A Place

When I turned 17, we ordered a cake at the grocery store for my party, as we’d done many times before. If you wanted something written on the cake you’d write it into a section of the order form. We requested, very simply, “Happy Birthday Courtney”. When we went to pick it up the day of the party, this is what we got.

The bakery employees had absolutely no explanation for this. The order form, attached to the box, very clearly did not contain any of those extra names. Whomever had done the writing was no longer in, so there was no one to ask how this had happened. The fact that the name ‘Juan’ is misspelled bewilders me to this day. (I’ve never seen ‘Miley’ without the E, either, but it’s believable that someone might spell it that way.) Did this cake slip in from an alternate universe where I’m one quarter of a set of Hispanic quadruplets? Dyslexic Hispanic quadruplets, maybe?

This cake became the focal point of my party. At least two of my friends regularly called me ‘Courtney Mily Jaun Pablo’ for years to come. My siblings and I still reference it sometimes, eleven years later. It is probably the funniest thing ever to occur at any birthday celebration of my life, and may well remain so for the rest of my days.

No One Like You

now, it took us a while to realise it meant "(there is) no one like you". at first, we all parsed it as a botched "no one like(s) you"

I made this transparent PNG the night he died in preparation for one of the many ways I was going to memorialize him--a surface rug in his likeness that I planned on laying directly in the line of his favourite sunbeam. And I uploaded that PNG here, because this is the website where people post their cats.

I was not expecting the reception I got. Many people have pointed out that this post has more reblogs than likes, and how insane that is in 2025 when reblog culture is at an all time low. I didn't even talk about the fact that Burger passed away in the original post, it wasn't a tearjerker reblog bait or anything like that. People just loved Burger that much, in the same way I fell in love with him at first sight. He was such an ugly kitten.

Anyways, it's really special to me that so many people have reblogged my best friend. I made this PNG to memorialize him in a completely different way, and you all wound up doing just that in ways I never even imagined.

Thank you. Wherever he is, I know the sun is shining.

Be me, just discovering manga for the first time as a extremely sheltered baptist 14 year old. I was obsessed. Naruto scratched an itch in me as a young repressed gay that veggie tales and 321 Penguins just couldn't reach. I would check out my highschool's book limit in naruto volumes, tear through them in one night, bring them back the next day, check out the next 6 volumes, rinse and repeat. Nothing would come in between me reading through these books as fast as humanly possible.

So when I was dragged out of my room to go to my new stepdad's company sponsored picnic, i was less than thrilled. But, oh well, a ninja should always be adaptable, so i grabbed my current volume and we headed off to the park.

Now I don't know if you've ever had the displeasure of experiencing the Corporate Sponsored Family Picnic, but let me tell you, even as a child it was a sorry affair. Small groups of pale middle aged men in khaki shorts and polos stood in circles clutching their solo cups full of sprite while their equally haggard looking wives wrestled wood chips out of the mouths of their redfaced toddlers.

I was more concerned about finding a quiet corner of the pavilion to read out of the reach of sticky fingered middleschoolers and curious siblings alike.

Staying quiet and undetected was the way of the ninja.

Well, wouldn't you know it, the company hired a clown to come and paint the faces of their employee's children. I loved facepaint but unfortunately being 14 meant that i was far too mature for the butterfly masks and spiderman faces of yore, so I kept reading.

That is... until i saw him.

The first time i saw Orochimaru I had two thoughts. One was gay panic, the other was complete and total assurance that this was the coolest looking character that had ever been made in the history of man. Looking back now I could probably have sited this as being the moment my egg cracked for me but u can't tell therapists that so moving on.

Right then I knew that I had to be him. Embody every bit of intimidation and power that came with his killer eyeliner. Smugly, I strode past all the unicorns and batman faces, knowing that I was about to become the ultimate ninja.

I slapped the open book onto this poor 40 something year old woman's table and just pointed.

"Are you sure?" she asked me, pleaded me, eyes squinting at the picture of a man vomiting a smaller version of himself up.

I nodded solemnly.

I stood completely still for the whole process, brimming with excitement and undiagnosed autism. When she was finished and showed me the result, I was so blinded with euphoria it didn't matter that several dads had begun to stare or that my very christian mother was already wetting paper towels as I hopped down off the stool.

For those brief few moments I was the most powerful sannin at that picnic

thank u

nattou, this is the best fucjing thing ive ever read.

allow me to explain:

"People back then always married young it's natural!!!" Every single 1800s guide I've ever met casually mentions that, of course, you really shouldn't get married before you're at least 20, and waiting until 25 is usually better.

Or, like. Okay here's a long segment:

Just firmly going "it is crazy sexist to blame The Wife for overspending when thirty seconds of asking questions will immediately establish that her husband was outright lying to her about how much money they had. Talk to your wife like a normal person."

Or--okay, here. A section on being honest and not writing love letters in secret, because that's usually a good sign that there's something untoward going on....

....except that he then immediately acknowledges that sometimes, the reason you're hiding this from your parents is that your parents suck. That there are parents who frankly have not earned the right to approve or disapprove of your partner.

"Men and women being friends with each other is literally normal. Don't be a controlling freak."

"If you have to abuse a child to keep order in your classroom then you're a bad teacher."

Meanwhile this was what various medical professionals in that reddit thread had to say about it.

“Say the planet is born at midnight and it runs for one day. First there is nothing. Two hours are lost to lava and meteors. Life doesn’t show up until three or four a.m. Even then, it’s just the barest self-copying bits and pieces. From dawn to late morning—a million million years of branching—nothing more exists than lean and simple cells.

Then there is everything. Something wild happens, not long after noon. One kind of simple cell enslaves a couple of others. Nuclei get membranes. Cells evolve organelles. What was once a solo campsite grows into a town.

The day is two-thirds done when animals and plants part ways. And still life is only single cells. Dusk falls before compound life takes hold. Every large living thing is a latecomer, showing up after dark. Nine p.m. brings jellyfish and worms. Later that hour comes the breakout—backbones, cartilage, an explosion of body forms. From one instant to the next, countless new stems and twigs in the spreading crown burst open and run.

Plants make it up on land just before ten. Then insects, who instantly take to the air. Moments later, tetrapods crawl up from the tidal muck, carrying around on their skin and in their guts whole worlds of earlier creatures. By eleven, dinosaurs have shot their bolt, leaving the mammals and birds in charge for an hour.

Somewhere in that last sixty minutes, high up in the phylogenetic canopy, life grows aware. Creatures start to speculate. Animals start teaching their children about the past and the future. Animals learn to hold rituals.

Anatomically modern man shows up four seconds before midnight. The first cave paintings appear three seconds later. And in a thousandth of a click of the second hand, life solves the mystery of DNA and starts to map the tree of life itself.

1. If you see this post, highly recommend taking it as an opportunity to set a timer for 15 minutes and switch over to ACTIVITY YOU ENJOY. if after those 15 minutes, you want to go back to scrolling, that's okay!

2. Huge shout out to this popping up in my notifs often, bc I do go back to activity.

me: yeah, i posted on tumblr

publisher: .........tumblr?

me: that's where the gays are.

publisher: And what is your marketing strategy on... tumblr?

me: idk, i shitpost at 2am?

publisher: .....and it works?

me: depends on what the gays find funny at that point in time.

publisher: Could I have a link to your tumblr?

me: .......absolutely not.