The amount of times I could have been that white girl in the horror movie could honestly be a movie in itself and it’s honestly a waste that my entire life isn’t constantly recorded on film because it would be HILARIOUS
when ppl act like leaving gifts for fairies is to get the fairies’ attention so they’ll be kind to you~~ when really leaving gifts for fairies is the supernatural equivalent of a mafia protection racket
Anti-Mom: You shouldn’t not-complain because there’re always people who have it better.
how to draw a rat step 1: draw any shape step 2: congrats
alright so Pangur got her claw stuck while rolling over in bed, and then just GAVE UP, which led to her being horizontally flattened in a way that gives her impossible girth and...... I'll share, but just know that it's an optical illusion. please. I swear to god she's a healthy weight. I mean, a little chubby, but not like this.
“Someone left a phone with a busted screen in a road-stop toilet stall. I’d pulled in while driving home after making a delivery and i needed coffee. This photo was the only thing on it.”
THIS IS THE ONLY ACCEPTABLE BRUCE CHARACTERISATION
Okay, buckle up buckaroos, because today I met an honest-to-goodness cryptid.
I was out running errands and I made a stop at Intimate Books (…for a friend), and on my way out I realized that the bookshop next door was open.
This bookshop has existed for more than a hundred years, and in all my life it has NEVER BEEN OPEN. I mean, I assume it has to be open sometimes, but never at any normal, reasonable hour. Everyone says it’s a front for the mob or something.
So what do you do when the weird mafia bookshop is open? You go the fuck inside.
The first thing I noticed was the smell. You know that smell when you accidentally leave your towel on the bathroom floor all day and you come back to that mildew funk? The shop smelled like that times a thousand. I expected to see stuff growing on the walls, but the books were pristine. We’re talking first editions, rare editions, weird Bibles and books inscribed to really famous dead people. Librarians would weep for the chance to accession this place. In the first two minutes I found a signed copy of The Crucible and what I think was a first edition of Blake’s Book of Thel.
Then a clerk showed up out of nowhere—honestly nowhere. He looked EXACTLY like a bookseller should look, kind of fluffy and bewildered and really, really gay.
“Are you lost?” was the first thing he said to me.
“Nope. Just browsing, thanks.”
“Browsing, I see. Erm. How do you feel about snakes?” he asked. And without waiting for me to answer, he just walked away and vanished around a shelf.
I figured it was a metaphor, or a code phrase for the mafia. Until I turned a corner like ten minutes later and found a little reading nook. It was really pretty, although I feel like that particular window should have been on an interior wall? Anyway, curled up in an armchair in a patch of sunlight was the biggest fuck-off black snake I have ever seen.
Like, I don’t mind snakes in general. But in their normal context, right? Outside. On the ground. Not six feet long and sitting on a threadbare velvet armchair like it owns the place.
I was about to turn around and leave, but I saw a gorgeous first-edition copy of Leaves of Grass on a shelf, a little too close to the snake for comfort. But I had never needed anything so badly in my life.
So I went back to the counter to buy it, but the clerk was nowhere to be found.
While I was waiting, I noticed a collection of pictures hanging on the wall behind the counter, dating back to the very dawn of photography. A couple were of this rock-star looking guy from the 70s that I should probably have recognized, but there were authors and landscapes and stuff, too. There was even an old tintype portrait of Oscar freaking Wilde, sitting in this very shop with a guy that I would ACTUALLY SWEAR was the clerk from before. Like, I know my family all has the same nose, but this guy had the same everything.
After approximately one year of waiting, the clerk came back out to the desk. By now I’ve realized that he’s too bad at his job to be anything but the owner of the shop.
“I saw your snake,” I told him.
“Did you? Was he behaving himself?”
“He was sleeping.”
“Yes, he enjoys that.”
“Does he just stay out in the open like that? What if he gets out?”
He shrugged and smiled. “He always comes home again, the dear boy.”
Right, a homing snake. That’s totally normal.
Then he cleared his throat and asked, in a weirdly reluctant voice, if I was going to buy the Whitman.
“Yes, please,” I told him. “I saw it on a shelf by the snake, and it was just too tempting.”
He sighed. “Oh, yes, I expect it was.”
When I started to hand him my card, he went all fluttery and said that they didn’t take cards.
All right, fine. I had some cash on me, but I told him that he’d sell a lot more books if he got a Square or something.
He got this scandalized look on his face and went, “Why would I want to do that?”
Oookay. I handed over the cash and he popped open the ancient till and started making change.
In shillings. Shillings! I swear to god I saw Queen Anne’s face on one of them. The silver value of the coins was probably as much as I paid for the book.
But I had to have proof that this happened—at that point, all I had was a book in a plain brown wrapper, not appreciably different from what I bought next door. So I asked him for a receipt.
He looked delighted and wrote one up for me.
By hand.
With a fountain pen.
And that’s the story of how I met a bookseller cryptid and his pet snake.
bear and bird are friends
*smoke emiting from clenched fist*
woman: OOOOoOOH NoO!!!! It’s meelltIINNGG!!
*ring melts off woman’s hand*
woman: MY PRECIOUS POWERRrRR RING! GONE FOORRVVERrrr..
woman: *screams like a pterodactyl*
Scooby Doo idea: Daphne Blake as the weird rich kid whose parents signed her up for a shit-ton of rich-kid extracurriculars like polo, fencing, and all of this other shit so they wouldn’t have to deal with her/bolster her college resume. She puts a lot of effort into actually being good at all these extra-curriculars bc she’s competing with all of her ~super successful and talented~ sisters for attention and ends up athletic as hell and socially stunted and like…really aggressive and competitive and never quite satisfied with anything she’s doing. The only other ‘High Society’ kid who can put up with her is Norville “Shaggy” Rogers —an anxious stoner with freaky strict parents whose only friend prior to Daphne was his equally anxious rescue dog—Daphne’s been beating up Shaggy’s bullies for years. Then there’s student council dweeb Fred Jones who’s always been groomed to be this ‘leader’ by his parents and is always pressured to go to these youth leadership things and stuff and yeah he’s pretty good at directing group projects, but really Fred’s kind of shy and more interested in engineering, forensics and maybe criminal justice and he’s been friends with this chick Velma Dinkley in engineering club who’s brilliant but she’s also tactless, awkward and very bitterly sarcastic to cover up for the fact that her book smarts far outweigh her social skills.
So then there’s this mystery downtown and all five of them show up and there’s a mutual, “Oh hey it’s you: The weird kid from my school. What are you doing here?” and everyone goes around. Fred’s like, “Oh I knew the owners of this place and they said they might have to close down because of this ghost and I told Velma about it and Velma thinks we can get to the bottom of this.” And Shaggy’s like, “Scoob and I didn’t want to be home right now and we honestly didn’t know about the ghost but hey Daphne’s here so we feel safe enough to hang out and maybe Scoob can sniff out some clues or something.” And then everyone turns and looks at Daphne and Daphne’s just like, “I want to fight a fucking ghost.”
thatch - they/them i like the sims a lot and also other things sometimes
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