What I love about that six word Hemingway story, "For sale: baby shoes, never worn" is that in those few words we instantly grasp the sadness of what it is trying to tell us: the baby was so freakishly massive when it was born that it could never wear the shoes its parents had bought for it.

A dear friend has the same problem I do finding stays for the rental/fantasy fair that fit her chest so when she's here to visit next week I'm surprising her with a pair of reversible mermaid-themed stays interlined with powermesh instead of twill to accommodate a heat-related condition 😸

Both the title, and entire content, of my hypothetical TED talk

The Signalman (Postgate, 1976)

Apparently, I'm too cynical and paranoid, but you would be too if you'd spent most of your adult life finding out over and over and over again who people really are. Grifters and predators all the way down.

#MementoMoriMonday 💀 A gorgeous cadaver effigy 🦴 📍St Mary's Church • Tenby ⛪ #Wales #History

Irish moots, how the hell do you say the name "Ossian"? I've tried looking it up in various places and a) the pronunciations vary wildly and b) the comments are all like "no, this isn't right". Help?

Broke a teeeeeeeny tiny bone in my wrist while packing up a rental tent while I was working at REI. It hasn't been right since. My mom had broken the same bone in the same wrist the year previous lifting a patient's head to position them for a scan.

I am just a store GM standing before game publishers at large, asking for the NUMBER OF PLAYERS your game works best for to be featured prominently in your game descriptions. I need to be able to tell people how many players each session can run for🙏 Please.

In all seriousness, if anyone knows any queer-friendly writing/social groups around North London please let me know, every one I've found so far either imploded or had weird vibes

We are entering peak flu season, and a new variant is spreading quickly across the country, driving a sharp rise in illness and hospitalizations. https://to.pbs.org/45BmT4l

Happy New Year. Bring this energy to 2026.

Signed up for a second non-credit course! Gonna take a super basic grant writing 101 type course along with my admin professional cert course. I am going to get a big girl job this year, I swear to god. I can't stay at the game store.

Working retail in NYC always makes it feel like I'm cheating at these somehow but: I once sold Dame Helen Mirren a truly fascinating number of travel-sized bug lotions when I worked at the REI in SoHo. To this day, I wonder where she went after that purchase that she needed that much bug lotion.

"Whenever five or six English-speaking people meet round a fire on Christmas Eve they start telling each other ghost stories. Nothing satisfies us on Christmas Eve but to hear each other tell authentic anecdotes about spectres" Jerome K. Jerome, 1891 #PhantomsFriday #BookChatWeekly #GothicAdvent

#EdwardGorey at #Christmas

The soles of the damned return!

Looking for someone to do a talk on the "romance of graveyards" - why our gothic hearts love them so much, any tales regarding love, death & cemeteries, etc. It’s for Writing the Occult: Love & Death which is, naturally, on 14 Feb. All online. Kicks off 1pm UK. writingtheoccult.carrd.co 🧵⬇️

"Woe to those who have not cleaned their houses - it is said that the Schnabelperchten will cut open their stomachs with long scissors and empty the rubbish into them" ✂️

Advice to all writers from my most fucked up character.

You know, there was a time when working with knit fabric would have made me intensely nervous but tonight I had the thought "ugh, I have to whip up two pairs of merino wool leggings before I go to my parents' on Friday" with nothing more than mild inconvenience.

Winter tip: stationary bike 5 miles before bed so that the fact that your shower is barely lukewarm is a perk, actually.

The Between is now available to preorder! If you missed the crowdfunding campaign, now is your chance to grab the books, plus a few delicious add-ons. Please re-post! the-between.backerkit.com/hosted_preor...

Birthday beats for Tom Waits. From my linocut series #alphabetofmusicians where I taught myself reduction printing over the course of a year. Huge thanks to Derek Ridgers - one of the greatest portrait photographers of his generation - who kindly let me adapt his photo for the linocut illustration.

It's offically "drag the clothes into bed with me and then dick around on my phone while they warm up" season 🥶

Oh look at that: the now-unionized REI I used to work at is being shut down in 2026 (for transparently obvious reasons given WHY that store unionized) and openAI is going to be leasing the building it's currently in. Double puke.

I have signed up for a certification course at the local community college. The in-county rate was low enough that it seemed silly to not TRY and get some kind of boost in the job search.

Your annual reminder that the Victorians (and earlier) used to play a Christmas game called Snapdragon where you had a big dish of burning brandy and you had to fish raisins out of it without combusting yourself

People got pissy with me in in the late-2010s for saying I dislike it when players dump a bunch of backstory on me in the first session, so I made a whole-ass system where, in order to tell your backstory, you have to slowly kill your character over 12-15 sessions.

I have a suggestion no one will like Incidentally, flu deaths plummeted in winter 2020. I wonder what people were wearing over their faces that helped stop the spread. I guess we'll never know; the practice appears lost to time.

#CovidIsntOver. I had a contact tracing call last Monday. I’m up to date on boosters & I’ve tested clear twice since then, in part due to masking and/or social distancing, & I could do better. I have family with Long Covid. I lost two family members to Covid. With the CDC gone, why take the risk?

I love church kneelers and always look for them when I go churchcrawling. I think they are such a wonderful piece of folk art. I was particularly happy to see this delightful trio of guinea pigs in Alberbury church. 💚 #folklore #folkcustoms #history #churches #Shropshire #churchkneelers

Now's the time of year where my freelance work slows to a crawl and some of my Startplaying #ttrpg campaign sessions begin getting postponed or wrapping up. If you're looking for someone to run a new system for you and friends or a writer for your project this winter. Hit me up!

On that note,

+++ 'Bram' Stoker, the author of Dracula, was born on this day, the 8th of November 1847, in Dublin. +++ Tonight in Whitby, we will be raising a glass of the red stuff! V''''V #bramstoker #dracula #gothichorror #otd

Happy Halloween! Keep a close eye out today for witches being driven around the countryside by their root vegetable chauffeurs in a hollowed out marrow car.

I'm getting my antique furniture that's been in storage since we had to flee the old house delivered today and I'm so nervous about the state of it after 2 years. To say nothing of the feelings that have been dredged up. A frivolous example of which is how much I miss cheap Midwestern antiques.

Yes please.

I like the colors of this Lively Ghosts dress I thrifted but found the length/shape kind of lackluster so with the power of some ribbon and blanket binding I hid some ribbon channels on the inside with the stitches concealed in the black stripes and now I can bustle front and back to my liking!

Mindlessly hung my towel on the back of the door last night. Woke up at 2am, saw this in the dark and almost shat meself.

You have to be in it for the love of the game. You have to be obsessed. If you let a bot do your research for you, your bloodline is weak, your ancestors are ashamed, and you will not survive the winter.

Love it. #CelebrityTraitors

The painting of me that I hide in the attic because it reflects my sins still looks fine. Looks just like me. Even though I ate both halves of that kitkat yesterday.

I gotta buy a back brace/posture brace. I'm trying to finish darning this sleeve and I'm sore as hell from sitting like a shrimp 🍤

Australian witch and artist Rosaleen Norton was devoted to the god Pan, whom she believed ‘is the spirit whose body — or such of it as can be seen in these four dimensions (the fourth being time) — is the planet Earth.’ #WyrdWednesday

🔪Welcome to the Genziana Hotel🏔️ Crowdfunding for my gothic horror mystery rpg is live! Investigate the hotel, meet unnerving guests and creepy staff, find dreadful clues, answer horrible questions and discover what happened to Marga, the boyish girl with the wild curls.

J is for M R James from my #folkhorroralphabet series. matpringleillustration.bigcartel.com/product/folk... #BLOCTOBER2