#nightmares!

[libertyreads]

Book Review #59 of 2024--

Nightmares! by Jason Segel and Kirsten Miller. Rating: 3 stars.

Read from October 3rd to 5th.

This spooky Middle Grade was the last book in my physical TBR that I've owned before the start of 2024. That is amazing to me. I technically have no TBR veterans. Super proud of that one. This one took me a while to get to because I picked it up at a library sale for super cheap and really only had interest in reading it for a spooky season. I think the few ways that this one didn't work for me had more to do with my age and my not being the target audience. I actually think this would have been such a good read for me when I was a kid. There are a tons of wonderful messages in here that would have been great to read while growing up.

I enjoyed seeing the world through Charlie's eyes and seeing the fantastical way he saw the world. He truly has a vivid imagination and it made everything feel so atmospheric. I enjoyed the big purple mansion on the hill and all the mystery surrounding it. I would love to spend a weekend in that house. Ooh, and if it were dark and stormy? I could curl up in the tower with a good book and a warm beverage. I think Charlie's friends are one of the best parts of the book. They really support him and help him get through this hard time. I also appreciate the message that you have to face your fears in order to move forward. Otherwise, you'll just come up against the same fears over and over again. I think that's a pretty great message for children as well. There were a couple of moments when the stepmom and the dad would say certain things that went over Charlie's head that were definitely added for any adult readers to chuckle over.

Despite enjoying seeing the world through Charlie's eyes, there were so many things that, as an adult, I couldn't ever truly suspend my disbelief. A lot of the more magical and mystical things he experienced were things that I could see in a more realistic way, with more realistic explanations. I couldn't help but see how a child could have this perspective and how his emotional turmoil might create it. I'm trying to be vague here to not give anything away. I also felt like the plot was a bit meandering. At one point, Charlie and his friend have to go from location to location to achieve certain goals so they could all be safe at home. But they would go from point A to point B to point C back to point A then to point D then back to point B. It felt very...tiring? It just seemed like the action in the story could have taken a more linear path somehow.

Overall, this was a fun and quick read. It just wasn't something I could really connect with as an adult. I think it has great messaging for the right readers and a few subtle nods to adults as well.

[valdotpng]

an accomplice turned victim his apology, long overdue

[omnybus]

making shitposts, making shitposts is so fine

[one-time-i-dreamt]

Gomez and Morticia Addams got divorced. I woke up mortified and with a sense of inexplicable dread.

[cl0ckworkpuppet]

ok weird poll time???? because apparently i am not normal

you don't need to go into them if you don't want to. im just curious how Not Normal i am because i get nightmares almost every night

[rainbowthefox]

Im so sorry but this is the funniest fucking thing

[libertyreads]

October 2024 TBR--

We are getting so into spooky season this year with some spooky reads. I'm super excited about a couple of these books, but, also, the last book that I've had on my physical TBR since before January 1st of this year will be read this month. Everything else on my physical TBR is something I've purchased this year which is amazing to me. Let's get to the spooky reads.

Graveyard Shift by M.L. Rio (New Release)-- This might be the book I'm most excited to read. We follow five people who cross paths as they work the late shift: a bartender, a rideshare driver, a hotel receptionist, the steward of the derelict church that looms over them, and the editor-in-chief of the college paper. One night they discover a hole in the churchyard that wasn't there before. Who dug this fresh, open grave? And for whom? These five people try to get the answer to this mystery.

The Enforcer by Avery Keelan (Kindle)-- My next hockey romance! This one follows Lakeside U hockey superstar Nash Richards and the girl whose heart he broke. She's forced to work with him all semester long and has to work not to fall for his charms a second time.

Dreadful by Caitlin Rozakis-- From GoodReads: "It's bad enough waking up in a half-destroyed evil wizard's workshop with no eyebrows, no memories, and no idea how long you have before the Dread Lord Whomever shows up to murder you horribly and then turn your skull into a goblet or something. It's a lot worse when you realize that Dread Lord Whomever is...you." When I was standing in the middle of a bookstore reading this synopsis, I had so much hope that this would give me Assistant to the Villain Vibes. Let's hope it does.

Midnight at the Houdini by Delilah S. Dawson-- Anna, a diligent stage manager, has grown up in glitzy Las Vegas with her older sister Emily, but when Emily reveals a startling betrayal, Anna flees in the middle of a raging storm. She takes shelter in a boutique establishment she's never seen before: The Houdini. She discovers a magic hotel and a magical boy. When the clock strikes midnight, Anna will be trapped in the Houdini forever unless she can make an impossible escape.

The Dare by Natasha Preston-- Senior pranks are just beginning for Marley and her friends who egg houses, set chickens free on the quad, and fill the principal's office with glitter-filled balloons. But Marley's friend Jesse accepts a dare to drive a ten-mile stretch of winding road that's notorious for car wrecks called danger alley with no headlights. Now four friends are bound by a tragic accident and a dark secret that threatens their bright futures.

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins-- The final book of my Hunger Games reread. In this one, Katniss has become the heart of the rebellion, but being a hero is hard when you also have PTSD. Things between the President and the Mockingjay come to a head in this finale.

Nightmares! by Jason Segel and Kirsten Miller-- Charlie Laird has several problems: his dad married a woman he's sure is a witch, he had to move into a purple mansion, and he can't remember the last time sleeping wasn't a nightmarish prospect. Nightmares can ruin a good night's sleep, but them slipping out of your dreams and into the waking world is worse.

Certain Dark Things by Silvia Moreno-Garcia-- Domingo, a lonely garbage-collecting street kid, is just trying to survive in the heavily policed streets of Mexico City when a jaded vampire on the run swoops into his life. Atl, is smart, beautiful, and dangerous. Domingo is mesmerized. Atl needs to quickly escape the city, but her plan doesn't include Domingo. Little by little, Atl finds herself warming up to the scrappy young man and his undeniable charm.

I'm so excited about so many of my reads for the month of October. My Christmas love will get put on hold while we dive into all things creepy and scary.

[inbabylontheywept]

bad dating stories time: the shoe incident

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

he was okay at it.

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

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

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

"i can't get pregnant"

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

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

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

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

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

WHICH SURPRISINGLY isnt even how the story ends.

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

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

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

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

and then they started making out.

i was close enough to hear it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[stil-lindigo]

lead balloon (the tumblr post that saved me)

if this comic resonated with you, it would mean the world to me if you donated to this palestinian family's escape fund.

--

no creative notes because this isn't that kind of comic.

I know I don’t owe any of you anything but I still felt compelled to write about my long term absence. And I feel far enough away from the dangerous spot I was in to be able to make this comic. I have a therapist now, and she agreed that making this could be a very cathartic gesture, and the start of properly leaving these thoughts behind me. I am still, at seemingly random times, blindsided by fleeting desires to kill myself. They’re always passing urges, but it’s disarming, and uncomfortable. I worry sometimes that my brain’s spent so long thinking only about suicide that it’s forgotten how to think about anything else. Like, now that I've opened that door for myself, I'll never be able to fully shut it again. But I’m trying my best to encourage my mind in other directions. We'll see how that goes.

I am still donating all proceeds from my store to Palestinian causes. So far, I've donated over $15K, not including donations coming from my own pocket or the fundraising streams which jointly raised around $10K. In the time since I made my initial post about where this money would be going, the focus has shifted from aid organisations to directly donating to escape funds.

If you'd like to do the same, you can look at Operation Olive Branch, which hosts hundreds of Palestinian escape funds or donate to Safebow, which has helped facilitate the safe crossing and securing of important medical procedures for over 150 at-risk palestinians since the beginning of the genocide.

[colorful-horses]

moons student

[bug--png]

yall are gonna hate what this is a redraw of

enjoy my 2014 masterpiece (i was 11)

[chloesimaginationthings]

FNAF nightmare foxy is a huge fan of Roxanne Wolf,,

[doubletrucks]

double checking the pdf im about to send to make sure the invoice i just scanned didn't magically turn into a full frontal nude image

[one-time-i-dreamt]

Someone passed me a note in my math class and when I opened it it was a drawing of a hare. The hare looked at me and said, “The mountains have roots. They want the sky back.” And then the ink seeped through the paper until I was holding a completely black and soaked note.