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

Seven tools for reading anything else.

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

The stack

The same work, as software.

Every installment demonstrates a specific failure mode — a number nobody checked, a status gone stale, an institution that said the words and meant the opposite. These are the tools built for those failure modes. The Ledger on this site is their output, published openly and permanently, because a work product argues better than a pitch.

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.

The board

The Wall

Every place on the board, sorted by where it actually stands: confirmed and published, investigating, or debunked with the reason. Reader submissions carry a credit; everything else is marked as the editor's own board, so you can always tell which is which.

The plate

The Map

Every location in the series, at its real coordinates. There are no coastlines on this plate — a drawn coastline would be decoration pretending to be data, and the positions are the only part of a map we can actually source. Grid lines every 30° of longitude and 15° of latitude; equator dashed. Click a pin to open its installment.

Sixteen stories, one at a time

The Bracket

Single elimination. Pick the one you find more outrageous, fifteen times, and you get your own winner. This is your bracket, not a poll — nothing is sent anywhere and there is no global tally, because we do not have one and will not print a number we cannot source.

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

Two minutes, then you have the whole thing

How to use this

Short screencasts of the real site — no mock-ups. Every one is also written out underneath, so you never need the video to follow along.

Prefer to read? Every screencast is transcribed above its player, and none of the site's tools need one — the Ledger, the Sniff Test and the Source Ladder are all plain pages that work without video, audio, or JavaScript-heavy interaction.

The DeskFact-checking companion