinking about what others would want, focus on yourself. You can go back if you want, face the consequences of your actions, but you will have a chance to mend your relationship with your father. Or you could keep going, but instead of running find a purpose to better yourself. Your life is your own, so make sure you do what YOU want”.

You aren’t sure how to respond. You can find no fault with his words, but at the same time you don’t know how to answer them. What DO you want? Though you’re scared of him, you really want to have your dad back, and you miss your old life. But the potential for your future is greater if you keep moving. You ponder for a good few minutes. Before you look up at Destruction.

“So? Have you decided what you need?”

You open your mouth to speak, but stop yourself, instead simply nodding. He nods back, standing up, with you joining him. He reaches out and shakes your hand.

“It has been a pleasure talking to you (Y/N), I wish you the best” he says.

“Thanks. Best of luck with your baking,” you reply, smiling at him.

He gestures to the door and hands you your pack. You push open the door and walk out into the wood, not looking back and with a purpose to drive you.

Thanks for reading! :D

[adambstingus]

What Stupid Thing Is Trending Now? (9/24/2017)

What stupid thing is trending now? Well…

It’s unclear whether the jarring audio played during the emergency broadcast was a prank, or a bumbling intern who got “normal broadcast tone” with “alien apocalypse” mixed up. Either way, these broadcasts are no War of the Worlds in terms of quality. There are a few problems with the narrative that really need to be addressed.

First, there’s the alien plot arc, which honestly left me a bit underwhelmed. The script reads, “The space program made contact with… They are not what they claim to be. They have infiltrated a lot of, uh, a lot of aspects of military establishment, particularly Area 51. The disasters that are coming-the military-I’m sorry the government knows about them…” Aliens infiltrating the military is a solid premise, but one we’ve seen before. So there needs to be a bit of extra spice to really bring this hoax dish to life. Maybe the aliens look like human babies? Or it could turn out that we were the aliens all along? Just something a little extra. And I rolled my eyes at the “Area 51” comment. I mean really, do you think aliens would make a beeline for Area 51? No, their first steps would be to assume control of Tinder and the popular restaurant franchise Applebees. With the mating habits of the young, and the dining habits of the old squarely under their control, the aliens would be able to both stymy our ability to reproduce, and our ability to keep our elderly non-cranky and somewhat tolerable. We’d be doomed within hours.

The biblical apocalypse plot must also be addressed. First of all, you can’t just layer aliens and bible End Times on top of each other like some kind of misery parfait. You have to mix them together with skillful writing, such as “God was an alien all along.” Also you can’t just handwave the events of the apocalypse by saying, “in the last days extremely violent times will come.” That’s lazy writing. You’ve got to show, not tell, your audience. What kind of hell violence is this exactly? Everyone’s skin is now fire? Our skeletons come out of our bodies and attack us? You’ve got to use details to paint a scene. So the next time you startle Californians with hoax emergency broadcasts, put some effort into your art. And if you really want to scare Californians, tell us the end times means drought, and drought means no avocados.

I’m not some sort of fancy “historian.” But I’m almost 80% sure that Yoda did not meet with King Faisal at the UN. Maybe he’s be willing to chat foreign policy in some kind of foggy swamp area, but not the UN. That’s not Yoda’s scene at all. The man (alien?) can’t even stand to wear anything but the lone bathrobe in his possession, the one with all the cream of wheat stains. He’s an old, cranky, green retiree. He gave up being on the Jedi council just so he didn’t have to deal with the long speeches and underwhelming cafeteria food. Why would he come out of retirement just to sit and list to more long, boring speeches, when he could be giving whiny Jedi vague, indirect lessons? Also, I think Yoda died at some point or something, so that would make it hard to get in to the UN.

Maybe the editors of this textbook mistook Yoda for Alan Greenspan. But even then, why would Alan Greenspan be at the UN? He’s also a retiree who only hangs out in foggy swamps and gives indirect advice to young economists. “Adjust interest rates to all-time lows, you shall.”

I’m as big a fan of learning new vocab as any other pretentious dweeb. For instance, did you know “borborygmus” means that rumbling noise in your stomach (and it’s also probably a Pokemon)? But there’s a time and a place for everything. As president Trump and Kim Jong Un trade insults, it feels as if we creep ever closer to military escalation. Which really makes me want to borborygmus in my pants. But despite our perilous situation, the one fact we took away from all this was that Kim Jong Un used a funny word, “dotard,” which means “old an senile,” and is also probably a Pokemon.

It’s great we’re learning new vocabulary, but even the fanciest GRE words aren’t going to do much for us once we’re all a smoldering piles of ash. Here’s a neat word: internecine, which means “destruction on both sides of a conflict,” and used in a sentence is, “The potential internecine war between the U.S and North Korea means everyone is super duper boned.”

Money is objectively disgusting. And not just in the sense that greed is the root of all evil: the paper money itself is covered in inconceivable amounts of filth. It’s honestly better not to think about where your money has been, whose nose it’s been up to vacuum cocaine, whose g-string it’s been tucked into, what rich person has used it to wipe their ass while laughing about the poors. The only way our monetary system can go on is to maintain a flimsy veneer of willful ignorance about the dark places and unspeakable stygian horrors our paper bills have gone through.

That’s what makes the story of this liquor store’s problems all the more harrowing. Instead of using pockets, purses, or a folksy bindle, some customers insisted upon storing their cash in the sweaty crevices of their body. It’s an unspeakable crime against the social contract to reach into the dank recesses of your own body to fish out a slightly moist bill, and to hand that into the trembling hand of a hapless cashier. And as soon as one of these customers goes, “Oh hang on, I think I have exact change in my butt crack,” the cashier will let out a primal scream, the carefully maintained illusion of civil money will crumble, and all of society will soon follow.

Oh come on, what barely visible smudge in the background of a cartoon are parents complaining about now– oh. Oh dear. That is actually very clearly a drawing of a penis. And Snopes has confirmed it.

This was clearly done by the hands of a very disgruntled animator/texture artist. Day after day of slaving away in the animation mines has probably turned the culprit into a hardened, bitter individual, with no other tools to fight back against his corporate overlords but a pen and a vague understanding of what a penis looks like. Or perhaps this required the cooperation of multiple animators and graphic designers, who staged a coup in the only way they knew how. “Help, we’re being held for days on end while we must carefully render all these goddamn stupid cartoon bees,” would probably not get past QC, but a subtle penis would. This isn’t just any dick. This is a cry for help.

Have you ever seen an exposed, hairy man belly in public and thought to yourself, “If only I could surgically remove his gut and sew it into a pouch that can be used to hold my iPhone and keys?” First let me say, getting therapy is nothing to be ashamed of these days. Secondly, you need wish no more! You can now buy mass produced hairy man belly fanny packs. They come in a variety of flavors: first off, there’s “The Allen,” a tasteful, vanilla version that has a modest amount of hair and protrusion. “The Derek” is similar to “The Allen,” except it acknowledges that “pasty white” isn’t the only existing skin tone. “The Bobby” is completely hairless, somehow placing it squarely in the uncanny valley of beer bellies. In contrast, “The Sherman” is thickly forested with coarse, bear-like hair that surrounds a yawning abyssal belly button. “The Magnus” is a photoshopped cascade of belly folds that seem anatomically improbable.

So if you’d like to attain the mystical aura that is the “dad bod,” slap on one of these beauties. As an added bonus, you’ll have a handy pouch to store all the phone numbers you’re totally going to collect while wearing these.

Finally, a victory for the common man. If FedEx says they’ll do overnight delivery, and you trust in them that they’ll honor what they advertise and deliver your horse sperm to your doorstep within a timely manner, it’s critical that the courts hold them to their word. FedEx tried to weasel their way out of their sticky legal situation by arguing the fine print clarified they made no guarantee of overnight delivery, even though it’s called “priority overnight,” with a slogan of, “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.” And that promise is important when you order horse sperm.

It’s not like horse sperm grows on trees. High quality horse sperm does not run cheap, and you don’t want to impregnate your mare with low-grade budget horse sperm. You can’t hop down to Costco and get plus-sized gallons of horse sperm for $25, and black market horse sperm is often cut with glass and encourages cartels. So for many buyers of horse sperm, delivery is the only option. And by god, if you pay for your horse sperm to be delivered overnight, you should get that horse sperm delivered overnight.

Sure, you might be thinking, “Well I never have needed nor can see any possible reason I will ever need horse sperm delivered to me overnight,” but this court decision affects us all (as long as you happen to live in Nova Scotia, Canada). This is a win for the consumer, whether you’re trying to get priority shipping on a gift for your grandma, or a pint of fresh horse sperm.

There are many, ordinary reasons you might poop in someone’s yard. You could be drunk, there may be no public restrooms, you could have eaten 2 pounds of prunes, or you might be cosplaying as a dog. What makes this story so compelling is that none of these reasons seem to apply to the jogger serial-pooping in residents’ yards. The woman doesn’t appear to be mentally ill or unable to access public restrooms, and her actions seem calculated. She brings toilet paper and poops at the same houses, and shifts her schedule based on when she’s been caught in the act. It seems too coldly premeditated to be a result of a gastrointestinal medical issue. And when she is confronted she apologizes, but never stops, nor cleans up after herself.

It’s a crime spree that seems completely unsolvable. You could tie heroin to the end of a stick and set Sherlock to work, and he’d come away defeated. Is there a personal vendetta involved? Has this jogger finally snapped after dog owners have left countless poops in her yard? Perhaps she’s living by the timeless adage, “When life hands you lemons, you eat those lemons, turn them into poop, and leave those poops on the yards of the innocent.”

This is one of those cases where we just have to accept we’ll never know the definitive answer. Like the Chupacabra or Bigfoot, she will forever capture our imaginations, but we will never capture her.

Photoshop is like a hammer. When used delicately, it can be used to construct beautiful cabinets. But when abused it can pulverize a human body. In this instance, the Tomb Raider poster has been Photoshopped with such wanton abandon, Lara Croft’s neck has gained altitude and flexibility not found in the normal range of human anatomy. Due to this graphic designer’s overabundance of enthusiasm, the writers of the movie will have to change the plot to Lara Croft mixing her DNA with that of a giraffe and an owl, thus becoming the greatest artifact hunter in the history of archaeology.

Can’t see above a pile of rubble? No problem for Lara Giraowlff, she can use her seven extra vertebra to peer over obstacles like a periscope. Are there bad guys trying to ambush the protagonists? Lara Giraowlff’s uncannily perceptive hearing can pick up the sound of a mouse scurrying a mile away, she can definitely hear human footsteps. She can then swivel her head like a lazy Susan, much to the horror of anyone trying to sneak up behind her. “Hoo’s there?” she quips, before unloading her pistols into the body of some hapless henchman, her unblinking owl-giraffe hybrid eyes cold and uncaring as she watches the corpse fall to the ground. This remake is going to be awesome.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/what-stupid-thing-is-trending-now-9-24-2017-2/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/182592126672

[allofbeercom]

What Stupid Thing Is Trending Now? (9/24/2017)

What stupid thing is trending now? Well…

It’s unclear whether the jarring audio played during the emergency broadcast was a prank, or a bumbling intern who got “normal broadcast tone” with “alien apocalypse” mixed up. Either way, these broadcasts are no War of the Worlds in terms of quality. There are a few problems with the narrative that really need to be addressed.

First, there’s the alien plot arc, which honestly left me a bit underwhelmed. The script reads, “The space program made contact with… They are not what they claim to be. They have infiltrated a lot of, uh, a lot of aspects of military establishment, particularly Area 51. The disasters that are coming-the military-I’m sorry the government knows about them…” Aliens infiltrating the military is a solid premise, but one we’ve seen before. So there needs to be a bit of extra spice to really bring this hoax dish to life. Maybe the aliens look like human babies? Or it could turn out that we were the aliens all along? Just something a little extra. And I rolled my eyes at the “Area 51” comment. I mean really, do you think aliens would make a beeline for Area 51? No, their first steps would be to assume control of Tinder and the popular restaurant franchise Applebees. With the mating habits of the young, and the dining habits of the old squarely under their control, the aliens would be able to both stymy our ability to reproduce, and our ability to keep our elderly non-cranky and somewhat tolerable. We’d be doomed within hours.

The biblical apocalypse plot must also be addressed. First of all, you can’t just layer aliens and bible End Times on top of each other like some kind of misery parfait. You have to mix them together with skillful writing, such as “God was an alien all along.” Also you can’t just handwave the events of the apocalypse by saying, “in the last days extremely violent times will come.” That’s lazy writing. You’ve got to show, not tell, your audience. What kind of hell violence is this exactly? Everyone’s skin is now fire? Our skeletons come out of our bodies and attack us? You’ve got to use details to paint a scene. So the next time you startle Californians with hoax emergency broadcasts, put some effort into your art. And if you really want to scare Californians, tell us the end times means drought, and drought means no avocados.

I’m not some sort of fancy “historian.” But I’m almost 80% sure that Yoda did not meet with King Faisal at the UN. Maybe he’s be willing to chat foreign policy in some kind of foggy swamp area, but not the UN. That’s not Yoda’s scene at all. The man (alien?) can’t even stand to wear anything but the lone bathrobe in his possession, the one with all the cream of wheat stains. He’s an old, cranky, green retiree. He gave up being on the Jedi council just so he didn’t have to deal with the long speeches and underwhelming cafeteria food. Why would he come out of retirement just to sit and list to more long, boring speeches, when he could be giving whiny Jedi vague, indirect lessons? Also, I think Yoda died at some point or something, so that would make it hard to get in to the UN.

Maybe the editors of this textbook mistook Yoda for Alan Greenspan. But even then, why would Alan Greenspan be at the UN? He’s also a retiree who only hangs out in foggy swamps and gives indirect advice to young economists. “Adjust interest rates to all-time lows, you shall.”

I’m as big a fan of learning new vocab as any other pretentious dweeb. For instance, did you know “borborygmus” means that rumbling noise in your stomach (and it’s also probably a Pokemon)? But there’s a time and a place for everything. As president Trump and Kim Jong Un trade insults, it feels as if we creep ever closer to military escalation. Which really makes me want to borborygmus in my pants. But despite our perilous situation, the one fact we took away from all this was that Kim Jong Un used a funny word, “dotard,” which means “old an senile,” and is also probably a Pokemon.

It’s great we’re learning new vocabulary, but even the fanciest GRE words aren’t going to do much for us once we’re all a smoldering piles of ash. Here’s a neat word: internecine, which means “destruction on both sides of a conflict,” and used in a sentence is, “The potential internecine war between the U.S and North Korea means everyone is super duper boned.”

Money is objectively disgusting. And not just in the sense that greed is the root of all evil: the paper money itself is covered in inconceivable amounts of filth. It’s honestly better not to think about where your money has been, whose nose it’s been up to vacuum cocaine, whose g-string it’s been tucked into, what rich person has used it to wipe their ass while laughing about the poors. The only way our monetary system can go on is to maintain a flimsy veneer of willful ignorance about the dark places and unspeakable stygian horrors our paper bills have gone through.

That’s what makes the story of this liquor store’s problems all the more harrowing. Instead of using pockets, purses, or a folksy bindle, some customers insisted upon storing their cash in the sweaty crevices of their body. It’s an unspeakable crime against the social contract to reach into the dank recesses of your own body to fish out a slightly moist bill, and to hand that into the trembling hand of a hapless cashier. And as soon as one of these customers goes, “Oh hang on, I think I have exact change in my butt crack,” the cashier will let out a primal scream, the carefully maintained illusion of civil money will crumble, and all of society will soon follow.

Oh come on, what barely visible smudge in the background of a cartoon are parents complaining about now– oh. Oh dear. That is actually very clearly a drawing of a penis. And Snopes has confirmed it.

This was clearly done by the hands of a very disgruntled animator/texture artist. Day after day of slaving away in the animation mines has probably turned the culprit into a hardened, bitter individual, with no other tools to fight back against his corporate overlords but a pen and a vague understanding of what a penis looks like. Or perhaps this required the cooperation of multiple animators and graphic designers, who staged a coup in the only way they knew how. “Help, we’re being held for days on end while we must carefully render all these goddamn stupid cartoon bees,” would probably not get past QC, but a subtle penis would. This isn’t just any dick. This is a cry for help.

Have you ever seen an exposed, hairy man belly in public and thought to yourself, “If only I could surgically remove his gut and sew it into a pouch that can be used to hold my iPhone and keys?” First let me say, getting therapy is nothing to be ashamed of these days. Secondly, you need wish no more! You can now buy mass produced hairy man belly fanny packs. They come in a variety of flavors: first off, there’s “The Allen,” a tasteful, vanilla version that has a modest amount of hair and protrusion. “The Derek” is similar to “The Allen,” except it acknowledges that “pasty white” isn’t the only existing skin tone. “The Bobby” is completely hairless, somehow placing it squarely in the uncanny valley of beer bellies. In contrast, “The Sherman” is thickly forested with coarse, bear-like hair that surrounds a yawning abyssal belly button. “The Magnus” is a photoshopped cascade of belly folds that seem anatomically improbable.

So if you’d like to attain the mystical aura that is the “dad bod,” slap on one of these beauties. As an added bonus, you’ll have a handy pouch to store all the phone numbers you’re totally going to collect while wearing these.

Finally, a victory for the common man. If FedEx says they’ll do overnight delivery, and you trust in them that they’ll honor what they advertise and deliver your horse sperm to your doorstep within a timely manner, it’s critical that the courts hold them to their word. FedEx tried to weasel their way out of their sticky legal situation by arguing the fine print clarified they made no guarantee of overnight delivery, even though it’s called “priority overnight,” with a slogan of, “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.” And that promise is important when you order horse sperm.

It’s not like horse sperm grows on trees. High quality horse sperm does not run cheap, and you don’t want to impregnate your mare with low-grade budget horse sperm. You can’t hop down to Costco and get plus-sized gallons of horse sperm for $25, and black market horse sperm is often cut with glass and encourages cartels. So for many buyers of horse sperm, delivery is the only option. And by god, if you pay for your horse sperm to be delivered overnight, you should get that horse sperm delivered overnight.

Sure, you might be thinking, “Well I never have needed nor can see any possible reason I will ever need horse sperm delivered to me overnight,” but this court decision affects us all (as long as you happen to live in Nova Scotia, Canada). This is a win for the consumer, whether you’re trying to get priority shipping on a gift for your grandma, or a pint of fresh horse sperm.

There are many, ordinary reasons you might poop in someone’s yard. You could be drunk, there may be no public restrooms, you could have eaten 2 pounds of prunes, or you might be cosplaying as a dog. What makes this story so compelling is that none of these reasons seem to apply to the jogger serial-pooping in residents’ yards. The woman doesn’t appear to be mentally ill or unable to access public restrooms, and her actions seem calculated. She brings toilet paper and poops at the same houses, and shifts her schedule based on when she’s been caught in the act. It seems too coldly premeditated to be a result of a gastrointestinal medical issue. And when she is confronted she apologizes, but never stops, nor cleans up after herself.

It’s a crime spree that seems completely unsolvable. You could tie heroin to the end of a stick and set Sherlock to work, and he’d come away defeated. Is there a personal vendetta involved? Has this jogger finally snapped after dog owners have left countless poops in her yard? Perhaps she’s living by the timeless adage, “When life hands you lemons, you eat those lemons, turn them into poop, and leave those poops on the yards of the innocent.”

This is one of those cases where we just have to accept we’ll never know the definitive answer. Like the Chupacabra or Bigfoot, she will forever capture our imaginations, but we will never capture her.

Photoshop is like a hammer. When used delicately, it can be used to construct beautiful cabinets. But when abused it can pulverize a human body. In this instance, the Tomb Raider poster has been Photoshopped with such wanton abandon, Lara Croft’s neck has gained altitude and flexibility not found in the normal range of human anatomy. Due to this graphic designer’s overabundance of enthusiasm, the writers of the movie will have to change the plot to Lara Croft mixing her DNA with that of a giraffe and an owl, thus becoming the greatest artifact hunter in the history of archaeology.

Can’t see above a pile of rubble? No problem for Lara Giraowlff, she can use her seven extra vertebra to peer over obstacles like a periscope. Are there bad guys trying to ambush the protagonists? Lara Giraowlff’s uncannily perceptive hearing can pick up the sound of a mouse scurrying a mile away, she can definitely hear human footsteps. She can then swivel her head like a lazy Susan, much to the horror of anyone trying to sneak up behind her. “Hoo’s there?” she quips, before unloading her pistols into the body of some hapless henchman, her unblinking owl-giraffe hybrid eyes cold and uncaring as she watches the corpse fall to the ground. This remake is going to be awesome.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/what-stupid-thing-is-trending-now-9-24-2017-2/

[samanthasroberts]

What Stupid Thing Is Trending Now? (9/24/2017)

What stupid thing is trending now? Well…

It’s unclear whether the jarring audio played during the emergency broadcast was a prank, or a bumbling intern who got “normal broadcast tone” with “alien apocalypse” mixed up. Either way, these broadcasts are no War of the Worlds in terms of quality. There are a few problems with the narrative that really need to be addressed.

First, there’s the alien plot arc, which honestly left me a bit underwhelmed. The script reads, “The space program made contact with… They are not what they claim to be. They have infiltrated a lot of, uh, a lot of aspects of military establishment, particularly Area 51. The disasters that are coming-the military-I’m sorry the government knows about them…” Aliens infiltrating the military is a solid premise, but one we’ve seen before. So there needs to be a bit of extra spice to really bring this hoax dish to life. Maybe the aliens look like human babies? Or it could turn out that we were the aliens all along? Just something a little extra. And I rolled my eyes at the “Area 51” comment. I mean really, do you think aliens would make a beeline for Area 51? No, their first steps would be to assume control of Tinder and the popular restaurant franchise Applebees. With the mating habits of the young, and the dining habits of the old squarely under their control, the aliens would be able to both stymy our ability to reproduce, and our ability to keep our elderly non-cranky and somewhat tolerable. We’d be doomed within hours.

The biblical apocalypse plot must also be addressed. First of all, you can’t just layer aliens and bible End Times on top of each other like some kind of misery parfait. You have to mix them together with skillful writing, such as “God was an alien all along.” Also you can’t just handwave the events of the apocalypse by saying, “in the last days extremely violent times will come.” That’s lazy writing. You’ve got to show, not tell, your audience. What kind of hell violence is this exactly? Everyone’s skin is now fire? Our skeletons come out of our bodies and attack us? You’ve got to use details to paint a scene. So the next time you startle Californians with hoax emergency broadcasts, put some effort into your art. And if you really want to scare Californians, tell us the end times means drought, and drought means no avocados.

I’m not some sort of fancy “historian.” But I’m almost 80% sure that Yoda did not meet with King Faisal at the UN. Maybe he’s be willing to chat foreign policy in some kind of foggy swamp area, but not the UN. That’s not Yoda’s scene at all. The man (alien?) can’t even stand to wear anything but the lone bathrobe in his possession, the one with all the cream of wheat stains. He’s an old, cranky, green retiree. He gave up being on the Jedi council just so he didn’t have to deal with the long speeches and underwhelming cafeteria food. Why would he come out of retirement just to sit and list to more long, boring speeches, when he could be giving whiny Jedi vague, indirect lessons? Also, I think Yoda died at some point or something, so that would make it hard to get in to the UN.

Maybe the editors of this textbook mistook Yoda for Alan Greenspan. But even then, why would Alan Greenspan be at the UN? He’s also a retiree who only hangs out in foggy swamps and gives indirect advice to young economists. “Adjust interest rates to all-time lows, you shall.”

I’m as big a fan of learning new vocab as any other pretentious dweeb. For instance, did you know “borborygmus” means that rumbling noise in your stomach (and it’s also probably a Pokemon)? But there’s a time and a place for everything. As president Trump and Kim Jong Un trade insults, it feels as if we creep ever closer to military escalation. Which really makes me want to borborygmus in my pants. But despite our perilous situation, the one fact we took away from all this was that Kim Jong Un used a funny word, “dotard,” which means “old an senile,” and is also probably a Pokemon.

It’s great we’re learning new vocabulary, but even the fanciest GRE words aren’t going to do much for us once we’re all a smoldering piles of ash. Here’s a neat word: internecine, which means “destruction on both sides of a conflict,” and used in a sentence is, “The potential internecine war between the U.S and North Korea means everyone is super duper boned.”

Money is objectively disgusting. And not just in the sense that greed is the root of all evil: the paper money itself is covered in inconceivable amounts of filth. It’s honestly better not to think about where your money has been, whose nose it’s been up to vacuum cocaine, whose g-string it’s been tucked into, what rich person has used it to wipe their ass while laughing about the poors. The only way our monetary system can go on is to maintain a flimsy veneer of willful ignorance about the dark places and unspeakable stygian horrors our paper bills have gone through.

That’s what makes the story of this liquor store’s problems all the more harrowing. Instead of using pockets, purses, or a folksy bindle, some customers insisted upon storing their cash in the sweaty crevices of their body. It’s an unspeakable crime against the social contract to reach into the dank recesses of your own body to fish out a slightly moist bill, and to hand that into the trembling hand of a hapless cashier. And as soon as one of these customers goes, “Oh hang on, I think I have exact change in my butt crack,” the cashier will let out a primal scream, the carefully maintained illusion of civil money will crumble, and all of society will soon follow.

Oh come on, what barely visible smudge in the background of a cartoon are parents complaining about now– oh. Oh dear. That is actually very clearly a drawing of a penis. And Snopes has confirmed it.

This was clearly done by the hands of a very disgruntled animator/texture artist. Day after day of slaving away in the animation mines has probably turned the culprit into a hardened, bitter individual, with no other tools to fight back against his corporate overlords but a pen and a vague understanding of what a penis looks like. Or perhaps this required the cooperation of multiple animators and graphic designers, who staged a coup in the only way they knew how. “Help, we’re being held for days on end while we must carefully render all these goddamn stupid cartoon bees,” would probably not get past QC, but a subtle penis would. This isn’t just any dick. This is a cry for help.

Have you ever seen an exposed, hairy man belly in public and thought to yourself, “If only I could surgically remove his gut and sew it into a pouch that can be used to hold my iPhone and keys?” First let me say, getting therapy is nothing to be ashamed of these days. Secondly, you need wish no more! You can now buy mass produced hairy man belly fanny packs. They come in a variety of flavors: first off, there’s “The Allen,” a tasteful, vanilla version that has a modest amount of hair and protrusion. “The Derek” is similar to “The Allen,” except it acknowledges that “pasty white” isn’t the only existing skin tone. “The Bobby” is completely hairless, somehow placing it squarely in the uncanny valley of beer bellies. In contrast, “The Sherman” is thickly forested with coarse, bear-like hair that surrounds a yawning abyssal belly button. “The Magnus” is a photoshopped cascade of belly folds that seem anatomically improbable.

So if you’d like to attain the mystical aura that is the “dad bod,” slap on one of these beauties. As an added bonus, you’ll have a handy pouch to store all the phone numbers you’re totally going to collect while wearing these.

Finally, a victory for the common man. If FedEx says they’ll do overnight delivery, and you trust in them that they’ll honor what they advertise and deliver your horse sperm to your doorstep within a timely manner, it’s critical that the courts hold them to their word. FedEx tried to weasel their way out of their sticky legal situation by arguing the fine print clarified they made no guarantee of overnight delivery, even though it’s called “priority overnight,” with a slogan of, “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.” And that promise is important when you order horse sperm.

It’s not like horse sperm grows on trees. High quality horse sperm does not run cheap, and you don’t want to impregnate your mare with low-grade budget horse sperm. You can’t hop down to Costco and get plus-sized gallons of horse sperm for $25, and black market horse sperm is often cut with glass and encourages cartels. So for many buyers of horse sperm, delivery is the only option. And by god, if you pay for your horse sperm to be delivered overnight, you should get that horse sperm delivered overnight.

Sure, you might be thinking, “Well I never have needed nor can see any possible reason I will ever need horse sperm delivered to me overnight,” but this court decision affects us all (as long as you happen to live in Nova Scotia, Canada). This is a win for the consumer, whether you’re trying to get priority shipping on a gift for your grandma, or a pint of fresh horse sperm.

There are many, ordinary reasons you might poop in someone’s yard. You could be drunk, there may be no public restrooms, you could have eaten 2 pounds of prunes, or you might be cosplaying as a dog. What makes this story so compelling is that none of these reasons seem to apply to the jogger serial-pooping in residents’ yards. The woman doesn’t appear to be mentally ill or unable to access public restrooms, and her actions seem calculated. She brings toilet paper and poops at the same houses, and shifts her schedule based on when she’s been caught in the act. It seems too coldly premeditated to be a result of a gastrointestinal medical issue. And when she is confronted she apologizes, but never stops, nor cleans up after herself.

It’s a crime spree that seems completely unsolvable. You could tie heroin to the end of a stick and set Sherlock to work, and he’d come away defeated. Is there a personal vendetta involved? Has this jogger finally snapped after dog owners have left countless poops in her yard? Perhaps she’s living by the timeless adage, “When life hands you lemons, you eat those lemons, turn them into poop, and leave those poops on the yards of the innocent.”

This is one of those cases where we just have to accept we’ll never know the definitive answer. Like the Chupacabra or Bigfoot, she will forever capture our imaginations, but we will never capture her.

Photoshop is like a hammer. When used delicately, it can be used to construct beautiful cabinets. But when abused it can pulverize a human body. In this instance, the Tomb Raider poster has been Photoshopped with such wanton abandon, Lara Croft’s neck has gained altitude and flexibility not found in the normal range of human anatomy. Due to this graphic designer’s overabundance of enthusiasm, the writers of the movie will have to change the plot to Lara Croft mixing her DNA with that of a giraffe and an owl, thus becoming the greatest artifact hunter in the history of archaeology.

Can’t see above a pile of rubble? No problem for Lara Giraowlff, she can use her seven extra vertebra to peer over obstacles like a periscope. Are there bad guys trying to ambush the protagonists? Lara Giraowlff’s uncannily perceptive hearing can pick up the sound of a mouse scurrying a mile away, she can definitely hear human footsteps. She can then swivel her head like a lazy Susan, much to the horror of anyone trying to sneak up behind her. “Hoo’s there?” she quips, before unloading her pistols into the body of some hapless henchman, her unblinking owl-giraffe hybrid eyes cold and uncaring as she watches the corpse fall to the ground. This remake is going to be awesome.

Source: http://allofbeer.com/what-stupid-thing-is-trending-now-9-24-2017-2/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2019/02/05/what-stupid-thing-is-trending-now-9-24-2017-3/

[adambstingus]

What Stupid Thing Is Trending Now? (9/24/2017)

What stupid thing is trending now? Well…

It’s unclear whether the jarring audio played during the emergency broadcast was a prank, or a bumbling intern who got “normal broadcast tone” with “alien apocalypse” mixed up. Either way, these broadcasts are no War of the Worlds in terms of quality. There are a few problems with the narrative that really need to be addressed.

First, there’s the alien plot arc, which honestly left me a bit underwhelmed. The script reads, “The space program made contact with… They are not what they claim to be. They have infiltrated a lot of, uh, a lot of aspects of military establishment, particularly Area 51. The disasters that are coming-the military-I’m sorry the government knows about them…” Aliens infiltrating the military is a solid premise, but one we’ve seen before. So there needs to be a bit of extra spice to really bring this hoax dish to life. Maybe the aliens look like human babies? Or it could turn out that we were the aliens all along? Just something a little extra. And I rolled my eyes at the “Area 51” comment. I mean really, do you think aliens would make a beeline for Area 51? No, their first steps would be to assume control of Tinder and the popular restaurant franchise Applebees. With the mating habits of the young, and the dining habits of the old squarely under their control, the aliens would be able to both stymy our ability to reproduce, and our ability to keep our elderly non-cranky and somewhat tolerable. We’d be doomed within hours.

The biblical apocalypse plot must also be addressed. First of all, you can’t just layer aliens and bible End Times on top of each other like some kind of misery parfait. You have to mix them together with skillful writing, such as “God was an alien all along.” Also you can’t just handwave the events of the apocalypse by saying, “in the last days extremely violent times will come.” That’s lazy writing. You’ve got to show, not tell, your audience. What kind of hell violence is this exactly? Everyone’s skin is now fire? Our skeletons come out of our bodies and attack us? You’ve got to use details to paint a scene. So the next time you startle Californians with hoax emergency broadcasts, put some effort into your art. And if you really want to scare Californians, tell us the end times means drought, and drought means no avocados.

I’m not some sort of fancy “historian.” But I’m almost 80% sure that Yoda did not meet with King Faisal at the UN. Maybe he’s be willing to chat foreign policy in some kind of foggy swamp area, but not the UN. That’s not Yoda’s scene at all. The man (alien?) can’t even stand to wear anything but the lone bathrobe in his possession, the one with all the cream of wheat stains. He’s an old, cranky, green retiree. He gave up being on the Jedi council just so he didn’t have to deal with the long speeches and underwhelming cafeteria food. Why would he come out of retirement just to sit and list to more long, boring speeches, when he could be giving whiny Jedi vague, indirect lessons? Also, I think Yoda died at some point or something, so that would make it hard to get in to the UN.

Maybe the editors of this textbook mistook Yoda for Alan Greenspan. But even then, why would Alan Greenspan be at the UN? He’s also a retiree who only hangs out in foggy swamps and gives indirect advice to young economists. “Adjust interest rates to all-time lows, you shall.”

I’m as big a fan of learning new vocab as any other pretentious dweeb. For instance, did you know “borborygmus” means that rumbling noise in your stomach (and it’s also probably a Pokemon)? But there’s a time and a place for everything. As president Trump and Kim Jong Un trade insults, it feels as if we creep ever closer to military escalation. Which really makes me want to borborygmus in my pants. But despite our perilous situation, the one fact we took away from all this was that Kim Jong Un used a funny word, “dotard,” which means “old an senile,” and is also probably a Pokemon.

It’s great we’re learning new vocabulary, but even the fanciest GRE words aren’t going to do much for us once we’re all a smoldering piles of ash. Here’s a neat word: internecine, which means “destruction on both sides of a conflict,” and used in a sentence is, “The potential internecine war between the U.S and North Korea means everyone is super duper boned.”

Money is objectively disgusting. And not just in the sense that greed is the root of all evil: the paper money itself is covered in inconceivable amounts of filth. It’s honestly better not to think about where your money has been, whose nose it’s been up to vacuum cocaine, whose g-string it’s been tucked into, what rich person has used it to wipe their ass while laughing about the poors. The only way our monetary system can go on is to maintain a flimsy veneer of willful ignorance about the dark places and unspeakable stygian horrors our paper bills have gone through.

That’s what makes the story of this liquor store’s problems all the more harrowing. Instead of using pockets, purses, or a folksy bindle, some customers insisted upon storing their cash in the sweaty crevices of their body. It’s an unspeakable crime against the social contract to reach into the dank recesses of your own body to fish out a slightly moist bill, and to hand that into the trembling hand of a hapless cashier. And as soon as one of these customers goes, “Oh hang on, I think I have exact change in my butt crack,” the cashier will let out a primal scream, the carefully maintained illusion of civil money will crumble, and all of society will soon follow.

Oh come on, what barely visible smudge in the background of a cartoon are parents complaining about now– oh. Oh dear. That is actually very clearly a drawing of a penis. And Snopes has confirmed it.

This was clearly done by the hands of a very disgruntled animator/texture artist. Day after day of slaving away in the animation mines has probably turned the culprit into a hardened, bitter individual, with no other tools to fight back against his corporate overlords but a pen and a vague understanding of what a penis looks like. Or perhaps this required the cooperation of multiple animators and graphic designers, who staged a coup in the only way they knew how. “Help, we’re being held for days on end while we must carefully render all these goddamn stupid cartoon bees,” would probably not get past QC, but a subtle penis would. This isn’t just any dick. This is a cry for help.

Have you ever seen an exposed, hairy man belly in public and thought to yourself, “If only I could surgically remove his gut and sew it into a pouch that can be used to hold my iPhone and keys?” First let me say, getting therapy is nothing to be ashamed of these days. Secondly, you need wish no more! You can now buy mass produced hairy man belly fanny packs. They come in a variety of flavors: first off, there’s “The Allen,” a tasteful, vanilla version that has a modest amount of hair and protrusion. “The Derek” is similar to “The Allen,” except it acknowledges that “pasty white” isn’t the only existing skin tone. “The Bobby” is completely hairless, somehow placing it squarely in the uncanny valley of beer bellies. In contrast, “The Sherman” is thickly forested with coarse, bear-like hair that surrounds a yawning abyssal belly button. “The Magnus” is a photoshopped cascade of belly folds that seem anatomically improbable.

So if you’d like to attain the mystical aura that is the “dad bod,” slap on one of these beauties. As an added bonus, you’ll have a handy pouch to store all the phone numbers you’re totally going to collect while wearing these.

Finally, a victory for the common man. If FedEx says they’ll do overnight delivery, and you trust in them that they’ll honor what they advertise and deliver your horse sperm to your doorstep within a timely manner, it’s critical that the courts hold them to their word. FedEx tried to weasel their way out of their sticky legal situation by arguing the fine print clarified they made no guarantee of overnight delivery, even though it’s called “priority overnight,” with a slogan of, “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.” And that promise is important when you order horse sperm.

It’s not like horse sperm grows on trees. High quality horse sperm does not run cheap, and you don’t want to impregnate your mare with low-grade budget horse sperm. You can’t hop down to Costco and get plus-sized gallons of horse sperm for $25, and black market horse sperm is often cut with glass and encourages cartels. So for many buyers of horse sperm, delivery is the only option. And by god, if you pay for your horse sperm to be delivered overnight, you should get that horse sperm delivered overnight.

Sure, you might be thinking, “Well I never have needed nor can see any possible reason I will ever need horse sperm delivered to me overnight,” but this court decision affects us all (as long as you happen to live in Nova Scotia, Canada). This is a win for the consumer, whether you’re trying to get priority shipping on a gift for your grandma, or a pint of fresh horse sperm.

There are many, ordinary reasons you might poop in someone’s yard. You could be drunk, there may be no public restrooms, you could have eaten 2 pounds of prunes, or you might be cosplaying as a dog. What makes this story so compelling is that none of these reasons seem to apply to the jogger serial-pooping in residents’ yards. The woman doesn’t appear to be mentally ill or unable to access public restrooms, and her actions seem calculated. She brings toilet paper and poops at the same houses, and shifts her schedule based on when she’s been caught in the act. It seems too coldly premeditated to be a result of a gastrointestinal medical issue. And when she is confronted she apologizes, but never stops, nor cleans up after herself.

It’s a crime spree that seems completely unsolvable. You could tie heroin to the end of a stick and set Sherlock to work, and he’d come away defeated. Is there a personal vendetta involved? Has this jogger finally snapped after dog owners have left countless poops in her yard? Perhaps she’s living by the timeless adage, “When life hands you lemons, you eat those lemons, turn them into poop, and leave those poops on the yards of the innocent.”

This is one of those cases where we just have to accept we’ll never know the definitive answer. Like the Chupacabra or Bigfoot, she will forever capture our imaginations, but we will never capture her.

Photoshop is like a hammer. When used delicately, it can be used to construct beautiful cabinets. But when abused it can pulverize a human body. In this instance, the Tomb Raider poster has been Photoshopped with such wanton abandon, Lara Croft’s neck has gained altitude and flexibility not found in the normal range of human anatomy. Due to this graphic designer’s overabundance of enthusiasm, the writers of the movie will have to change the plot to Lara Croft mixing her DNA with that of a giraffe and an owl, thus becoming the greatest artifact hunter in the history of archaeology.

Can’t see above a pile of rubble? No problem for Lara Giraowlff, she can use her seven extra vertebra to peer over obstacles like a periscope. Are there bad guys trying to ambush the protagonists? Lara Giraowlff’s uncannily perceptive hearing can pick up the sound of a mouse scurrying a mile away, she can definitely hear human footsteps. She can then swivel her head like a lazy Susan, much to the horror of anyone trying to sneak up behind her. “Hoo’s there?” she quips, before unloading her pistols into the body of some hapless henchman, her unblinking owl-giraffe hybrid eyes cold and uncaring as she watches the corpse fall to the ground. This remake is going to be awesome.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/what-stupid-thing-is-trending-now-9-24-2017/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/176531947952