Put the "Fan" back in "Fantastic," People!

I'm a Crazy Cat Lady, a Fan-Writer with a wonky sense of humor, and that one unfiltered friend you really shouldn't take home to Mama. You've been warned. My family's IRL names are classified but you can call me "Ghost." I live in the Missouri Ozarks with my hubby "Cold." We have two eccentric cats, code-named "Heiferlump" and "Woozle." ~*~ Feel free to pester me in comments, chats, or whatever! ~*~ Like something? Sharing encouraged with credit given. ~*~ Wanna share something with me? Have at it - I love it already! ~*~ Y'all have a great day, now, and thanks for dropping by!

[ghost-chance]

Fowl play on Valeska’s Watch

Y’all, check out what I just found! I’ve been chasing this creepy little two-faced farknugget all over the Emprise du Lion…

…and yes, it has one head on top of another. If you get the right angle in tactical view, you can see a second mouth. It has dialogue and pops up in multiple places, so I’m suspecting there’s more to it. Someone on the Inquisition subreddit mentioned a landmark I hadn’t found, I went looking for it, and I just found it. What’s “it?” Apparently, if you can get up by the tower over Valeska’s Watch—which was a pain, by the way—you’ll find a scale with a stone on one side, a charred corpse, and a stake sticking up out of an old fire pit. That lump on the other side of the scale looked familiar, so I got a closer look.

That’s how I found this stack of round things by the rock. Crackers? Coins? Cookies? I have no idea. That lump looked suspicious either way.

Seeing Valeska’s Watch tower from up on the hilltop was intriguing, but what I found on the other side of the scale killed me.

It’s…

…it’s a chicken!

I’m fucking dying, y’all. A chicken. A random whole-ass roasted chicken. I wish I knew the story behind this scene because it’s bound to be ridiculous.

[ghost-chance]

“Plugging the Sky-Hole” Rubbish, chapter 3:

Of Sparrows and Dead Lady Swans

Read on Archive of Our Own and FFnet today

[ghost-chance]

Art imitates life imitates art

Oh. My. Freaking. FUCK. I can’t believe this! What sort of sevens-degrees-from-eggs-and-bacon ridiculousness is this?

So, apparently, Will Arnett is featuring in new commercials for Dunkin Donuts. Will Arnett, my fellow nerds may recall, played Vern Fenwick in the Michael Bay TMNT movies. And now, the kicker:

This passage is from A New Lease on Life, chapter “A Taste Without Tears.” The names are different, but Barbux was modeled after Starbucks, and Donut Heaven was modeled after Dunkin’ Donuts. I wrote Vern losing out on a Starbux brand deal because he preferred Dunkin coffee, and now, the guy who played Vern is in a brand deal with Dunkin!

[ghost-chance]

Chapter 2:

Simeon…and Somebody Else?

Read “Plugging the Sky-Hole” Rubbish on FFnet and AO3 today.

[ghost-chance]

Chapter 1:

Introducing Inquisitor Idjit

Read “Plugging the Sky-Hole” Rubbish on FFnet and AO3 today.

[ghost-chance]

I put together the cover for an unposted WIP last night (sans text) using a stock image and screencap. Thoughts, anyone? I’m happy with the results…I think? …but feedback would be much appreciated since I’m a bit out of practice and this version of PicsArt is set up very differently from my previous version. The comic, cartoonizer, poster, watercolor etc filters are also something that never really look…right…to me.

Thoughts?

[ghost-chance]

Live NOW!

A New Lease on Life, chapter 62:

Redemption Is a Process

…in which Kimber is a self-destructive and halfway feral little shit, Amber needs a drink, Mercy needs a nap, and unbeknownst to everyone, trouble is brewing and change is coming.

Read A New Lease on Life today on Archive of Our Own, Fanfiction.net, and Adult-fanfiction.org.

[ghost-chance]

Grammarly just had a stroke:

This is why I switched to ProWritingAid. JS.

[ghost-chance]

Editing fail: I couldn’t make this shit up if I tried

Editing the upcoming chapter of A New Lease on Life (it’s not dead! 😭) in Pro Writing Aid, 450 words at a time, and I come across this absolute insanity.

See that last paragraph? Red means it’s, quote, “hard to read.” I’ve found that the readability checker is easily thrown off by uncommon names. In response, I often have to replace character names, locations, and other unusual proper nouns with three-to-five letter words to get an accurate read. (Bob and Amy go to Texas and eat tacos when it’s actually Barnabus and Annabelle going to Albuquerque and eating empanadas, for instance.) With my novel, most characters’ names are original, location names are original, and there are inclusions of a made-up language, so the readability checker gets traumatized.

Usually, that’s the problem. This…I got nothing. That paragraph above the hard one? That’s a mix of improperly spelled Scots and Scots-Gaelic—a verse of a folk song—with a footnote thrown on the end for reference purposes. Green means it’s an easy to read paragraph.

…what…the actual…fuck…are y’all smoking…

[ghost-chance]

How some people search for gaming advice: can I romance X character and Y character?

How I search for gaming advice: will romancing X and Y characters ruin my romance options with Z character, or can I be the dirty little bisexual ho I was born to be?

…y’all think I’m joking? This is straight out of my search history.

…also, I’m not dead.

[ghost-chance]

Over 18 years of driving coast to coast has put me in precarious situations. Especially driving in the South. I know most of you consider Missouri Midwest but it is the South in my book. Ice like you say, is a bad thing where you live and the little snow you get is also dangerous. It's not those two that scare me the most however, it's the drivers who can't handle it. I live in Northern Minnesota. That should be enough to tell you that where it's cold for 6 months of the year, we experience these things as secondhand. We still have people who lose their minds once snow and ice start to enter into the picture and get out on the road and forget how to "drive to the conditions" or, don't drive at all Leroy! We have snow plows aplenty to handle all of this whereas, you folks don't have the equipment like we do. The worst I've seen in the South was in Tennessee in April. This was many years ago when I started to drive in the South. They had an ice storm followed by sleet and snow with downed trees and power lines scattered. I was driving a one-ton with a four-wheel drive and a small fuel tanker on board. There were many cars on either side of the Interstate. I came upon a Highway Patrolman who was stopping people and talking to them. I rolled up and talked to the man who as he stated, didn't think I was from around here. Yes. That's right officer. I'm from Minnesota and I'm headed up there to be on a contract. He said I was good to go since I knew how to drive under these conditions and no one else seemed to know how to drive or just to get off the road. It was early afternoon by this time and I knew I was going to be late for the beginning of the contract anyway and I needed to get off the road before someone hit me! I told the officer I knew how to drive under these conditions and I also knew when to get off the road. There was a motel just up the road and I told him that I had had enough fun for the day, thank you and I was going to get a room for the night! He gave me a thumbs-up and thanked me.

I’m…not sure what you’re asking me here, or why you asked on anonymous. Unless this was a response to my frequent reference to Missouri as part of the Midwest…? If that’s the case, yes, we are technically Midwest—according to the maps—but we’re really more of a blending point between the South and Midwest. I think of us as the Midwest and South’s embarrassing younger cousin who can’t quite figure out who they are.

[ghost-chance]

I just asked Siri to “play A Blue Fire State of Mind on Spotify.”

What did she say? “Now playing Fish Cake Swirl” something-or-other.

I am CHOKING.

[ghost-chance]

New chapter of Shifting the Paradigm, live now: “Shuttered Hearts, Opened Eyes”

Updated just tonight: Shifting the Paradigm.

Read the new chapter Shuttered Hearts, Opened Eyes, at the links below.

Archive Of Our Own

Fanfiction.net

[ghost-chance]

Alright, was anyone ever going to tell me that so much of the character build, backstory, plot, and moral of Avatar: The Last Airbender came from the early life and the political career and campaign of the 14th Dalai Lama, or was I just supposed to hear it from a history podcast while doing needlepoint?!

[ghost-chance]

Every day, people complain people just don't want to work, and blame problems at businesses on a shortage of employees. Folks...the real problem is so much worse.

The company my husband works for now just issued mandatory hour cuts for all workers. They're alternating between assigned full-time shifts and assigned short-shifts. He was hired for full time, and he's being ordered to leave early with work still to be done. Despite how it sounds, this just means more work and more stress for the employees.

But no. Clearly the problem is people just don't want to work.

The company my husband works for is a multimillion dollar international household name; they could easily afford to hire more people and keep everyone on full-time, and they could even afford to raise wages without feeling a pinch. Instead, they're making it so there aren't enough workers onsite to get everything done.

The cart bays are empty or nearly so; there's rarely anyone free to collect them. Shelves aren't getting stocked frequently; the stockers are overloaded and needed elsewhere in the store. There's a max of three cashiers open at rush hour, and maybe one the rest of the time, but the self-checkouts are all operating. People are being sent home early with work left to do. The last place was an entirely opposite sort of screwed-up - the few folks they had were given mandatory shifts ranging from ten to sixteen hours, five days a week, all because the company couldn't be arsed to hire anyone new to pick up the slack. For the record, this was a labor-intensive job that left my fanboy husband barely able to move when he got home.

But no. People just don't want to work.

All this is saying nothing about how many places my husband applied to last winter that said "oh, we actually aren't hiring," or advertised for full-time but refused to hire for anything but part-time, or advertised for full-time permanent but refused to hire for anything but seasonal temps.

Are there people who just don't want to work? Always. That's a fact of life. The labor shortage right now, though...it isn't entirely because people won't work. It's not that simple. Essential workers have gotten sick, died or been rendered disabled, and left job vacancies. Laid-off workers trained for better jobs and left job vacancies. Workers got fed up with being treated poorly and underpaid and applied to better positions or chose self-employment. On top of all that, some fat-cat companies are being stingy with hours and compensation, bait-and-switching new hires, working their few employees to the bone so they don't have to hire more people, and stirring the pot by creating the appearance of a massive worker shortage. It's like the produce shortages during the Great Depression; farms and orchards in regions that escaped the droughts sometimes destroyed product to artificially drive up prices in order to compensate for high labor and an economy in the crapper. This company is burning oranges but all the customers see is those damned Okies refusing to pick them.

There's so much more going on here than people don't want to work...sometimes it's people want to work but they can't.

[ghost-chance]

I’m sick. Naturally, I spent the little energy I had creating a bodice ripper and schoolbooks for a WIP floor plan.

[justsomeantifas]

rich people:

millennials:

[freeandresponsible]

I am fairly sure there are other explanatory factors for a dropping life expectancy, such as skyrocketing obesity rates and no one exercising enough. There’s not much evidence that increases in the quantity of working hours is linked to a dropping life expectancy.

[justsomeantifas]

x

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for folks in office jobs:

x

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ya ever hear of researching shit before you embarrass yourself?

[justsomeantifas]

remember when i eviscerated someone so thoroughly they deactivated?