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SurreptitiousMuffin
Mar 21, 2010
in and I would like the judges to gently caress me up

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SurreptitiousMuffin
Mar 21, 2010
anomalous blowout more like anonymous buttface

SurreptitiousMuffin
Mar 21, 2010
*ahem*

no

u

SurreptitiousMuffin
Mar 21, 2010

sebmojo posted:

:siren:Surreptitious Blowout Fungal Butt Brawl:siren:



Fungi are very weird aren't they, yes they are don't answer me it was a rhetorical question.

Write me up to 10,000 words on three characters in a world where the fungi have won. It can be neither bleak, nor grim, nor depressing.

Sitting here will help judge bc she is more mushroom than woman, these days

28 Feb 2359 PST, toxx up
I will, I'll do it in a box
I will, I'll do it with a :toxx:
I will beat AB here and there
I will beat AB everywhere

SurreptitiousMuffin
Mar 21, 2010
[removed for publication]

SurreptitiousMuffin fucked around with this message at 11:22 on Aug 15, 2019

SurreptitiousMuffin
Mar 21, 2010
In with a flash.

SurreptitiousMuffin
Mar 21, 2010
I'm told the 'dome has a rule against Google Docs. Let it be known that I, Muffin, am a rude boy who does a poo on your rules.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1aN4QLmiWyVb-aYn1IUgix-Cx6TC5MxEchUKWl90tjYQ/edit?usp=sharing

SurreptitiousMuffin
Mar 21, 2010

Anomalous Blowout posted:

THROWDOWN IN THE NURSING HOME!



Sittingmojo Idiot Show Brawlmania 2019

Write me up to 3000 words about an aging, retired wrestler. This is not a metaphor, your story must contain a wrestler and their wrestling must be relevant to the story. They don’t have to be the protag, though.

This bout for the belt ends at 2359 PST on 20th May.
hey weren't we meant to collab on something

can I anti-brawl

can I bet like "gently caress you coward write a story with me and somebody else will judge it"

is the 'dome too old for new toys

SurreptitiousMuffin
Mar 21, 2010
I WANNA DO SOME DOPE poo poo WITH GOOD PEOPLE

SurreptitiousMuffin
Mar 21, 2010

Anomalous Blowout posted:

What about doing terrible things with a horrible jerk?
I REFUSE TO DO TERRIBLE THINGS WITH A HORRIBLE JERK

IT'S A PITY YOU'RE AN EXCELLENT PERSON WHOSE WORDS AND CONDUCT I RESPECT U loving DINGDONG

SurreptitiousMuffin
Mar 21, 2010

Antivehicular posted:

You can and should also do Yoru's, btw

If you don't, I will buddy-write a story about petting a griffin with whoever wants to
Has Yoru been telling random people in the 'dome how much she loves griffons because goddam

also :toxx:

(USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST)

SurreptitiousMuffin
Mar 21, 2010
Sure, in.

SurreptitiousMuffin
Mar 21, 2010
Wetware

Henry Tavit tore out his own brain. That’s an abstraction, but abstraction is everything.

Look, let’s talk about computers. In 2006, a single bit flip in a Toyota Camry glued the accelerator pedal to the floor and took the car into a tree, killing the passenger instantly. The onboard computer between the pedal and the engine had over 10,000,000 lines of code. I bet you didn’t even know there was a computer there, cars are barely mechanical any more—they haven’t been for decades. It took three years to find the bug, and it was one solitary bit flip: 0 → 1, and a car goes into a tree.

Bookout v Toyota Motor Company took eight years. Toyota was found guilty of negligence, ordered to pay three million dollars: eighteen hours of their global profit, and significantly less than the cost of a Camry recall. The ‘05 Camry is still on the market. It’s a popular car; you probably pass at least one every day on the way to work, and every single one has—lurking somewhere in a gnarled grey matter of its codebase—the bug that killed Barbara Schwarz. This really happened. If you don’t believe me, ask your phone.

I don’t want to go into the details of how a Trimplant works so here’s the short version. There are about forty million lines of code in a chip the size of a grain of rice. It perches on the occipital lobe. You turn it on, and you trip balls.

The problem is, it’s always on. It’s not always active, but the difference killed Henry Tavit. When it’s on, it’s still processing data. The human brain is electric: neurons are pushed along their routes by tiny charges of bioelectricity. They factored it into the design, of course: the Trimplant leeches tiny microelectric charges to keep itself running, never more than it needs. Over the nine months, its spiderweb wiring dug into Henry’s occipital meat, and the electricity changed it. Piece by piece, in imperceptible fragments until—nine months after implantation, while he was in his apartment kitchen, knife in hand—a 0 turned into a 1.

The Trimplant was not poorly-designed. It was a marvel. The engineers knew the risks of putting hardware into a human brain, and they spared no expense in development. It hurts to say, because we want villains in these things, but the team who made the Trimplant were highly competent. They accounted for almost everything but they—like the engineers at Toyota, like the engineers who run our power grid, like every engineer for the last hundred years—weren’t gods. They didn’t think it would be a problem. Nobody worries about drowning in a stream but given enough time, streams will carve canyons from bedrock. The almost-imperceptible flow of bioelectricity took nine months, but it changed a 0 into a 1.

Standing in his kitchen at 3AM—half-sober, half-awake, making himself a grilled cheese—Henry started to trip. You ever had a New Certainty? Sometimes, when it leads us into the light, we call it an epiphany. Sometimes though, you wake up with red-eyed demons standing around your bed and your chest so tight it’s about to break open and disgorge your guts and you go oh, okay, I guess this is my reality now. Henry had the second type. He realised—as the drip-drip of water opened up a critical weakness and the ocean rushed in—that his house was alive, and hateful. He was in its belly, being slowly digested. The walls moved in and out, the rough timpani of a monstrous heart.

Henry was a clever man. On some level, he knew what was happening. On another level, a dark wave crashed down on him. The cameras in his home caught almost nothing: just a twitch, and a stillness. He stood in his underwear with his knife halfway into a block of cheese, almost comical. His two halves fought in silence. Then, without speaking, he smashed his head against the kitchen window. Once, twice, cracks spiderwebbing out like a cruel echo of the wiring in his brain. Three times, and he opened up a hole. He gulped at the cool autumn air like a fish on the dock, opened up gashes on his chin, his cheeks. Sliced open the soft cartilage of his nose. His expression remained fixed: dead-eyed, staring into the distance.

Whatever part of him stayed cogent kicked in. It knew what was happening. It could stop it, or die. It had a kitchen knife, and very little time. Henry Tavit died performing neurosurgery on himself at 3AM, in his kitchen, with a model of the human brain open on his laptop. He opened a slit on the back of his neck—close, to access the occipital lobe, but inches-as-miles from where it needed to be—and struck his spinal column with the blade. Collapsed to the floor, gasping, no feeling below the neck. He broke his neck when he fell, and blood flowed into his airway and lungs. The dishwasher grumbled, as though the whole house were laughing. Henry Tavit died on his kitchen floor, surrounded by demons.

The Trimplant is still on the market. The next bit-flip might happen to a surgeon, or a pilot, or a president. A recall of installed units is almost impossible, and a recall of units on shelves is costly enough that the accountancy department quietly nodded to themselves and made the company forget. The court case is ongoing. The story appeared on newsfeeds as a suicide. It didn’t last a day before the tide carried it away.

SurreptitiousMuffin
Mar 21, 2010
Yeah sure I'm in.

SurreptitiousMuffin
Mar 21, 2010
Milk and Honey

Callum sat with his guts in his hands, surrounded by gold bricks, scorched turf and Prussian corpses. They’d been absolute bastards to the man—the remnants of Von Tempsky’s old unit, scalp-takers and cannibals all—but nobody deserved to die in loving Otago. Callum should’ve died in Scotland, like every man of his blood before him, but he’d cut the fuses half an inch too long. Timing wasn’t exactly an issue when you used the poo poo for mining: you made the fuses as long as possible, and if they took a long time to blow then you went out for a sandwich break with the lads. Half an inch of fuse, maybe ten seconds’ difference, and his belly was laid open on the turf. Half an inch, because it was cold and his hands were shaking and he barely had enough left to buy food, let alone gloves.

His skin was freezing cold, but his guts were burning hot. It was like all the heat in his body were pulling inwards, t’wards the heart, mounting a brave rearguard to keep the rest of his bits alive. It wasn’t working. He couldn’t feel his legs. He picked up a gold brick, and tapped it against his tooth. It went clink, like it should. The last shipment out of Otago before the mines closed, now spread out all across the highlands, mixed in with little bits of blast-grilled German savage; mercenaries, not paid nearly enough to find themselves spread out to the winds. They took scalps because they’d heard native folks did it. Wrong continent for that business entirely, but nobody felt the need to correct them.

Four hundred-thousand pounds worth of gold, destined for London, for the fingers and necks of lordly ladies. More money in one brick than Callum had seen in his lifetime. He spat, and it painted the turf red. The pain hollowed him out like rot inside a tooth. He panted and tried to stay conscious, but night was coming and there weren’t poo poo he could do about it. His da had come from the other highlands—the real highlands—after the clearances drove the family north, to Inverness. Otago wasn’t home, but it was close enough; the place was emptier than Am Fuckin Monadh Ruadh.

Like the highlands back home, there was nothing left. Not a nugget of gold: not above-ground, not in the rivers, not anywhere you could reach with a practicable quantity of dynamite. Boys like Callum had flooded south with gold in their eyes, and come out with dust in their bellies. Thousands of them, tens of thousands, all for it to dry up in less than ten years. Up north they were so pressed for land they were killing brown men for it, but Otago had empty town after empty town stretched out across the hills like so many winter flowers. There was plenty of space—maybe they just liked killing brown men. Some of the gold would stay in-country: make its way to Wellington, fund more bullets to fight more Maori. There weren’t enough land, apparently. He’d heard that one back home, when they started dragging families out of the highlands, pushing them to Inverness and Aberdeen and Glasgow—they needed more space. Now there was nothing but space and silence. Silence in the Waikato, silence in Am Monadh Ruadh, silence across the Otago highlands—boundless, monstrous silence filled only by the dull clinking of gold.

Callum had nothing left to do but die, but instead he sang. It sent a shudder through him, from his balls to his tailbone and then off up his spine, but he sang. He didn’t know many songs that fit right: it was mostly miners’ and sailors’ stuff about girlies back home and how very well they filled out their clothes. There was one though, that da had sung sometimes. Burns? Probably Burns. It was always fuckin’ Burns. His tenor came out through blood and foaming spit, liquid and sloppy, tinged purple by the ache in his guts.

Farewell to the mountains, high-cover'd with snow,
Farewell to the straths and green vallies below;


The Company would find the gold. They had a system in place for this sort of thing. Half the plan was about keeping the damned cart in one piece so he could ride it away. Rocks fall in front of Germans, Germans come to a stop, threaten Germans with further demolition unless they leave the gold and gently caress off back to Dunedin. Best laid plans and all that. Callum didn’t know robbery: he knew mining. For a moment it had seemed like one could become the other but that moment had all gone up in cordite smoke. In the burning glare of hindsight, he knew it had never been a clever plan, but hell—when all you’ve got in dynamite, everybody looks like a goldmine.

It hadn’t blown when it was meant to of course, so he’d run—worthless fireheaded tin-cocked fool—to check on it. Saw the Germans actually moving through the pass un-stopped, run to check on the sticks, rounded the corner just in time to see the whole drat highlands come to pieces. The blast had taken out at least one of his eardrums, and sent a bullet-sized piece of rock into his stomach and out the other side. Shucked his belly like an old woman working wi’ peas, spilt him out over the stone. He was a dead man and he knew it—the message just hadn’t reached his heart yet.

With nothing better to do, in defiance of God and Country and the gold rush and the clearances and the bastard cannibal Germans and the Company, Callum sang while the light faded.

Farewell to the forests and wild-hanging woods,
Farewell to the torrents and loud-pouring floods.
My heart’s in the highlands, my heart is not—

SurreptitiousMuffin
Mar 21, 2010
p ost dont wait until sunda y u cowards

SurreptitiousMuffin
Mar 21, 2010
waiting until last minute is for FOOLS

your mum probably looks at you like "what an absolute TIT I raised" and she's right loving post u coward

SurreptitiousMuffin
Mar 21, 2010
Yeah sure in under the wire

SurreptitiousMuffin
Mar 21, 2010
sure, I've been slack and I will be in

SurreptitiousMuffin
Mar 21, 2010
In

SurreptitiousMuffin
Mar 21, 2010
:toxx:

sebmojo posted:

On the solid assumption that muffin and as sneaks toxx up for this, I will judge it.

400 words, due 25 sept high noon nzt, "the hole underneath the ramshackle farmhouse"

SurreptitiousMuffin
Mar 21, 2010
Year 3, lost in the anal inroads.

I have not seen my beloved Jeremy in many years. It smells like rear end in here.

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SurreptitiousMuffin
Mar 21, 2010
it is 9pm local time in the last year of our founding decade

One last time, let our voices rise together in chorus:

PROM<PTP

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