Here there be wierdness

The frantic claustrophobia of being trapped in a space far too small for them. All they can do is swim helplessly in circles, hoping that some kindhearted person is clever enough to get them out. 

Or maybe there are too many people coming by. Maybe it’s the community pool, endlessly crowded every day, and mer-whumpee has no choice but to hide before they’re found by someone who wants to hurt them. 

And that doesn’t even begin to cover the scratchy concrete floors, or the potential dangers of the filters, or the disgusting stuff left behind by careless swimmers. 

And things are even worse if our mer-whumpee comes from the ocean.  

A saltwater mer-whumpee growing more and more ill by the day, the lack of salt taking its toll, ruining their gills, weakening muscles and organs that they used to use without thinking. 

Mer-whumpee being unable to open their eyes, unable to bear the sting of the chlorine and other chemicals. Or worse, the chemicals stinging their skin, burning their scales, causing horrible wounds that our whumpee has no idea how to treat. 

1. The FBI's Famous Cases & Criminals archive (fbi.gov/history/famous-cases) has detailed breakdowns of real fraud cases, Ponzi schemes, and confidence operations. The language they use is clinical and precise, which is perfect for getting the procedural details right.

2. The FTC Consumer Sentinel Network publishes annual reports on the most common fraud tactics in the US. Great for understanding how modern scams actually work and what makes people fall for them.

3. The Smithsonian's American Art Museum has a free digital collection of forgery case studies. If your character forges documents or art, this is gold.

4. Court Listener (courtlistener.com) is a free legal database where you can read actual court transcripts from fraud trials. Want to know how a real con artist talks under oath? This is where you find out.

5. The Internet Archive's collection of old newspaper crime sections. Search for "confidence man" or "swindle" in papers from the 1920s through 1960s and you'll find incredible real stories that would feel too dramatic for fiction.

Bonus: The Psychology of Fraud section on the Association for Psychological Science website has accessible articles about why people trust, how deception works cognitively, and what makes someone a convincing liar. Essential reading if you want your con artist characters to feel psychologically real.

It started as a class thing where showing off your fancy collar meant you could provide well for your mate but as technology got better and materials got cheaper they became a fashion statement.

Jack asks Robby to design his collar for him, and it’s perfect. A nice thick leather with strong stitching and a silver plate with Abbot-Robinavitch engraved on it. If it were up to Jack, he’d never take it off.

But he has to for work.

Not only does he not want to risk getting some unfortunate fluid on it, the hospital doesn’t allow them because rowdy patients have been known to grab at them.

So for work he wears a watch instead, on the backside of the face J+M is inscribed and on hard days Jack will press on it until he feels their initials mark his skin.

Everyday, the second he walks through their door, his leg comes off and the collar comes on.

Sometimes he brings Robby lunch just to have an excuse to show it off to their coworkers, and Robby always brightens when he’s wearing it.

Alpha!Jack who didn't think he'd be interested in another Omega after his mate died but being absolutely enchanted by how sad that damn man looks.

Omega!Robby who denies himself every single pleasure because the only thing he is worth at this point is doing his job.

Alpha!Jack who spends handover thinking what the poor thing would look like when he fucks away that stick up his ass.

Omega!Robby who reluctantly denied any attempt at courting despite wanting nothing more but to give in.

Alpha!Jack who didn't think he'd be interested in another Omega after his mate died but being absolutely enchanted by how sad that damn man looks.

Omega!Robby who denies himself every single pleasure because the only thing he is worth at this point is doing his job.

Alpha!Jack who spends handover thinking what the poor thing would look like when he fucks away that stick up his ass.

Omega!Robby who reluctantly denied any attempt at courting despite wanting nothing more but to give in.

Robby is regretting everything because now he’s using PTO to travel with Jack to ‘cryptids walk amount us’ no where to get these oversized pumpkins. (He’s being stock-homed into this. He’s developing opinions about pumpkin types for fuck’s sake)

At some point they’re driving to Nova Scotia at 2 am hauling a well over 100 pound pumpkin and Robby turns to him and says, “Intake it back. Go back to getting shot at.”

Everyone at The Pitt live streams Jack’s races. Ahmad has the board out. Ellis has separate cookie cakes for if he wins or loses. Dana uses some of the pumpkin innards for pie. Whitaker once went up to help scout out the best pumpkin. Gloria looks the other way when she sees them watching Jack (she watches the highlight reels in her office).

Here is a free pdf of xanathars guide to everything

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Here is a free pdf of mordenkainen’s tomb of foes

tumblr being the website of cannibalism talk and the moral discussions of it im curious what the consensus is if it was actually legal.

Consensual cannibalism is sorta a gray area because if someone offed themselves with the express understanding that you were allowed to eat them, you could still get in trouble for improper disposal of a corpse, its kinda case by case with that.

Mine was a story about a soldier and a medic from opposite sides of a war falling in love, if I remember correctly.

The soldier had been severely injured in an attack behind enemy lines and was either the only survivor or abandoned because he was too injured to move. He's found by a medic of the enemy side who was searching the battlefield for survivors. She brings him back to her home and slowly nurses him back to health and they kind of fall in love.

He has a crisis of faith because he was raised to believe terrible things about the enemy side that he realizes just aren't true. Plus his kingdom is horrible and tyrannical and the more he stays with her the more he realizes how awful his home is. But he also feels terrible because he had a wife and family back home and yeah his wife probably thinks he's dead but he loves her and he feels wrong about loving this new woman and he feels like he should go back to her but if he does he'll just be executed as a traitor anyway.

The medic is conflicted because she saved this man because she believes everyone should be saved but he's part of the kingdom that killed everyone she ever cared about. And she kind of hates him for that but she realizes its not really his fault and also he's a good man who has been forced into a very bad situation, and she starts to fall in love with him. But she learns about his family and now she's conflicted and also he's the enemy and if anyone finds out about him they're both fucked.

Aaaand I don't really remember how the story ends 😅😅 but I'm pretty sure it involved him being tortured at some point...

It started as a Fnaf thing were the security guard does Fnaf things, but for some reason child me decided to kidnap this man.

He gets wrapped head to toe in bandages and strapped to a table. He has a blindfold, he can't speak through an oxygen mask/feeding tube and at one point he gets giving earbuds that play painfully loud music.

And that was it, he spends years being trapped and left in the dark.

Mine was a story about a soldier and a medic from opposite sides of a war falling in love, if I remember correctly.

The soldier had been severely injured in an attack behind enemy lines and was either the only survivor or abandoned because he was too injured to move. He's found by a medic of the enemy side who was searching the battlefield for survivors. She brings him back to her home and slowly nurses him back to health and they kind of fall in love.

He has a crisis of faith because he was raised to believe terrible things about the enemy side that he realizes just aren't true. Plus his kingdom is horrible and tyrannical and the more he stays with her the more he realizes how awful his home is. But he also feels terrible because he had a wife and family back home and yeah his wife probably thinks he's dead but he loves her and he feels wrong about loving this new woman and he feels like he should go back to her but if he does he'll just be executed as a traitor anyway.

The medic is conflicted because she saved this man because she believes everyone should be saved but he's part of the kingdom that killed everyone she ever cared about. And she kind of hates him for that but she realizes its not really his fault and also he's a good man who has been forced into a very bad situation, and she starts to fall in love with him. But she learns about his family and now she's conflicted and also he's the enemy and if anyone finds out about him they're both fucked.

Aaaand I don't really remember how the story ends 😅😅 but I'm pretty sure it involved him being tortured at some point...

It started as a Fnaf thing were the security guard does Fnaf things, but for some reason child me decided to kidnap this man.

He gets wrapped head to toe in bandages and strapped to a table. He has a blindfold, he can't speak through an oxygen mask/feeding tube and at one point he gets giving earbuds that play painfully loud music.

And that was it, he spends years being trapped and left in the dark.

Because, yes, listening to a story and reading a story use mostly the same parts of the brain. Yes, listening to the audiobook counts as "having read" a book. Yes, oral storytelling has a long, glorious tradition and many cultures maintained their histories through oral history or oral + art history, having never developed a true written language, and their oral stories and histories are just as valid and rich as written literature.

We still can't call listening in the absence of reading "literacy."

The term literacy needs to stay restricted to the written word, to the ability to access and engage with written texts, because we need to be able to talk about illiteracy. We need to be able to identify when a society is failing to teach children to read, and if we start saying that listening to stories is literacy, we lose the ability to describe those systemic failures.

Blind folks have been knee-deep in this debate for a long time. Schools struggle to provide resources to teach students Braille and enforcing the teaching of Braille to low-vision and blind children is a constant uphill battle. A school tried to argue that one girl didn't need to learn Braille because she could read 96-point font. Go check what that is. The new prevalence of audiobooks and TTS is a huge threat to Braille literacy because it provides institutions with another excuse to not provide Braille education or Braille texts.

That matters. Braille-literate blind and low-vision people have a 90% employment rate. For those who don't know Braille, it's 30%. Braille literacy is linked to higher academic success in all fields.

Moving outside the world of Braille, literacy of any kind matters. Being able to read text has a massive impact on a person's ability to access information, education, and employment. Being able to talk about the inability to read text matters, because that's how we're able to hold systems accountable.