“One time my Nanny and the Gardener were having a heated argument in the car and he took her Queen tape out of the player and threw it out the window with rage and she looked him dead in the eyes and pulled out a second copy of that same tape and put it back in the player.”
I can totally envision Warlock’s version of the duck story!
One day when I was ten, the gardener comes into the house soaking wet and says, in that voice one usually reserves for toddlers or small animals, “Ah! One feels like a duck splashing around in all this wet! And when one feels like a duck, one is happy!” And then Nanny yelled, “Ooh, ducklings!” To which the gardener replied, “Too old to be a duckling. Quack, quack.” And then walked into the kitchen. I think about that every goddamn day.
“I love my family, or at the very least people would assume so. People would think that growing up as a politician’s son would be easy, and they are right. I got everything that I ever asked for, spending money the only way Rick People could spend money.
“Dad! I want a Pony” Boom, Pony is at my feet
“Dad! I wanted it black” Boom. Done. Pony now looks like it crawled out of the Black Lagoon.
“Dad! The Pony glared at me!” I get a bottle of glue the next day. I was living the Rickie Rich lifestyle. I can have anything I want.
But the best part of growing up rich, the absolute best part, was that we were able to afford our own nanny.
I love her so much but am goddamn terrified of her to this day. I am a 28 year old man and I live in my own bodyweight of fear towards her.
When I was 1 to when I was 11, we had a nanny in our house. Her name is Nanny. If you call her anything else you will die. Somedays I think that my parents made a Rumpelstiltskin Deal with her before I was born, where instead of taking baby me she just moved in to our house to raid our fridge and judge the world from lofty windows. This is just the first part of the mystery of my nanny.
She dresses like she is preparing to go to a funeral. And the difference between preparing to go and actually going is that they hadn’t found the body yet. You know when friends say that they would kill someone for you? Nanny would gut a cat if I wanted to play the violin that’s how hardcore she was. She wore red sunglasses because her glare alone could turn anyone to stone. If you squint hard enough you can actually see lasers coming out of her eyes.
Now you need to remember, I lived with this woman for Ten Years. Since I was a baby. This shit was normalized to me. While my parents were in West Wing I was living in the Addams Family. Nanny loved me and raised me and so what if she told me that I was going to lead Satan’s Army someday. That’s just Nanny. But throughout all of this, I never truly understand how terrifying she could be until I was 8 years old.
Picture this: a little 8 year old me, plump and trimmed with baby fat, standing next to Mary Poppin’s evil twin. One day we were going out for brunch so I can, and I’m quoting here “practice giving out orders when the army of hell arrives”
I’m still waiting for them, just to let you know.
So we get inside Nanny’s car, an old Black 1933 Bently which plays nothing but Queen music on cassettes.
I know this sounds fake, but she is a real person and not some Baba Yaga who decided not to eat me.
As we were about to leave, Brother Francis ran out to us. Francis was out gardener. He worked for us for as long as Nanny has, wears suspenders and a sun hat, and I’m pretty sure he ran away from a monastery. He walks up to Nanny and asks for a ride to the local gardening store for supplies. So he gets in the front seat, I’m in the back, and all three of us get on our way.
At 1000 miles per hour in a 55 zone.
Now I’m 8 years old. And no matter how cool your Nanny is, you just don’t pay attention to boring adult stuff like meetings, or finances, or traffic safety laws. So I’m lost in my own thoughts on how to direct my hell army to build myself a waterpark.
I don’t know how long I zoned out because when I snapped back in Nanny and Francis were arguing. Not in the pleasant passive aggressive way that makes you rethink your life choices, but full on yelling. So we are speeding down the road like death is chasing us. Bohemian Rhapsody is playing on blast. Nanny and Francis screaming at each other. Sulfur filled the air, radiant light pulsed menacing around us. Exactly how I imagined what parents fighting would be like. Things came to a head right as Freddy was about to hit his last “For Me!” because that was when this meek looking gardener snapped. Francis turns to Nanny and screams “YOU’RE DRIVING TOO FAST!” yanks the cassette out and pitches it out the window.
And then time stood still.
Have you ever been on a rollercoaster where at the top of the first hill staring down you regret every decision you’ve ever made that led you to this point? That was where we were all at.
Because there were three rules to Nanny’s Bently. Nanny always drives. Nanny always drives fast. And Nanny always drives fast with Freddy Mercury blaring down like her own personal angel.
This is all new uncharted territory for me. I’ve never seen anyone even dare disrespect her angel and plan to live to tell the tale. I was just watching in fascinated horror as this moment just searing into my mind.
Nanny’s looking directly at Francis, you can feel her eye’s heat laser’s charging up. I was trying to think of reasons to tell my parents why we don’t have a gardener anymore. Because even at 8 years old I know a death marker when I’ve seen one and by the end of the trip I was expecting Francis to be nothing but a smoldering piled of ash and a $15 hat.
She looks at him, and takes one hand off the wheel. Still barreling down the road like a madman mind you. But it alright because time’s frozen so we don’t hit anything. And with one hand, she reaches in front of him to the glove compartment, gently pulls out another cassette tape, and places it in the deck.
[pauses]
[sings] “FOR ME!!!!!”
We pull into the parking lot by the time Bohemian Rhapsody ends and I have never looked at Nanny the same way ever again. Because anyone who can play the exact same song on two different cassettes without missing a beat is their own god and needs to be feared.”
the implication that bending is completely reliant on whether you think you should be able to instead of like…innate laws of the universe pleases me greatly
A waterbender, levitating a slice of pizza: See, I believe that pizza is technically a soup, not a sandwich, so
Tags:
#Avatar: The Last Airbender #story ideas I will never write #fun with loopholes #I love when superpowered people talk the universe into letting them do stuff #by arguing that the ability logically follows from the powers they already have
Someone (probably Hermione) takes Luna to a muggle museum of natural history, in a last ditch effort to convince her that dinosaurs really did exist. They go through all of it: full and partial skeletons on display, fossil imprints of skin textures, a little video about carbon dating, exhibits on the evolution of all life from tiny one-celled sea creatures, bird-hipped vs. lizard-hipped, living giant isopods and coelacanths, the whole spiel about how the dinosaurs aren’t actually completely gone, since some, like the anchiornis and archaeopteryx, were the predecessors from which today’s birds – including every owl in the Wizarding World – evolved.
Luna takes all this in with her usual calm demeanor until the very end, when her eyes seem to grow even more enormous in her face, but doesn’t say anything. After a full minute of Luna’s silent astonishment, her companion prods her for a response. “Of course!” Luna exclaims, “no wonder I’ve never found them. I’ve been going about things the wrong way!” She launches into a lengthy explanation that the records that she and her father have been using for references were copies of copies of copies of absolutely ancient scripts, so in order to find the creatures as described in them, she needed to be looking for fossils.
Luna (with Rolf as her assistant) begins searching through areas of Wizarding Britain, using magical equivalents of the muggle tools she read about at the museum (a variation on Tempus to determine the age of a magical item or creature, Cryptozoam Revelio as a substitute for ground-penetrating radar). She finds the remains of a number of magical creatures from various ages, as well as accidentally uncovering a nest of Knuckers, a relative of the dragon previously thought to be extinct. After this discovery, she and Rolf are given a bit more credence than before, and they gain the support among creature-handlers, especially dragonologists. Because of this, they get access to more regions of the world, and their team grows. Eventually Luna ends up founding the Wizarding Archaeological Society, the first institution to combine both muggle and wizard research methods at a single institution.
On the 50th anniversary of the Society’s founding, they open a museum of their own (”Everything that was, at the WAS!”), to display the various fossils of magical creatures that they’ve managed to locate over the years. Unveiled at the opening ceremonies was what would become the pride of their collection, a diorama of Crumple-Horned Snorkacks in every stage of development, along with details about their habits, average lifespan, and a map of the full range of their habitat at their peak population in the mid-17th century. Their extinction at during the 20th century was attributed to rising global temperatures, as their most flourishing period coincided with the coldest years of the Little Ice Age, and no specimens from any later than the 1976 Heat Wave had thus far been recovered. The disappearance of the Snorkacks, it was said, had been an early warning sign of the global climate change which had troubled the entire world, wizarding and muggle, for the better part of the last half-century. A cooperative partnership had been reached between the WAS and the Royal Society a scant decade after the WAS’s founding , allowing research witches and wizards to pool their resources with muggle scientists, in time to prevent a catastrophe that the wizarding world would otherwise have been unlikely to survive.
In her speech at that evening’s gala, Luna told the story of how it all happened, to reveal the person who had singlehandledly started this series of events, which resulted in not only a golden age of discovery in the field of cryptozoology, but also an era of peace and cooperation between both worlds, allowing restrictions imposed by the Statute of Secrecy to be loosened for the first time in nearly five hundred years, all in the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake.
Hermione Granger, who had been grumbling in her chair the entire time, rose when acknowledged. Luna Lovegood beamed at her aging friend, the witch who had gone from being her most skeptical critic to her most dedicated – and most challenging – supporter in a mere half-century.
When Harry becomes the DADA professor, kids constantly ask him for an autograph, but he refuses, saying the only thing he’ll autograph is a detention slip. Eventually, though, he starts carrying around a stack of autographed pictures of Ginny, which he gives out when people ask for an autograph. It gets really popular, so he starts mixing it up with autographs from other people, mostly Ron and Hermione. But the students love it, so he adds more. Soon he’s giving out autographs from like fifty different people, including all the teachers at Hogwarts, and a bunch of other random people like Luna, Lee Jordan, Oliver Wood, etc. He even has some fairly rare ones from Krum and Fleur. It becomes a game in Hogwarts to collect all the autographs, like chocolate frog cards. Some of them are more limited edition than others, like signatures from all the ghosts (though Harry won’t reveal how he managed to get those). George starts to offer a discount at Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes (and a prize autograph from Peeves, who will only sign Bertie Bott’s scratch-and-sniff cards) to anyone who can prove they’ve collected the whole set. Harry provides him with up-to-date lists of autographs to check against. Every Hogsmeade weekend there’s a line of Hogwarts students in WWW’s Hogsmeade branch trying to get the discount.
At some point a seventh year comes up to Harry and asks for his autograph, but not as the Savior of the Wizarding World, but because they now have the autograph of every other Hogwarts teacher and want Professor Potter’s to go with them. Harry–trying not to tear up–agrees, but only in exchange for the student’s signature. He begins offering this deal to all departing seventh years, his autograph in exchange for theirs. He tells them it’s in case they ever get famous, so he can add it as a limited edition autograph, but really he keeps them all in a big binder just for himself, to remember all his students. (A couple times, though, when a students does become famous, he will contact them and ask if they’d like to be added to the game. So far no one has said no.)
When Teddy starts at Hogwarts he begins a black market autograph trade because he has access to a lot of the people Harry gets autographs from. Harry’s other three children proudly continue the trade when they get to Hogwarts. They’re all secretly aided by Ginny.
The Universal Translator is the most boring invention in Star Trek, which is why I tend to ignore it. It’s useful for first contact, but the idea that everything someone says is translated means that we never get any depiction of linguistic diversity in Star Trek, particularly in something like DS9. Imagine the possibilities:
Kira being sent on a crash-course on Federation Standard when she is made liaison officer.
Bashir sitting with several dictionary PADDs and a grammar, trying to figure out if the translation matrix Garak ran the Cardassian novel through has messed up or if Garak is playing a very intricate practical joke on him, because surely it can’t mean that.
Molly cheerily code-switching between Japanese, Irish and English. Sometimes she throws in some Bajoran too – Aunt Nerys taught it to her.
Sisko asking for Kira’s help to get better at Bajoran. They meet over coffee and practice Bajoran.
Dax sometimes dreaming in languages she no longer knows, but previous hosts were well-versed in.
Kira and Odo always speaking Bajoran to one another and only switching to Standard when Starfleet folks are there.
The entire storyline of Garak, Kira and Odo with the Cardassian Resistance being in Cardassian
Kira learning Cardassian properly only then – before that she spoke only a Bajoran-Cardassian pidgin which developed during the Occupation.
Nog teaching Jake Ferengi as a way of returning the favour of Jake teaching him how to read.
Garak eavesdropping on everyone. No one is sure how many languages he understands.
The chatter of dozens of languages on the Promenade – the gutturals of Klingon, the uvulars of Cardassian, the retroflex liquids of Bajoran.
Julian gets really confused because there are about fifteen different past tenses in Cardassian and according to Garak he’s using the wrong one every single time. There is only one future tense.
Jake trying to write a story in Bajoran – which he thinks should be easy, because he’s been living among Bajorans for so long he can speak it almost as easily as Federation Standard – only to be hopelessly tripped up by the fact that there are actually three forms of Bajoran (colloquial spoken/written, formal/religious spoken, and formal literary) and he really only knows colloquial Bajoran
Jake, along with a lot of Bajoran writers who grew up during the Occupation and so did not have much formal schooling, start a literary movement of writing in mostly colloquial Bajoran. It’s very controversial, with some saying the more formal written forms of Bajoran are being lost and that’s another thing the Cardassians took from us, and others saying, what, so we can’t move forward and change just because we were occupied?
Has anybody written a series with this premise yet? Because I love it. As someone who writes in a language that’s not her own, and if she did, would do it in her our dialect instead of a neutral, I feel so attracted to this idea.
would like to add to this post and say that harry is uploading these videos to standard muggle youtube. people see this kind of scruffy, obviously Fucked Up kid rambling nonsense into his deskptop camera and just think he is really really good at shitposting
Harry, *filming himself with one hand, throwing raw meat at a seemingly empty space with the other*: “So anyways, you guys probably can’t see him through the camera lens but this weird fuck belongs to my best friend Luna who can’t actually take care of him right now because she’s out riding drag- er, um she’s on vacation in Romania so I have to do it. Um, the only reason I can see him is because I watched my close friend get murdered by an evil wizard when I was fourteen which, by the way, was around the same time I started to think I might be gay. Anyone else?”
Teens on tumblr who have no idea he’s being completely serious: “This is the only man alive who truly Gets me.”
Hermione finds out about his channel because someone she went to primary school with posts it to Facebook and then she marathons his entire channel overnight to make sure he’s not going to get arrested for breaking the statute of secrecy
Hot Take: they can’t arrest him for jackshit because Hermione shows them Muggle memes and demonstrates that the Youtube audience legitimately has no reason to believe he’s anything but an elaborate shitposter.
Slughorn:let me tell you the story of the kid who survived and killed the dark lord who was in this exact class where i teach him the most important part of potions
Muggleborn:cool cool
Slughorn:Harry Potter
Muggleborn: THE FREAKIN YOUTUBER
Tags:
#Harry Potter #fanfic #story ideas I will never write #I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog
The Riddler hijacks the local TV airwaves and appears onscreen holding a comically long roll of paper. After dramatically clearing his throat, he proceeds to read from it.
“The following is a list of people who can suck it. Number One: The Joker. I don’t think I need to explain that one. Number Two: Cluemaster. Fuck you, you stole my bit, and I will be like a plague unto your house. Number Three: King Tut. You also stole my bit, but did it while killing people and got me arrested for murder. Also, I’m, like, 93% sure you’re a white guy and your costume is racist.
“Number Four: The Scarecrow. I know you ate my leftover Chinese, Jon, even though I wrote my name on it. I was saving that for lunch. I had to eat a goddamn peanut butter and jelly sandwich like a five-year-old. It was all you had in the hideout. For fuck’s sake, go shopping, not all of us can live like a bridge troll.
“Number Five: The Penguin. You- No, no, wait, wait… That one should be crossed out. He replaced that and apologized. Never mind, Oswald, you’re fine. Drinks at 7:00 tomorrow, right?
“Anyway, where was…? Ah, yes. Number Six: The Mad Hatter. You carded me and left me like that for six hours because I, and I quote, ‘would not stop talking about Mythbusters.’ Well, excuse me for trying to make intellectually stimulating conversation on a level you could understand. I suppose every time you prattle on about mome raths and borogoves it’s goddamn Shakespeare? Well… Well, it’s Carroll, but… Oh, you know what I mean!
“Number Seven: Catwoman. You left me hanging by one hand from a ledge five stories up and holding a twenty-pound bag of jewels and very pointy objets d’art while you ‘distracted’ the Dark Knight. I know you were making out with him, Selina. You were gone for fifteen minutes. My shoulder almost dislocated. Very unprofessional.
“Number Eight: Kite Man.”
Here the Riddler pauses, lifting his narrowed gaze to glare at the camera, voice dropping to an ominous tone.
“You know what you did…”
His demeanor shifts quickly, and he’s back to reading from his list almost cheerfully.
“Number Nine! Th-”
He’s interrupted by a crashing noise in the background and looks over his shoulder just an instant before a deep voice angrily growls, “Riddler!”
“Oh, for the love of-” He turns to glare at the camera, speaking quickly. “Number Nine: Batman! Interrupting me while I’m on television making very important- Hm-mmph!”
He’s reduced to muffled curses as a black gloved hand covers his mouth and pulls him out of frame. The camera tilts, a cracking noise is heard, and the broadcast turns to static.
If I were batman I’d give him like a five minute warning, because this actually sounds theraputic.
Batman: Riddler, you’ve hijacked the TV airwaves and you know that’s wrong but I think this is actually theraputic. So I’m giving you five minutes, and then I’m taking you to Arkham
Robin: Geez get a facebook account for this crap, hell if you wanna vent to millions of strangers just get youtube.
Riddler takes this advice. He gets his own youtube channel called RiddleMe_Th15. It starts out as being purely therapeutic, a platform for publically calling out those who have annoyed him. Then someone leaves him a pathetically easy riddle to solve in the comments, and he spends his next segment ranting about it, and then posing a better one.
This starts a dialogue with a number of other youtube users who both attempt to answer his riddles and pose their own riddles in return.
Riddler has found his people, and his hit count is climbing.
Seriously, Riddler would KILL IT (metaphorically speaking) on YouTube. He just does those weird animated puzzle videos where he poses lengthy, overly complicated puzzles, game theories, and riddles, then gives away…fuck I don’t know…Amazon or iTunes cards to whoever gets them right.
“Riddle me this: How can I ensure there are more videos like this one? The answer, my little quest solvers, is simple: Like and subscribe, and consider donating to my Patreon! Which isn’t much of a Riddle, but seriously I’m down to eating crackers and ramen right now and YouTube keeps demonetizing my videos because I used to be a supervillain.”
Bringing this back because “YouTube keeps demonetizing my videos because I used to be a supervillain” has to be shared and because I have some followers who have not experienced The Riddler Post.
Seriously, if you ever need a good time, just read all the responses in the notes. This post still ranks as one of the best things I’ve ever done.
Tags:
#Batman #fanfic #I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog
Look. Meetings of the Sharing apparently involve a lot of volleyball, as we know from mentions in #1, #10, Visser, and #31.
Volleyball is a dangerous sport. Volleyball injuries happen. Volleyball accidents frequently result in severed limbs. We know this from the dozens — no, hundreds — of recorded cases of this exact phenomenon occurring, almost all of them in one town in Southern California. Statisticians have hypothesized that this may have to do with the extent to which one particular local organization uses regional variations on the standard rules of volleyball, but all attempts at participant observation have resulted in the social scientists who joined the Sharing abruptly dropping the project and going in new directions with their lives.
Currently, warning labels on volleyball equipment indicate that its use has a 15% chance of resulting in serious injury and/or death. Factoid is actually a statistical error. The Sharing’s inter-chapter volleyball league, which loses an average of 41.7% of its members per month to volleyball-related amputations and murders, is an outlier and should not have been counted.
That sounds like an excellent way to live in a constant state of terror and fascination; being a human social scientist who is infested and watching the mess that is the Visserarchy from terrifyingly close, and thinking that that either you’ll either never be able to share your findings (if you die or the Yeerks win), or be at the edge of any entirely new edge of social science.
Imagine being a yeerk inside a newly captured social scientist watching them passively eviscerate every aspect of your primitive 30-year-old military culture down to its component parts, every conclusion basically being “these guys suck at everything they’re doing and are struggling desperately to make sure their underlings don’t realise that”
<Stop it! Stop thinking! Stop trying to shake my loyalty!>
<I can’t! This is what I was trained to do! You don’t like it, stop reading my mind!>
<I CAN’T!>
*Visser Three starts speaking*
<And this one’s intimidation tactics have gone far, far beyond useful and are greatly crippling his own forces; not sure yet whether it’s pure unchecked sadism or insecurity and distraction as a result of – >
post war someone is going to have an amazing dissertation “Perverse incentives in authoritarian systems, a first(ish) person case study”
Tags:
#Animorphs #fanfic #violence cw #death tw #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(the newly captured social scientist) #my past self has good taste
Batman Story Idea: The reason the Joker’s personality varies so wildly is that there are two people who, completely independently, adopted the identity
One is the goofy clown who’s more concerned with mayhem and spectacle than murder/suffering; ala the Silver Age Dick Sprang Joker or the Lego Batman Joker, the other the serial-killing social-engineering monster that’s a force of nihilistic chaos ala The Killing Joke/The Animated Series/the Heath Ledger Joker.
Both of them know about each other and fucking hate each other and each accuse the other of being a ripoff despite that almost certainly not being the case and them seemingly having come up with the identity independently in a hilarious coincidence.
What the devil didn’t know when he went down to Georgia looking for a soul to steal is that “Johnny” was one of the fae who went up to Georgia looking for mortals to play tricks on. Instead, Johnny found someone more challenging than a mortal…. or rather, the challenge found him.
They were in a circle of mushrooms playing a fiddle sung of chesnut,
when was heard from the hickory stump “Boy, let me tell you what.
“I bet you didn’t know it, but I’m a fiddle player, too.
And if you’d care to take a dare I’ll make a bet with you.”
Now games were their specialty, they played them oft enough;
So they charmed their face into a childish gaze and prepared to win some stuff.
A soul the devil was looking for, they scoffed at the very thought;
But this one fae was ready to play – for there’s a lesson to be taught.
The fae called themself Johnny, and said that “it might be a sin,
But I’ll take your bet and you’re gonna regret ‘cause I’m the best there’s ever been.“
The Devil Rosined up his bow, and made it hiss like a snake,
The fae eyed him slyly- a step forward’s all it would take.
They heard a band of demons back up that fiddle gold;
But it would take more than a sizzling score to beat a fae of old.
When the Devil finished, the fae said, “Well, you’re pretty good ol’ son,
But sit down in that chair right there and let me show you how it’s done.”
“Fire on the Mountain.” Run, boys, run!
The Devil’s in the house of the rising sun
Chicken’s in the bread pan picking out dough
Granny, does your dog bite? No, child, no”
…
Nonsensical though the words might be, that one chant would prevail;
For it was sung with sorcery, the kind which could never fail.
Indeed they saw the devil bow his head like he’d been beat;
And he stepped inside the mushroom ring to lay the fiddle at “Johnny’s” feet.
Then he turned to go, but quickly saw he’d been deceived;
For no matter what he did, it was impossible to leave.
The fae saw that he was stuck and said “that’s really quite a shame;
But you know, since I’ve got you here- why don’t you give me your name?”
Brinens and Things 