If you are looking for Reaper, you have found the author. That said, I am still working on this story, but have not posted for a couple of reasons. The most important right now is that I have joined a writing group and am more seriously pursuing publication of my work. Unfortunately, a lot of places do not want to publish anything that has been previously published, even on a small online blog.
So I will probably not be publishing too much more original fiction on Tumblr for the foreseeable future, and I apologize to those who have been waiting for this. But I do have every intention of publishing Reaper and sharing it with the world, and you guys are the reason why.
Here's a collection of my Tumblr-available fiction and poetry:
Yeah I saw the lovecraftian horrors and didnāt succumb to madness. What- no Iām not a cultist, James. For Christās sake. What youāre forgetting my friend is that HP Lovecraft wasnāt a flexible man. His brain simply wasnāt stretchy enough to take it all in. I however, have short term memory issues. Flexibility is the name of the game when you canāt remember if you ate lunch or not. Whatās the size of the universe? Big. You knew that already, James. Come on now. You donāt need to witness the terrifying ocean at the base of the entirety of reality itself to know that. Pass the brandy.
During a Eldritch Horrors based tabletop RPG my character was a young dandy who wasn't particularly interested in all this monster mystery stuff but his father (my brother's character) was a researcher who WAS very into it, so Bertie went along to make sure the old man didn't get into too much trouble. It was your average Eldritch Horrors RPG in that you don't make your characters with the expectation that they will survive for very long, both the game itself and the genre are very intent on turning your characters inside out, driving them insane, and blowing them up in no particular order.
The thing was, everything in this nightmare hellscape just seemed to keep coming up Bertie because the man was too stupid to realize what genre he was in. Every time he had to roll for a sanity check whenever he saw something crazy, the dice treated him so well that he just... didn't get it. Gee that sure is a funny costume. There's something wrong with that dog. These mean guys in stupid hats are trying to hurt that young lady, we can't have that! I had not built him this way, his intelligence stats weren't even that bad, random chance just made it so that this man was living a scooby doo adventure while everyone else was being consumed by The Horrors.
The final straw was at the end of an adventure when Bertie escaped from the cultist headquarters by breaking out through the mansion's front window on a motorcycle with a hot rescued sacrificial maiden clinging to his back and leading the cultists on a merry chase through the hedge maze while the other adventurers escaped. His sanity score? HIGHER than when the adventure had begun. He had found the whole experience quite thrilling and felt very good about life in general!
Bertie retired from adventuring to marry the maiden he rescued and care for his aging father and delight and bemuse his friends at the gentleman's club with stories of his 'wacky' adventures. I didn't want to risk breaking his ridiculous lucky streak.
Reminds me of that story about the teacher or lecturer or whatever who told their class "hey, the ceiling has 'gullible' written on it" and anyone who looked up discovered that yep, the word "gullible" really had been written on a piece of card and taped to the ceiling. And after letting that sink in for a while the teacher said something like "those of you who looked up have just demonstrated one of the most important tenets of research: check the source."
āThis portrayal of a marginalized group was wrong then and is wrong nowā and āThis portrayal of a marginalized group was very progressive for the time period and paved the way for more representation while likely limited by factors outside of the creatorās controlā are two statements that can and should ABSOLUTELY coexist and be kept in mind when interacting with older media
Was trying to make a joke about TV writing to my friend the other day and had to pause and go "...does the phrase 'surf dracula' mean anything to you?"
When I lived in London there was a murder of crows that lived near me. I fed them often, they brought me presents (shiny rubbish and cigarette butts they found on the floor to thank me.)
When I moved, Iām certain they understood I was leaving because I had all my stuff and gave them lots of food and compliments.
But, they chased down my friend who lived in the next burrough over. They had recognised that friend with me several times and followed them to their house when they couldnāt find me.
They adopted my friend and it was now my friendās job to bring them snacks and receive the presents.
This was maybe 6-7 years ago.
I visited London last year. Went to see my friend. The crows all not only recognised me, they tracked me down. We got into my friendās flat and not twenty minutes later there was chaos on the balcony.
We open the curtains, the entire fucking murder is there shouting because they wanted to see me.
Yeah frogs donāt have ribs. Itās a quick way to identify the bullshit āinfoāpost about the ācorrect wayā to hold a frog. They seem to constantly mention hurting their non-existent ribs.
And here is the resulting image. There is at least Someone in the U.K. government who is actually doing their job, and it is Chief Mouser to the Cabinet, Larry the Cat.
Number 10 does not have a front door handle. It can only be opened from the inside. This means that if there is a police officer on duty outside the door, their main role is knocking so that someone can come and let Larry in. If there is no officer on duty right outside the door, a member of the press corps will go over and knock for him.
Okay so since this hasn't died yet, I feel like I have to add to it. The story re: my dept. lead also being on Tumblr and us outing each other with the sacred texts is like, one of the least weird/that sounds fake things that's ever happened to me.
Some of the greatest hits include:
-Was taken to the military funeral of a total stranger in the swamp lands of Louisiana by another total stranger when I thought I was going to a work meeting. (A funeral that ended with the words 'Sombitch y'all done shot MeeMaw!')
-Asked Zac Efron to take a photo with me in 2008 and then getting so flustered that I asked 'Do you want to use my camera or yours?' (he was very nice and said 'Why don't we use yours.')
-Was dressed exactly the same as every single person in my company (not in a company uniform, we were all dressed like our IT guy) when we were raided by the FBI.
-Got asked out at my mother's funeral.
-Signed an autograph as Kat Dennings to a VERY drunk man at the Nashville Airport just to get him to leave me alone.
-Attended my husband's 15th high school reunion alone and entirely by accident.
-Had a man come into my cafe and harass my employees and when I told him to leave he got up in my face and said 'I can gut you like a fucking fish.' And with my utter lack of will to live, I said, without blinking or moving, 'You can try.'
-Acted as maid of honor and gave a wedding toast for a couple I did not know because the bride was desperate to not have her awful sister have the microphone and ruin everything.
Since @grimeysociety asked, I shall expound upon the tale of being raided by the FBI.
Back in 2018, I started working for a whole body donation center. If you don't know what that is, it's when someone decides to donate their bodies to science, we're like 'Yeah, hi, we'll take it.'
This company was very much on the up-and-up. We had pristine medical facilities, quarterly state inspections, all the right certifications, the whole nine. HOWEVER that's not the case for every whole body donation center in the country.
(If you're considering donation, it's a wonderful gift, but PLEASE research the company you're planning to use.)
For instance, there was a place somewhere in the US Southwest that, it turns out, was basically running a Frankenstein factory. I'm not going to go into details, but there's a Reuters article about it and it's pretty much the most horrific thing you can think of.
They were using Home Depot power tools for tissue harvest and Rubbermaid containers for transport. That is all I will say. That, and about 10% of the FBI team that raided their site had to go on mental health leave immediately after because they had insane PTSD.
SO. Where do I come in?
Well, as I said, I was working at a different, entirely reputable WBD, but when there are only about 15 organizations in the country that provide the same service as a Frankenstein factory, naturally, someone in charge thinks it's probably a good idea to check in with the rest of them. Just in case.
Fast forward to October of 2018 and allow me to introduce Josh* into the narrative.
Josh was our IT guy. He was our on-site, tech guru, long-suffering, likely underpaid and overworked IT guy. He was the floor model IT guy. Tall, bearded, very quiet, very good at his job and had a tendency to wear the same thing to work pretty much all the time. Black jeans, black t-shirt, white tennis shoes, red flannel shirt and a black beanie.
Every day. Rain, shine, 90 degrees, 20 degrees, didnāt matter. This was Joshās uniform.
So about a week before Halloween, we all get together to start talking about playing a little joke on Josh. We all decided we were going to dress up as Josh for Halloween. Everyone could assemble a little Josh costume, oh itāll be so funny, we might even get him to laugh. Everyone was on board. EVERYONE from the receptionist to the CEO--everyone was doing this.
Halloween that year fell on a Wednesday. Unfortunately for us and our brilliant plan, Josh did not work on Wednesdays. So we decided it would actually be even funnier if we all dressed up on November 1st. So that Josh would come into work on a seemingly random Thursday and see everyone dressed up as him.Ā
And it worked! Everyone did it! Josh actually laughed and sent out a little email telling us all how funny he thought it was, grading peopleās Joshumes. A wonderful day.
Until about 1pm when the FBI arrived to raid our office.Ā
They herded us into one of the lecture rooms and explained what they were doing there, made sure we didn't go back to our offices or make any phone calls, basically babysat us until the other members of their team could secure the files they needed and inspect the facilities.
We were all so freaked out that no one was thinking about what we all must have looked like. 75 employees. Sitting together in a room. All dressed exactly alike from our beanies down to our white sneakers.
I didn't realize how it looked either until one of the other FBI agents came in and straight up stopped in his tracks at the sight of all of us and under his breath went, "What in the actual Christ..."
Then they closed our office for 2 days while they investigated further, found no wrong-doing, and let us return to business as usual.
No one ever suggested we do a group costume again.
Imagine that you are an FBI investigator and you have heard all of the horror stories about Frankenstein's for-profit nightmare factory. Your co-workers have talked about it, there have been team meetings about being respectful of people's trauma and counseling services available, hell maybe you were there. And now you're getting ready to raid another facility which might be the same. You go to sleep the night before wondering if you're going to find a perfectly ordinary office or if you're going to have nightmares for for the rest of your life about what you find.
And then you walk into the facility and it's perfectly clean. Everything in order, paperwork filed, nothing amiss.
Except every single fucking person in the entire building is wearing the exact same outfit, from their beanies down to their shoes. Like you walked into a movie theater which you knew was either going to be playing The Human Centipede or Gray's Anatomy, and it's playing Gray's Anatomy but also every single seat is occupied by a mannequin with its head turned towards the entrance.
I wonder if they thought they'd accidentally walked into a cult, some new and special way for things to be fucked up.
