Category: Pulverbatch

California game update

February 26, 2006 /

My uncle John offers a rhyming take on Atlantis, and my mom gently reminds me that of course I didn’t invent the form: both “California” and the game were inspired by a picture book she read us when we were young, called Whose Mouse Are You, by Robert Kraus.

Also, saved from the LJ comment thread:

Will:Where is Atlantis? Under the sea.

What’s under the sea? Not you, and not me.

Well then, where are we? The internet.

How’d we get there? Zeroes and ones.

What do those stand for? Video fun.

What is flypaper?

Me: Sweetness that kills.

David: What can’t be killed?

Scott: Everything dies.

Josh: Why do they die?

William: They run out of time.

Beth: What is time?

Kevan: Memory. [Then, because of a crosspost:] Curse you, time!

Ken: What time is it?

Stephen: It’s hamburger time.

David: Do hamburgers rhyme?

Scott: Not on my dime.

Me: OKAY NEW ONE. What is a curse?

Scott: Bad karma, realized.

William: How is it realised?

Ken: Through the teachings of the Maharishi.

Beth: What is the Maharishi?

Me: A teacher of hunger.

Scott: Where is the hunger?

David: In the bowels of the cursed…

Which seems like a neat place for a cutoff.

How many is seven?

A game to play while walking

February 24, 2006 /

I call this the California game, but it doesn’t actually have to rhyme.

What is noir? A story about losers.

Who are the losers? They didn’t win.

Who are the winners? The writers of history.

What is a history? Lies that come true.

What kind of words come true? Magic ones.

So for a noir story you make up people who know magic, then write about the ones who don’t.

Your turn. Where is Atlantis?

Which that story isn’t but still

February 13, 2006 /

“The Slush God: Are you totally sick of seeing rejected-writer-gets-revenge-on-editors stories in the slush pile? Have you ever read a good one?

Kelly Link: There is a wonderful epistolary story by a Canadian writer, Robert Boycuk, in which an editor is lowering himself into a terrible void, in pursuit of an author’s manuscript. It’s a sort of apology from the editor for how long it’s taken him to get back to the writer.

Otherwise, I can’t think of any off the top of my head. I’m sure there are some good ones out there. I would say that there’s probably a novel waiting to be written about hapless slush readers, but it would have to be very well done.”

February 9, 2006 /

So apparently my “include virtual” server-side commands (which make all the content appear at xorph.com/creator) have stopped working, and are now rendering as plaintext. Awesome! Luckily, I appear to have exactly two readers who actually go to that page instead of reading via RSS or LJ, so the tide of complaint and bewilderment has been, well, minor.

Of course, if you do read NFD via the front page, you won’t be able to see this, and if you don’t, you probably haven’t noticed the problem. So this is pretty much a reminder to myself to change the damn Advent webcam already.

January 19, 2006 /

Heard from the office next to my cube, mere moments ago:

(chuckling) “Yeah, a rose by any other name… is… still a rose!”

January 6, 2006 /

In the lobby of each floor in the building where I work is a yellowing, framed floorplan, with the fire stairs clearly labelled. Today I noticed that the one on my floor had been pulled off the wall (leaving a different color of paint behind) and replaced with a much newer plastic frame labelled “EVACUATION PLAN.”

The piece of paper in the frame was blank.

December 21, 2005 /

Via Kevan comes a 1978 speech by Philip K. Dick about science fiction, solipsism, Gnosticism and Disneyland that everybody else has probably read before. Regardless, it offered me the best answer to the question “why write?” I’ve ever encountered:

“What if our universe started out as not quite real, a sort of illusion, as the Hindu religion teaches, and God, out of love and kindness for us, is slowly transmuting it, slowly and secretly, into something real?”