Funniest (fantasy) way to find out you're trans I think. Assigned male by ancient prophecy

You cant be in the closet theres a fucking prophecy. You have to kill the dragon.

Or the reverse. Oldest son doesn’t get powers, second son does, and the first “son” goes, “…ohhhh, yeah, no, that makes sense.”

> THE JESTER

hi um my liege y-you asked me to um. report back to you when the prisoner you sent into the labyrinth had been, um, dealt with by th-the minotaur. well y-your highness t-there seems to be a bit of an, ahem, issue. no, no the prisoner is still in the labyrinth, y-yes the minotaur found them. i-it just ah, um, it appears that the. it appears that the prisoner and the minotaur are, um, they're-

Ugh, just say it.

They're unionizing.

The King: I was hoping you would say they were fucking so I wouldn't have to burn down the whole labyrinth.

The knight: But... The labyrinth is literally in the palace basement?

The King: Union busting is more expensive and time consuming than a new multimillion palace, burn it.

A gothic horror story where a gentleman from a good family gets haunted by something monstrous, which follows him around and keeps killing people around him at utter random, in cruel and horrifying ways. Specifically within circumstances where the protagonist has no alibi, and everything indicates that he committed the murders.

But the real horror is not that he would find himself accused of the murders, but that the people around him naturally assume that he did do it, but genuinely do not care, because the victims are never people that the society around him considers "important". The scullery maid of his household is found brutalised beyond recognition in a room where even the ceiling has been splattered with blood, and a constable of the local police brushes it off as a case of household discipline gone wrong, being horrifyingly casual with the assumption that the protagonist severely beat a girl in his service to death, and will dismiss it as an accident. The street urchin that the protagonist was seen talking with - wanting to help this poor little orphan - is found decapitated, severed head in the protagonist's fireplace. This, too, is calmly swept under the rug.

After every horrifying murder, the protagonist tries to seek help, to present the crime to authorities in hopes of getting some semblance of help, or at least clearing his own name of this, but every time it's brushed off. "These things do happen", he is reassured, like it's perfectly normal that a mansion of that size has a secret garden of unmarked graves in one shady corner.

The real horror is the ever-encompassing implication that this is perfectly normal.

Trust me when I tell you that I love my local Mexican restaurant, with their molcajetes full of sizzling beef and their extremely inexpensive tacos. There's just one downside: their parking lot kind of sucks. It's one of those narrow 1960s jobs, where you have an exit only on one side, and it's constantly full of food-delivery types blocking the lane so you have to do weird ninety-point turns just to park.

Now, let's get one thing straight: I do not at all care if I get my doors "dinged." A couple years ago, a then-new Acura MDX parked a little close to me, and their kids banged their door into my door. This was enough contact for the rust demon to jump from my Valiant onto their car, and by the time they had returned from the store, their vehicle and its delicious Nipponese steel had been wholly consumed. Only the tires remained. No, I just don't like the inconvenience of having to strongarm-steer my wheezing piece of garbage into this tight lot. Things are bad enough that I've actually thought twice about going to get Mexican food. I know. I can barely believe it myself.

My parents didn't raise me to be someone who gives up easily. In fact, if you ask Child Protective Services, they didn't raise me at all. Television brought me up to idolize heroes like reruns of Clutch Cargo and whatever cool robot toy they wanted to sell that week. And if there's one thing those daring pioneers wouldn't accept, it's a slightly inconvenient parking lot.

What's the easiest way to fix a parking lot with only one exit? By adding another exit. Turns out the city construction workers nearby just keep their keys in the bulldozer, as long as your definition of "in the bulldozer" also includes the site supervisor's locked office inside a fireproof safe that doesn't stand up to the weight of a bulldozer rolling down the hill into it after having its parking brake released. I plowed a neat car-width divot through the nearby sidewalk – take that, walkable neighbourhood – and now the vibe of the entire parking lot had changed for the better.

Unfortunately, I had not counted on the increased traffic that this would bring. All of the city, it seems, was also putting off getting Mexican food. This slight inconvenience factor actually served as a pressure-control valve of sorts. With the floodgates wide open, the place was now crammed stem to stern with hungry rich folks and their conveniently-parked luxury cars 24 hours a day. Let this be a lesson to all of you: never try to make things better.

An Incomplete List of the Animals my Grandpa brought home over the course of his 67-year marriage to Gandma:

The marriage only ended because thier time on earth did. He never kept an animal Grandma wouldn’t allow and if anything she was worse about it. She was the one who brought home a tarantula.

Questions from the Notes:

Your grandparents were Druids, right? They were a Steel Worker and Head Clerk at the local grocery store, respectively. 

How does a Horse run races the Wrong way? Get near the finish line then make a U-turn becuase he wasn’t done running yet.  He was also an excellent jumper and swimming horse. Much happier being a trail horse on Cleveland’s Emerald Belt.

How does a St. Bernard hide in a small suburban house? Clever use of the space behind the couches, under the sink and under beds.  For a 110lb animal, Gretchen was also very quiet and knew to wait until the house was empty to move from hiding spaces or to snitch food off the counters.  Once her coat grew back in she was willing to be visible again.

The Tarantula Didn’t come froma  pet store, did it? You know that stereotype about Tarantuals hiding in Bananas? That used to be a real thing that happened when bananas started being regularly available in Postwar mass market grocery stores.  Not very often, but it did. Grandma found the tarantula in a shipment of Bananas, and being the only non-arachnophobe working in the store, took her home and named her “Carmen Tarantula” after the famous brazilian singer. Geography was not Grandma’s strong point

Carmen Tarantula lived for 3 years and juding by the extremely blurry polaroid in the family albums, was probably a Brazilian Black.

What do you mean Spooky was an “Alleged Dog”? Well, for one thing, she Meowed.

Spooky was a 35lb delicate-limbed dog with owl-like pale green eyes and bat-like ears that was solid black save for a white patch on her chest in exactly the shape of Casper The friendly ghost, which was the only part of her visible when she would roam the halls at night, which is how she got the name.

Spooky was living in the house at the same time as Dummy, Son Of Stupid and another more Prototypical cat named Needles.  Dummy would sometimes forget what he was doing and get lost in the house, causing him to mewl pathetically until one of the humans or animals found and escorted him back to more familiar settings.  Typically, Needles would meow back at Dummy until she found him.

After three weeks in the house, Spooky could do an astonishingly good Cat’s Meow as well.

Spooky could also open doorknobs, get into the attic which didn’t even have a human entrance, would sit up like a human to eat her dinner or watch TV, and had a peculiar penchant for fishing.  Grandpa and Uncle popeye would regularly take her on fishing trips becuase she’d gleefully dive into the lakes and finish bringing the catch in, whether it were lake trout or pike or in one case, a strugeon.

Spooky also LOVED tomatoes.  More than anything else in the world.  If given a choice between a ribeye and a tomato, Spooky would chose the tomato every time.  This only applied to raw tomatoes though, she despised ketchup.

So while very much shaped like one, Spooky gave the distinct impression of something else dressed up as a dog.  Whatever she was, she was a loving and beloved companion to the family for 16 years.

If you enjoyed this story, you can check out my #Family Lore tag on my blog, or you can pre-order copies of the Family Lore Book containing many more stories on my Patreon.  I am disabled and telling stories online is my primary source of income so if you share these please link back and consider donating to my Ko-Fi or PayPal.  Thank you all for your support!

DEFINITELY go read the tag. The stories are incredible! I would straight up read an entire book of them. Repeatedly.

And if you’ve got a buck to spare, drop it in that tip jar.

Appreciate your taletellers, folks. 😊

I’ve only seen this post in screenshots. My day has been made.

i, too, have only seen this post in screenshots….. and the lore about spooky has me thinking: “what if it was a spirit of the fae (or something of the like) who came and chilled with your grandparents bc they took in all the injured, unwanted, supposedly unlovable animals…?”

I’ve known Gallus was an amazing storyteller with a remarkable family for years, but this is the first time I’ve suspected an ancestral connection to Gerald Durrell.

Yet another epic. :)

I wondered why this was getting notes lol.

Some More animals from my mother’s childhood home:

Honorable Mention:

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I still make my living telling stories on the internet, so if you want to support my Ko-fi or Patreon, I’d be very grateful.

Moving out of the apartment

This is, without a doubt, the saddest photo I have ever seen in my ENTIRE LIFE.

STORY TIME!

So in undergrad, my bestie lived in a true shithole of an apartment. When he moved in, he threw a housewarming party and brought out a bunch of washable markers and let us all draw on the walls. Being a tribe of feral assholes, we started competing to see who could draw the most obnoxious/offensive things. IIRC, there was George Bush frenching Ronald Regan, a skeleton with tits, some very rude portraits of the pope, etc etc.

now one of our friends who I hope to god has gone to therapy since then shut himself up in the walk in closet and painted the entire back of the door. He wouldn’t let anyone see it til he was done, and guys, I had nightmares about it. He’d driven a lovecraftian monster like you wouldn’t believe. It had eyes where it shouldn’t have eyes, teeth where it shouldn’t have teeth, and no matter where you stood it looked at you. We were all suitably impressed and horrified.

Anyway four years later bestie moves out and repaints the entire apartment.

Years and years later, I was talking to him and brought up the closet door monster. he visibly paled and confessed “oh god, I forgot to paint the inside of the door”

That is an entire episode of the magnus archives right there

I have become a regular at the local cafe. I sit at the lunch counter with my laptop to write. The workers keep me updated on all the tea.

Barista: Oh god here he comes.

Me: who?

Barista: White Ferrari guy. Hes banned from the other cafe. All he ever does is tell the same stories about the pyramids. Or ghosts. Or his car. Don't make eye contact with him. If he talks to you he won't leave you alone- Hi hello welcome!

I almost immediately accidentally made eye contact with him. He practically beelined to the chair next to me, and stares at my notebook. The vibe is immediately strange. I understand why he was banned from the other cafe.

White Ferrari Guy: What're you writing?

Me: (fuck it) I'm developing a script!

WFG: A what?

Me: A script. I'm developing an alternate script for the international phonetic alphabet. My goal is to make it one grapheme represent a single syllable, rather than one grapheme per phoneme. I'm happy with the consonants, but the vowels still need work. I'm experimenting with kerning based on Georgian script-

I look up, he is staring past me completely dead-eyed. He could not be less interested in what I'm saying. He leaves about a minute later.

[sheathes this notebook like a katana] your autism is weak, old man.

construction workers were a superstitious organization who thought orange objects could ward off vehicles, or even control people.

Legend has it their most important ritual was destroying a section of a road then smoking cigarettes around it for hours on end. Experts say this was to bless the area

I’m not a teacher (yet) but I do work with students and one of them had the nerve to look me dead in the eye and ask me “why would it be a bad idea for me to eat this entire marker?” They’re 11

An 4th grader asked for a high five by saying, “A little slappy to make daddy happy?”

I did not give him a high five.

A student during break had her head in her arms and was shaking a bit, so i asked the kid next to her whether she was laughing or crying and this 8 year old stared me in the eye deadpan and said “im crying on the inside”

Wait i take that back, I cant believe i forgot about the time i brought in a small stuffed octopus as a class mascot because why tf not. It was a class of high schoolers and i didnt imagine theyd actually care much, but one student snuck in a snack and gave it to the octopus as a tribute. Which led to other students doing the same thing, until every day there was a pile of of offerings to Fweej the Overseer, mostly consisting of things like string cheeses and small bags of chips, but sometimes there wouldd be a couple bucks in quarters, one kid brought in some giant pocky i think, and at one point there was a cold stone gift card. This stuffed octopus gained a cult following.

Later i brought in another stuffed octopus that looked exactly the same but bigger and told the class that Fweej the Overseer accepted their offerings and became stronger. These highschoolers lost their goddamn minds.

So Ive been going through the notes of this post and it seems Fweej the Overseer is pretty popular with tumblr as well. So I dug through facebook and found photos for yall. Special thanks to @sakoyo, who was my TA and made the facebook posts, thus keeping the record and immortalizing his legacy.

Fweej lives on 🙌🐙🙌

The thing is. I would eat the grapes. I would eat the pomegranate seeds. I would eat the Turkish delights. It doesn’t matter what the stakes are if you put a little plate of snacks out in front of me I’ll eat them.

If you sent me to an evil fantasy realm and told me that if I ate anything I would die a painful terrible death then set a charcuterie board down in front of me that would be it for me. Like it wouldn’t even be like a torturous internal struggle to not eat the cheese. I wouldn’t even need to be that hungry.

OP made the post unrebloggable but said it's fine to screenshot and I'm in love with this

@rhianthialritak

@spiritspodcast

SLAIN IN HIS HONOR

physical zines • read SLAIN IN HIS HONOR • read A CRUEL THING

If I had more money than I'd ever spend in a lifetime, I'd spend my life operating a pizzeria at a loss. Something with the slogan of "it ain't italian but you're hungry" - and a statement of how this is not authentic italian pizza because the owner's estranged aunt's italian ex-husband would not serve pizza in his italian restaurant because as far as he was concerned, a pizza is the "just throw that shit together" dish that you make out of leftovers, and he would not serve that to paying customers even if they wanted it. True story btw.

But I'd just like to run a place where the staff is allowed to tell rude customers to fuck off. And if they're scared to do that, they can summon me downstairs to do it myself (this fantasy involves having my own apartment upstairs of the restaurant), because you don't fucking disrespect my staff like that. Develop a reputation as a place where You'd Better Act Yourself or you get nothing, which elevates the quality of the food in peoples' minds because it's human to assume that more work=more worth, and if a pizza place can afford to simply throw rude customers out, that clearly must mean that the food is just that good that going back is worth it anyway.

Hiring enough people to get the work done in a leisurely pace and occasionally have the time to chat with each other or customers. You just do the job I gave you in the time I gave you, don't steal anything and don't watch porn off your phone anywhere where the customers can see you, you're good. Don't care if you quit school at 16 if you can still mop floor. Don't care if you've been to prison because you killed some guy, as long as you're not doing that here. Don't care if you deal drugs on your free time as long as you don't bring your business to your day job. This place is exclusively for pizza business.

Have an item on the menu called "random pizza" - and if you order that one, they'll just throw in a mix of whatever ingredients we've got too much of, like if the bell peppers gotta be used before they go bad, every single random pizza is going to have them until they're either gone or need to get tossed. If you've got dietary restrictions or allergies, you gotta specify that while ordering, because other than that, random pizza is just whatever ingredients we need to get rid of. Surplus ingredients du jour.

Building a reputation as a place that's somehow simultaneously sketchy as hell but also remarkably high quality, getting five star restaurant customer service from a waiter with blue hair and stick-n-poke tattoos, there's a homeless guy at the back of the kitchen eating an order that nobody picked up, every surface is spotless and no matter how important of a suit-and-tie you are, if you won't behave yourself the owner will personally physically fight you.

We done told Meemaw not to go on no more adventures. We said at her, "Listen, Meemaw, you are 83 goddamn years old and the doctor says you can't go on no more adventures, it's bad for your ticker." But she done got up her hauberk and that god-killin axe of hers and went right out there and fuckin died and now I gotta go back out there to the dragon's lair with the Staff of Resurrection after her ass *again*.

Weren't her heart or nuthin, tho. She got et by the dragon.

oh you're in a horror film/book and your phone died/has no bars? how boring. I think phones in horror SHOULD work. they should ding only to have the protagonist check and find nothing. they should get calls from somebody you don't know but is still somehow in your contacts. google maps should lead you to one place, no matter what address you type in.

phones are such a big part of our daily lives, removing them from horror removes the horror from our experience. what if the horror felt like it could happen to you, right here, right now? what if it felt like it was already happening?

call 911 and something that is definitely not a person picks up.

call 911 and get an operator only for the call to become increasingly weirder and more sinister until you realize that whatever picked up is not there to help.

text messages from someone who's dead. voicemails that sound like dead air until you turn the volume all the way up.

emergency alerts for weather that doesn't happen on earth.

Your phone rings - but it's your phone number on the screen. You answer it, but all you hear is heavy, laboured breathing. You go to say something, only to hear your voice on the other end tell you "It's too late," and hang up.

You get a message from a number you don't recognise. It's a picture of you from behind. You turn and see there's nobody there. When you look back at your phone, you see the sender has sent another text - "Sorry, wrong number."

Your phone rings - it's a private number. You answer it, only to feel the sensation of something licking your ear.

You wake up to find a voicemail. You play it back, only to hear an autotuned version of your own voice reciting a Bible passage - 1 Peter 2: 18-20.

You get an emergency alert. It says "I'm sorry."

You keep trying to call 911 but you ALSO keep getting robocalls for duct cleaning, surveys, random scam calls and texts.

one time I was in an unfamiliar town, it was 11pm, and I was trying to find some food so I looked up the nearest 24-hour supermarket and started navigation, except instead of a supermarket my phone took me to the gates of a cemetery and then said "you have reached your destination." you could write that incident into a horror movie with zero changes and it scare the audience's faces off

I still remember encountering this as a teenager and getting really freaked out.

Sometimes classics can be improved upon.

The Tree Who Set Healthy Boundaries : an alternate ending for Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree by Topher Payne 💯🌳❤️

https://www.topherpayne.com/giving-tree?