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Hello all, as I think we can all agree, poo poo sucks rn. I'd like to revive an old forums Thing, which is writing weird, interesting, or absurdist humor. poo poo like the albert einstein bear thread in the goldmine or old Seastead imaginary fiction. I figure we're all at home in full posting mode, so let's make some outsider art. Rules 1. Don't be a dick. 2. Don't be creepy. 3. Being super demanding about exact punctuation or esoteric old fashioned grammar is classist and worse, annoying. We're on the internet, 50 570|D |=!9|-|7!|\\|9 7|-|3 7!|)3 0|= |_!|\\|9(_)!57!( |)|2!|=7 4|\\||) \\/4|2!47!0|\\| Here is my story below, if you think it sucks prove it by writing your own. === You wake up as the sun rises. You've been going to bed earlier and earlier, and it feels like you've been getting old. You never thought it would happen to you; 10 years ago you spent all your time online, having arguments with strangers thousands of miles away about, in the view of history, nothing. That doesn't happen anymore. You get out of bed, your partner still waking up. You walk outside and smell the earthy aroma of your dwelling's garden. Some of your neighbors tend to their own, but you've always had a brown thumb, so the food coop takes the few square meters and grows peppers. The morning meal is just started, the cooks dishing out food to anyone with a tray, a few attendants there to help older or impaired members. There's a fair amount of people with reduced mobility, a result of some trauma in their past. Most people don't talk too much about it, although you hear that there's always a need for group support volunteers. Your meal is simple, by the standards of doritos and lemon-lime carbonated sodas. Today it's a bowl of steamed vegetables with rice, some carrots and bean dip, and coffee grown in the communal greenhouses. You admit, however, that letting someone more talented than you at cooking has it's benefits, and the portions were more than you'd grown used to. Things took a long time to change after Trump, and as a computer programmer with a lot of debt and not enough savings in the midst of a popped bubble, you lived on cheap ramen with a side of resentment for a while. As you sit to eat, your neighbors talk about the day ahead. It's still early in the season, and the farms are planning to expand again. They handily fed the 230 or so community members with what they had, but you hear that the leadership council is worried about shortages. Beans and rice store well, which was the idea with the last expansion, and the last you heard from your buddy in the coop the idea now was corn. Soil quality erosion had made the crop difficult to grow in bulk, but a commune's worth of compost and some steady rehabilitation has made it possible again. Your meal eaten, you get ready for your day's work. Being an electrician's assistant wasn't what you were expecting, but a adolescence spent sitting around in your underwear and watching pirated anime gives you a better skill at repairing things than you expected. For the most part, things are either easy to repair, since they are jerry rigged and often homebuilt. Still, a community a couple hours away got a modern electronics factory up, and today's the day your little group goes back online. You get to your work shed, where the boss is already finishing up a few relay stations. Small, ultramodern, and sporting the miracle new solar panels that ate light in a somewhat disconcerting way, more bending the light than absorbing it. Your station from yesterday is still there, most of a long range wireless setup, a few midrange laser LOS receivers for peak bandwidth coverage, and (rather optimistically, you think) a mounting socket for a satellite dish. GPS was still mostly working, public access maintained by whatever remained of the federal government. The hardware, mounted to the local water tower, would hopefully suffice for the limited number of users you could support. Farmers would finally be able to share tips and get confirmation, and a part of you guiltily hopes that the cooks look up new recipes. If the computer coop you traded this stuff from can be believed, there was going to be more and more hardware available now that USD was toilet paper and the group could just use the abandoned factory. It strikes you, then, how different it was to live without the constant scream of the online world. You really only talk with the local people these days, and most news comes from word of mouth and the odd solar truck trader. Once the tower goes online, you'll get to find out what's been happening. The tablets they sent you have a bulky, utilitarian air to them, but they work. The software came from the same people who built the network hardware, and for the most part the setup wasn't bad. After a few hours, you start to get a handshake back from four local nodes, the signal ranging for miles around. An itch comes to you then. So much has changed and, at least until you give out the rest of your tablets, the internet is just for you again. It was nice, finding a community online. Your job sucked, your real life friends were never free, and somehow having all those people around made it feel less maddening working yourself to death. Just like before, it's just you and the internet. And you know just where to go. Somewhere safe and warm. Beautiful, in it's own way. You'd see it so often back then, and maybe it was okay for you to hope. Maybe it survived. Just maybe. You navigate the tablet. The icons are pretty familiar, and it looks like Firefox was still the browser of choice for linux nerds. The address bar awaits you, and you begin to type, hoping. g. o. a. t. s. e. .. c. x. A tear comes to your eye. Even after all this time, the internet makes you stupid. T-man has issued a correction as of 09:00 on Mar 31, 2020 |
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Mar 31, 2020 08:58
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| # ? Apr 26, 2024 20:40 |
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Once upon a time.... Pee pee poo poo. Ffffufcucucucchhshshshshsjhskdkdldld.
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May 6, 2022 00:56
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tokin come get your innie
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May 6, 2022 01:43
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