why do jellyfish only sting when theres physical contact
why doesnt the electricity just surge throughout the entire ocean
why dont jellyfish rule the world
Fun fact! Jellyfish don’t use electricity to sting you. Whenever they feel pressure against their tentacles, it causes its cells to rapidly send out these stingers into your skin that then release its venom. Like this:
They are called nematocysts. They are what make box jellies and other fun lil critters so dangerous, because without these wee little daggers, the venom would have no way to get into your skin.
And yet something as thin as nylon stockings or pantyhose is enough to protect you, they are so small.
So if you’re scared of jellyfish? Wear sexy sheer undergarments into the sea like the regal creature you are.
I’m going to reblog this again because that is some of the best advice I have ever gotten on this blog.
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
We read lots of good disturbing shit in hs or in the writing groups I joined in hs but somehow the top of the heap for shit that haunted me’s still indisputably Ethan Canin’s “The Palace Thief”. It’s not horror as such but it freaked me the fuck out.
There was another O. Henry short story we read that was also really alarming but I had to google a major spoiler (which is also a warning) to recall the name – “The Furnished Room”.
there will come soft rains by bradbury was very unsettling for middle school me
I had no idea so many were all written by Ray Bradbury, why did he do this to us
“Emergency” by Dennis Johnson – not entirely disturbing but really weird and there’s one Bad Part
“A Small, Good Thing” by Raymond Carver – again not all that bad but sad and kind of creepy
Bradbury wrote a lot of weird shit. But, “The Book of Sand” and"The Library of Babel" by Luis Borges.
“It’s a Good Life” – Jerome Bixby
“The Little Black Bag” – Cyril M. Cornbluth
“The Cold Equations” – Tom Godwin
“The Nine Billion Names of God” – Arthur C. Clarke
“Mars is Heaven!” – Ray Bradbury
“Born of Man and Woman” – Richard Matheson
“That Only A Mother” – Judith Maril
“The Country of the Kind” – Damon Knight
“Mimsy Were The Borogroves” – Lewis Padgett
“Lamb to the Slaughter” – Roald Dahl
“We Can Get Them For You Wholesale” – Neil Gaiman
“BLIT” and “Different Kinds of Darkness” – David Langford (set in the same universe) (there are a couple of other “basilisk” stories and they’re worth checking out)
“The Secret Number” – Igor Teper
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
Nearly anything by Borges tbh, he specializes in unsettling
Technically read it on my own in high school but Guts by Chuck Palahniuk wigged me out for a while.
Also, from college, A Very Old Man With Enourmous Wings by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Magical realism as a genre and genres inspired by it have some nutty fucking short stories and there are a lot that I remember imagery from but not the titles or authors (Borges is one).
POPULAR MECHANICS
I forget the title, but there was a story in one of my textbooks where the narrator hangs a kitten after his dad can’t stand its mewing and says someone should kill it. He gets in very deep trouble with his parents, and his dad says he didn’t mean it. I felt weird for days. We didn’t read it in class, but I was one of those bright kids who did extra reading. For fun.
“Leiningen Versus the Ants,” Carl Stephenson.
“The Voice in the Night”, William Hope Hodgson
“Survivor Type”, Stephen King
Not sure if it counts, but “Taily-Bone”. Note: we didn’t actually *read* this.
We were forced to sit in a dark room as an audio book was read aloud for everyone. 1st grade. Every day for a week. I don’t even remember why. Just… Taily-Bone.
*shudder*
When I was 8 I read part of War of the Worlds. I got to the part where the aliens drink all the fluids out of a live guy, got totally freaked out, and put the book back on our shelf. Specifically, I put it back on the shelf that I hadn’t realized was intended to be out of my reach. Behind all the other books, because it freaked me out enough that I evidently decided the logical thing to do was to hide it.
For the first time ever, stygiomedusa gigantea, a gigantic jellyfish was caught on video by scientists in the Gulf of Mexico. There have only been 115 sightings of this deep sea jellyfish in the past 110 years.
i have not even finished the first episode of the Best Friends Play LP of Detroit: Become Human and David Cage has already made several mind-boggling, immersion shattering mistakes in his world building:
to recap:
david cage believes that in androids that look exactly like humans will come to exist and be accepted by society
david cage believes that it would take five years in this universe before androids are required by law to have identifying characteristics like glowing circles on their temples and glowing clothes
david cage believes that a company could somehow completely dehumanize these fully human looking androids to the general populace in this amount of time, resulting in literally everybody calling them “it” instead of treating them like they’re alive despite the fact that people have been doing this with roombas since 2002
david cage believes that a company would be able to sell a completely servile human-looking android that looks like a black person and somehow not face intense, company reputation destroying backlash against this
david cage believes that androids being forced to sit in the back of the bus would be immediately accepted by society and not questioned at all, even though the civil rights movement and segregation are widely covered by public school’s history classes
david cage believes that paper will no longer exist and that all paper will be replaced by single-use disposable touchscreen devices. these devices include magazines, bills, and job applications
to repeat, david cage fucking believes that we’ll use snail mail to send eachother ipads instead of just using email or FUCKING PAPER
david cage expects us to believe that an android would only cost 8,000 USD in the year 2032
david cage expects us to believe that an android is a totally affordable item for a crack addict that lives in a building so dilapidated that it could barely be called a house
david cage expects us to believe that aforementioned crackhead beat the living hell out of his android to the point where he told the store “she got hit by a car” and the store just blindly believed this and repaired her free of charge despite the fact that phone companies now won’t even replace your broken screen for free
david cage expects us to believe that an android with a constant internet connection would not see this crack addict smoking crack and not log it or take any form of action to prevent or report it
david cage expects us to believe that this android that is very clearly able to produce detailed psychological breakdowns of humans at a glance would look at a child under the age of 10, see every single textbook sign of physical abuse, see the father (aforementioned crack addict) verbally abusing her while she cowering under a table, and not take any preventative action to ensure the child’s safety despite the fact that she HAS AN A CONSTANT INTERNET CONNECTION AND IS ABLE TO WORDLESSLY DO THINGS LIKE ORDER SHIT OFF OF AMAZON
david cage expects us to believe that the world detroit: become human takes place in has a 40% unemployment rate. the lowest the unemployment rate in the US has ever been was 25% during the Great Depression.
David Cage expects us to believe that a 40% unemployment rate looks like “maybe five homeless people in a town square tops and an angry crowd of ten peaceful protesters that are easily dispersed by a single police officer” and not “rioting in the streets with every single authority figure being drawn and quartered by the angered masses”
I haven’t even finished the episode yet. There’s probably more. I keep pausing it because I have to stop and talk about it to prevent myself from losing my fucking mind.
Your job in heaven is to look after the pets whose owners have not arrived yet. It’s your first day
NOTE: Just wrote this on Instagram, am re-posting here.
By the end of the first week in heaven, most of the animals owners had arrived. However, there was one dog. He waited, day in, day out for his master to come. And everyday, he’d trot up to me and ask the same question: “Am I a good boy?” I’d smile. “Of course you are, Buddy!” But as the days turned to weeks and the weeks to months, Buddy became more discouraged. I too began to wonder where the poor dogs master was. So I went to God. He flipped through the roll and couldn’t find Buddy’s owner anywhere.
I walked to where Buddy lay under a tree, the cooling shade playing on his soft, golden coat. He had his eyes closed, head resting on the fresh grass.
“I know why my master isn’t here.” He said out of the blue. “He wasn’t a good boy.” I lay down next to Buddy. “What do you mean?” I asked. He continued. “He killed the little good boy. His little good boy. So I bit him. Again. And again. Until he stopped moving. Then the people with nets and guns showed up and they pointed one at me and then I was here.”
We lay silent for quite some time. Slow tears rolled down my cheeks. The lump in my throat made it difficult to talk, but I managed to say the words.
“Buddy, you’re the goodest boy there is.”
*cries*
It wasn’t long after that when we found the little boy. He was with the children whose parents hadn’t arrived yet. There were bright faced kids running around, excited to be full of energy and life again. But one boy sat by himself, sad and still, and I knew that it was him. After a few minutes talking to the guardian looking after these children, some whose parents would be there soon, some whose parents wouldn’t come at all, I learned the boy would play with the others, but he wouldn’t speak.
Difficulty adjusting was common enough for murder cases, the guardian said, but so hard to see in small children.
Buddy recognized the boy right away and sprinted toward him. The boy looked up with wide eyes and threw his arms around Buddy’s neck. The embrace seemed to last forever, but before I knew it, the pair leaped up and began to play.
Without a word, it was decided. The two good boys were each other’s now.
Everyone agrees! Your intestines squirming around like eels in your belly is horrifying!
IM SORRY THEY FUCKING WHAT NOW?
The racks even have hooks to keep them from squirming right off and onto the floor apparently. They desperately want to escape our bodies
Intestines are muscles, and function involuntarily. If your muscles did not squirm around, then they wouldn’t be able to move food through them, thus you wouldn’t gain any nutrients from anything you eat, and the food would spoil and make you sick. I agree the squirmy wormies are a bit unsettling, but hey it’s actually really good for you! Your intestines work so hard for it! Please give them a little love.
so @coolestninja1242 texted me last night “deer but instead of antlers…arms” and i’m like “i have to draw that. i can’t not draw that.” so you can blame this nightmare fuel monstrosity on her lol
So I live in Texas, and we get hail sometimes. It’s usually pea-sized or so. This batch was not. About 70 seconds straight of this.
[5-second clip of hail raining onto a porch, as seen through a slightly opened door. The hail is large, multiple pieces easily over a half inch long. The sound is very loud and resembles someone popping bubble wrap at high speeds while several children with sticks bang on a tin roof. In the background, someone yells “this is a little bit excessive!” in a thoroughly amused tone and is barely heard over the noise of falling hail.]
BettSplendens Tumblr Evac 