this is so wild, this guy thought his landlord was going into his house and leaving him post-it notes but he just had an extreme case of carbon monoxide poisoning
Modern ghost story
Did reddit save this dudes life
What the fuck
NO BUT I READ THIS WHOLE THING ONCE.
he got the CO detector out, saw that it was in dangerous levels (there was a problem with an underground parkade in his building, iirc), calmly went “shit”, and went to the hospital. If he didn’t get that advice, he would most likely be dead now.
The best part? He didn’t get a webcam app or anything. He just made a folder, called it Webcam, and called it a night in his carbon monoxide induced delirium.
This is honestly one of my favorite Reddit stories.
That was completely wild. This is also one of my favorite explanations for both historical and modern tales of haunted houses.
In the story of that historical incident, the 1921 “Mrs. H” account, they experienced many of what we think of as the really classic signs of a haunting. Aside from moving into a run down, semi-creepy house – that’s how these stories always start, right? – they experienced things like mysterious noises as if someone was violently rearranging the furniture in the middle of the night. They heard voices, felt as if they were being watched or followed, heard tapping in the walls. And it was as if there were ghosts acting on them physically: shaking the bed, holding them down, yanking away the sheets. “Mrs. H” sees ghostly figures sitting at the foot of her bed, and describes them in detail. And it all turns out to be a carbon monoxide leak: the furnace is fixed, and the haunting immediately comes to an end.
What’s scariest about carbon monoxide IMO, and what’s really illustrated by that reddit story, is how quickly and thoroughly carbon monoxide poisoning can just disconnect you from reality. You think you’re taking appropriate action and thinking clearly and remaining essentially yourself, while half of what you’re doing, pretty much all of what you’re experiencing, turns out to be sheer hallucination. It has to seem so real on every level, but none of it is. It’s scary to think how easily our entire perception of the world can just be wrong, and we have absolutely no concept of it.
(My other favorite explanation for hauntings is infrasound. I don’t necessarily disbelieve the idea of some sort of life after death or things like that, I try to maintain an open mind because our understanding of our universe is seriously not as thorough as we’d like to think, but the scientific possibilities for what could cause the symptoms and sensations of a haunting are completely fascinating. Like who would’ve figured you could get such vivid, convincing, visceral effects from something as obscure as sound outside your ability to actively hear, or gas you can’t detect.)
hey all, firefighter here, i seriously cannot stress enough how important it is to have CO detectors. this guy absolutely would have died if someone hadn’t suggested carbon monoxide poisoning. it can and will kill you without warning – you probably won’t even realize it’s happening. do yourself a favor and get a detector, especially if you live in a cramped and poorly ventilated home or apartment, they’ll save your life
I think people often underestimate the potential educational value of senseless memes. For example, thanks to Spiders Georg, literally every teenager on Tumblr has a reasonable grasp of what a statistical outlier is and the sorts of problems that outliers can introduce into a naïve
analysis. There are grown adults who don’t get that – I deal with them on a daily basis.
“Memes have educational value” actually statistical error. Average meme teaches 0 facts. Spiders Georg is an outlier adn should not be counted
one of the most frustrating moods is Desperate Need to Create Something, Anything + persistent lack of motivation/attention/ability/time/inspiration/energy to do so
Yo ok what if there was a Cinderella story where Cinderella is a trans woman and that’s really why her stepmom treats her like shit and won’t let her go to the ball and when the prince and his men come around looking to try the slipper on every woman in the land her stepmom tells the prince there aren’t any women left in the house because she insists that Cinderella is a man, but Cinderella comes out and the prince recognizes her and says something along the lines of “well I’d say that’s a woman if I ever saw one”
“Ella is transgender. She’s known since she was young; being a woman just fit better. She was happier in skirts than trousers, but that was before her stepmother moved in. Eleanor can’t stand her, and after Ella’s father passes she’s forced to revert to Cole, a lump of a son. She cooks, she cleans, and she tolerates being called the wrong name for the sake of a roof over her head. Where else can she go? An opportunity to attend the royal ball transforms Ella’s life. For the first time, strangers see a woman when she walks down the stairs. While Princess Lizabetta invited Cole to the ball, she doesn’t blink an eye when Cinderella is the one who shows. The princess is elegant, bold, and everything Ella never knew she wanted. For a moment she glimpses a world that can accept her, and she holds on tight. She should have known it wouldn’t last. Dumped by her wicked stepmother on the farthest edge of the kingdom, Ella must find a way to let go of the princess and the beautiful life they shared for an hour. She’ll never find her way back. But it’s hard to forget the greatest night of her life when every rose she plants is a reminder.”
Jesus Christ was a brown Jew in the Middle East, conceived out of wedlock in an arguably interracial if not interspecies (deity and human) relationship, raised by his mother and stepfather in place of his absent father. He may not have had a Y chromosome. He spent his early youth as a refugee in Egypt, where his family no doubt survived initially on handouts from the wealthy (You think they kept that gold, frankincense, and myrrh from the wise men? Hell no, they sold that stuff for food and lodging). He later returned with his parents to their occupied homeland and lived in poverty.
Trump and his administration are xenophobic, misogynistic, racist, fear-mongering, warmongering, tax-dodging, anti-Semitic, anti-choice, anti-welfare, anti-equal pay, anti-LGBTQIA+, anti-immigration, support tax cuts for the rich, support Citizen’s United, want to keep refugees out of this country, want to limit our ability to speak against the government, plan to abolish the Affordable Care Act, and they wrap all of that up behind a banner of “Christian family values.” If you support them, you have no right to call yourself a follower of Christ.
Small town culture is knowing that there are Old Folks with strange nicknames but never knowing the stories behind them.
Of course, I made the mistake of asking why everyone calls this one guy Brickaday and it turns out that he worked at a brickyard for 40 years, stealing exactly one brick every day and making no particular efforts to conceal the theft. Nobody thought anything of it until years later he was discovered to have built three houses.
His boss is said to have shrugged and made some remarks about the importance of coming up with a plan and sticking to it.
I‘m trying to arrange my face into an appropriate approximation of silent bafflement and failing miserably.
Tumblr backup 