Tell the Truth now!
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Let's play a fun game! Answer the question below truthfully, then post your own!
What bug are you deathly afraid of and why?
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@mianngu I'm not really afraid of any of them, it's more like... a sense of intense revulsion. I can easily deal with spiders, centipedes, and wasps, with no issue. But there's something about tomato hornworms, a type of caterpillar, that really disgusts me. I found some dying in the cold rain on my then-roommate's tomato plants a long time ago. The pitchers that held the tomatoes were flooding and the caterpillars got caught in the storm. I tried to lead them off with another surface, but they weren't having it and made this weird rapid twitching motion that just set me off somehow.
Roaches disgust me a lot, having lived in several infestations when I was very young.
Lastly, I'm adding ticks to the list. I caught Lymes twice in my late teens and it really did serious damage to me for a long time. It felt like dying for two weeks straight and I was so weak I couldn't even push in the button on a vending machine without collapsing against it. I never take them lightly anymore.
My question is this. You can learn the truth behind one historical or pop-culture mystery that no one has fully explained. For example, it could be something that occurred during a time when records were poor, an unsolved crime, a disappearance, or something that is seemingly anomalous (ala The Man from Taured story). But it has to be something that people aren't entirely sure about regarding what happened. What mystery do you reveal to yourself and why?
I'd rather be creating!
My books: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B07S5PYV79
My Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/19218824.Alexander_Salkin -
@Alexander-Salkin Oooh great question. I think my answer has to be the Dyatlov Pass incident. There's many theories, a couple of them very plausible, but to me it's still very creepy and gives me chills when I think about it.
The gist of it is: a very experienced group went trekking to a Soviet mountain in the middle of winter. Something happened in the middle of the night that made them cut their way out of their tent and leave the campsite either completely naked or almost. All of them died, most of hypothermia and some of physical trauma.
TW: gore (text)/physical injuries descriptions
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One victim had major skull damage, two had severe chest trauma, and another had a small crack in his skull. Four of the bodies were found lying in running water in a creek, and three of these four had damaged soft tissue of the head and face – two of the bodies had missing eyes, one had a missing tongue, and one had missing eyebrows.
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If anyone wants to hear more about it, I recommend episode 11 of the Chilluminati Podcast, which is where I found out about it.
My next question is: What's the biggest lie you've told and got away with?
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So it's not a lie per se, but it is something I have gotten away with.
Right after my parents got divorced, my dad's aunt died leaving him with a large inheritance. My mother somehow convinced him that she was owed a gift since she was his wife for 20 years. I don't know how she managed this, she's quite the smooth talker.
Her gift was a BMW Z3. The cutest little manual two-seat convertible you could buy in 2001. Well, to this day she doesn't know that I took that baby out every night that I could. I would wait till 1 or 2 in the morning, way after she was sound asleep, and joyrode all over town. Had to teach myself how to drive a manual in order to do it too. At the end of the night, I made sure to put the seat back, the radio to the right station, and drove in with no lights on. She never found out.
Question!
What was the time in your life you thought for sure you were going to die? How did you survive?
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@mianngu said in Tell the Truth now!:
What was the time in your life you thought for sure you were going to die? How did you survive?
I almost drowned once when I was a kid. The memory is pretty fuzzy, I think I was ten at the very oldest, so this was at least 25 years ago. I was camping with my family, some of my parents’ friends, and the friends’ kids. All us kids were playing around in a small lake and I didn’t know how to swim. There were no lifeguards and (for some reason) no adult supervision. I’m sure you can see where this is going. There was a steep drop off at one point, the ground disappeared from under me, and I was thrashing violently trying to keep from sinking. I could only barely keep my head above the surface and I was swallowing so much muddy water I couldn’t scream for help. I remember at one point just knowing that I was about to sink and nobody would notice until it was too late. I was too tired to fight it anymore, my vision was going dark, and finally someone started pulling me toward the shore. They plopped me in the dirt and just...left? I was able to see it was one of the older girls. She never said a word about it and I’m not sure anyone else even knew it happened. Later that night a bunch of us kids were playing Uno in a tent and I remember feeling so strange that I was sitting across from the girl who saved my life and neither of us were even acknowledging it. I’ve seen her a handful of other times and we’ve still never talked about it. So weird.
Okay, my (kinda woo-woo) question: Have you ever experienced anything paranormal? Seen a ghost or a UFO? Glitch in the Matrix? Has anything ever happened to you that you just can’t explain?
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@SwampCreature Yep, had several small experiences. Bear with me.
A. I was very young at the time. I was racing up the lawn at my grandmother's house after we all got out of the car from a shopping trip. While waiting for the adults, I was looking around at the grass by my grandmother's window to her room.
I happened to notice two small holes there, about the width of a pretzel rod. They were side by side. I saw what looked like a hint of color just within the holes. Suddenly, a worm-like thing came out of each. One a pale sherbert orange and the other a milky blue. After a moment, they danced/wriggled aggressively in place, similar to how a disturbed caterpillar might. Then they rapidly retreated into the ground, leaving a layer of slime, respect of their colors, along the sides of each hole. To this day, I have no idea what in the world I was looking at, but they freaked me out at the time.
B. Many years later, I was talking to my mother in my now late grandmother's house one night before bed. She then looked to a corner of the ceiling and said she saw a light. I didn't see anything at first, so I stared at that point. Suddenly, that corner of the ceiling flashed at me! It was a purplish white flash, like the kind you'd see in your eyes after having an old Polaroid camera take a shot of you head on. I'm unclear if she saw it a second time, but I think so. We both stayed in the same room that night out of anxiety, too weird.
C. In my adolescent days, we used to visit the beaches in NJ often. This one isn't really spooky, just curious.
At one beach with my then friend and his mother, he and I discovered a cluster of brightly colored mushrooms had washed up at the bay. They were stuck together by some white calcification and each had a different color... I want to say red, blue, and yellow. Anyway, his mother picks them up when we point it out to her and simply says they're 'sea mushrooms', like it was common knowledge.
There's no such thing as far I can tell. There's marine fungi and even a rare mushroom that grows in fresh water, but I've seen no evidence for starkly colored salt water mushroom caps. Was it the component of some washed up toy maybe?
Another time at Cape May NJ during the winter, I found several pieces of washed bright cobalt blue coral in little chunks. There is no coral that grows like that anywhere near that area. I have a friend who visits there yearly and he does a cursory look at that beach for it, but there's never anything. Could it have been a smashed up dyed blue decorative coral? Maybe, but why there? Why on the coast line instead of just trashed if someone didn't want it?
D. In my teens, I used to hang out at the woods for a couple of hours at night by myself during summer break and during late autumn on weekends. I found it calming and I liked being outside away from noise and crowds which is hard to escape in NJ.
So, I'm sitting there on a log in a spot I called The Basin, which was a small clearing in the woods with a few scattered trees sitting in a shallow depression that would collect with water when it rained, hence the name. It was around October. I was watching the dusky night sky and coming to appreciate the branches reaching up to the clouds, finding the perspective unique. I then noticed an occasional soft flashing nearby. I thought it was headlights reflecting at a weird angle from a road some hundred feet away, but no.
The bark of a few specific sections of the trees in the basin were softly flickering with light. It wasn't like the other one I mentioned, it was a very dim light. But always the same few spots and with no discernable pattern in regards to time. I was a bit taken aback by it, wondering if it was St Elmo's Fire or something, but it was on the lateral sides of the tree and not the top. I remember the light flashes being very faint and I'm not sure if they had any particular color, only that those specific patches on the trees would make them and nowhere else. The effect persisted for a while before I decided to go home. I recall being more bemused than bothered by the sight.
E. I once received a decorative glass globe with a fiddler crab sealed inside from my mother, who got it from a neighbor was moving out. I remember touching it and getting this awful dark enraged feeling from within it, like nothing I can compare it to. Still, I put it on a shelf in my room. For two nights straight, I was wracked with nightmares, which I am not otherwise prone to. I had this weird sensation that it was responsible and wanted to be cracked open. I handed it back on the third day, wanting nothing more to do with it. The nightmares immediately stopped.
F. Back when cassettes were still a thing as CDs were coming out, I was going through my cassette collection, trying to sort out blanks from stuff I recorded FM or otherwise copied music on. Well, midway through one blank, a weird tinny voice starts up, sounding all evil and self amused for about ten seconds. It said something along the lines of, "Yessss, yessss... soon, very soon. nee hee hee Very sooooooon". I had no idea why this seemingly blank cassette had such a voice on it in the middle of nowhere! I played it for a few others who ultimately didn't know what to make of it. My mother wondered if it was me, but my voice is low and deep not high pitched and lilting. Creeped out, I threw the thing away, content to never hear it again.
G. Fast forward to my mid 20's and I'm working overnight stock at a Home Depot. Me and some of the other workers were sitting on a bay entrance to the lumber aisle during break, just making idle talk. I commented to one guy, let's call him Gerry, that someone was coming in late for work that night. It was about 1 am. We saw a husky figure from the far end of the parking lot walking from where the road and grassy median next to the lot met. He looked like he was wearing a coat, but was otherwise indistinctive outside of his bustling casual pace. Well, on his apparent way to our building, he walks behind a light pole- and his form doesn't come back out the other side. He's way thicker in width at that distance than the pole and it didn't seem like he was doing to duck down or dart away suddenly. I asked Gerry if he saw what I did and he confirmed it. We didn't know what to think, but there's an old 1800's cemetery directly across the highway from that spot, so who knows.
H. I may or may not have seen a UFO before, I'm not sure. I was in the mountains of NJ that night with my friend and we were star watching. I commented that one star looked like it was drifting away from the others, but I couldn't be certain and wrote it off. My friend then pointed it out to me again a few minutes later. It had definitely moved away from the others. It gradually went to the horizon over the next ten minutes, making peculiar wide swaying/dipping motions, like it was rocking back and forth as it flew away. We watched as it went over the horizon and out of sight. This was when drones were still in their infancy of being introduced, but the movement was really quite bizarre and inefficient.
I. Back when I did janitorial work at a Board of Education building, the third floor, and occasionally the second, used to get weird after 9pm. The third floor would start manifesting shadow people once in a blue moon, whereas the second floor would occasionally have the sound of running footsteps in it when I was on the first floor and there was no one else in the office but me. Funny thing is, I used to run for exercise on the 2nd floor during my breaks, but never if I heard other footsteps up there before I went.
J. One time while heading back home from a weekend visit to the shore, I was driving down a straight highway at night that I had been down dozens of times. This time, I needed to get gas. Not familiar with the exits, I found one advertising a station so I pulled off and fueled up. Nothing crazy about that. However, after my detour finished and I was on my way again on that straight highway, I found I was drastically closer to home suddenly without explanation, to the tune of an entire 15 minutes faster than I should have been, despite my stop off. That seems like the complete opposite result of what should have happened.
K. Lastly, this one isn't mine, but my mother's incident. It took place during the late 50's-early 60's. She and her friend witnessed a massive black pyramid flying over their houses, with a blinking red light at each corner. It moved slowly and made no noise. Additionally, no one else seemed to be able to see it.
My question is have you ever had an unplanned lucid dream that enlightened you to something?
I'd rather be creating!
My books: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B07S5PYV79
My Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/19218824.Alexander_Salkin -
@Alexander-Salkin said in Tell the Truth now!:
My question is have you ever had an unplanned lucid dream that enlightened you to something?
Oh definitely. So even before I started dealing with insomnia as a side effect to meds, I would occasionally have lucid dreams (among day dreaming, regular dreams, and basically just letting my imagination run wild) and there have been several that inspire philosophy, writing, and just creating in general.
I honestly look forward to those moments and try to write down everything I can remember. I suck at trying to trigger them in any way, so when it does happen, I have to be ready and pay attention lol.
They always make me feel small. Not like, small in a bad way. More like, there is so much more to the world. It gives me perspective. There could be great and powerful cosmic forces outside of time and space, and here I am worrying about rent, my job, and whether or not to get pet insurance for my accident prone dog.
My question~
Do you feel most of your "self talk" is mostly positive or negative?LiveTale Ambassador
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@Alexander-Salkin wowwww thank you for taking the time to write all those out, your stories were super cool! I love when paranormal/weird experiences like that are just kind of inconsequential, because not everything has to be an alien abduction or a bridge collapse. Sometimes the world is just a little strange!
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Oooo oooo so I don't have an internal monologue. There is no self-talk. Most of the time my brain is blissfully quiet, until a thought or idea pops in much like a soap bubble bursting (we need milk!). I discovered this one night when I was utilizing a particular weed and talking to myself in my head. I mentioned it to my partner, who was astounded and replied "yea that's what it's like all the time". Well, not for me! I had previously thought that talking to ones self was a method utilized by authors or storytellers to convey something to the audience. So I don't have self-talk, which feels like a blessing. It takes incredible strength to listen to negative things all the time, especially from yourself. I'm so very sorry if anyone has to deal with that and I hope you know how very loved you are.
What is the one day you would choose to repeat and why?
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@mianngu I have heard that some people can't hear their own voice in their heads, like they just don't have a running monologue. They think in terms of pictures and feels more than words. I envy you and all the rest lol.
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@Ezra Yep, I’m one of those people. No internal monologue, no “voice” in my head (I actually can’t even conceive of how that works - is it your own voice?) and my thoughts come to me as concepts or directives or facts rather than constructed sentences or images. I also have aphantasia, so I find it extremely difficult to picture things in my mind at all. I’m gonna bust out the same chart I always use to explain it to people:
This represents what happens in your mind when thinking about an apple. Most of the time when I’m thinking about an apple, I’m at 5 - no image, just the word/concept of “apple” in my head. If I focus I can maybe very briefly get to 3, but it’s difficult to keep the image in there and I’d struggle to even describe it because it disappears so quickly. It makes it tricky for me to read certain kinds of writing (too much descriptive prose bores me because I can’t form the mental image so it’s kind of just irrelevant to me) and unfortunately makes it really difficult for me to roleplay, as I simply can’t imagine things. That’s actually a big part of why LiveTale excites me so much - having a visual medium for my own RP games will help me tremendously! The silver lining is that I’ve been this way my whole life so I don’t feel I’m missing out on anything, just me and my empty head, kickin’ it.
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@Ezra @SwampCreature Also no inner monologue over here, I can definitely force it out, but by default it hasn't happened at least in over a decade. Most of my thinking revolves around images/videos or just concepts and how they relate to each other making it real easy for me to lose my train of thought when speaking because I found a weird connection that I kept exploring instead of having a nice voice that would've told me what to say.
I wouldn't be jealous though because it's not like it's all nice and relaxing due to its absence: my brain decided to replace it with constantly playing music and it's inescapable. I think I broke my brain in high school the times I had to spend potentially >1 hour sitting at my desk doing nothing (no phone, no book, no sleeping) after handing in an exam, and I figured a great way would be to try to play songs like Stairway to Heaven in my head to see how accurately I could get to the ~8 minute mark over and over.
Now it translates to me at 3am having the bass notes from Super Rich Kids by Frank Ocean echoing in my head, on the verge of tears cause I just want to go to sleep.
@mianngu That's a great question
I guess it depends on whether I can repeat it over and over or just one time. I'm going to assume it's a one-time repeat, because if I could do it over and over, I'd have to find a day where I made a lot of significant choices that had instant outcomes (within the same day) all of which I wanted to explore; and I can't think of one off the top of my head.If it was a one-time chance, I'd choose the time a pigeon flew into the exhaust pipe of our tankless gas water heater and we had a carbon monoxide leak in our house. Everyone ended up being fine, but it was reaaaaally scary (for me who had to drag everyone out) and people had to go to the hospital. I'd appreciate being able to just wrap a nice bow on that story by having the issue solved before it became a real problem. Bonus points in that we wouldn't have had to spend a lot of money in now buying a bunch of electric appliances to replace the now-useless gas ones after they shut the gas line to the entire apartment building (can you believe the entire building wasn't up to regulation? And that it's not common for pigeons to just be able to fly into exhaust pipes? Or to not have vents or detectors?).
If you could have any "traditional" superpower for 24 hours, which one would you choose and what would you do?
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@Mariano said in Tell the Truth now!:
If you could have any "traditional" superpower for 24 hours, which one would you choose and what would you do?
I’m always torn between invisibility and super speed. I’d absolutely use either of them to cause trouble (I’m poor, use your imagination) but at least with super speed I’d be able to create an alibi for myself. Couldn’t have been me who robbed that billionaire, I was at this very populated event and have dozens of witnesses who’ll attest to that! The other benefit to super speed would be the time dilation, like...if I were to somehow find myself falling off a cliff (don’t ask me why, just know that it’s absolutely a possibility for me) I would be able to view time so much slower and maybe grab a ledge or something? To be honest I’m not sure how that works really and I’m not brainy enough to learn uhhh physics, or whatever principle governs time and speed. I go fast, that’s all I need to know. Also it would make chores easier which is possibly worth as much to me as robbing billionaires. Might actually be able to do the dishes and the laundry in the same day, imagine that!
Next question: if you could sit front row at any concert, any musician, living or dead, who would you see? Which songs would you want them to play? Who would you bring?
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@SwampCreature hmmm I would love to go to a Melanie Martinez concert, I haven't had a chance to listen to much of her Portal Era songs but her persona and prosthetics for it are epic and would be amazing to see in concert. The only other concert I've ever been to has been a Weird Al concert in High School so going to any concert would be a big deal for me LOL. I would want to bring my close group of friends and we would likely dress up to be on theme :3
My question: What was something you were really into growing up but may have been made to feel "weird" because of it?
EX: I was/am really into Folklore/Fae but you know how middle/highschool age kids can be
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@Kismet I was really into writing fancfiction about anime, specifically Gundam Wing and Sailor Moon, to the extent that I created characters. These characters now have their own worlds and storyline sitting in draft files on my computer.
My question is if you could be anywhere in the world right now, where would you prefer to be?
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@ae-writer85 first of all, I wanna say that I also totally did this lol. I wrote in characters for Yu Yu Hakusho and Rouroni Kenshin and DBZ lol. Glad I'm not the only one!
If I could be anywhere in the world.... well I think that depends on a couple things. Like, as far as places I have been to before, I wish I could go back to Germany. I absolutely loved Tuebingen and I would love to go back to carefree days walking in the town center, getting crepes, and exploring shops.
But, I have heard, though haven't been, that Finland is a wonderful place to live, though it is a challenge to move to another country. I have also heard great things about life in the Netherlands so I guess I just need to be in Europe lol.
My question is, what is one creature (mammal/reptile/insect/whatever) you wish you could have as a pet, if it were safe and legal have?
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@Ezra DBZ was fun, too. My friends weren't as into it, so the fancfiction didn't take off there.
As for the pet...an axolotl seems really cool.
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@Ezra Oh!!! I talk about this all the time! I wish it were safe, humane, and legal to have a pet bat. They’re sooooo cool and cute (even the ones with weird faces) and I could build a little hutch with a wire grid ceiling for them to hang upside down from and it would be so awesome!!! I also really want to have a goat someday, which I know is actually somewhat feasible, just not any time in my immediate future. I would build the goat a jungle gym in my yard!
My question is: if you could sit down for lunch/tea/whatever with one famous person, living or dead, who would you choose?
(Mine would be Anthony Bourdain, 100%, no contest)
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@SwampCreature we should try to find a bat sanctuary to hang out at! I love bats too. I want to have enough property to have a bat house^-^
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@Ezra I’ve looked into bat sanctuaries (me and equally bat-obsessed partner really want to visit one) and the only one I’ve been able to find looks great - lots of cute, happy, well cared-for bats that you can hand feed - but it’s in Fascist Florida so my queer nb ass will not be making a visit any time soon. It’s a shame there aren’t many more because I think lots of people would be interested! Bats are cool!
