- “life” and “wife”
- “girl” and “world,” look that is NOT EVEN A REAL RHYME
- “sky” and “high”
- “frown” and “upside-down”
Category: Obsessions
After a TV show about Edwardian cuisine, the household tonight spent twenty minutes in goggling horror at the idea of a duck press. Here is what a duck press is used for: squishing a duck so hard that all the blood comes out. That’s it! Apparently they were later bastardized into lobster presses (do lobsters have blood? I thought they were insects) and now duck presses cost thousands of dollars and are impossible to find.
But the ones you can find have little webbed feet.
I got spam today with the most intriguing subject line ever, so I googled it and bam, first result was Gordon Fay’s 24-hour RPG Blood Royal. The subject line, and its description: “A competitive game of fairy-tale intrigue and skulduggery in which players take the roles of a dying King’s children, each vying to be named successor at the end of the week.” How cool is that! Thanks, spam! Welcome to unintended consequences.
I do this too, but nobody’s ever noticed. I do it a lot less when I have my headphones on.
I finally watched Primer, with the expected result.
I guess I’m going to read the plot breakdown before I watch it again (yes, of course it’s on Internet; no, I’m not going to link to it). Mom claims that catch-what-you-can plots are the only kind I like, which is not quite true: I also like plots where good people do their best to destroy each other for perfectly good reasons. And romantic comedies.
Everybody compared Primer to Memento, but I think Primer is superior–both by its refusal to spell things out and by the fact that it doesn’t rely on a weird structure to screw with you. Rethinking a lot of things about structure, lately.
In 2006 I wrote 255 stories, making it two years in a row without missing an update. Even if a couple of those updates were on Pacific time. Ahem.
This year, barring catastrophic brain injury, we’ll hit 1000 stories (and, even less meaningfully, 1001). We’ll also see the debut of the Anacrusis book, Ommatidia, although our impending move isn’t going to make that any easier to finish than the hecticity of the past six months. Tomorrow morning I’ll post the last completed six-word story from the initial round of submissions. More about that in the next paragraph.
The six-word stories were fun! Since Anacrusis has apparently outlasted Constrained.org and now I need a new paragraph for the FAQ, I’m going to make the offer permanent. Send me a six-word story, and I’ll probably write the other ninety-five, for as long as I’m doing Anacrusis. No guarantees on when and I probably won’t mess with the pennies, but you will get credit in the popup text. I really can’t think of a smaller thank-you for doing my work for me. Wait, no! Let’s talk about pennies again.
People have talked about an Anacrusis wiki. I’ve talked about a blink-fiction community. I’ve also talked about my general distaste for authoritative canon, then put the lie to that by refusing to finish six-word stories about my canon characters. Finally, I’ve got ommatidia.org just sitting around right now.
What if I started a new wiki, as a host for both information on recurring characters and new 101-word stories by people like you? It’s pretty arrogant for me to launch a new site and say “humans! Discuss the amazing things I have created!” It’s also silly of me to try to host stories, since I think all the Anacrusis readers interested in constrained writing of their own already have perfectly serviceable blogs or story journals.
That said, things like the stories I repost from the comment feed, timeline conjecture and the Millicent Resurrection Army suggest there’s a demand. The basic concept here is to throw open my canon and offer you tools to create new canon of your own. Given the opportunity, would you contribute?
Eeeee
I’m only posting this so I can talk to people on the LJ comment feed about tonight’s Battlestar Galactica.
Brace yourself, feed
So this Battlestar Galactose show. It’s pretty good?
I guess.
I discovered quite by accident on Saturday morning that there exists a DOS emulator. Then I installed Master of Magic and played for thirty hours straight.
I love Master of Magic like I will never love another game. It has cute animal friends and pixelated graphics. It has tremendous strategic depth and the addictive buddha-nature of One More Click. Every time I think up a new idea for a computer game, it is basically me trying to replicate the thrill of a cartoon devil telling me my granary is complete.