storytime

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

eggheademporium:

eggheademporium:

eggheademporium:

writing-prompt-s:

All the gods of myth and legend are real, but having your prayers answered depends on discovering which god can hear you. You figured out which god is listening to your prayers, but they’re not what you expected.

Suzy was dissapointed. Most people her age had discovered their deity so far, and she was starting to think she was godless. She turned the next page of McBayers’ Little Book of Deities, and tried reading their names aloud to see if she’d get a reaction. It had taken her weeks just to get through Chinese spirits and deities, and had finally reached the first page of Egyptian Gods and you.

“Ammit? Amun? Anhur?” Nothing. Her heart slowly sank again. Three more tries, and she’d stop for now.

“Anubis?”

The ground shook. The lights in Suzy’s room flickered and went out. A single flame hovered in the middle of the room, and as it grew to a blaze it changed form. Within the blink of an eye, there was a tall figure standing in Suzy’s room. The body of a man, and the head of a jackal. His eyes shone bright as he peered at her.

 

WHAT IS IT, SUZY OF THE HOUSE MILLER?

“You’re the deity that answers my prayers?”

INDEED. I, ANUBIS, WHO RULES OVER THE LAND OF THE DEAD, IS HERE TO ANSWER YOUR REQUESTS.

Suzy thought for a moment. “O great and mighty Anubis who rules over the afterlife, can I please have a puppy?”

Anubis seemed taken aback.

IN THE CENTURIES THAT I HAVE BEEN PRAYED TO, THIS IS THE FIRST TIME I HAVE BEEN REQUESTED SOMETHING LIKE THIS. CHILD, HOW OLD ARE YOU?

“I’m eight and a half. My mommy says that if I can take care of a puppy, I can keep it.”

ARE YOU CERTAIN YOU DO NOT WISH FOR ME TO BRING PLAGUES UPON YOUR ENEMIES OR WEIGH A SOUL FOR YOU?

Suzy shook her head. “I want a puppy.”

CHILD, IN TRUTH THIS WISH I CANNOT GRANT. MY JOB HAS BEEN TO BRING PEACE AND LEAD SOULS INTO THE AFTERLIFE, NOTHING MORE. IF I WERE TO CREATE A HOUND FOR YOU, IT WOULD BE FORMED OF BONE AND SOUL ALONE.

Suzy thought for a second. She would have liked to have a nice fluffy puppy, but then she remembered how Aunt Marge’s Sphinx cat was still nice, even without fur.

“No fur is fine, as long as they don’t bite and make a mess.”

 

Anubis nodded, and raised a hand. Underneath his palm an intricate symbol appeared on the floor. It glowed bright, and the floorboards burst apart. Up sprang a massive skeletal dog, bigger than suzy herself. Its eye sockets held blue flame, and its jaw hang partly open in a perpetual grin. It slowly walked over to Suzy and nuzzled her.

 

“What does it eat?”

IT WILL NOT NEED SUSTENANCE, AND WANTS NOTHING MORE THAN TO SERVE ITS NEW MASTER. I HOPE THIS WILL SUFFICE.”

“I love it. Thank you, Anubis.”

Anubis looked slightly taken aback, but nodded peacefully.

FAREWELL FOR NOW, SUZY OF THE MILLERS. IF YOU EVER NEED ANYTHING ELSE YOU HAVE BUT TO ASK ME.

Suzy nodded, and ran over to her parents’ room to show them her new dog. She was pretty sure they couldn’t object to this pet.

A part 2,since this got some people interested.

Keep reading

Part 3, due to popular request. 

Keep reading

Tags:

#oh look an update #storytime #long post

Just Run: my neighbor just got an unsecured wireless printer, so I sent this to him

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

nixcraft:

Unsecured Wireless Printer 1

Next day: my neighbor has thrown out the printer

Unsecured Wireless Printer 2

And that’s the story of how I got a free printer:

Unsecured Wireless Printer 3

(Via blakemessick)

Tags:

#I was just telling my parents this story! #(we were talking about IoT security) #I’m not convinced that this particular incident actually happened #but the fact that it’s even remotely plausible is a bad sign #(I saw a non-password-locked refrigerator network while out Wi-Fi mapping recently) #(it was too faint to try though) #(and a lot of ””open”” networks just ask you for a password anyway the first try you try to load something with them) #(especially residential ones) #(so it might actually have been locked for all I know)

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

lizardywizard:

eggheademporium:

masquerading-brambles:

eggheademporium:

writing-prompt-s:

All the gods of myth and legend are real, but having your prayers answered depends on discovering which god can hear you. You figured out which god is listening to your prayers, but they’re not what you expected.

Suzy was dissapointed. Most people her age had discovered their deity so far, and she was starting to think she was godless. She turned the next page of McBayers’ Little Book of Deities, and tried reading their names aloud to see if she’d get a reaction. It had taken her weeks just to get through Chinese spirits and deities, and had finally reached the first page of Egyptian Gods and you.

“Ammit? Amun? Anhur?” Nothing. Her heart slowly sank again. Three more tries, and she’d stop for now.

“Anubis?”

The ground shook. The lights in Suzy’s room flickered and went out. A single flame hovered in the middle of the room, and as it grew to a blaze it changed form. Within the blink of an eye, there was a tall figure standing in Suzy’s room. The body of a man, and the head of a jackal. His eyes shone bright as he peered at her.

WHAT IS IT, SUZY OF THE HOUSE MILLER?

“You’re the deity that answers my prayers?”

INDEED. I, ANUBIS, WHO RULES OVER THE LAND OF THE DEAD, IS HERE TO ANSWER YOUR REQUESTS.

Suzy thought for a moment. “O great and mighty Anubis who rules over the afterlife, can I please have a puppy?”

Anubis seemed taken aback.

IN THE CENTURIES THAT I HAVE BEEN PRAYED TO, THIS IS THE FIRST TIME I HAVE BEEN REQUESTED SOMETHING LIKE THIS. CHILD, HOW OLD ARE YOU?

“I’m eight and a half. My mommy says that if I can take care of a puppy, I can keep it.”

ARE YOU CERTAIN YOU DO NOT WISH FOR ME TO BRING PLAGUES UPON YOUR ENEMIES OR WEIGH A SOUL FOR YOU?

Suzy shook her head. “I want a puppy.”

CHILD, IN TRUTH THIS WISH I CANNOT GRANT. MY JOB HAS BEEN TO BRING PEACE AND LEAD SOULS INTO THE AFTERLIFE, NOTHING MORE. IF I WERE TO CREATE A HOUND FOR YOU, IT WOULD BE FORMED OF BONE AND SOUL ALONE.

Suzy thought for a second. She would have liked to have a nice fluffy puppy, but then she remembered how Aunt Marge’s Sphinx cat was still nice, even without fur.

“No fur is fine, as long as they don’t bite and make a mess.”

Anubis nodded, and raised a hand. Underneath his palm an intricate symbol appeared on the floor. It glowed bright, and the floorboards burst apart. Up sprang a massive skeletal dog, bigger than suzy herself. Its eye sockets held blue flame, and its jaw hang partly open in a perpetual grin. It slowly walked over to Suzy and nuzzled her.

“What does it eat?”

IT WILL NOT NEED SUSTENANCE, AND WANTS NOTHING MORE THAN TO SERVE ITS NEW MASTER. I HOPE THIS WILL SUFFICE.”

“I love it. Thank you, Anubis.”

Anubis looked slightly taken aback, but nodded peacefully.

FAREWELL FOR NOW, SUZY OF THE MILLERS. IF YOU EVER NEED ANYTHING ELSE YOU HAVE BUT TO ASK ME.

Suzy nodded, and ran over to her parents’ room to show them her new dog. She was pretty sure they couldn’t object to this pet.

I can’t help but imagine her parent’s reaction to this.
“OH SUZY WHAT DID YOU DO?!”
“It’s my new puppy. Can I keep it?”

if this gets enough popularity I just might write a sequel or two. Hell, I could even make a multi-chapter deal out of this if people are genuinely interested in reading it.

I want to read so many of these with so many different gods and people.

Tags:

#long post #storytime

{{next post in sequence}}

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

sinesalvatorem:

eternalsailordianamon:

cannibalcoalition:

Okay so here’s one of those rare gems of moments where retail is actually kind of okay. 

I’m gonna start by revealing the well-kept secret that I live in Ohio… in case all the buckeye references flew by you. And Ohio… is obsessed with space travel. I mean- it makes sense. We’ve got a couple astronauts in our history, there’s the National Aeronautics and Space Museum in Dayton, and on those quiet summer nights, where the sky is clear and the stars are twinkling in the distance, it is hard to not look up at the darkness and wonder if there is intelligent life out there. (Not here.)

Anyhow, all the fourth graders have a big space-related project around this time of year and this means that we, as craft retailers, have to be problem solvers. The number one problem is ‘oh gods, please tell me that you’re going to put a primer down on that styrofoam before you spray paint it.’

Because- you guessed it- everyone is making a damn solar system model. 

That is to say… their parents are making the solar system model. 

I was just finishing up explaining the use of a styrofoam primer and which spray paints are safe to use with styro to the mother of one ten-year-old when the mother of another ten-year-old rounds the corner looking desperate. 

“Is this a good paint for cardboard?”

It’s not. So I round her back to where her son and daughter are waiting and explain them what will work. She needs green, and there are three different kinds of greens. The mom holds them up and has her daughter choose. 

“Which one do you want for your face?”

I freeze because putting acrylic on your skin is a great way to get a rash. “Hold on, you’re not putting this on your skin, are you?”

“No, gosh no. We’re painting a box and putting the box on her head.”

…

Okay, I’m curious. “Can you explain what you’re making?”

The daughter chimes in. “We have to do a project for school and I’m gonna dress up like a alien!”

Instantly, I love this child. Not just because she considers dressing up as an alien to be an acceptable school project, but because she’s not leaving it to her mom to do all the work. 

So we talk for a minute about project stuff and she tells me that her brother is going to be the first man on Mars. Her brother is five. Her brother concurs- he is going to be the first man on Mars. Their mom tells me about the Neil Armstrong museum nearby. Like… this is a family of people excited about the future of space travel.

“Did you hear about those new planets,” I asked. 

The little girl starts jumping up and down. “Yes! Yes! Yes!”

Mom: “Can you remember what they said about the new planets?”

“They said…. they said that they can… uhhh… sustain life! There might be aliens!”

Mom: “Now, they said they can sustain life, but I think they also said that it isn’t very advanced life.”

The little girl looks off into space- contemplating this new information. She is formulating a very important thought. 

Very softly: “We get to be the aliens this time.”

@sinesalvatorem

“We get to be the aliens this time.”

Tags:

#space #storytime

phi-of-two asked: Then what *is* the most extreme case of “they left off a deadline so go for it”? I feel like there’s probably some interesting stories there.

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

comparativelysuperlative:

The Twenty-seventh Amendment to the United States Freaking Constitution.

After the Constitution was passed, James Madison yelled at the other Federalists until they agreed that yeah, we promised we’d add a bill of rights to get New York on board, maybe we should get on that. They proposed twelve amendments. Ten passed.

Proposed amendment number two was one of the boring ones. What it says is that when Congress passes a law changing its pay, that can’t go into effect until after the next election. A good rule to have, but not exactly earth-shakingly important. There were thirteen states, and only seven voted for it, so it didn’t pass. (Um, amendments need three quarters. They weren’t just that bad at counting.)

Pause.

Like, a lot of pause.

Cut to 1992, and it gets its thirty-eighth ratification, making it the law of the land.

(Actually it was the thirty-ninth. Kentucky had ratified it in 1792, but everyone forgot.)

What happened in between? Well, a couple of states ratified the amendment as a pointless expression of We Are Very Angry At Congress. (Which is, like, the default state of being for state legislatures and American citizens in general, so I don’t know how it didn’t pass in the first place faster than you could say “opposite of progress.”) But mostly it was a ten-year campaign started by some guy in Texas who wrote a paper on it for law school.

He got a C. Something about “unrealistic.” And now he’s personally responsible for getting an amendment added to the U.S. Constitution by sheer force of rules-lawyering.
(Not even regular-lawyering! He did it by writing a bunch of letters about his favorite piece of trivia!)

Anyway, 1992 was also the year Congress passed a Cost of Living Adjustment act. Couldn’t take effect until ‘94, of course, but now their pay goes up automatically unless they suspend it. Gotta respect ‘em; they know this loophole business too.

Tags:

#this is beautiful #it probably shouldn’t be beautiful but it is #home of the brave #fun with loopholes

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

another-normal-anomaly:

So you all know that I’m a fan of Atlas Shrugged, but I don’t think I’ve told the story of how and why I first read it.

Once upon a time in senior year, I was an atheist at a Catholic high school, a brilliant asshole ready to Discourse with anyone who held still long enough. Fortunately it was a Jesuit school, so lots of people held still long enough. And this Jesuit school had a yearly senior retreat called Kairos, where a bunch of students and a handful of teachers would disappear from Tuesday to Friday and do Stuff. I knew approximately jack shit about Kairos, because it was under a very heavy no-spoilers norm and nobody leaked spoilers, at least not at me. But it sounded cool, because the word was in the front of those Time Quartet books and I was a huge Meg Murray fangirl, and anyway I have never been able to resist a secret meeting. So I signed up.

Now, the general impression I got from what little people would say about this Kairos thing was that it was about opening up emotionally and getting close with your classmates, and also something something God, and that it would permanently alter your brain. None of my friends were going because they were all sensible people whose response to “mindhazard warning” is not “I want it inside me”, and I was exactly as alienated from the rest of my classmates as ~asperger’s plus a whole lot of effort could make me, so signing up for 96 hours of Deeply Serious Neurotypical Jesus Party was the equivalent of opening a .exe you got off pyRatBay.ru. So of course I resolved to be as charitable and open-to-it and nonsnarky and taking-it-seriously as I could manage, and then start in on Atlas Shrugged as soon as I got home. Y’see, my very liberal parents had warned me against all things Rand when I was in middle school, citing mindhazard. And I had previously read The Fountainhead and hadn’t really understood what was going on (because I was too distracted by Dominique’s various issues to focus on the plot), and Atlas was advertised as “Fountainhead but not for pansies”. So I decided that immediately after doing one potentially brainfucking thing was the best time to do another one, on the theory that they would either 1) cancel out and leave me net unaffected or 2) stack weirdly and fuck me up extra hard, and either of those sounded like fun.

Without spoiling too much, Kairos was a potentially mind-altering trip. I had a few moments of feeling not totally alienated from humanity in general and my classmates in particular. I also learned that my classmates were very unlucky people and that my father fundamentally Gets me as a person and is the same type of person, but that’s another and much less bloggable pair of stories. It started out pretty fun, but my suspension of disbelief contrarianism was wearing off pretty hard by day 4, as was my ability to enjoy … stuff in general? I was some mix of overstimulated, sleep-deprived, emotionally exhausted from fighting my introversion, and generally mentally contorted. The fact that my boyfriend was in town the weekend after was deeply healthy and necessary, because at that point I really needed some social interaction I could enjoy without putting in intense effort to be both faker and more genuine than I ever normally get*. So I spent the next day using cuddles as a mental walware scanner and the day after reading Atlas Shrugged, which turned out to be impossible to put down. All told I spent about 96 hours in Christian Extrovertopia, 24 resetting, and the next 96 in Objectivistland. I think the Rand did cancel out the Kairos a bit; at least it got rid of the “You Must Love Everybody” effect. And then my model of Dagny Taggart took up residence in my brain and has basically never left, but has at least stopped commenting on literally every experience I have.

TL;DR: 

*explanation of what I mean by this available on request.

Tags:

#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(”either of those sounded like fun”) #Christianity #Atlas Shrugged #storytime

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

feynites:

forthegothicheroine:

The “horror nerd has valuable skills” trope is quite a respected tradition in film by now.  Often, this is subverted by the fact that the nerd is still useless (Scream), sometimes it’s played straight (Monster Squad), and sometimes it’s somewhere in the middle (Lost Boys.)  But you know what I haven’t seen?

The same trope applied to readers of paranormal romance.

I want a gory teenage horror movie where one of the survivors is a girl who’s the Catherine Morland of Junior High.  She’s read Twilight, she’s read all the Twilight knockoffs, she’s got a shelf full of Harlequin supernatural romances, and when she’s at a thrift store she scours romance book racks for anything with a vampire, werewolf, or fairy on the cover.

So when the supernatural bad guys attack, she feels she’s prepared and knows all about them.  And the worst part, that will be most grating to our heroes?  She’s absolutely right.

“Alright, Lillith, you need to go and talk to the vampire,” Olympia says, expression sombre as they gather outside of the night club where the rest of their friends have been taken.

“What?” Lillith asks. “Why do I have to go and talk to the vampire?!”

“Because! First of all, your name is ‘Lillith’. Second of all, you are a skinny white brunette who – for some unfathomable reason – has zero self-esteem about your appearance, despite looking almost entirely like a supermodel, a delicate constitution, and let’s be real here, out of everyone you are by far the likeliest to be the reincarnation of some Victorian lady who died tragically of illness before her vampire lover could whisk her off to the shores of immortality.”

Lillith hesitates.

“Oh no,” she says.

“Let me guess. You’ve been having dreams?” Olympia surmises.

“But he’s creepy!” Lillith protests.

“Look, after what happened with Peter and the werewolf, are you really gonna back down now?” Olympia demands. “You don’t have to marry the creep, he’s probably been longing for death of centuries and will be content enough to go if he can explode into dust motes in the sunlight after looking at your face ‘one last time’, okay? So just make with the fated re-introduction so we can get into the club and rescue everyone from the succubi.”

The two young women stare one another down.

Olympia lets out a breath of relief as resolve fills Lillith’s gaze, and she turns and heads towards the conspicuously pale figure making his way towards the club’s entrance.

Things might actually being go well, for a change. But then she hears it. Approaching the club, faintly at first, but then loud enough to almost sound like a car pulling up the street.

The jangling bells of the Fairy King’s coach. 

Oh, shit, Olympia thinks, because she knows. This one…

This one is hers.

Tags:

#storytime #vampires

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

rabbiteclair:

somecleverrhuze:

“I am Three-Wolves. I am three wolves.” 

Original Post: @rabbiteclair

Harshsmell: @jamesdijit

Three-Wolves: James Oh Burn

Bibarel and the Messenger: @pacoslimee

Narrated by: Yours Truly

I just about died laughing when I read this post and rallied the troops pretty much immediately. Please enjoy!

This finished like a full minute ago and I’m still laughing, so you’ve definitely got my stamp of approval.

Tags:

#upon reflection I’ve decided to reblog the audio that contains a link to the text #so that you may choose for yourselves which version to use #(I have not listened to the audio and make no guarantees regarding it) #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

feynites:

writing-prompt-s:

You’re a mystic who runs a shop full of mysterious artifacts and potions and you’re sick of uninformed middle-aged suburban moms asking for energy crystals and herbal weight-loss mixtures while throwing around made-up terms.

When a middle-aged woman rolled into my shop and told me she was looking for ichor, I didn’t think much of it at first.

You get all kinds in a shop like mine, and doubly so when you put up the right signs on your door. The signs that let certain kinds of people know they’re welcome, not just the collectors or the curious or the new age mystics, looking for this root or that crystal or wanting to gawk at a jar of old bones, but the less innocuous individuals as well.  The kind who mean business when they come looking for their… less run-of-the-mill specialities.

Keep reading

Tags:

#storytime #death tw