#the lore…

[manorpunk]

Teach Me, Maria-sensei! 7️⃣

Sunny: I haven’t heard you talk about your family, like, ever. What’s up with that?

Maria: None of humanity’s institutions are defensible, but ‘the family’ is by far our worst creation. It is the root of all evil, the ancestor of all hierarchies and unearned authorities, and thus deserves a slow and painful death.

Sunny. Neat. So you totally want to complain about your family, don’t you?

Maria: I’d really rather not.

Sunny: Then you want to say something nondescript about them?

Maria: No! Why do you care so much about it?

Sunny: Because you usually want to share your opinions about everything and everyone, so if you don’t want to talk about it, then I must be poking a nerve.

Maria: …

Sunny: Poke poke.

Maria: …

Sunny: You know it’s only a matter of time. I can do this all day.

Maria: [sighs] Right, I forget sometimes that you’re evil.

Sunny: I’m not evil! I’m just good at what I do. Now gimme the details. Gimme gimme.

Maria: It’s… ugh, I can’t believe I’m telling you this. By any chance, have you ever heard of the ‘skuman project’?

Sunny: Nope, but it’s in quotes so it must be important.

Maria: I had just described how the billionaire class retreated to their bunkers, private islands, and company towns back in the 2030s. Once they were settled, they unfortunately were not content to stay idle, and set to work on a number of experiments previously considered off-limits. The ‘skuman project’ was one of those experiments, or rather, a collection of related experiments that would have previously been rejected as unethical and physically impossible - exowombs, genetic engineering, tailored hormone therapies, the list goes on. They tried anything that would bring them closer to a future of eloi and morlocks, deific übermenschen ruling over obedient, unthinking worker bees.

Sunny: Sheesh! I mean, I am also trying to make people into my obedient and unthinking servants, but I just do that by bein’ so gosh-darn cute! [wink, peace sign]

Maria: But, as always happens with such grand ambitions, the billionaires behind it were deeply in denial. There’s a reason that such experiments were off-limits - back then, our knowledge of human genetics was woefully rudimentary, and their ‘experiments’ were akin to doing surgery while wearing oven mitts. They were throwing darts in the dark, often with live human subjects. The majority of these experiments were straightforward failures. Their exowomb experiments never produced any viable offspring, and the only thing their gene-tailoring therapies did was give children genetic disorders… hence why I’m stuck in this wheelchair most of the time.

Sunny: Whoa. So you’re telling me…

Maria: My ‘parents’ were a human breeding-sow and the supercomputer that wrote my DNA. I was raised by nannybots that followed the whims of their corporate masters. I am a skuman.

Sunny: That is, and I do not say this lightly, wowsers bowserinos. There’s no way it’s still going on, right?

Maria: Correct. The Global Logistics Network came in and shut the whole thing down back in the 2050s, then paid off all the surviving skumans to keep quiet about it, though by this point it’s become an open secret.

Sunny: Why did they want to keep it secret? If I were in their shoes I’d love the chance to show off other people’s bad ideas.

Maria: My guess would be that the GLN wanted to take a look at the results for themselves, see if there was anything they could learn from it. Mistakes can also be valuable information. Who knows what they’re doing with it now, it’ll probably be decades before anything is officially released to the public. If there’s one thing the GLN is good at, it’s giving people money to keep them quiet.

Sunny: Hey, it’s a form of wealth redistribution.

[long pause]

Maria: They thought they were making the future of humanity. And instead, they made a genetic train wreck. A woman-shaped pile of endocrine disorders. It’s like making pancakes, you know, the first one of the batch always comes out wrong. And you know what the worst part of all this is?

Sunny: [quietly] What’s that?

Maria: There’s a part of me that admires what they were trying to do. I don’t agree with their aims, obviously, but… whenever I tell people about all this, the first thing they do is whimper and coo about how hard it must be to not have a family. Then they turn around and talk about how much they hate their parents. In a way, us skumans are ex nihilo, free of ancestry and thus free from original sin. There’s a part of me that hopes the GLN gets some good data from all this and by 2100 people themselves are just one more mass-produced commodity.

Sunny: Why?

Maria: I don’t know. Because it’s what we deserve.

[falsepontchartrain]

drywell-lurkest has passed away. you should remove his name from your spreadsheet.

Oh I’m well aware he’s dead. I’m WELL AWARE he’s dead. Arlo made THAT shit clear, yes he did!!!

[summertimemp3]

We’re all just watching Gerard play with her ocs

[radroller]

[beemovieerotica]

idk if i told the full story on here but i signed up for a research study where they were testing a new opioid, and it was supposed to be up to 5 injections increasing the dose to see what people could tolerate

i got the first dose and almost immediately fainted. they had to call in a whole medical team and it was a huge fucking deal

i was kicked out of the study and got a phone call later where they were supposed to tell me what the drug was, so i could avoid it in the future. they told me it was saline water. a placebo. i fainted from the placebo effect.

anyway, it's been a few months and i just got an email from the same department asking me to be a research participant in a new study: testing the effects of open-label placebo.

open label placebo is when the subjects and the researchers all know it's a placebo. they're testing the power of my mind. my power to imagine anything.

i like to think that they chose me for this specifically based on their past experience with me. "get the guy who fainted like a little bitch boy from saline water." anyway i just submitted all my info and i'm looking forward to getting started.

[redrook]

I spent a lot of time handcuffed and in a cage in high school, for a charity bit the grocery store I worked at would do

the bit was that I was "put in jail for having too big a heart" and customers could donate to my bail to get me out (and the money would go to a children's hospital or something)

now. I was very clearly a teenaged employee handcuffed inside a large cage. and I would honestly tell people that I had been in there for hours. and people would say, that's terrible! that's awful! and I would show them my wrists red from the tight handcuffs, and say but I'm sooooooo close to making bail.

and then they would dump some cash in the basket, I'd thank them, and they'd walk away.

and every so often, one of the managers would come by and collect some of the cash, so I could keep being soooooo close to making bail.

I was very good with this bit. Parents with small kids would pay $5-10 if I told their children I had been placed in jail for not cleaning my room/doing my homework, etc. For people in their 20s, I'd threaten that I was very bad at playing the harmonica, but I WOULD play it and we'd all suffer unless they paid me. and for the most amount of money, older men in suits would almost always pay $20s if I avoided eye contact and stammered a lot.

eventually, the managers started to feel bad because I was in the cage so fucking long and often, that I'd need someone to brace me when I got out because I'd have no feeling in my legs. wobbling like a newborn giraffe.

but I would also rake in at LEAST $100 an hour in charity.

so they were like, hey champ. can we, uh, give you a pillow to sit on. in the cage. would you like a pillow so you're not just sitting on a cold metal slab. can we give you a pillow.

and I had to explain to them that if they gave me a pillow, people would think I was more comfortable, so they wouldn't feel as bad, so I'd bring in less money.

the compromise was that they'd bring me a nice coffee every couple hours, which I would have to try to block with my body from the customers.

all this money went to charity. that's what the money was for. it's what was on the sign. but how much they were willing to pay was very contingent on how comfortable I looked, never mind the fact that I was still a teenaged employee handcuffed inside a cage.

and out of the dozens of shifts I did this on, not ONCE did ANYONE say, hey kid I'm going to go talk to your manager because what the fuck is going on here. they would just drop money in the basket, and I'd thank them and sip from my secret drink.

I actually had people get MAD at me that I told them I was far away from bail, they donated like $15, and then 20 minutes I got let out because my shift ended.

again. the money was for charity. it was on the sign that was very clearly placed on the upper half of my cage.

so yeah. even when people think they mean well. people can be really, really fucking stupid.

[allpiesforourown]

Whenever my aunt springs her insane superstitious/religious cures on me I specifically remember when I was 17 and she got me exorcised. The priest was like "I don't think she's possessed" and she insisted "well there's something wrong with her, she's always [symptoms of depression] so..."

And the guy said some verses and touched my head and stuff then said I should drink only holy water for an entire week. Which wasn't hard to do, but my fav part of this whole experience was me saying I want to eat instant noodles and my aunt going "I'll make them for you. With the holy water he gave us." And then I had holy instant noodles

[atanerrum]

(hypnotizes you into liking my oc) (she has no lore)

[kurzler]

a quick psa to anyone recently getting into greek mythology and is a victim of tumblr and/or tiktok misconceptions:

-there is no shame in being introduced to mytholgy from something like percy jackson, epic the musical or anything like that, but keep in mind that actual myths are going to be VERY different from modern retellings

-the myth of medusa you probably know (her being a victim of poseidon and being cursed by athena) isn't 100% accurate to GREEK mythology (look up ovid)

-there is no version of persephone's abduction in which persephone willingly stays with hades, that's a tumblr invention (look up homeric hymn to demeter)

-as much as i would like it, no, cerberus' name does not mean "spot" (probably a misunderstanding from this wikipedia article)

-zeus isn't the only god who does terrible things to women, your fav male god probably has done the same

-on that note, your fav greek hero has probably done some heinous shit as well

-gods are more complicated than simply being "god of [insert thing]", many titles overlap between gods and some may even change depending on where they were worshipped

-also, apollo and artemis being the gods of the sun and the moon isn't 100% accurate, their main aspects as deities originally were music and the hunt

-titans and gods aren't two wholly different concepts, titan is just the word used to decribe the generation of gods before the olympians

-hector isn't the villain some people make him out to be

-hephaestus WAS married to aphrodite. they divorced. yes, divorce was a thing in ancient greece. hephaestus' wife is aglaia

-ancient greek society didn't have the same concepts of sexuality that we have now, it's incorrect to describe virgin goddesses like artemis and athena as lesbians, BUT it's also not wholly accurate to describe them as aromantic/asexual, it's more complex than that

-you can never fully understand certain myths if you don't understand the societal context in which they were told

-myths have lots and lots of retellings, there isn't one singular "canon", but we can try to distinguish between older and newer versions and bewteen greek and roman versions

-most of what you know about sparta is probably incorrect

-reading/waching retellings is not a substitute to reading the original myths, read the iliad! read the odyssey! i know they may seem intimidating, but they're much more entertaining than you may think

greek mythology is so complex and interesting, don't go into it with preconcieved notions! try to be open to learn!

[gurlu]

When I was in my teens, I used to make an entire magic system with 360+ unique spells, ordered in magic schools and categories, and it boggles my mind that I basically reinvented DnD mechanics, even down to metamagic.

I wanted to make a wiki about it but I don't have time for it.

The point was to try to encompass every "superpower" I could think of into a magic system.

I even got lore related to it all, I'm pretty sure I'm gonna simply reuse it all for OC worldbuilding. Ngl the fun part was naming all the spells, symbols and coming up with the logic of it all.

[adobe-outdesign]

the craziest beta 'mon is this guy, who would evolve into a random Pokemon upon evolution

like imagine finding this autism creature fighting for its life out in the wild so you catch it out of pity and two months later it evolves into goddamn Rayquaza

[valemrsn]

making aus for ocs are so funny cause like. theyre already in a situation… but what if they were in a DIFFERENT situation

[inbabylontheywept]

so. my wife came downstairs just as i took a bite out of the remaining half red onion on the counter. literally within seconds of just getting away with it. i looked at her, and she looked at me, and we both sat there a moment, all frozen, before she said babs, what the fuck. i tried to say i can explain but it came out as or corn explorn because such was the onion in my mouth that there was no room for words. its honestly a miracle that she understood me at all. at least, i'm assuming that she understood me because she did let me get my bearings for a few moments. a smarter man would've used that time to think up a good lie, but instead i just chewed as fast as i could because i knew i was gonna have to tell a whopper and i really wanted to be able to use big words again.

big words are instrumental to telling a whopper.

anyway, i totally ran out of time. i barely got my first swallow of onion in before she said well?, and i did at least have an empty mouth to match my empty head. but also i had no lies. so i looked her dead in the face, opened my mouth and waited, every bit as curious as her, to hear what excuse my mouth was gonna come up with.

im pregnant, said my mouth.

great job, mouth, said my brain.

mmmmm onion, said my mouth.

better you than me, said my wife.

then she went upstairs. it has been two hours she still refuses to kiss me. im devastated. im shook. im crying a little, i think.

(but that might just be the onion.)

[mapleandgingeroatmeal]

Ok you might be wondering, haha it’s funny to be an Animorph, Vic, but why the squid? To which I would reply that this Animorphs cover in particular features, I shit you not, a plot where an Alien ship has trapped the heros aboard while it tries to get them to play games.

[flicklikesstuff]

What.?

(Edit: We got her folks! One more to go!!)