What’s a story you can’t resist telling to anyone who’ll listen?
What’s a story you can’t resist telling to anyone who’ll listen?
Can be about yourself, can be about someone else, can be about anything, just try to keep exposed PII to a minimum. Can even be multiple, really.
My favorite one is about the time I hijacked a Geometry Dash forum when I was 12ish years old. Geometry Dash was my middle school hyperfixation, and I was really passionate about it, even though I sucked ass at both the creative and gameplay-based portions of it.
So I found this forum (it was, like, semi-official, IIRC) and began integrating myself into the site culture. I immediately attempted to organize a creative collaboration, and around the point where I got like three or so users to bite, I somehow roped in a forum moderator, who I convinced to rope in the one active forum admin, for some reason. I want to let you all know that at that point in time, my goal wasn’t to take over the forum, but to attach my name to a creative project, even though I sucked ass at making levels, for being the idea gal. Unfortunately, this meant I had to actually make a portion of the level, which I somehow had to bullshit my way out of.
So, over around a 6 month period, I would sporadically post ‘updates’ in the direct message group of cherry-picked, cropped screenshots, while everyone else also did the same but with more consistent progress. I would also use that group DM as a general social output, because lonely socially awkward 12-year old who was iPad-addicted and blasé about internet safety. The project eventually came to a standstill, as most of the people had other things to do and this was not the highest priority.
One day, a pinned announcement thread by the inactive forum admin announced that the active admin had stepped down and went no contact, and they would resume activity for a brief period while they found replacement staff for the forum. Me, being an insane 12-year old desperate for some kind of influence over people, DMed the admin with an inspect-elemented screenshot collection of the group message on the forum where I had the forum admin talking to me about admin duties, and ‘off-handedly’ remark that I’d make a good admin, and then ‘off-handedly’ remark 4 months later that they were probably stepping down soon and were considering who to replace themself with, to which I ‘jokingly’ remarked “me lol” and they ‘sincerely’ replied “honestly, maybe, it’s not off the table.”
This exchange was entirely fabricated. However, the fact that I was publicly listed as creating a collaborative project with them was enough proof for the relatively-detached temporary head admin to believe me, so they stepped away and granted me admin because what was he gonna do, contact the person who went no-contact? So, I was appointed as the head admin for the forum, and in my boundless reign of two whole days, I used my god power to appoint all my friends as moderators, ban people who questioned me, and create pointless boards and stickied threads that had absolutely nothing to do with Geometry Dash.
It wasn’t even forum user outrage that got me removed, I got bored after two days and Skype-DMed the inactive admin that I was actually trolling and didn’t expect to get this far, and somehow he didn’t give enough of a shit to ban me? Did lose admin roles, though I don’t believe I lost some of the more facetious user-flair roles I had created for myself that, while they didn’t give me any privileges, were higher up on the hierarchy than mods, so they couldn’t ban me, and by the time they found a new admin, the whole thing had blown over and I got away scot-free 
I did not learn my lesson immediately set my sights on creating a fake persona as a ‘social experiment’ with a group of good-but-gullible players ‘assisting’ me in the idea of creating a fake person who was a ‘prominent and skilled player’. I got bored a month later and abandoned the project. I have no fucking idea how I got away with any of this and still maintained any semblance of credibility, but it’s the coolest thing I’ve ever done online because I was a literal child when I did it and they were mostly adults. If I didn’t have my moment of reckoning that sent me straight-leftward I know my ass could have very well been doing crypto rug pulls and possibly getting away with it.
What's the 'one story' for you?
The time I got shot with a crossbow
Short version: Drunk guy didn't follow trigger discipline, I ended up with a crossbow bolt in my shoulder and had to go the ER where I gave them a fake id and skipped on the bill
Long Version: senior year of high school, me and a couple of buds (let's say they're Tom, Greg and Dave) went to do some underage drinking at one of their houses
Sure enough, four or five beers in, Tom goes, "Hey, check out what my dad just got me" and pulls out one of those little hand crossbows
Dave bets Tom he can't hit one of the empties off a fence post and sure enough, Tom can't because while he was loading it, he shoots it into my shoulder instead
I'm pretty drunk, so I didn't react much as the bolt hit me in the clavicle and ricocheted off sideways leaving a nasty V-shaped gouge in my shoulder, but after a minute or so, my arm kind of stopped working so i started freaking out
Now, I didn't want my parents to find out that A) I was underage drinking and B) getting shot with crossbows, so I immediately began extorting Greg to take me to the hospital and he starts freaking out because he's afraid i'm going to bleed on the inside of his mom's van
A short argument and several makeshift dressings later, I'm at the hospital getting twenty stitches in my shoulder
Had to give them the fake ID I used to sneak into bars so they could try and bill me, but I just snuck out before anyone came back with any paperwork
The best part was heading back home and hiding the wound from my parents for two weeks while also doing field medicine on myself to keep it clean and eventually take the stitches out
To this day, my parents don't know that this happened and Ricardo DeLeon has never paid his hospital bill
Say you have twenty yards of linen...
I used to be a beat cop a long time ago.
spoiler
Now I’d get called out on domestic disputes all the time, hundreds probably over the years. But there was this one guy, this one piece of shit, that I will never forget. Gordy. He looked like Bo Svenson. Remember him? “Walking Tall?” You don’t remember? Anyway, big boy. 270, 280. But his wife, or whatever she was, a lady, she was real small, like a bird. Wrists like little branches. Anyway, my partner and I get called out there every weekend and one of us would pull her aside and say, “C’mon, tonight’s the night. Press charges.” And this wasn’t one of those “deep down he really loves me” set ups, we get a lot of those, but not this. This girl was scared. She wasn’t gonna cross him no way, no how. Nothing we could do but pass her off to the EMTs, put him in the car, drive him downtown, throw him in the drunk tank, he sleeps it off, next morning out he goes back home.
One night, my partner is out sick and it’s just me. Then the call comes in and it’s the usual crap. Broken nose in the shower kind of thing. So I cuff him, put him in the car and away we go. Only that night, we’re driving into town, and this sideways asshole is in my backseat humming “Danny Boy.” And it just rubbed me the wrong way. So instead of left, I go right, out into nowhere, and I kneel him down and I put my revolver in his mouth and I told him, “This is it. This is how it ends.” And he’s crying, going to the bathroom all over himself, swearing to God he’s gonna leave her alone, screaming as much as you can with a gun in your mouth. And I told him to be quiet and I needed to think about what I was gonna do here. And of course he got quiet. Goes still and real quiet, like a dog waiting for dinner scraps. And we just stood there for a while, me acting like I’m thinking things over and Prince Charming kneeling in the dirt with shit in his pants.
After a few minutes I took the gun out of his mouth and I say so help me if you ever touch her again and such and such and such and such and blah blah blah blah blah.” “Just a warning?” Of course. Just trying to do the right thing. But two weeks later he killed her. Of course. Caved her head in with the base of Waring blender. We got there and there was so much blood you can taste the metal. The moral of the story is I chose a half measure when I should have gone all the way. I’ll never make that mistake again.
Your story makes me rage ACAB
good story
Not about me, still fun. Eucalyptus trees are arsonous maniacs.
Background: plants in wildfire-prone areas either need to survive or ensure there's going to be a next generation. If you can't stand the heat, as they say. Options for survival are to surround yourself with a nice layer of insulation (known as cork) or to bury some sort of nutrient store below ground, because the heat doesn't penetrate too far so you can just resprout later. If those two options are off the table, there's serotiny: keeping your seeds in an insulated container that opens after the flames have passed, usually triggered by heat or smoke.
Enter the Eucalyptus. Wildfires are common in the dry areas where they live, and they go for serotiny. All well and good so far. The seed pods, however, aren't dropped. They stay in the canopy. If you're a corky-layer-of-insulation tree, this should raise some red flags for you, because if serotinous seed pods need fire to open, and those seed pods stay in the canopy, then the fire needs to be in the canopy for the Eucalyptus to reproduce. If the fire hits the canopy, then you, a corky tree, are also screwed because there's nothing protecting you if your hair catches fire.
Once you notice that you might also notice the Eucalyptus tree shedding its bark in a way that builds up something that resembles a nice, fire-friendly tinder pile at the base. If you are paying especially close attention you might notice the leaves are full of a highly flammable oil. Then you hear whatever the tree equivalent of an evil cackle would be.
You see, the Eucalyptus tree has developed a unique and terrible evolutionary skill. It wants its seeds to grow well when the fire has passed and as such does not want competition from anything presumptuous enough to survive the fire. So it makes sure there are no survivors. Once the relatively small-potatoes baby wildfire finds a Eucalyptus tree, it graduates to a forest-leveling inferno as it climbs into the canopy and finds - essentially - a pile of rocket fuel. The Eucalyptus seeds then get first dibs on the nutrient-rich ashes left over.
Also some folks introduced like a bunch of them to California, something I'm sure the current residents absolutely love.
I am self-aware enough to know that I am a serial story-repeater, but with a bad enough memory that can't remember which ones they are.
