Ten installments · Two collections · Every claim sourced

SAY WHAT???

True stories that sound made up. Sourced anyway.

Every installment is a story so absurd your first instinct is to assume it's fake — and then it holds up under sourcing. The weirdness isn't the point. Showing the work is. We kill the folklore on the way to the real story, which is always stranger.

The shape

Six blocks. Same order. Every time.

You should be able to feel the shape by installment three. That's deliberate — a fixed structure is what lets you check a story instead of just consuming it.

Think with us

Four tools for reading anything else.

The series is the demonstration. These are the instruments — they work on any story, not just ours.

The actual thesis

The folklore is never as interesting as the paperwork.

A curse is a boring explanation for a dead town. A famine, an annexation, and a signboard that accidentally created a national ghost legend — that's a story. Every installment ends up in the same place: the ordinary institution, doing an ordinary thing, producing an absurd outcome nobody designed.

Instrument 01

The Ledger

Every claim checked across both collections, on one page. This is the signature block of the series pulled out of the installments and made searchable — including the corrections that make our own stories less fun, and the ones where the honest answer is that nobody knows.

Instrument 02

The Sniff Test

Run these nine on any story — including ours. Tap each one you can actually answer. The score isn't about the story being false. It's about how much of it you're taking on faith.

0

Tap the checks you can honestly answer for a story you read this week.

Instrument 03

The Source Ladder

"According to sources" is not a source. This is the hierarchy we work down, top rung first — and the specific thing each rung is and isn't able to prove. The weight number is a rough guide, not a formula.

The rule that follows from the ladder

When only advocacy or press sources exist for a figure, say so in-line — "Korean sources put the figure at 122; Japan disputes the framing." A number without its rung is not a fact, it's a rumor wearing a suit.

Instrument 04

The House Rules

Published so you can hold us to them. Several of these cost us the more entertaining version of a story, on purpose.

The six blocks, in full

The DeskFact-checking companion