Back in college, I used to call that the Typewriter Game (mostly used for prose, though), except that when it was the second person's turn, the first person would often stop typing in the mid -thought, and then we'd have to fill them up with gas, or oil, or even imperial stout before they'd continue. One time we ran out of the room mid-game when a fire alarm went off. When we came back we were somewhat nonplussed to realize that the sprinklers had gone off and soaked everything. While we were dealing with drying things out, the senior who lived across the hall came to the door and asked if any one had seen his wife, as she had a tendency to wander off, looking for advice on knitting. We said we hadn't seen her but he should ask for a Bruce Willis next time he went to the hairdresser, because the combover was not helping. No one expected him to show up a week later with cherry-red hair, but that was then and now was like a scene from tatooine, complete with freakin' jawas. he looked like wookie-nookie,
he was so in need of shaving,
[fourteeners, anyone?]
But his plaid pajama bottoms had everybody raving.
They were bulging in the front, and he claimed it was his breakfast banana, but we knew he always sliced that into his cereal, which he ate with milk and brown crayons dipped in warm and hideously introspective guilt-flavored oatmeal over having jacked the threat to this alarming track where people use the word 'jack' without even thinking. I tell you, it's meta, that's what it seems like from this perspective, similar to a hedgehog without apples to stick on his spines. Not that they actually stick apples on their spines, I mean where the hell did that even come from, I'm going to complain to the Hedgehogs' Anti-Defamation League, see if I don't, and then you'll be up the creek without a turbo encabulator, which is not a position you want to be in when your dilithium crystals have been stolen to make into a necklace for been classified COSMIC TOP SECRET and misfiled in a crate almost identical to the Ark of the Covenant. I mean, would you people who give overlapping prompts [meta: my last works for both 112 and 113, but I'm not sure how/if it can go on from there.] transfers the problem rather than solving it, like a bunch of Californian mathematicians who were too busy updating ubun
tu linux to treat every problem like a set and then refuse to teach assertiveness training courses for passive solar water heaters in the barren desert valleys of Lower Dipstikistan where men are men and women rewrite the Kama Sutra in INTERCAL because they have nothing better to do because the men pay them no attention at all, since they started reading Western romance novels and expect the men to be able to find their g-spot with the light off . But the men are too busy, having just received a consignment of velcro gloves and set off to terrorize people in Arizona with unacceptable accents - i.e., those from the Northern reaches of England. Have you ever heard them try to dictate poetry into their text-to-speech apps on their phones? Meanwhile, back at the ranch, sing the line, "from Tucson to Tucumcari / Tehachapi to Tonopah"? it's not at all useful or interesting, since who cares about Arizona anyway? Good state to avoid since they as if synchronicity problems manifest in myriad ways, like ducklings in the spring. Such a thing could never happen in Arizona, since they went all racist on their laws. So who cares about the sane people in Arizona (there must be some) who are probably all considering the three-body problem, particularly as it applies to moving to a state that doesn't have a stupid racist ledge and a stupid racist governor, but not all of them can because they volunteered to spend the summer helping to clean off oil-covered balloons. But then they discovered that the balloons were actually dirigibles and so they rode slowly up into the strange cloud of Arizona's cactus didn't soak up those Louisiana oil balloons, so they had to go to the lesser Arizona cactus cloud, where seventeen angry Klingons were dancing Klingon ballet, which requires some cleanup of the blood after the Klingons threw their partners into the cloud of Oort, which was oddly orange and oomorphic, but the Klingons' blood was pink, which clashed horribly, so they decided to move to Mars and take up [I thought Klingons had purple blood?] knitting, which meant they had to contact Teresa and ask her to teach them how to use knitting needles for something besides piercing their enemies repeatedly. So they wrote to her, misspelling her name as "Theresa Neilson Heidan," and asked her if she would loosen a man's tongue with root beer. Surprisingly, send them a case of string and some pencils and she wrote to them with several patterns, which they enthusiastically knitted. Little did they know intestines and hearts and gizzards have a way of coming back to haunt flower gardens. Flower gardens, of course, were forbidden by the late Klingon regent, after the embarrassing incident where the aphids ate the intestines that he was saving for lunch right next to the plums, which were so cold and so sweet, and which Spock ate, because to let them go unconsumed would be illogical. Meanwhile, in Kansas a small boy was growing up and slowly beginning to realize that he wasn't like other boys. Instead, he was turning green and sprouting great green wings that carried him high above the highest steeples of his town. This allowed him to admit he never tears for California. That said, he made a point of always photosynthesize [what did you think he was going to do up there?] singing "Don't Cry For Me, Argentina" when coming in for a landing, though he himself could not explain why. "For that is what I am doing," he would always say to the instant-news camera crew who would stick a microphone in his face and ask breathlessly for him to explain it all to the politicians Pat Robertson claimed great green wings were a sign of the devil, and Rush Limbaugh threatened to move to Somalia, the land of free enterprise, and easy prescriptions from a universal health care system, and transcendental meditation which is a passion of his ever since where you don't have to press 1 for English or 2 for the three seashells. But who would have predicted that on that day, an old man in a scarf would stalk past muttering, "They say everything's better with Daleks. Ha! I'd like to see them get a Dalek to compete on Iron Chef, there's only so much you can do with a blog, for as ben jonson said, "I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honor to Shakespeare, that in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blogged a line. My answer hath been, 'Would he had blogged a thousand,' which they thought very unlike him, really. Not at all like Joseph Fiennes, and this led to some consternation and confusion, but a general agreement that it was better than if it had been Ralph Feinnes, because then we'd have the whole nose thing to deal with, and eew. (Mind you, the Voldemort fanatics do unto others early and often, yet they never seem to claim that *he* was a genius, too, and then when you say, "well, he sure is dead, anyhow," they mumble and turn bright pink and then suddenly you burst into flames. Again. Bugger.) Meanwhile, no one ever notices the tentacle (possibly rugose, but definitely squamous) that twitches gently back and forth in time with the music of dinosaurs practicing sodomy (not that they needed the practice) . But to get back to my main point, I must say that Xopher's Black Hole Brownies of Death are the bomb. Unfortunately, I mean that literally. For everyone's sake, please finish eating so we can start dancing our way through the explosive because Steven Brust is quite eager to play the tune to which he just set this thread. He and Reesa have the cimbalom tuned, and are just waiting for the kaval player to extricate herself from the hive mind, which envelops and absorbs all into its fluorospheric plot simmering in the kitchen, which threatened to leave beetroot stains on the ceiling.
Nevertheless --------------------------
Each poster writes a line or two to keep
The story going. Telephone is now
The game; the fluorosphere is ankle deep
In nonsense and in brilliance. I avow
"I love this place!" In poetry and prose,
Our flights of fancy always make me smile.
The rhymes aren't always easy, heaven knows,
But difficulty is itself worthwhile.
(Or so they say, whoever They may be.)
The plums are in the icebox--or they were,
The dinosaurs engaged in sodomy,
The sonnets will return soon, I aver.
For thread derail was Earl a bit contrite,
But playing games is part of Making Light. the poetry always returns, because it never leaves. It just goes underground where we can't see the adventitious roots dig deeper than Dwarves did delve in Moria. Nonetheless, there's more beneath this ground than fish and Balrog some precious thing that binds us all such as magma and diamonds. Moreover less under!, said the hobbitses, tired to death of cobwebs and improper pluralizations they dragged Gollum off to the schoolhouse, where "and pleurisy" wheezed Gollum, "we hates and wishing for more light in their dark inevitable simultaneous posting; hates it, we do!" 212
Think of the different versions of the story you can make with those! But Sam went right on cutting up the two coneys for stew, using an elliptical slicing technique to cut them into conic sections. Then he And Gollum rubbed the Ring and wished for 214: Put them in the pot. Alas, 215: Happy ever after (well, why not). Alas, the conic sections made them cook faster than the Riders of Rohan , who don't really cook all that fast, but whatever. At any rate, the overdone coneys attracted the attention of the Elder Gods who rotated them into one too many dimensions, drawing the ire of the Riders of Rohan, who were annoyed at being interrupted in their own "rotating in several dimensions," hastily dressed, and found their horses were taking tea with the Black Dragon, who had stopped by from San Francisco and swiftly joined them in discussing the story so far. All agreed that we should have some rock candy and rye ((in case we are getting a cold). Furthermore, the Lemon Drop Kid reckoned the Mountains of Madness weren't too far off, and if strangers have the best candy then Elder Thing candy must be out of this world. So they girded their loins, min-maxed their character sheets for extra sanity points, and put on hats, because a Nize Hat is put on their slippers and danced down the Yellow Brick Road, singing off-key. This was more than the Klingon ballet dancers could stand, so they swapped them out for Jägermonsters, who were lighter on their feet though regrettably also a little too sarcastic to take the entire performance seriously. I mean, one doesn't mind improv, but audiences draw the line at "The Hunting of the Snark." So the monsters were not really boojums but the borogoves were some serious set design, what with all the clockwork needed to make them mimsy properly, a real triumph of architectural whatsit for Mrs. Who, as she really did not like to think in only two -- or was it three? -- dimensions. Instead, she preferred
@229: is required if one wishes to attend the to do her designs in eleven-dimensional p-branes, wobble them, and allow the set to occur as the natural result of @238 AND 239 (tying back together): Inter-Galactic Seminars on Non-Euclidean Filk Singing. This, as you might imagine, is not wholly compatible with sanity, but then neither is any kind of filk singing. Why, I remember a time when a bunch of filk singers caused the entire convention to swear off buttermilk, resulting in bug out, screaming "gods, will you stop! I can't stand it any more!" and breaking the Tacoma Narrows Bridge by way of resonance frequency mayhem. This led to the creative application of silly string -- which as all True Scotsmen know, is really the fundamental force that ties the fabric of socks and of Reality, which is but gingersnaps and buttered parsnips. Meanwhile, back at the ranch on Titan dinosaurs knitted kilts and discussed the foreboding omens that had appeared in their last batch of cookies. It appeared as though
we're ready to resume our game. Now rol--
--L INITIATIVE! SEE! I ROLLED 6. ATTACKING!
--eplay like our knights, forsooth; not like a troll
--l your eyes. This game's no fun. It's lacking... Slow down. One at a time. Now first, let's see--
-- MY SWING; A 20! YOU"RE A DEAD MAN WALKING!
-- our quest completed, not this banditry,
-- that chaos rules! I love it! Now we're talking! Enough. Back up; we'll start again where you--
-- ROLL DAMAGE! CRUSHED HIM! I GO UP A LEVEL...
-- wish certain players eaten by a grue...
-- say random catchwords, which invoke a devil... Can we--
-- GO LOOT --
-- this travesty --
-- with fries?
That's it. Rocks fall, and everybody dies.
the coelacanth had slipped away. "When the meteor arrives," the dinosaurs said, "what would you like on your banana split?" "Schadenfreude," answered the Wombat. "With shavings of reproach." "Hot fudge on the side?" Meanwhile, off at the side, the bandersnatch dripping with hot fudge and wondering where its cherry had gone, seemed, from the above line, to be in a very different kind of movie than this. "Great grue!" he exclaimed, "There's an elephant in the soup!" (Shame on you, P J Evans, for not continuing the game.) "What's it doing there?" "Looks like the backstroke," he replied to general laughter, which was cut off short by [It's suppertime] the elephant's cellphone starting to play "Cor blimey!" she said, "an elephant?". "How incongrueous wrote he, after which someone berated him for the typo that was such an horror that the elephant held it's nose, just to demonstrate its disgust, by wrapping a thread around it's trunk. "the point of this thread," said the elephant, is that there's literally nose on it! too bad for it!" just then the crocodile noticed the time on the clock in its belly, and crying "I'm late!" hurried down the path toward went to the kitchen to make tea. He had just put the Kiwi jam down next to the biscuit tin when zeebas house, casting Pearls before Swine as he went. The zebra, seeing this crossposting, went looking for the jam, which had been carried off by the flying monkeys to the post-zombie-apocalypse stronghold, surrounded by mindless undead chanting "Heigh ho, heigh ho, it's eating braaaaains we go," which "Cthulhu f'thagn, and I don't care", when suddenly caused the world to spin backwards, and the mountains to move west, so that even jim macdonald got disoriented, and said, "well, how did i get here?", which startled david byrne so violently that he the stronghold fell off the rock it was on and dumped all the treasure on [well, maybe the stronghold's treasure fell on David Byrne] [David Byrne, who] exclaimed "these are not my elder gods!" and then who said, "this is not my beautiful treasure/
this is not my beautiful non sequitur! He was then eaten by an incongrue, which skeleton!" as the Elder Gods ripped it out of his body. Meanwhile, back at [incongrue, which] escaped down a maze of twisty little passages, all different. And then ," said the Professor, puffing on his pipe. "A most marvelous thing happened. Why, it was just yesterday, while I was grading papers, I found xtrawd'n'ry! Mr Holmes talked all about the dog in the nighttime, until we all fell asleep from sheer boredom. And then he went around and took all of our the answer to the question that has puzzled me all my life: What about Naomi?" And the professor fell silent, puffing thoughtfully on his pipe. "Indeed," he said again, "what about Naomi?" And then he the recipe for 'Pygmy Mammoth and Jumbo Shrimp Salad' in the book the Professor had left behind in the salon with the candlestick and Mrs. Plum (again!) showed up in the kitchen, only this time she was prepared for Iron Chef, because she had an enormous chopper, and an interesting device for analyzing the fat content of vinegar, thereby discovering new uses for zero. But that was nothing to her steampunk-driven style of knitting it was amazing to watch the way those needles knit together everything in sight--yarn, leaves, hair, even small children--into an emergent fabric-based artificial intelligence demanding only one thing —a good yarn! Good yarn, indeed! Why, it's amazing how
The needles clack propelled somehow by steam
The Klingons gyre and dance, a young boy flies
On great green wings as fragile as a dream
The dinosaurs are sinful -no surprise!
The threads combine and separate and weave
The hobbits, Dr Who, a southwest state
A graceful save when overlap can leave
Confusion over words that come too late
Or maybe they're just from a different view
Of how we came to just this point in time
Where Holmes, Naomi, grues, a plum or two
Are brought together in a bit of rhyme
The thread was jacked, but really it's all right
It's all part of the fun of Making Light
"And so you see," the professor concluded, "there are times that a bit of impromptu verse can be far more than...than...” He stared in horror as the enormous chopper flashed once, twice, cutting off his choking scream of agony. With his dying breath he could only manage to feebly croak the name of his assailant: "Holmes! Holmes!", he cried. "Look! It's slash fic! "oh my word," said Watson, "whatever could they mean by splitting an infinitive like that? It can only be --urk", and with that he expired, in a death scene to rival those delivered operatically. The hunting dogs moved in slowly, sniffing each others' fundaments, as no other scent was evident. Morosely, they patrolled the gruesome scene, until their leader, Naomi, began excitedly barking and running back and forth amid the carnage. The door burst open, and the coelacanth burst in. "Guys! You'll never believe what I she went into the garden to cut a cabbage-leaf to make an apple-pie; and at the same time Debbie posted something much better, but saw on Mulberry Street! Now this involves a feline with a very tall tale. of how he saved Timmy when he fell into the well and was pulled out by Dr. Fell, who liked lassies very much, he did, and tended to exclaim, "and a hey! ho! hey nonny no!" at random intervals while riding his pony, which was named "Macaroni", and carrying several lassies at a time on the saddle with him. Until he heard the barking of the Elder Dogs at the Bones of Tyndalos, which came from the bodies of the Riders of Rohan and which were painstakingly shrink-wrapped, including the rings on their FINGERS OBVIOUSLY BECAUSE LIKE YOU CAN EVEN HAVE RINGS ANYWHERE ELSE AHEM AHEM AHEM (Meanwhile, somewhere else:) Nobody seems to have mentioned #253 yet. I love it. By the way, on another board I go to, the threadwrack caused by simultaneous posting is called "dysfractionation." It's a wonderfully useful word and I sometimes forget that it's subgroup-specific. Is it worth adopting here,do you think? and the rings on their chain mail, too, because it's all rings when you look at it so reminded of the rings around their collars, he grabbed an industrial-sized weasel which ripped his flesh and formed another band from L.A., causing a massive outbreak of punk rock unrivaled since the 1970s. But even that was overshadowed by Lamont Cranston, who was reported to be inside a Godzilla suit. It was actually Santa Claus, who was (Love 253 too! Also 303.) speaking in secret numeric code, which revealed the secret location of Da Vinci's pope/antipope slashfic stash as being in the New York Public Library, in a hollowed-out copy of Delany's Dhalgren, which unleashed Daleks all over the Staten Island Ferry and Neil Gaiman's blog, much to the consternation of ten thousand fangirls demonstrating the Danse Macabre. But as you all know, the Dance Macabre, like morris dancing, can unleash [Aargh! Danse! Danse!] Dark Spirits, like the Lord of the Dance (not the scary one, just a demon). This can result in the Apocalypse of Bunnies (what do they need such good eyesight for anyway?) because of the lack of lepine (?) ophthalmologists, who need to see to the Carrots of Penzance, who sowed terror all over the the Carrots of Penzance, who sowed terror all over the legendary multiple postings of Cornwall! until the Lapinafore struck back against the betacarotine (sp?) vampires, who had malfunctioning software and were even more anemic than the plot of your average Michael Bay film. Fortunately the Mikado was being produced just up the road, featuring dinosaurs, Chthulu and two gardeners in a horse costume, with buttons up the ahem! We shan't get into that, he muttered as he paced across the room and pondered the object in his hand, which was tickling his palm, cooing, and making damp spots. "Zounds!" He ejaculated. 'This must be my Victorian great-uncle's automatic lubricator for his Babbage Engine, I can finally complete its restoration once I get that turbo-encabulator installed on the interrocitor, sold by Exeter to the Torchwood Group, LLC. He often wondered about them. Why did they always seem so reluctant to ask for refunds when, every time they plugged a device in, it randy and yet also depressed? It was hanging out with a pack of thirty-something teenagers, except generated a hologram of Elvish Elvis impersonators, which was clearly the developer's idea of an amusing error message, though not as funny as the "Press to test/Release to detonate"button they put on the coffeemaker in the breakroom at Muppet Labs. "Mimimimimimimi!" cried Beaker when he saw the effects a quadruple espresso had on the Swedish Chef. Meanwhile, Zoot was cleaning his Sax and wondering if Animal was available for a long and satisfying set on the drum kit, but not if Crazy Harry was anywhere in the vicinity after the last incident involving the bomb squad and a ridiculous amount of whipped cream that ended up all over the ceiling in the foyer - and it was a twenty-foot making first contact with several new interstellar races, a few of which turned out to be quite delicious--especially the dreaded zorknids from the Planet Without a Refresh Button, which borked threads terribly but went wonderfully with horseradish sauce and two of thirty-eight, who really appreciated horseradish sauce on zorknids and blymazer sauce--what do you mean you don't have blyzamer sauce, what is this, the Dark Ages? What? It is? Oh dear, I must have set my time machine incorrectly! How [er, "blymazer steaks" instead? That's the problem with fast-paced context-sensitive games like this on] [e] (pulls out sonic screwdriver) and advances slowly on interesting. So, you boil water for drinking here too? They do that in twenty-first century Boston The Doctor stopped abruptly, surprised by the other time-traveling visitor who seemed unaware of the dangerous situation he'd just dropped into. In fact, the Doctor noted coolly, the new visitor was just about to step into zero g, but in fact it was a really large pile of bifurcated fluorescent hamsters. The hamsters, in perfect unison, emitted a pleasant hum which coincidentally rendered the Doctor's screwdriver useless, forcing her to shout "RUN!" to her companion. They hit the stepping disk just as the Singularity virus deployed onto every iPhone, due to an Accounting Division mistake at Laundry headquarters installing Flash on everything except the kitchen sink and Bob's computers, but the Making Light servers having achieved sentience some time ago in the wake of a particularly witty villanelle were involved with a pinochle game and Death had just learned the game, so when pinochle was raised at the same moment he was so surprised he dropped his scythe, which cut off electricity to the entire Eastern Seaboard. He couldn't seem to talk in small caps, however, which rendered him mute*, so the substitute Death wandered over from the Sandman-verse, nonchalantly applied her eyeliner in the dark, and said
*(Tried even faking it by font sizes, but ML was having none of it!) "oombada neckinada comment allez vous. Rock it on me, sugar baby. Love me like you do. Love is the word. Nardo's the name. Ask me again, I'll show you my goldfish." Then Delerium wiped off the makeup and wondered what that shiny scythe could do if she turned it into a balloon the exact shape, size, and hardness of a scythe, but then she was distracted by that stone statue over there. Hadn't it just been facing the other direction? Just then, a cheering mob of football fans from Blaenau Ffestiniog rushed past, celebrating the Dynamo Dinorwig victory in the cup final. She forgot about the statue and turned her back on it, at which time the gargoyle opened his eyes, stretched and said, "Excuse me, but can I have a pizza? Extra cheese and Pygmy Mammoth. Hold the Jumbo Shrimp . What I need now is a tall glass of Blog, and some crottled greeps to wash down with it. Do you suppose you could crottle some for me?" But she had lost track of this thread, and was absent-mindedly trying to remember who she was now but it probably didn't matter unless she was a well-known writer of sonnets. Seizing the opportunity to change identities, she remembered that she had always wanted to sail across the ocean, alone. Now, all she needed was be Francis Bacon. Or was it eat bacon in France? She wanted to ask her brother, but he was down by the docks, with Kevin Bacon, who was six degrees away from Boss Hogg. "Well," she thought, "I'd best get my pearls and my autographed Paul Erdos collaboration which was cleverly disguised as a completely different autographed Paul Erdos collaboration, one which looked like a Squashed Armadillo Cake, and tucked neatly into her sows-ear purse. Clutching her pearls, she dashed across the cape held by Sir Doctor of TARDIS, who was pleased to be back in the story but annoyed by the lack of jellybabies (the gargoyle had eaten all of them) and the fact that the army of thousands of Daleks in the next room was quite obviously a collection of toy Daleks filmed in extreme close-up. "I've heard of budget cuts," he muttered, "but this is a horse of a different color." He whipped out his dysfractionater, but mistakenly stopped the thread dead in its tracks. "Why won't this thing work when you want a calzone , when you want a pizza, play G# on the ocarina and you will be answered by LINK! And Zelda! And a dragon boat, which makes wisecracks about the inevitability of death, taxes and someone on the Internet being wrong, which according to four out of five Doctors is a leading cause of the Heartbreak of Psoriasis and heartburn. Act now, and we'll throw in --Free! -- this complete set of Ginsu tomatoes, for just 19.95. But wait! there's moar. You can has cheezeburger too, and bukkit, jus 4 all ur base which are belong to Goldman Sachs Coburg and Gotha m City, before the Bat Signal shone through the clouds of a dark and stormy night and the ghost of Edward Bulwer-Lytton whose pen wasn't mightier than a sword that the pirate who suddenly appeared on the horizon carried before the white whale and the white hart , wearily muttering to himself, "Kittens. Why does it always have to be beer stains on the carpet? You'd think they didn't know how to clean pizza? Or argue with a Sicilian shoemaker. But distilling whiskey from Whiskas was not beyond the sticking-point your courage must be when death is on the line or when it's just sort of close to the line," he finished. However, since both glasses of wine were from Gallo, no one drank any of it, and the contest escalated rapidly when someone exclaimed, "What a dream that was, Auntie Em!"
...There's no place like home...