??????

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"

Well, here's the thing, according to Bluesky reporting it actually emerged as part of an indie TTRPG zine:

> accidentally meme your way into creating a hit song made entirely out of slurs

> song gets banned from the dance charts right as its about to chart

> every gay bar in the country immediately adds it to their playlist in protest

First tweet: “I saw a piece of fabric? on the floor of my room so I went to pick it up but it was actually the moonlight that entered through the window lmao”

me messaging a best friend w/zero lead-in:

the IDs will look very impressive. they will not come cheap. they will not help you.

there's no checkpoint to bluff your way through and nobody who wants to hear you try. if you try to time travel anywhere near the Titanic, whether you try to board with all the other passengers or appear on the boat in the middle of the voyage, you will get slammed directly into a whitespace dragnet - a time bubble, in layman's terms.

and you will be surrounded by at least a dozen time cops, all of whom are bored and cranky and very eager to flex their newfound authority, which means they will absolutely detain you for as long as possible and insist on giving you a lecture when a slap on the wrist would do. if you talk back they might double your fine or even suspend your chronal permissions for up to a year.