A different sort of vampire

Mark was bored. He couldn't pinpoint when he became aware of it. The knowledge just slowly grew until he wasn't only sure of it, but positive that he somehow had always known.
He seemed to know when he lived in the old shelter. It didn't have a roof and he felt lucky to have the four walls and floor. He and Edgar lived there, with the thin walls seperating them from the bright nothingness beyond. Sometimes they would jump up into that nothingness, feel their flesh burna s moisture began to leave them, and then fall back to safety.
It was dangerous. They couldn't pinpoint when they figured it out. One day Edgar stopped mark from jumping, and neither had done it again. Their desire to survive was stronger than their curiosity or bravado.
Edgar had as little to do as Mark. Edgar wasn't aware of this because he was insane. His days were filled with trying to spot creatures out in the nothingness. He once told mark that there was a giant fanged beast, a hundred times their size, hidden in the nothingness just outside the shelter. Mark began ignoring him, and without noticing it, realized how bored he was.
The new shelter was nicer. It was larger than the old one and had more stuff in it. Mark couldn't remember leaving the old shelter, just fragments or noise, light, the burning sensation of moisture vaporizing into the nothingness, and then a bug-eyed monster. The monster was named Neil, and was very self-conscious of his bulging eyes. Those were common for his kind, of which he was the last in the shelter.
Neil showed Mark around. There wasn't much to see so Neil led him through the castle and around the plastic coral after each stop. The new shelter even had it's own roof, too high to keep out the nothingness, yet low enough to add it's own sting to any leap.
There were others in the shelter, most were long and spindly, some species Mark had never seen before. Mark didn't speak to them, and avoided Neil when he could, but Edgar spent a lot of time talking with them. Whoever they were, they had connections, they seemed to be regularly giving Edgar packages.
Edgar hid the packages under the giant diver statue. Mark didn't know why, as he and Neil were the only ones in the shelter who didn't know what Edgar was getting. Neither had any interest either, which made hiding them even stranger. Mark assumed that Edgar was just acting out his insanity, but one day he was drawn in as well.
Mark was hanging out at the castle when Edgar came up and asked for help. "Help with what," Mark asked.
"Digging. I'm going to dig down find a way out. I'd just like you to help me move the rocks."
Mark agreed, and spent several days moving around the rocks that lined the shelter floor. He didn't assume it would work, but it put a dent in the boredom. The others came to watch, except Neil who was worried they'd all die if the floor was breached. Edgar didn't care. His plan seemed to involve a long piece of rope, a plastic tarp, and several of the smaller rocks.
They had dug all day, narrowly escaping several cave-ins, when Mark decided to take a break. The others watched Edgar, except Neil who hid in the castle practicing holding his breath. Mark went to the statue, curious now about what Edgar's plan entailed. He began digging out Edgars supplies. It was mostly ropes and tarps, dozens of each. The only other thing buried there was a clear plastic cylinder with something grey inside it labelled 'duraskin'.
Mark had a pretty good idea that the duraskin was to protect against the nothingness. The shelter walls held up against it, so they could be safe. Edgar had obviously found something that he thought could work, and there was no ignoring that Edgar had put a lot of thought into this plan. Feeling excited for the first time in what seemed forever, Mark opened the cylinder.
It was a suit, a grey suit with a strange number and assortment of limbs, as though it were not intended for their species. It wouldn't fit anyone in the shelter properly, but it only needed to fit well enough. Edgar was going to escape. There was only one suit, which meant that he was going to be left behind. Mark didn't want to be left behind, but everyone would know it was Edgar's plan, and would keep him from escaping.
Mark wasn't sure what to do, so he stared at the suit. The suit seemed to be getting larger, and Mark began to hope that it would be big enough to hold two. He stared at it, trying to make mental note of reference points to measure it's size. It wasn't until the eyepieces blinked that he realized it was staring back.

Goe, letting you know this ties into this, but the title is from a different half-written story just to keep you on your fins.

sitcom

I want to see a sitcom where the main character turns out to be a serial killer.

Goe, cause the ideas are the easy part.

something good about the bad.

probably be new story up tomorrow.

Goe, inspired by bad scifi.

yet another

impromptus up, this time with extra che!

Goe, cause che murdered thousands and all he got was a lousy t-shirt.

Firefly

Been compelled by other people to watch the dvds of the show. i must confess it's growing on me even though the stories remain annoyingly predictable.

some carnival thingie is up.

and y'all should be in bed right now! what the hell is wrong with you?!

On another note. most of the first person shooter games now have 'neutral' characters that are just sort of there for atmosphere. whenever i'm playing an fps game and get to the part where you are shooting past guards in the evil villain's mad science lab, i always shoot the employees. always figure they should have known better than to facilitate evil villainous plots. am i being overly vengeant?

Goe, learned that you can't shoot the monkeys in 'no one lives forever'.

Beating InstaBlender again!

Sometimes it's good to hit a subject before it hits 'mainstream' blogs. Everything non-feminine is decried as barbaric, and this isn't good. Some notice that USA Today has an article about it. An unhappy BBC employee complained about it months ago, not how it's affected educational outcomes, but how it affected everything in life. The BBC even celebrates over it's disparaging treatment of the non-femininegender.

Goe, apparently only good for looting and pillaging, needs viking helmet and axe.

Deterrence

works on many levels.

Goe, likes things that work, not so fond of local media.

heh

good thing i dont have a lot of readers who demand constant entertainment. for the handful of people who do check in every now and again, instapundit links to protest babes.

Goe, not labelled for individual resale.

been sick, not busy

getting better though. chilling out watching tv this afternoon, I watched 'Big Trouble', an awesomely funny film. It had both tricia mcmillan and goats.

very funny film and worth watching again.

And then the local news started. mostly hurricane related stuff, a bit on iraq... and then they talked about how the city was asking for volunteers to do weeding in city parks so that they could be 'pesticide free'. apparently knowing the difference between a pesticide and an herbicide is not important to either working in local news or running city parks. the 'local reservists return home' segment was started with the 'anti-war protest somewhere else' captions still up... the news is a fucking joke.

Goe, can't turn a can into a cane, nor a man into a mane.

Instapuppydrinker

Misses a key strategy in fighting pork.

That $223 million dollar "bridge to nowhere" that goes to a local airport?

Don't ask the congressman who put that in to cut it, ask the rest to cut it. Some states benefit from pork more than others, and not many congressmen could defend spending X many dollars on their own pork projects when the bills that those projects are part of make a net loss for their state. if you only get 100 million from a bill that will cost you 500 million, you're giving away 400 million. demand a cut equal to what you're paying in or vote no. that'd kill more pork than just asking people to vote no, especially when bills hit the senate where large population states can't gang up on low population states.

Goe, being sneaky.

Firefly & Serenity

While discussing the show and film with someone today, I realized what annoyed me so much about most shows on television. Firefly is the perfect example of most of them, from the stock sci-fi characters to the grand conspiracies dreamed up and run by people too stupid to run even the simplest tests to divert people who hate them from (or at least include a functional retraining program in) the "turn cute women into super duper bionic ninjas" program.

It's about as original as burnt toast, and about as palatable.

Something else that bugs me is what I've seen referred to as "oprahfication", the making of everyone into a victim. It annoys me that a show whose main characters are all desperately seeking to control their situation, in the "frontier" of space, can't just go 'fuck it' and take off to parts unknown. No, they have to stay around and whine about not being able to. If you have blasters, don't whine, blow something up and you'll feel better.

Shows are about characters. Stories have characters in them, so that we have something to relate to, but it's not that important that the story be about the characters. It used to be that the basic conflict of man vs nature, man vs man, and man vs self were the driving force behind stories. Take some people, put them into conflicts, see how they turn out. On a tv show, this could be repeated, with older shows suffering from Gilligan's Problem always leaving the characters the same at the end as at the beginning, with the conflict not really changing them. Newer shows borrowed everchanging characters from soap operas, where they've been a staple since before burnt toast.

But now the stories are character driven. Characters change and develop relationships in preset ways and the conflicts are only there to drag the show out past episode 4. Only sitcoms don't do this, and they still stick with the Gilligan's Problem format. Sitcoms exist mostly to be funny and retain unchanging characters to provide a pre-existing foundation for that episode's jokes, instead of establishing new characters/underlying motives every episode.

Gilligans Problem: The conflicts/problems of every/almost every episode stem from an overarching problem that is the premise for the series (the castaways were stuck on the island). Solving the overarching problem solves those issues and hence ends the series.

Firefly manages to do both, ongoing character development causing Gilligan's Problem. The overarching problem is that the characters are self-contradictory idiots. They want to be left alone, but can't stop themselves from helping everyone who crosses their path. The solution to their problems is to push the lot of them out of an airlock. Unfortunately, that's the general tone of sci-fi these days, the mindless pablum of Star Trek: 90210/Gilmore Girls in Space.

Goe, can barely stand to watch Battlestar: Galactica now.

D'oh

I failed to catch it at the time, but last Friday was Ibbledot's first Blogiversary.

Hooray Ibbledot!

Goe, wishes he could program better.

Oh...

While I'm being all self-centered and stuff, I'd like to point out that Rachmeg, the regular reader, refers to this blog as "Bob's Forest". I haven't liked "This Space for Sublet" but couldn't think of anything better at the time. Been thinking about changing it to "A Forest for the Trees". Any opinion?

Goe, open to suggestions.

Horn tooting.

As I have mentioned before, I submitted a story to the Storyblogging Carnival. I've since submitted two more. The Administrator of the Storyblogging Carnival made a list of his personal favorite stories. As the title of this post may have given away, one of mine made the list.

Goe, waiting for lunchtime.

Right to be stupid

Apparently the right to be stupid is the most pressing concern for the puppydrinker. if he thinks the security of his pot stash is of more importance to the nation than say, the right to own a home that kelo overturned, then something has impaired his judgement. pot would be my guess.

Goe, supports zero tolerance.

Eric the half a post

One of the reasons I like impromptus so much is because he documents so much evidence of the evilness of the political left. Plus, it helps improve your grammar!

Goe, working stuff out.

Hmm...

The Puppydrinker was reminiscing about someone else's slightly older article on memorials.

The first link given though is along the same lines. What struck me about it isn't the description of Britain thowing away it's culture, history, and liberty (both individual and national) in favor of feelgood politics and politicians. Barring another Thatcher, the UK will be a historical footnote. No, what struck me was this...

There are more admirals on the Service List today than there are warships in commission

The navy that ruled the oceans and trade routes efficiently for five centuries, repeatedly defeating much larger and better equipped enemies, could put an admiral in command of every one of it's warships and still have more onshore at home to issue orders. Most of the non-war ships are manned with civilians.

I recall seeing once, and I think it was Nordlinger who wrote the article I read it in (I tried to locate it but couldn't), that the Royal Navy, at some point shortly prior to the Falklands War, had more support personnel who never left dry land than it had sailors on boats. I don't know what the hell they're doing, but ruling the waves doesn't seem to be part of the plan.

British plan:

Live up to ancestors: No.

Surrender to France: Yes.

Goe, thinks those people are seriously fucked in the head.

Hurricane News

I watched 'supernatural' or something on tv. was ok. flipped through the news channels afterwards and every friggin one of them had a reporter interviewing another reporter about damage/policing/relief. it's like if a blogger did nothing but link/quote other bloggers and had nothing to say themselves. fortunately, the only blogs like that are ones that only exist to sell ad space/search engine ratings.

Goe, still ad free!

To explain the substitute puppet

I would first like to apologize to sponsors, participants, and patrons of the Anenton Shakespearean Fortnight Week. Due to the difficulties with this year's Shakespearean Fortnight Week, it seems unlikely that we will be able to draw sufficient sponsorship to extend next year's event to two full weeks as we had anticipated. We shall continue to strive towards that goal in the years that come.

I am pleased to say that contrary to some rumors, Hope lives, and is recovering nicely at home. We haven't been able to find out why she fell off Juliet's balcony, but the railing will be rebuilt at a higher level. As promised, the balcony did not collapse this year, proof that our new carpenter is up to the task. We did include a warning that tragedies such as Romeo & Juliet are not advisable for young children, and next year we will try to arrange a monitored play area so that the parents have an alternative to bringing them into the ampitheater. Counseling will be available for those young children who attended any of the tragedies and were unable to cope with the subject matter.

Although head wounds can bleed severely, none of the Hamlet actors suffered any serious injury. I've been personally assured by the production medic that scarring will be minimal, enabling them to perform again next year. Another year of practice and we'll all think they came to us straight from Broadway.

I was told that it is customary for women in productions of some of Shakespeare's comedies to supplement their attributes. This is done to make claims about their attractiveness understandable to persons at the back of the audience. The actors who stuffed stuffed rabbits in their pants and proclaimed that they were "happy to meet" with the audience did so without any approval. Those actors will not be returning next year unless they participate in a sexual harassment seminar.

It fell to me to ensure that all of the events are appropriate for the Shakespearean Fortnight Week, and on the children's puppet show I failed in this regard. I was under the impression that the puppeteers understood that it was a Shakespearean event and that all participants were working directly or indirectly off of the works of William Shakespeare. I was not aware that the puppeteers were performing a puppet adaptation of 'Gladiator' until several of the other event staff members brought it to my attention. I contacted the sheriff's office and they intervened.

The cats only sustained minor injuries and are recovering at the local Humane Society shelter. The lion and tiger suits came off with sufficient turpentine, as did the cords used to control their feet. Contrary to rumor, there were no cords on the animals heads, as a starving cat will eat meat in the shape of a 'hero' of their own volition. Those wishing to adopt one should do so before the animals are euthanized in two weeks time. The puppeteers may claim that the cats were substitutes for puppet animals lost in shipping, but we will definately not be inviting them to return.

We have also filed a complaint with the talent booking service that arranged for them to join us this year, and are offering full refunds for the cancelled shows. We have thusfar been unable to get out of our contract with the puppeteers requiring us to pay for their production-related expenses, so we will be unable to refund tickets from the shows that were performed as scheduled until a later date.

Goe, apologizing for the substitute puppets.

ack

it's not a happy thought that mickey mouse supports genocidal tyrants.

Goe, hates commies.

meh redux

another impromptus. if they came in a box, i could collect the whole set.

Goe, tired of fish.

Uber-meh

another impromptus. the last bit is just awesome.

Goe, can't focus when he's not busy... at least lately.

Sad

What is FEMA doing to protect fat cats?

Goe, wants to know!

Spam Ho!

Got a piece of spam titled "Re: to explain the substitute puppet"

It gave me an idea.

Goe, will show you later.

Nordlinger

has a new impromptus up.

Goe, knows the secret to avoiding bad air travel... don't travel by air!

Was visiting

Spent the weekend visiting my parents. Here's a picture of my dad and his dog. It was supposed to be my mom's dog, but she usually ignores it.

Goe, didn't get any cool pictures of the beach.

hurricanes

here is a link to some of the stuff that galveston did to protect itself from future hurricanes. new orleans is a much older city, has a lot more experience with hurricanes, and has done absolutely nothing to protect itself. i haven't a drop of sympathy for those people. they knew a storm was going to flood them out of house and home, it was just a matter of when and they never bothered to prepare. just like crapaud descendants to do nothing to help themselves but whine incessantly about how it's everybody else's fault for not helping fast enough.

Mother nature attacks, texans fight and the cajuns surrender...

Goe, because perhaps someone you know could sparkle and shine.

been busy

been really busy this past week. didn't even know about the mess louisiana made for itself until this evening. got another story a third done, will try to get it posted next week. it's more light-hearted and less 'true story' than grover's interview, so you'll probably like it more.

Goe, because the nearly man was nothing, he was never any use.