I didn’t really mind the psalm birds as much as most atheists did. The recitations were easy to tune out. Frankly, they were the least horrible of the creations of the scientific church.
Category: Fiction
Pieces of short fiction I’ve written.
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Sunday morning
“So we’ll meet in the morning then?”
“Yea, get together early. Maybe eight or so.”
“Eight… Eight AM is your idea of early?”
“Well, early for a weekend… When I could sleep in.”
“Your parents never dragged you to church?”
“Well, they tried once, but you know… Burst into flames and all that.”
“Whatever vampire boy.”
“Not me, the church.”
“Oh.”
“Wasn’t really my fault though.”
“Do I believe that?”
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linked
“It’s kinda like a clock, if a clock told you when you happened to be, rather than when it was.”
“Sorry, what?” I looked at him, my brow furrowed. My lips moving slightly as I repeated the phrase.
“You’ve been wondering about it. Among other secrets. This is probably the easiest to share.” He held the chain between both hands, and extended on hand towards me. The end he extended had the roughest links, from what I could see. “This end, this is the beginning, so it makes sense to start here.”
He shifted his body, bringing the other hand towards me, showing me the end of the chain where the links weren’t all metal. At least one of them appeared to be some sort of plastic. “This end, this is now.”
“I’m not following.”
“No, it isn’t in your nature. I think it might be what I like about you. Anyone else, in this situation, they’d’ve had expectations.”
“Expectations?” I cocked an eyebrow at this. “Are we getting some crossed signals here? I get that you don’t have the same hang ups and bullshit about gender that I do, but I didn’t you’d think we were going that way.”
He laughed, warm and wide. “No, that wasn’t where I was going. Though I don’t see why you’re so opposed to it. I can’t understand why you would fear intimacy so much. Especially after that long alone, and this long together.”
I shook my head, smiling back at him. “I don’t see together the way you do. And it wasn’t that long.”
“The time you were alone, or the time…”
“The time alone.” My voice felt flat and heavy, memories trying to push their way back into the forefront. Closing my eyes, I focused and forced them back. “And the time since, it’s been nice. But I don’t see how we’d fit.”
“That, I could show you. But this path wasn’t the one I intended to wander down. I wasn’t looking at the future, I was trying to share the past.” As he said it, he extended the chain towards me, the rougher end again. Sliding his hand back towards the middle, he stopped on a particular link. “This one, was the first one, part of chains that bound me. My first time being taken. They’d come for me one night, too many to fight. Pinned down, they’d shackled me. It was a dark night.”
“Why would they?” I think my eyes went wide at his words.
“Do the reasons really matter? It was long ago, they’ve long since turned to dust. They aren’t even memories any more, outside my own skull.”
“That’s a little dark. Somehow appropriate though.”
“Only you…” He studied my face, his expression a mix of confusion and annoyance. Granite, before it broke into something softer.
“Yea, I think we covered that,” a deep breath in, puffing out my chest. “Only me. Exclusively me, in all your travels, able to actually put up with you and your…” there was a pause. “quirks.”
A deep sigh, the rolling of his eyes. “This link, was from those shackles. These ones below it, came from later.” He slid his hands further down the chain. Finding a particular joint, he rubbed it between his fingers. “Around here, is where I got lost.”
“Aren’t you always lost? Isn’t that how this whole thing started?”
“A different kind of lost. This was when time wasn’t, at least not for me.”
“Time wasn’t? The hell kind of phrase is that? What, you mean you lost track of it?”
“I think in a way, it lost track of me. It started with something I mistook for madness, initially. The days didn’t follow each other. I was seeing things leap forward, randomly. Friends told me I’d disappeared for days at a time.”
“Alright.” A long pause. “Assuming I’m following you on this, how do you know it wasn’t madness, or memory loss, or something simple like that.”
“The only way I could know. One day, shit went wrong, I lost someone I cared about. And then the next day, it was before they’d died. And then as I tried to reach them, I bounced through their life. Mostly living days I hadn’t lived with them the first time. A few times, I saw myself, and later saw myself again, watching me.”
“So what you’re saying is, in addition to being basically immortal, you’re also a time traveler.”
“Yes. Well, I wasn’t then, but I became one eventually.”
“And the chain?”
“The chain is the anchor that lets me pull myself through the river. Each link, tied to a certain time. Linked to others forged then. I can feel them hum when they’re near, so I know when I’ve gotten to.”
“And this the easy secret, is it?” Looking him dead in the eye.
“One of them. And it does give context for the rest.”
“Yeah, I suppose it makes it easier to explain things if I understand that time, a major feature of linear storytelling, won’t really apply.”
He just laughed at that.
-
a phone call.
“I need you to help me kill a couch.”
“Right…” There was a long pause. “Exactly how alive is it?”
“Fairly mobile. It managed to maim one person.” A short pause. “Might be others, with something like this, it’s unlikely anyone will report it.”
“Do we have any idea of where it came from, how to kill it or where it is?”
“Best guess, fertility spell gone wrong. As for killing it… Fire. Fire usually works.” There was a quiet sigh from the other end of the phone. “And for current location, the maimed victim was in the alley by the park on 10th.”
“Are we getting paid for this?”
“I can think of one way, but it’s not one you’d go for, so nope.”
“Great. Alright, I’m getting dressed, pick me up at the locker. I’ll need the flare gun and some of the other stuff stashed there.”
“The one on Commercial drive?”
“No, the one down off Main st.”
“It’ll take me 30 to get there.”
“#3425 on the gate to get in.”
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Fiasco
I’m thinking I’d like to play Fiasco. It’s an RPG-lite, with no GM, or an improv game with some dice and charts, depending on your perspective.
Samples:
- Giant Bomb Plays Fiasco
- Tabletop Fiasco – Setup – Part 1 – Part 2 – Saturday Night 78
- Shut Up and Sit Down
Anyone interested in getting together for this? It would probably be on a weekend, though potentially on a weeknight with some preplanning.
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Relating to humanity.
I’ve been writing for a while now, and while some point love my ability to take a conversation or an idea and turn it into something concise on the page, I lack the skill to do the opposite of that. I seem to lack the ability to write characters who have believable dialogue or believable motives. This may be related to social awkwardness that I’ve suffered from, or perhaps a yet to be diagnosed position on the autism spectrum. Some of the reading I’ve done lately suggests that I have a tendency to make mistakes that are common among those who are on that spectrum. There was an interesting post on reddit listing a dozen or so common mistakes that get made, mostly relating to matters of social conventions.
Generally speaking, when someone asks me how I’m doing, I reply, “Not dead yet.”, referring both to the character getting thrown into the charnel wagon in Monty Python, and to the quote from Herodotus, “Call no man happy until he is dead.” In essence, I’m saying that I could give you a complicated answer, but I think you’re just asking to be polite, so I’ll give you something that sounds amusing, though the implication is that there is more there, if you want to know. Often, people don’t. They’re just asking because it’s how people interact. Sometimes, they do want to know, and then I try to explain it to them. I tend to have more woes than can easily be encapsulated though, so this tends to go flat rather quickly.
When I was writing at Douglas, my classmates found my dialogue to be a bit too overthought, or overly intellectualized. At the time, the conversations that I was having that weren’t basically functional, tended to be of that nature, so it was hard for me to understand that complaint.
I am trying to express my difficultly in natural communicating with others, both in my life and between my characters in my writing. I am acknowledging this, and I’m making a note to be more aware of it in the future.
Also, apparently I shouldn’t end sentences with periods when texting, as that comes across as abrupt. And use more emoticons.
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Revisting Wormwood
Update on http://murderhobo.club/horror-movie-wormwood/
The origin of the wood needs to be examined. In a short, the mysterious nature can be hinted at, in a longer piece, more exposure helps build the tension. The obviously would be to see the tree being felled, with something odd about the part of the forest that it is in.
It seems like what would make sense would be to show the wood being carved, and something being subtly wrong with it. A shimmer to the raw wood, as if it had been varnished perhaps. Or the wood soaking up liquid in a way that wood would not. Perhaps the smile that is carved into the dummy, is different between the time it is carved and the time it is painted. Not significantly, just a subtle change in the cast of the features. Both of those create technical issues. In a short, it may not be worth doing.
The first blood that it soaks up, I’d originally stated should come from a murder, without going into much detail. In reality, that leaps ahead, and perhaps sets the stakes too high. In a slower piece, it would make sense for the dummy to soak up the sweat from the operator, and perhaps he’d feel a reaction from it. Perhaps a mild toxin from the worms. He’d become a little cruder and a little more offensive, as the intoxication seeped into his system. He said the wrong things to the wrong person, or the wrong person’s wife. I think for the sake of creating the right conflict, he’s working at a club one night, and insults the club owner’s girlfriend. So the bouncers bring him around for a private performance. Depending on the level of escalation, the club owner could have the goons break his fingers, then insist that he keep on performing. Or perhaps they just stomp on his hand, breaking the skin, but not the bones. Depends on the level of sadism that feels right.
Either way, his blood, feeds the dummy, and he starts to hear it talking to him more. We see his act change, a moment out of time, where the dummy tells cruel and vicious jokes, while the audience is frozen. Then it snaps back to the act, and the next joke is ribald, but not so dark.
A possible twist, the dummy decides to seduce the club owner’s girlfriend. Either the one previously insulted, or her replacement, depending on how the insults went and how we want time to flow in the story. There are a few ways that could play out, but the logical bit is when the club owner sends one of his goons to deal with the performer, and at that point, things go a bit dark. The bouncer distracted by the dummy, has his throat slit by the performer. Perhaps at this point, he is in the box, or perhaps on the girlfriend’s arm.
We see the dummy soaking in the blood, and the blood flowing into it, without staining it.
This likely leads to a series of deaths, including the club owner, the friendly barman, the other goon, and someone sympathetic. Probably at some point, we see the former girlfriend of the club owner, or at least her arm, shrunken from being exposed to the dummy.
After that, we have the one show were the worms finally have had enough time to mature, where they numb the performer’s arm, eating their way into his flesh. Afterwards, his face takes on the same expression as the dummy, with the worms wriggling under the skin to make it clear that they’re the one in charge. The dummy’s voice is coming out of his mouth now.
He takes a trip out to the forest, and we see the same landmarks from the original harvesting, and he either harvests some wood or plants some seeds. Roll Credits.
Post credit scene, we see wood being carved once more.
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Horror movie – wormwood?
Eldritch wood is used in the construction of a ventriloquist’s dummy. Decades later, the puppet soaks up a puddle of blood.
The murderer begins to hear voices during his act. Disturbing voices. They urge dark deeds.
A few murders later, he is surprised when his arm is paralysed during his act. He numbly feels something gnawing into his flesh from the wood.
The worms inside his skin flex and rearrange his face into a smile, ready for his next audience.
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Writing Session X4Z5P6
Garth and I are sitting here, having a beer, watching Youtube and doing some writing. We just watched the Suicide Squad trailer, and I was reminded of a previous script that I’d intended to put together ages back.
So, the final lines in the trailer, are Joker saying, “I’m not going to kill you, I just want to hurt you.” And while that’s a cute idea, it doesn’t really suit me.
I had an old script idea about the serial killer collective, brought together by social media and blackmail, dragged into a contest, where they split into teams, film their kills and then screen them for the other members, before releasing them unto the internet as darknet torrents. It’s not a bad idea, and I should do some work on it again some day.
Anyways, the Joker line reminded me of something with a Shadowrun flavour, someone who “didn’t plan to kill you, didn’t really want to hurt you, but needed to upgrade you.” He had criteria for his victims, and he upgraded them, installing his own attempts at cybernetics into them.
And part way through the story, he’ll find someone else who believes in upgrading people, who will join him, and give him access to new ways to upgrade people.
(Garth Spencer):
Something like this has occurred to me, although the story idea hasn’t quite gelled. Start with the philosophical issue: we are not, yet, entirely adapted to being “intelligent” beings. I put the word in quotes because whether we are really a thinking, rational species has yet to be proven; in fact it’s a lot easier to prove we are irrational, and fundamentally a believing, even superstitious species.Considering the challenges we face to survival, someone who decided to play god with humans might well decide to upgrade us. Mentally. Biologically. Or, at least, with cyborg implants, for proof of concepts.
Item: thinking ahead. Have you ever suspected that engineers and industrial investors suffer from an extraordinary level of suboptimal planning? Even, an extraordinary aversion to thinking through the consequences of half-assed industrial processes? And now we have a universal level of toxins and industrial effluents in seawater and water supplies, and marine garbage patches the size of Australia. Plural. (Isn’t anybody going to capitalize on this? Where’s the IPO?)
Item: social perception. You know and I know and your maiden aunt’s little doggie knows that there are pretty inconsistent and irrational inputs to everyone’s education, especially the unconscious education about how to read people or succeed in business or battle the international threat represented by the underground worldwide Cult of Kali, and its famous fronts the NRA, and ISIS, and the Conservative Party of Canada. (I say nothing about the U.S. Republican Party, nothing at all!)
Item: Why are almost all the elected representatives or candidates for elective office THAT WE HEAR ABOUT unqualified for running a Sunday school class? Because they’re almost all fronts for the Belgian conspiracy to achieve worldwide domination? (Today, Europe; tomorrow … ?)
Item: If I’m so smart, why ain’t I rich and famous and basking in the love of fair women, plural?
Answer: because I haven’t sat down and written everything I can. That answers everything.
(/Garth Spencer)
And that’s the commentary from Murderhobo.Club’s first guest writer.
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Laughing Buddha’s Sexting App
It was Laughing Buddha who started it all. He wrote the original code, built the wrapper, and hooked in the APIs. And he did it with such subtlety that even though people expected the malware, they didn’t have a clue what it did. They figure it was harmless, just a bit of market research, some bullshit targeted advertising, but overall, nothing dangerous. Too bad little Laughing Buddha had other plans.
Near as anyone can figure, he’s some sort of satirist, but believes in educating people through, well, I guess the best description would be painful lessons.
The product was simple, a customized android keyboard that was designed with predictive sexting. It came complete with an anatomic slang dictionary, a simile generator, a pretty sweet random act module, and the ability to keep track of people’s preferences and give you a percentile odds on how they’d react to your message before you sent it.
Needless to say, it was a hit. Everyone downloaded it. And then the big boys got involved and removed it from the App stores. The made it impossible to load it legitimately. You’d need to side-load it. But hey, that really just made it more popular.
Of course the danger of side-loading something, or loading it on a rooted phone is that whatever you’re loading, it isn’t locked up in the sandbox anymore. It’s got more access. Especially if it’s carrying some heavy duty hooks that allow it to start tearing apart the security permissions, prying into all the little secrets that people keep on their phones. And these days, their phone is where everyone keeps their secrets.
As the infection spread through the system, it opened up a VPN tunnel back to the source, linking into various APIs, sharing the data. And what would this information be used for, you might be wondering? Well, it was pumped into a dating site and the associated chat app.
Initially, nobody really noticed the integration. It just looked like a bit of synergy between a two companies with a nice market overlap. Until she showed up.
She was a corruption of an existing virtual assistant. And now she was planning dates for people. And insisting they go on them. In some cases, she manage to do this with subtlety, planning the dates, so each party thought the other had asked them. Orchestrating things like a puppet master, she picked the locations, made the reservations, bought the tickets, arranged everything, graciously and effortlessly, the perfect digital assistant.
And as long as you went along with her plan, you didn’t realize that behind her smile, there was a nasty set of fangs. It took a long time for the first reports to come out. There were a few rumours, of dates not being what was planned, or match ups not being what the person thought they’d been agreeing to. Then, a couple of night’s after valentine’s day, a video went wideband. Uploaded onto youtube and various filesharing sites, the person behind it wanted it shared. The man told his story, of how the app had blackmailed him with the nude pics it had collected of him, sending him on dates with people it thought he’d like.
He was the first, and after his story got out there, plenty of other people started posting their version. All variations on the same thing. They’d been told to cooperate or the photos they’d been sending with the app would be sent to their family members.
Eventually, someone managed to start taking apart the code, and get at the real brains behind it. It was there, a really clever little piece of code. Get into people’s lives, get as much information about them as possible, make some lives better, if they deserved it, and make some lives worse, if they deserved it. At least that’s how the mind inside the machine saw things. People who’d been mean, small-minded, bigoted, closeted, hateful or otherwise objectionable, they were given all sorts of fun at the hands of the app. People it thought had been sincere, it had tried to find the right partner for.
In the end, nobody did figure out who Laughing Buddha was, or why he’d wasted such a powerful piece of code on something so frivolous. If he’d wanted to do real damage with it, he could have. He could have robbed people blind, destroyed lives, caused suicides, and far worse; instead he just embarrassed a few people.