it just snowed in south texas for the first time since 2004 and everyone’s losing their goddamn minds it wasn’t even an inch deep it was like 0.1 inches but our weather is almost always in the high 80’s year around I’m always sweating my ass off so no one fucking kill my excitement with a “oh haha that’s like summer in chicago” because I DO NOT care some of us have never seen snow in our lives and I’m nuttin rn and I built a shitty fucking snowman
jsyk…my shitty snowman looks like hello kitty on a pregnant woman’s body… do u want to see
As a Chicagoan, I really wanna see this legendary Texas snowman
If you want to make the world a better place for mentally ill and neurodivergent people, get into the habit of shutting down people who mock/laugh at/sneer at “odd” or “weird” but harmless behaviour. Just refuse to laugh with them and say “That’s not funny.” or “They’re not doing any harm.” Do this whether or not anyone who’s directly negatively affected hears it. This is both about protecting people from ableist verbal abuse, AND about teaching ableists that their attitudes are not being tolerated and that you’re not going to bond with them over ableism (or, hopefully, any other form of oppression).
good post
My fav is saying “I don’t get it” or “what’s the problem/joke?” and forcing people to admit that they’re just being assholes.
When I was in high school, I was the part-time henchperson of a Mad Scientist.
I’m not exaggerating about “Mad Scientist”. “Riley” (Name changed for his family’s privacy) was a former Medical Doctor, as well as an artist, microbiologist, pilot (as in, designed and flew his own experimental aircraft), magician, computer programmer and musical composer, and had an outbuilding attached to his house where he kept things like his hand-made 3D printer, electron microscope and drone-dirigible assembly devices.
Riley had ALS and was eventually wheelchair-bound, so by 2006 I was being called in on the odd school night or weekend to go out around FoCo and the surrounding mountains. “I need a younger set of legs and someone with no fear of heights” He’d say. Being that I was a very boring child that had no interest in sex or drugs and always called when I was going to be late, and that Riley was a trusted family friend, My parents trusted me to go out at like 9PM and come home at 2AM on a Tuesday.
…To do things like scale locked fire escapes and climb around on rooftops that we DEFINITELY did not have permission to be on to do things like install speakers and bluetooth broadcasting devices at strategic points around Old Town so that if you download the right app onto your phone (I’ve got it backed up somewhere, I’ll post it when I find it) , you can walk around town and be exposed to the ghostly, extremely shady side of FoCo history for his 2007 Halloween project.
We did get caught by the cops but I was 17, short and white as goddamn mayonnaise so when the cops asked me what I was doing “It’s for a community art project!” actually worked.
My favorite Mad Science Project was in 2009, Gallus rostromegalus.
I was home from college for summer, and Riley had been messing around with Rotational Physics and had managed to make Giant (24’ x 18’) extremely realistic Chicken eggs, weighted and everything so that if you picked one up, it would feel like there was a heavy yolk wobbling around inside. They’re amusing all on their own, but after leaving them in the slash pile from spring cleaning, Riley realized they had POTENTIAL.
So we went around getting permission from a few businesses and the art museum, and I spent a few nights making plausible enormous chicken feathers in Riley’s lab out of grass, acrylic glaze and some other odds and ends laying around, and filling up the back of my mom’s van with as much of the backyard slash pile as fit in there, then drove out in the middle of the night to set up giant nests for the eggs, strewn with feathers and surrounded by Traffic cones and orange construction mesh and signs from the entirely fictitious “Department Of Fish And Wildfowl, Specious Relocation Division”
(an incomplete nest on the steps of Fort Collins Museum of Art)
(signage, responsibly warning people to stay away in case of giant chickens)
Riley even made QR codes that linked back to an obviously false Wiki- if you scrolled to the bottom, the page was covered in feathers and after five minutes it would start to make chicken noises.
People. Went. INSANE.
Crowds turned up to take selfies with the nests and Riley tracked down literally dozens of tagged photos captioned “IS THIS REAL????”.
Someone wrote a very worried and not terribly facetious-sounding letter to the editor concerned that Giant Chickens were roaming around FoCo, something that big could hurt someone! There was an entirely-serious-sounding counter-letter that we Humans have clearly invaded this majestic creature’s natural habitat, where are they SUPPOSED to make their nests, huh?
Multiple people called the police to report having seen the elusive Gallus rostromegalus up in the hills or skulking around downtown. Reports claimed it was anywhere form five to twelve feet tall, with dramatic plumage and an eerie, yodeling sort of call.
A few nights after installing each nest, we went back, collected the eggs, and left broken ‘eggshells’ and extra down feather around each of the nests. One of the nests was put up at the local Garden Center and I remember one of the assistant managers coming outside just after we finished the ‘hatching’ and shrieking “OH GOD I THOUGHT THOSE WERE FAKE THEY’LL GET TO THE TOMATOES SOMEONE CALL THE POLICE!” That woman would later become my manager when I worked there for a summer, though she never made the connection between me and The Chickens.
Riley passed away in 2015 after a good and well-lived life, and was kind enough to leave me The Eggs in his will.
It was a truly splendid bit of ruckus, and I miss him terribly, and I very much treasure the memories. And the Eggs, which I am absolutely going to inflict on some unsuspecting neighbors at some point, in his honor.
(If you’ve enjoyed this story, please consider donating to my Ko-Fi or Paypal so I can support myself telling stories, thank you!)
action movie about a guy who pretends to be a hitman and does the whole “25% up front and the rest when the job is done” thing but then just keeps the down payment, doesn’t kill anybody, and stops responding to the client’s calls, knowing that they can’t sue him for breach of contract without confessing to trying to hire a hitman. problem is now a lot of people who are comfortable with the concept of paying someone to kill someone else are mad at him
none of his former clients know his real identity, due to him using a fresh fake for each con, so he decides that his only hope of making it out of this mess unscathed is to land the inevitable contract for his own assassination and fake his own death. thus begins his deadly race against the clock and against other actual bounty hunters, former clients, and a smoldering ex lover, whom he must betray, persuade or kill. darknet: the catfish bounty
Someone make a movie please.
Just send me 25% of the funding up front and the rest when I deliver the completed movie. I’ve got a kickstarter and
