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Spent tonight at a local short film festival. One of the shorts was made by two 12 year olds in their backyard and it was the best short of the entire night

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man sometimes i really want to get back into welding but then i remember that the guys from the first course i took won’t be there and change my mind

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"Was this book good or was I deeply 19 when I read it:" an investigative journalism series

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Happy pride month to my dad. When I came out as bi to him, this man googled what it ment, look at me and said "ohh. Yeah. You get that from me. You'd have far more siblings of I only shaged women." And went right back to his work emails.

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today it was 1 thousand degrees outside and i had to wade through a creek in the woods for work obviously

so when i got into the office i was drenched in sweat and with POTS it's really difficult to regulate your temperature so after sitting in the air conditioned room for 15 minutes and changing my clothes i STILL wasn't cooling down

so i opened the chest freezer where we keep frozen food for our education animals and i sort of just? draped? stuffed? my entire head and torso into the freezer so my legs were just sort of hanging out behind me like maybe i had been crushed in some freak freezer incident.

i heard my colleague walk in behind me and then his foosteps stopped and i didn't know what to say so i waited for him to say something and he said, sounding not at all troubled, just the most neutral tone possible,

"well, this is unusual."

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what will it be, boss? the comfort of misery or the pain of change?

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ghost stories are alarmingly easy to spread tbh

when I was like ten I was walking back from the chip shop near my gran's house with a neighbour and we took a short cut down an alley which was enclosed by garages except for one part which was wire fenced and led to the electricity shack

and while I was walking I chucked a chip over the fence. the girl walking with me, C, reasonably asks why I did that

"oh, don't you know?" I say, as if I'm not equally out of my own loop

she shakes her head. the enclosed alleyway has no streetlights. it's after dark. the shack is isolated in the distance.

"a little girl who lived up on the court climbed the fence once on a dare. she went up to the shack and touched it, but there was a wire sticking out, and when she touched it, she got electrocuted and died, right there. if you come back in the daylight, you can still see the black mark."

[editor's note: the court was the smaller road off the side of the crescent, which was the one C's family and my gran lived on. the houses there were slightly more expensive and newer, almost all occupied by wealthy commuters to the city, where most of the crescent houses were occupied by retirees and locals who worked on the trading estate. naturally, crescent kids hated the court. houses there got bricked about once a month.]

"no she didn't," C says

I made up this story for absolutely no reason and with no plan, but I'm not gonna back down now. "sure she did. and if you go past on your way back from the shops and you don't leave her an offering, she'll follow you home through the streetlights. one flickers behind you, then the next, then the next, until you get home. and then the lights start to flocked inside the house. even if you turn out all the electrics before bed, it'll be too late. she's inside. and you'll wake up on the night and see her, and she'll be so awful to see it'll stop your heart."

[editor's note: the streetlights always flickered. this was because our neighbour monkey george kept setting the junction boxes on fire]

"I never did before and she never followed me home!"

"do you come down the alley after dark? or do you take the main road with the streetlights?" I knew she didn't use the shortcut, because I'd been the one to talk her into it that night. she was three years younger than me and scared of the dark.

C claims not to believe me, but she throws a chip over the fence too, and walks the rest of the way looking over her shoulder. I get to pride myself for the night on being good at scary stories, and don't think much more about it.

fast forward six or seven years. I'm back in town. I'm on my way back from the chip shop, taking the same shortcut home. ahead of me on the road are a couple of kids I vaguely recognise as old playmates' younger siblings.

they stop, and I watch one fish out three sweeties from the pack they're sharing. they take one each and throw them over the fence. they carry on walking.

I realise that this is probably my fault, as are any resulting pest control issues around the old electricity shack.

when I get to the fence, I throw a chip over.

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I'm here/ I'm home

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cuteness aggression

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i'm literally cuddlebait. i'm internationally recognized as a snuggle risk. they've got me on the registry of snoozers with two charges of soft and reasonable suspicions of smells good

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That's a 2,500 year old mosaic floor from Pompeii. The cord across the entryway, the text in the display on the wall, these things make me think that once upon a time they used to let you walk on that floor. Which is wild.

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they should invent an apartment that has huge windows but is never too hot and is near everything i like and all my friends but is also quiet when i want it to be and costs zero dollars or perhaps they pay me to live in. and they save it just for me so i dont have to look for it :)

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One day we will wake up and there will be crabs.

In the meantime, look after each other.

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jomthan

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somewhere out there right now is a kid with curly hair being raised by people who have wavy hair at best and those people are giving them 2-in-1 shampoo and conditioner and telling them to dry brush it. and that kid is gonna spend all of middle school and high school hating their hair and moping over the flat iron. they're being told right now that if they don't dry-brush their curl pattern into oblivion every morning it means they're unkempt and gross even though they naturally have the kind of ringlets that a thousand bridezillas would commit horrible murders for every june. it's happening right now it's an absolute epidemic and a tragedy every time