theribthatgrewback

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"Do you ever dream of land?" The whale asks the tuna.

"No." Says the tuna, "Do you?"

"I have never seen it." Says the whale, "but deep in my body, I remember it."

"Why do you care," says the tuna, "if you will never see it."

"There are bones in my body built to walk through the forests and the mountains." Says the whale.

"They will disappear." Says the tuna, "one day, your body will forget the forests and the mountains."

"Maybe I don't want to forget," Says the whale, "The forests were once my home."

"I have seen the forests." Whispers the salmon, almost to itself.

"Tell me what you have seen," says the whale.

"The forests spawned me." Says the salmon. "They sent me to the ocean to grow. When I am fat with the bounty of the ocean, I will bring it home."

"Why would the forests seek the bounty of the oceans?" Asks the whale. "They have bounty of their own."

"You forget," says the salmon, "That the oceans were once their home."

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*points at the waiter* your soul is uniquely sick

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they always make studio ghibli food look so delicious

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This is absolutely and simultaneously the cuntiest and most diabolical TTRPG design possibly ever. I think any person who plays as Onslaught should be allowed to put their Swindle players into a chokehold.

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idk i don't think it's terrible to joke about common themes and even tropes in poetry and fiction. like some things are funny in the way that they pop up so often and are sometimes overdone & hamfisted.

the problem for me is when people on this site post poetry or short prose and someone reblogs it with a joke and that version of the post gets big notes. and that happens on here like every other month.

regardless of whether it's "good" or not, that's someone's art and unless they've already published it, this this is likely the only place they're "publishing" so the comments & tags here will be the only feedback they get.

and if they push back at all, they're portrayed as bad sports. i joined this site as a creative writing blog when i was 15 in 2008 and over the years i've seen so so so many young writers here play along and laugh it off when one of their poems becomes the new joke, because at least then only their writing will be criticized, not them.

i'm not by any means suggesting the no one is rude and terrible to visual artists here as well but i will say there isn't a tumblr trend of reblogging someone's drawing and commenting "lol this is corny and stupid" and then that version gets 100,000 notes with everyone agreeing and laughing.

there are literally "iconic" copypasta memes from this site that were teenagers' poems.

try being nice

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Customer started yelling at me because I was 1 minute late to open the shop so I banned him from shopping with us and locked the door on him. Play stupid games.

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raising my son on a strict media diet of Portal, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and Mythbusters in an attempt to resurrect the extinct species Pre-Gamergate Smug Nerd Boy

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"i asked chatGPT" "I asked copilot" well I asked Gramble Gigglefunny, and he said "you don't know a thing about love. That's why your wife left you"

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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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Ok am I, stupid or do a fair portion of the lyrics to Kiss From A Rose just not make any sense at all

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a funny thing about having a Problematic Blorbo is that you'll periodically come across a post along the lines of "um let's not forget that [Blorbo] is a bad person..." listing their various crimes, and if you have a modicum of intellectual honesty you find yourself nodding along and saying yeah it's true... but it's the greyness of their character that makes them so compelling... At the same time though you have a little Saul Goodman in your ear going "your honor in their defense: who cares like omfgggg who caresssssss like come onnnnnn"