#i don’t know WHAT is scary. even a big rock or a cinder block is panic inducing.

[nelfs]

I don’t use the word Phobia lightly because I think not all fears can be classed as phobias, but I do think I have some kind of water-related phobia…. I LOVE swimming but as long as I can remember I’ve had a persistent and irrational fear of what’s beneath me underwater. I remember being terrified of buoys as a child because of the mooring rope leading down to the lakebottom, docks have always scared me, even today when I went swimming I had moments of panic because I’d hit a cold spot and imagine what might be under me. it’s not even a fear of wildlife/sharks, it’s like, what if there’s a shipwreck or a piece of wood or a totally innocuous metal bar down there in the dark? it’s totally irrational. it’s frustrating because I love swimming but I get really anxious when I can’t see the bottom. i am even too scared to open toilet tanks sometimes. can anyone relate??

[marvel-ously-blog]

Hidden Voicemails

Tom Holland x Reader

Author: Grae

Word Count: 1844   |   Warnings: mentions of abuse, language, angst

Summary: Spoiler: he’s not a prince charming.

A/N: So I've been having some really shitty writer's block but I finally have this out! So that's a victory. This is kind of inspired by the American Shameless between a scene with Lip and Mandy that I cried at honestly. 

You were sitting on the steps of the electronic store as always. Your foot stomping to whatever music was playing off the phone your friend had covered by a solo cup to magnify the sound. You looked beautiful to him in the ugly orange street light, even in the shitty neon signs light. Different, he thought, but beautiful. Even with the neighborhood that smelled of vomit, cigarettes, and alcohol, you still managed to radiate.

You noticed him immediately, the corner of her mouth tugging itself up into that smirk. If he wasn’t already smiling he was now.

“Hey, what’re you doing here movie star?” You asked there was a fake ease to your voice. It had been a while after Tom got cast as Spider-man since you had seen him. The urge to run off the steps and go hug him was beat down as you held your cup tighter in your lap. He looked better, his muscles more pronounced and he even seemed to stand with more confidence. In this setting he looked so out of place, like he was cut out and pasted.

“Well, I had to come visit my best girl.”

Your heart seemed to skip a beat but not in the way that all the grown-ups told you it would when you loved someone. It seemed to skip right off the edge with a cinder block tied to it and sink right down.

“And I just happened to be in the neighborhood,” he said with a smile. You couldn’t tell which one was more of a falsehood, his reason or his smile. “Now where’s this big scary boyfriend that Haz told me about,” he asked, looking around with a small chuckle.

“Poker night,” you said shortly, taking another sip of what needed to be stronger liquid courage. Your friends were eyeing Tom like a piece of meat. You had known them before you moved and they had been filled into the shit hole you were left in after he was cast.

Two years of serious dating went down the drain when he left. The whole long distance thing went to shambles within a couple weeks. He could only call you for five minutes every couple days or when he was finally allowed to go to the house they gave him, but even then he was too tired to talk to you. After seeing the rumors of him and Zendaya you called it off. He tried for a couple days after you broke up with him, calling and texting constantly but you just seemed forced yourself to block his number.

That’s when Alex managed to pop up. He had been your knight in shining armor until you moved in with him. You knew it was a downsize from your apartment in London and you even had to switch jobs and eventually quit because he could take care of you just fine. But he was the best thing in your life and you needed a rock to keep you on the ground. He never hit you so it wasn’t technically abuse and you fucked up a lot so why did his language matter.

There was always that little voice telling you that it was wrong, but he loved you and just wanted to grow with you. As of late, he thought that growing should be done in America, with his new job. You weren’t completely sure whether or not you wanted to go that far out and when you asked Harrison, who you managed to keep in contact with, he must have passed it on to Tom.

“Can we uh, go talk somewhere private?” Tom asked, kind of snapping your attention back to him. You looked up at your friends and tipped your cup to them as a goodbye.

You were both blocks down the street before you spoke.

“So what exactly did Harrison tell you?” you said bluntly.

“Enough,” he returned your tone. You barely registered his hand tugging at your wrist before you were face to face with him. His hand moved to behind your neck, there was force in the motion but no malice. He started kissing you, in the deep and passionate way he always had. You stood still. The look he gave you after he pulled back was full of pain, part of you was glad he felt it too.

His other hand raised to the other side of your face and pushed your shaggy hair to the side. His thumbs were warm as they tugged on your skin gently. He was looking directly into your eyes as he spoke leaving small pauses between each statement. “You are beautiful Y/N. You are sweet. You are funny. You are so very smart”

You were still as his eyes teared up. Nothing in your expression changing.

He continued though. “You know that right? You know that I would never cheat on you. You know that you don’t deserve his bullshit.”

Your patience had finally worn off. “And what? I’m going to just leave him for you?” you spoke with a certain coldness and when you pushed him away you noticed his eyes let off a single tear, then another.

“You can’t just show up and sweep me back off my fucking feet Tom. You moved on and so did I. And I’m happy now, at least I know he’ll never leave me.”

Tom was yelling now, “But you’re so much better than him! And what the hell are you going to do in bloody America? They don’t have what you have here.”

“Oh, you checked didn’t you.”

There was a silent tension that neither of you could remedy. There was nothing to be done and nothing that was going to be said. Everything inside you was screaming at you to cry but your eyes remained dry. You would not let this fucker see you cry. Not after what he did.

“Go tell Harrison to fuck off.” You turned on your heel and walked away.

After a tantrum that managed to smash two cups and an unused picture frame, you finally settled into bed. Your knees were at your chest and the tears were falling harder than you had ever felt. It wasn’t until your phone beeped that you finally looked up.

Fumbling for your phone you noticed a text from the snitch of the hour.

Haz-

Hey Tom told me what happened, I'm sorry you ok?

You almost crushed the phone in hand but still ignored it. Something had taken over your fingers and you were brought to your voicemail. You hadn’t opened it since before you broke up with Tom. It was too painful to hear his voice anymore and since you barely got any voicemails regularly, it wasn’t a big deal if you just ignored it.

Your fingers still managed to move on their own to open it up.

1st Tom:

I love you so much, I couldn’t be here without you! I miss you so much and you wouldn’t believe what happened on set today! Just uh call me back when you get this I miss you!

2nd Tom:

Um I just got your voicemail and I wanted to talk to you about it. I know I’ve been busy but I can do better I swear. Please just call me so we can work this out. It seems silly to do it over a voicemail.

3rd Tom:

If this is about the thing with Zendaya, it’s nonsense, I told you that just please pick up the phone. I need to hear your voice.

4th Zendaya:

Hey uh Y/N its Zendaya and Tom wanted me to tell you that there’s nothing going on between us. He never shuts up about you and I look forward to meeting you at the premiere!

5th Tom:

Hey it’s late and I haven’t been able to sleep without you on the phone. I miss the way your hair smells when you’re sleeping next to me and I miss hearing you sing in the shower. I miss the way you always had to dunk your oreos in 10 times before eating them and how sometimes you would count out loud without realizing it. I miss that stupid song you played on repeat for a solid week and I miss the way you danced to it. I just need you right now. I don’t even know if you’re getting these messages anymore but I need you. Please call me back.

6th Tom:

You’re a bloody bitch you got that! I get offered the role of a lifetime something you supposedly wanted from me and now that it’s here you just bloody bail on me! You know what fuck you.

7th Tom:

I’m sorry about last night. Um Harrison somehow brought home a lot of beer and said I needed to drink it out. I still love you. I really just want to hear your voice again.

8th Alex:

Hey this is the hot guy you met at the bar yesterday. Was curious if I could show you that bass I was telling you about sometime. Maybe a cheap bottle of vodka to go with it?

9th Harrison:

Hey Tom’s really beat up could you just call him to talk to him one last time

10th Alex:

Hey babe just calling to tell you happy birthday! Bring a bag to my place tonight and we’ll have some fun.

11th Tom:

I’m not going to call you anymore.

12th Alex:

I fucking told you this morning I was picking you up for lunch where the fuck are you?

13th Alex:

Your fucking mother just called me telling me to back off of you. What the bloody hell did you tell her?

14th Tom:

I know I said I wouldn’t call but I needed to be reminded that you still exist. I don’t want to give up on us even though that’s what everyone is saying I need to do. You were always so good at knowing what I needed and I’m so lost without you. I’m sorry I fucked up but I still love you and I’d give up the movie just to be with you again.

You weren’t crying when he finished. Your eyes were raw and there were no tears left even though your heart was crushed with a mallet on the floor. You hadn’t moved at all during the messages and your knees were aching but you couldn’t get yourself to budge.

It wasn’t till you heard the front door to the apartment unlock that you laid down in your bed, put your phone under the pillow and pretended to be asleep. When the bedroom door opened you heard Alex sigh and close it again. The refrigerator opened and you heard the clanking of his beer and the sound of the TV.

You felt around the bed stand for your earbuds and plugged it into your phone.

1st Tom:

I love you so much, I couldn’t be here without you! I miss you so much and ...

[theliterateape]

Recent Memory: Case File #0002: "The Millennium Bug"

By Keith Gatchel

And, now, a look back at what had made the news over the past 5 to 20 years, and if it still matters to this day.

What was the news? The Millennium Bug.

How was this news? Two thousand years were about to end in the 1990s. We'd all celebrated New Year's Eve before, and seen more than one or two decades go by (stop reading if you haven't, this is PG-13). Even a select few of us are lucky enough to live over 100 years, or be cursed by a painting. But, this was "Dick Clark's Rock Hard New Year's Event of 19Goddamn99, Jabronies!" The odometer rolling over into a whole new number. And, damn were some people into it. Jennifer Lopez waited for tonight, Will Smith sampled the name. And Prince, true to form, was ahead of his time. Despite being the construct of a guy who would soon hate March 15, then a Pope who had to fix it, people gave a nearly supernatural significance to the upcoming year of 2000.

What went down? This coincided with the permeation of the modern personal computer into homes worldwide. To understand how revolutionary computers and the internet were at the time, or if you have to explain it to a kid: imagine walking down to the river every day to get water, and however much water you get is determined by how many times you can get up and walk down to said river. Then, someone comes along to your little hut (or teepee, or van on cinder blocks) and installs indoor plumbing with a Champagne glass shaped Jacuzzi; now there’s less walking, and a better chance to get laid. Still unclear? Talk to Rome. But, with all change comes questions and healthy skepticism. Where does this water come from? Could this water get polluted flowing through the pipes? Will the Jacuzzi jets hide your farts? Could sex in it prevent you from getting an STD, or cure it like the biblical healing waters of Jordan?

But, this wasn’t just water, this was information. (Brain water!) Computers were made by vast swaths of nerds, not all of whom talked to each other, which was typical, as much fewer comic cons existed at the time. The internet they would soon use to communicate with was still being made by them. Thus, this was the internet by the end of the '90s, this was how it was sold and this is was the past 20 years leading up to it. How you felt about the future determined what you awaited for in the years or decades until the year 2000: either the vast, sprawling, perfect civilization predicted for you by The Jetsons, The Carousel Of Progress or Demolition Man, or the scary hellscape of Mad Max, Judge Dredd, or for that matter, Demolition Man again (seriously, that movie really holds up.) But, with this massive change came a flaw, a “recalled airbag” if you will.

Since you don’t have as much time to watch old internet videos like I do, I’ll summarize. Computer memory was expensive, thus space was limited, thus the years were paired down. "1969" became "'69" (of course, you're picturing the yin and yang.) Thus, the average computer, as the ball dropped, might read the year "2000" as “00," mistake it for “1900" then possibly clam up and pretend it didn’t exist (again, like many nerds of its day). This was all over pop culture, specifically Strange Days, Sports Night, SportsCenter, Family Guy, that Chris Carter show that wasn't The X-Files, the X-Files episode that finished that show, Newsradio, and plenty of others. The movie Office Space described it well, which I’ll link again here because this is essentially every movie in the ‘90s wrapped up within one clip. The Heaven’s Gate cult killed themselves (but not whoever still maintains their website). The year 2000 was like the arrival of a celebrity, or god, with a cult of personality formed around it with a manager, a publicist and a stuntman.

Here’s Leonard Nimoy scaring the crap out of you, and a commercial selling you a survival kit. Apple computers released an ad starring HAL 9000 telling you why they won’t rise up and kill you (talk about sending "Nixon to China," eh, Nimoy?) To be fair, there were many people who weren’t all that concerned about it, and most that were prepared for just a tiny apocalypse.

What's up with it now? We’re still here, if you weren’t too sure. True, we might not be. But, for all intents and purposes, nothing really happened. Overall, we partied hard, then went back to normal.

Does it still matter? What the Millennium Bug did was give the end of the world a name. As a species, we’ve never dealt with a singular threat as one. Between raiding, attacking and destroying each others’ civilizations, we’ve never faced a life threatening asteroid or alien race that threatened humankind. But, here we had a name with a weakness to exploit: sunlight to our Gremlins, a tangible enemy that we could defeat. And, 100 billion dollars later, we did. (Say it with me, 100 BILLION DOLLARS!) But, that hasn’t stopped other end-of-the-world predictions, be they from some random preacher, another possible bug in the year 2038, or the prediction of the Mayans just because their calendar stopped (as if one Mayans didn’t just say, “Hey, um, guys, we just mapped out 5,000 years into the future, so I think we're at a good stopping point.”)

Do we still care? Unless you plan to live another 983 years (dream big, you!) probably not. And, there's a real chance that words and numbers might not even mean the same to us at that point, if we even still speak with mouths. But it brought out a little secret we as a society are all curious about: how will the world end?

No one wants the world to end, in the sense that none of us want to cause it (...put down the earthquake machine.) But we know the world we live in isn’t natural, and built on shaky ground. I live in Chicago, and am never entirely sure at any given time which grass is real. So, we imagine it like we imagine winning the lottery or going to jail—we wonder how we’ll act. And the best part about Y2K, if we’ve learned anything, is that we, as a society, won’t totally lose it. If the day comes that we see an asteroid hit the Earth, or nuclear war, we won’t immediately hunt and kill our neighbor, Beth. And, if it's going to happen, we secretly want to be there for it. Perhaps we want to be one of the few billion in heaven that get a t-shirt made. We’ll get to be a part of the special somebodies that got to be the epoch of civilization, the height of mankind, the end of the book, the cookie dough ice cream of the freezer. And, more than anything, we would know what predictions are right and which ones were false. Because that’s the thing about prophecies, it’s easy to make up ones that will never come true. So, it’s best to focus on the ones that will.

[thecoroutfitters]

Written by Wild Bill on The Prepper Journal.

Why leave a perfectly good home, one with an emergency generator , water and food stored, ammo, hidden gun safes, and an understanding of all the points of approach and egress? What could drive you from such a place, other than a Preschool opening next door?

A walk-through of my home with the goal of answering the above questions, was scary, period. Under the premise that my home was “intact” after a natural disaster, or not at ground zero when the SHTF, how does it really stack up for the short-term as a place to hunker down?

The “NOT GOOD” list: My electrical panel and water shut off are outside the fence, which is a gated 7’ cinder block wall, nicely painted

so they are exposed to the street and anyone walking by or wanting to “drop in”. I have to leave the house to get to them. The electrical panel can be locked with a padlock or combination lock (yeah, right, who in their right mind puts a combination lock on a box they may need to open in the middle of the night, in a blizzard?) But mine, probably like yours, is made of metal barely stronger that aluminum foil soaked in spray starch. And locking down the water shut off valve? Kids, toilets, toys placed in toilets, magic lever pulled, you get the picture. Plus, there is an additional exposed water shut of valve at the connection of the house plumbing to the city water supply, the one the city will “lock down” if you don’t pay the bills and the one that would surly on a fine if you even look at it.

  Next issue, my fenced property, again, is a cinder-block wall, but only 7’ high and even I can still scale a 7’ wall, plus pistol rounds from a 9mm, 40 mm, or a .45 ACP will penetrate it, it may take two to three to get through both sides, but the wall can be taken down with a pistol. And the house is stucco over a wood frame, dry wall, lots of windows, and on a corner lot. The only thing this stops is the screams from inside getting out.

It gets better, all the windows are ground level, easy to approach, and the landscaping has some softball sized rocks readily available. It is a single story with blinds and shades that are very nice but print the inside lights even at dusk or dawn.

Okay, what else? Having a fuel-powered portable generator means it must be ventilated, read “outside”, the now mostly-mostly-closed dwelling as I have to run the extension cords into the refrigerators location as well as power cords to recharge other electrical devices; I have an electric stove, so do I plan to cook outside on the BBQ, again, outside!

Of course, noise from the generator will give away the fact that you and yours are there, fuel for the generator must be safely stored and rationed. And then, it gets ugly.

  Disposal of waste – human and otherwise. If city water is lost, then disposing of human waste becomes a real issue. Dig a latrine in the side yard? I do have one bright spot here, I have a 12,000-gallon swimming pool. But what I do not know is just how many buckets of pool water it will take to get solid human waste through the house plumbing to the now not-operating city sewage system? Common sense tells me that this will work temporarily. At least it is a good use for the chlorinated pool water, other than putting out flaming arrows in case of an attack.

So, what is my plan? First thing is to see if I have enough disc space to write a plan, a big plan. Then to figure out what I missed in my assessment. I was caught in the first of three blizzards that shut down Denver International Airport, in 2003. (Others occurred in 2006 and 2016.) What was the item people ran out of first? Disposable diapers. No stores at the airport stocked them and parents traveled with small supplies. It was bad, we were locked down for three days! Point is what you don’t think of can kill you, or in this case, make you many new enemies.

And yes, there is a GOOD list: Guns, ammo, food and water are in abundant supply, just not stored in the best location. I suggest doing a similar walk through of your “castle”, the resulting depressing is only temporary.

The post Is Your Home Your Castle? appeared first on The Prepper Journal.

from The Prepper Journal Don't forget to visit the store and pick up some gear at The COR Outfitters. How prepared are you for emergencies? #SurvivalFirestarter #SurvivalBugOutBackpack #PrepperSurvivalPack #SHTFGear #SHTFBag