Before I begin, I’d just like to say a huge thank you to Sally Georgina Cronin of Smorgasbord Blog Magazine for featuring my latest novel Charybdis and one of the excellent reviews it’s received. I really appreciate it and you can read it here! And now on to the lunacy.

I’ve been spending a lot of time on Facebook Marketplace lately, looking for cool miniatures to use for my tiny rooms. Here’s the latest room that I made:

It’s in our guest bedroom and it IS our guest bedroom (or at least a close approximation), which makes me feel so meta. Or mini-meta as the case may be. I can’t seem to control the Marketplace algorithm though—I want it to show me all the miniature things, but once—JUST ONCE—I clicked on an ad for a mobile home and my ‘suggested for you’ feed is literally all mobile homes, campers, and tiny homes. Is the universe telling me to downsize?

At any rate, I’ve seen a few really strange ads in the past couple of weeks. This person who posted this one REALLY wanted to make sure that people understood exactly what it was:

And of course, my first instinct was to immediately message with “Is this a bag for a man? I would like to purchase it for my husband, as he is a man.” Why would anyone be THAT worried about the gender of the person potentially buying their bag? Anytime I post anything, my main concern is that people don’t ask stupid questions like, “Where are you located?” when I clearly state in the ad EXACTLY where I’m located.

While the above ad is weird in its own way, this next ad freaked me out. One would think that when one was trying to rent a private room, that the picture would be OF the room, not of some dude giving off a definite serial killer vibe. Of course, the ad says there are 18 more pictures but I was too scared to look. Also, I put the bar over his eyes to protect his identity, but they were HAUNTED.

And I don’t know where this room is, but I wouldn’t want to wake up in the middle of the night to discover it’s not actually PRIVATE after all.

Finally, if you think the last ad was freaky, what the hell is this one?

Is it The Blair Witch Barbie? If you’re trying to sell a doll, why would you pose it FACING the wall? I mean, I know Hallowe’en is coming, but then shouldn’t the picture be more like this:

And speaking of bizarre things that will freak you out, yesterday I went over to the local fall fair. It’s a typical fall fair with competitions in different categories like best quilt, antique stumper, largest pumpkin, and whatnot. And there’s also a school competition where the students at the local public school are given categories of their own to enter. I was having a lovely time checking out the paintings, best popsicle stick structure and so on, and then I came across this:

Maybe the guy who thought that category up is the same one with the room for rent…