Category: Plugs

Story Fight!

September 20, 2006 /

Riposte!

Miranda sits at the table and turns the ring over and over. “You should have called me,” she says.

“Of course I called you.” He blinks and frowns. “I called you until your mailbox filled up. I called out the window and I called 911. I called, I–I called you names–“

“Please don’t take that tone,” she says.

“Why not?” he asks coldly. “It’s not as if I can make you upset.”

But Miranda loves him, loves him like chocolate and heat and really good pop songs. She can’t speak. She slaps the table and all the windows blow out.

And it’s a bit of an in-joke, but William’s allegory for my occasional struggles with syndication is unfairly rich.

September 7, 2006 /

My family was pirates again! Brenna had to go to the hospital! But she’s okay! My embarrassingly bare portfolio site went live! Ben wrote another LJ-feed story!

Mario and Tessa sit at the machine.

“What do you think these knobs do?” Tessa asks. Mario responds in the most natural manner possible.

The machine will hum. Tessa will say “Wait, did you hear that?”

Mario will nod. “Yeah. It’s tensokinetic, all right.” He’ll twist another knob.

The machine will have hummed. Mario will have said “Now that’s just weird. Let me try and find another tense.”

Tessa will have said “Yeah, I don’t think we want to get much more esoteric than this.” Mario will have spun another knob…

But the past tense setting [error: tense not found] broken!

August 25, 2006 /

Oh that’s better.

For the first time in years, I can link people to xorph dot com–just plain Xorph Dot Com–without feeling like I’m showing off my dirty underwear.

Other people that write good

August 5, 2006 /

UJ wrote a fantastic response to my “Christ of the Barricades” challenge, and Will wrote a prequel to Beloit, saved here from the LJ feed:

Tarnished as it is, the dirty chrome armour of the Heliocrashers shines as they blast through the wall: Erythrophobia zaps at a guard, but canon says that sonoluminescence doesn’t cause bubble fusion. So she punches him through a wall.

The other ‘crashers are covering her while she sets a charge against the generator’s critical weak point when canon oozes out of a grate and tears Erythrophobia in half. The charge doesn’t detonate because canon says they use fusion to fly, not fight: instead, her top half flies into a duct and her suit’s failing containment does the job just as well.

And then there’s stuff like Sumana’s MC Masala, which… you know about MC Masala, right? And Leonard is getting the kind of rejection letters most of us would kill for, for a story you will (when you get to see it) kill to have come up with.

There’s no unifying characteristic between the amazing writers with whom I associate, no New School or Movement, even though I keep trying to assign one. I guess I’m just going to have to publish all you guys?

Sneakers, Punch-Drunk Love, Grosse Point Blank; Unbreakable just fell out of the top five

June 3, 2006 /

It took what, ten years? But early indications are that the #1 spot has finally changed hands. The fact is I know I can’t trust my judgment in the immediate aftermath of a revelatory experience, especially one I’ve been anticipating this much, so I’ll have to wait and see it again before I can make this official.

But I don’t think I’ll change my mind. Sorry, Hackers. Brick is probably the best movie I’ve ever seen.*

* Disclaimer: do not ingest this recommendation without salt. Consider my previous favorite, and that any low-budget indie high school western noir with its own slang dialect and a protagonist named Brendan is pretty much made just for me. Side effects may include shortness of breath and a desire for subtitles. See our ad in Nature. Brick: Thick As What All.

June 1, 2006 /

The Mayan Gypsy, probably our favorite restaurant, gets a nice writeup from the deplorably-named Louisville HotBytes (the closest thing we have to a Zagat’s). The critic (Paige A. Moore, according to the reprint in LEO) even praises the famous Beef and Shrimp Diablo.

Man, we haven’t been back there in a while. Want to take some guests next weekend, Maria?

This goes out to my posse in the 402.

May 24, 2006 /

Okay. As you probably know, I want to see a movie called Brick. Brick is ostensibly coming to the Baxter Avenue Theatres, but not on the release date (May 26) promised by Brick’s distributor, Focus Features. That’s because May 26 is part of Memorial Day weekend, when Baxter will be busy filling seats for movies that “anyone has heard of” and that “make money.”

The evidence suggests that Baxter now has a print of the film, but is holding off on showing it for the aforementioned financial reasons; it doesn’t help that Focus decided Brick wasn’t doing well enough to justify more publicity spending, and is now recycling prints by moving them from one theater to another instead of making new ones. If there’s no perceived market for Brick in Louisville, Louisville may not see Brick at all.

Every time I’ve called the management offices of the Baxter to confirm or deny a revised release date, they seem a little startled that I’ve even heard of it, much less that I know it’s scheduled to come here. One guy actually asked “how did you hear about that? A rumor? Where did you hear the rumor?” I would like to change that. I would like them to pick up the phone and go “are you calling about Brick too?”

So: if you live near Louisville and you have any interest at all in the movie, it would be neat if you called the management office at (502) 456-4404 and casually asked hey, Brick? Is that coming here? Oh, do you know when? Cool. No need to call if you don’t live around here, and no need to wheedle, threaten or cajole. Just ping a little data against the collective consciousness of whoever answers the phones over there.

Don’t all do it today, either; pick a time within the next week or so and put a little note in your datebook. People on the LJ feed can call dibs on days in the comments. Whatever. This whole operation is very casual, except if you don’t do it you don’t love me.

I really, really want to see Brick. I am going to print out some flyers and hang them down Bardstown Road. I am going to continue talking it up here until you’re all sick of it. I swear, I am going to make an event on Facebook.

I would like you to see it with me, and I’d like us both to have the chance.