Your church-going, God-worshipping sister adopted a small child and you’re excited to see them. But when you do, the child is a menace. They’re throwing things everywhere, setting furniture on fire with seemingly nothing, chanting in Latin to summon demons, but the weirdest thing is that your sister doesn’t seem to mind.
“You literally adopted the antichrist, Anne. What the fuck.”
“Yeah, I knew when I saw him at the orphanage. I figured if the kid had some decent fucking parenting that we could avoid the whole ‘Revelations’ shite. Nasty business, that.”
George, who’s name has been kindly changed from Damien, approaches his new mother with a huge spider in his hands. It promptly bursts into flames.
“Good job, love. Now go find the rest.” George’s face makes no expression, but his eyes shine when he recieves a pat on the head for his efforts.
As the months go by, George seems to settle down. He adjusts to school, friends, and the positive reinforcement Anne gives him. She encourages the good he does, even though the powers he uses aren’t “good”. When she gets calls from the school, it’s about a rambunctious boy that won’t sit still. Not a destroyer of the world and innocence.
It’s at Christmas dinner, that you let slip your amazement to your mother. How good Anne is for him and how he’s improved a lot. Still summoning hellhounds for games of fetch, though.
“Oh, he’ll forget how to do that when he falls in love the first time,” Your mother laughs, smiling wide.
“How do you know that,” you ask bewildered.
“Because, you did.”
okay so someone please write the story of the family of super-low-key holy warriors who have made it their mission to locate the antichrist in every generation (because when one gets spoiled they try AGAIN) and adopt them and love them into not being the antichrist anymore, thus perpetually delaying the apocalypse
delaying the apocalypse via good parenting I love this
I just realized that the specific reason the 80s and 90s anti-racism preaching in the media failed is because it was entirely focused on emotions and bullying and self esteem, and now everyone thinks the only thing that racism affects is people’s feelings.
but in reality, personal emotions about one’s self are the FINAL, smallest, most individual, personal step in what racism does. it ALSO does so much astronomically more than that, and anyone who’s experienced it knows that on some level. it’s institutional; it’s woven inextricably into the fabric of not only our country, but our global system, too. and people are utterly blind to that.
popular culture still suggests that racism is wrong JUST because saying racist stuff hurts people’s feelings, and not because it’s a cultural attitude that informs every level of how our society operates; there is little awareness that racism is about ACTIONS, actions with no conscious intent behind them, not beliefs, which are intangible.
and now that the alt-right has popularized the idea that feelings are objectively stupid, there’s no longer ANY reason not to say racist things. because who cares about hurting other people’s FEELINGS? that’s the very last, smallest, most individual, personal thing you can possibly care about! 🙄
that’s why people are convinced nowadays that a public figure with wide-reaching influence can say racist things unapologetically without “being” racist. because to them, “being racist” isn’t the same as ACTING RACIST. It’s some internal belief—some character flaw—that only crazy people have, and if you’re ironic enough about it, there’s suddenly no harm in being openly racist for laughs.
when the truth is, ACTIONS MEAN MORE THAN BELIEFS. virulent racists are createdandenabledby an almost unfathomably massive system of laws and conventions and tradition and lies that people tell themselves and each other. on a global scale.
people think racism is a thing people believe but somehow NOT a thing people DO.
an incomplete list of unsettling short stories I read in textbooks
the scarlet ibis
marigolds
the diamond necklace
the monkey’s paw
the open boat
the lady and the tiger
the minister’s black veil
an occurrence at owl creek bridge
a rose for emily
(I found that one by googling “short story corpse in the house,” first result)
the cask of amontillado
the yellow wallpaper
the most dangerous game
a good man is hard to find
some are well-known, some obscure, some I enjoy as an adult, all made me uncomfortable between the ages of 11-15
add your own weird shit, I wanna be literary and disturbed
The Tell-Tale Heart, The Gift of the Magi, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calavaras County, Thank You Ma’am
the box social by james reaney. i remember we all had to silently read it in class, and you would hear the moment everyone reached the Part because some people would audibly go “what”
wHat did I just put my eyes on
“The Veldt” by Ray Bradbury
Not quite a short story, but read in class: “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” from The Twilight Zone
Harrison Bergeron, Cat and the Coffee Drinkers
“Where are you going and where have you been” by Joyce carol oates
“The Pedestrian” by Ray Bradbury
the lottery by shirley jackson
i can’t believe Roald Dahl’s “The Landlady” wasn’t already mentioned
and also it’s not so much unsettling as more absurdist but “The Leader” by Eugene Ionesco definitely made me go wtf
Ett halvt ark papper. I cried so much.
Ночь у мазара, А. Шалимов
A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury
I Have no Mouth, and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison
The Lottery by Shirley Jackson
All Summer in a Day by Ray Bradbury
Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby, by Donald Barthelme
I read Ray Bradbury’s “All Summer In A Day” in seventh grade (it wasn’t assigned, I was just going through my textbook for new stuff to read) and as a bullied kid with SAD, it Fucked Me Up.
An Ordinary Day with Peanuts, by Shirley Jackson
Eh, this was more like community college, but The Star by Arthur C. Clarke
Lamb to the Slaughter by Roald Dahl
and this story that I can’t remember the name of and can’t find, though it might be by O. Henry? it’s about a bunch of demons who want to stop Santa Claus from going through with Christmas, and he must travel through the mountains they inhabit to escape their vices? (good christ I can’t remember the name for the life of me)
Ok but the laughing man and a good day for bananafish but j.d. Salinger
The City (195) Ray Bradbury. An intense commentary on colonialism and space exploration. I read it for a sci fi survey class.
Another short story I read in that sci fi class was Vaster than Empires and More Slow (1971) by Ursula K. Le Guin. A commentary on humanity and how human we believe ourselves to be. Also, an interesting commentary on mental health.
In the Woods Beneath the Cherry Blossoms in Full Bloom, written in 1947 by Ango Sakaguchi. It made my skin crawl the first time I read it.
I didn’t read it in a text book, but “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” haunted me for life.
I read most of Ray Bradbury’s stuff as a kid, and I remember being deeply horrified by almost all of it. “All Summer in a Day” was probably the worst, though, because holy shit I could relate to that girl. Could never remember the title, though, so thank you guys for the list!
Also of note: Harlan Ellison wrote one of the best episode of TOS Trek, “The City on the Edge of Forever”. The original screenplay is haunting.
old people really need to learn how to text accurately to the mood they’re trying to represent like my boss texted me wondering when my semester is over so she can start scheduling me more hours and i was like my finals are done the 15th! And she texts back “Yay for you….” how the fuck am i supposed to interpret that besides passive aggressive
Someone needs to do a linguistic study on people over 50 and how they use the ellipsis. It’s FASCINATING. I never know the mood they’re trying to convey.
I actually thought for a long time that texting just made my mother cranky. But then I watched my sister send her a funny text, and my mother was laughing her ass off. But her actual texted response?
“Ha… right.”
Like, she had actual goddamn tears in her eyes, and that was what she considered an appropriate reply to the joke.I just marvelled for a minute like ‘what the actual hell?’ and eventually asked my mom a few questions. I didn’t want to make her feel defensive or self-conscious or anything, it just kind of blew my mind, and I wanted to know what she was thinking.
Turns out that she’s using the ellipsis the same way I would use a dash, and also to create ‘more space between words’ because it ‘just looks better to her’. Also, that I tend to perceive an ellipsis as an innate ‘downswing’, sort of like the opposite of the upswing you get when you ask a question, but she doesn’t. And that she never uses exclamation marks, because all her teachers basically drilled it into her that exclamation marks were horrible things that made you sound stupid and/or aggressive.
So whereas I might sent a response that looked something like:
“Yay! That sounds great – where are we meeting?”
My mother, whilst meaning the exact same thing, would go:
‘Yay. That sounds great… where are we meeting?”
And when I look at both of those texts, mine reads like ‘happy/approval’ to my eye, whereas my mother’s looks flat. Positive phrasing delivered in a completely flat tone of voice is almost always sarcastic when spoken aloud, so written down, it looks sarcastic or passive-aggressive.
On the reverse, my mother thinks my texts look, in her words, ‘ditzy’ and ‘loud’. She actually expressed confusion, because she knows I write and she thinks that I write well when I’m constructing prose, and she, apparently, could never understand why I ‘wrote like an airhead who never learned proper English’ in all my texts. It led to an interesting discussion on conversational text. Texting and text-based chatting are, relatively, still pretty new, and my mother’s generation by and large didn’t grow up writing things down in real-time conversations. The closest equivalent would be passing notes in class, and that almost never went on for as long as a text conversation might. But letters had been largely supplanted by telephones at that point, so ‘conversational writing’ was not a thing she had to master.
So whereas people around my age or younger tend to text like we’re scripting our own dialogue and need to convey the right intonations, my mom writes her texts like she’s expecting her Eighth grade English teacher to come and mark them in red pen. She has learned that proper punctuation and mistakes are more acceptable, but when she considers putting effort into how she’s writing, it’s always the lines of making it more formal or technically correct, and not along the lines of ‘how would this sound if you said it out loud?’
the linguistics of written languages in quick conversational format will never not be interesting to me like it’s fascinating how we’ve all just silently learned what an ellipsis or exclamation mark implies and it’s totally different in different communities or generations or whatever
I remember in high school, the early 2000s, my friends and I would still pass notes. Well, we would pass a single piece of paper back and forth with conversation. Not only did we use conversational English, but since we were all artists and weebs, we also had little chibi avatars on the side conveying additional emotions. Nothing fancy, just a cute face and a pair of hands if needed, but it’s fascinating to see how even that has developed. Even before chat and emojis were widely used, we were using them in written conversations for clarity.
there’s always that jerk named kevin that shows up in cartoons
it’s a bitch name
anyone remember the kevin story
What is the Kevin story?
someone once made a legendary post on reddit, asking who is the dumbest person youve ever met. Kevin wasn’t special needs or anything, but he sure was one interesting character. the gist of it can be found in these bullet points:
“
It was by some incredible fluke that his family hadn’t been wiped off
the face of the Earth years ago. Odds are his entire heritage was based
on blind luck and some type of sick divine intervention that saves his
family every time a threat presents itself. Kevin was the genetic
pinnacle of this null achievement….So here’s a list of events that made it abundantly clear that god exists and he’s laughing uncontrollably:”
Kevin
ate an entire 24 pack of crayons, puked, and then did it again the next
day. This is 9th grade. I have no idea where he got crayons.
Kevin’s
dad wrote tuition checks and mailed them to me…his English teacher.
This was a public school. When I gave it back to Kevin, voided, to give
to his dad with a brief note explaining that this is a public school,
Kevin got in trouble for trying to spend it at 711 after school.
Kevin was removed from the culinary arts program after leaving a cutting board on the gas stove and starting a fire….twice
Kevin threw his lunch at the School Resource Officer and tried to run away. He ran into a door and insisted it wasn’t him.
Kevin
stole my phone during class. I called it. It rang. He denied that it
was ringing. (Not that it wasn’t his, not that he did it…..no, he
denied that the phone was actually ringing). He tried it three times
before the end of the year.
Kevin
called the basketball coach a “Motherfucking Bitch” during gym.
Basketball tryouts were that afternoon. Kevin tried out. It didn’t go
well.
Kevin’s
mom could never remember which school he went to. She missed several
meetings because she drove to other schools (none of which he ever went
to)
Kevin tazed himself in the neck before a football game
Kevin
kept a bottle of orange koolaide in his backpack for about 4 months. He
thought it would turn into alcohol. He drank it during homeroom and
threw up.
Kevin said the N-word a lot. Kevin was white. The highschool was 84% black. Kevin got beat up a lot.
Kevin stole another student’s Iphone….and tried to sell it back to them.
Kevin
didn’t understand that his grade was dependent on tests, quizzes,
homework, classwork, and participation. Kevin finished his first
semester with a 3% average. He tried to bribe me with $11.
Kevin spit on a girl and said “You should get out of those wet clothes”. The girl was the Spanish Student Teacher.
Kevin tried to download porn onto a computer in the library…..at the circulation desk….while he was logged on.
Kevin
asked a girl to prom (he was in 9th grade and freshmen don’t go to
prom) by asking for her phone number and then texting her his address
Kevin got gum in his hair, constantly.
Kevin
regularly tried to cheat on assignments by knocking the pile over,
grabbing one before I had picked them all up, and then writing it name
on it wherever there was room.
Kevin
had several allergies, but neither his parents nor he could remember
what they were. They were very concerned that “the holiday party” would have peanuts. When they finally
got a doctor’s note….he was allergic to amoxicillin
Kevin
and his parents took a trip to Nassau and forgot all their luggage at home. I didn’t believe
him when he told me until I talked to him mom, who told me 1st thing
when I saw her at the bi-weekly meeting.
Kevin’s grandfather apparently died in a chainsaw accident. I can only assume God was looking the other way that day.
Me, a Hawaiian: “While Hawai’i had a queen we were at the forefront of innovation, technological advancement, and international alliances. All the way up until the “democratic” government of the US illegally arrested her in her own palace and threatened to kill her and massacre her people unless she signed her country over to them. I’d like to have a queen who cares more about her peoples lives than her power again. Also, fuck Trump.”
Reposting cause I can and it’s still relevant
Its worth mentioning that Hawaii is also one of the few countries with a mythic, “Hero King” who they can actually prove existed. King Kamehameha the Great (yes like in Dragon Ball Z), was seven feet tall, the guardian of the war god Kukaʻ ilimoku, and took Hawaii from an archipelago of rival Kingdoms who hadn’t really gotten out of the Bronze Age, unified him under his dominion, and turned the Kingdom of Hawaii into a global trading empire who’s monarchs were greeted at the Court of Queen Victoria.
Guys I’m legit about to cry.
A post I made has over a thousand notes!! And most importantly it’s starting a conversation and spreading knowledge about what was done to my culture.
It is also so heartwarming to go in the notes and find people sharing more information and sources! And even more so to see that only two idiots decided to chime in with their misinformation.
Like, I am damn PROUD of y’all tumblr, we out here learning how to respect each other’s cultures and it’s dooooope!!!!
DarkestElemental616 