Ingredients
1 incomplete childhood. Abandonment from birth preferred but in a pinch a tragic bus/train/car accident during formative years is a reasonable substitute.
4 medium-sized memories of the taste of other kids’ school lunches, peculiar sandwiches appearing for a week a year and then gone without a trace. Each taste varying inexplicably, as though house-smells have been [...]
He’s lethargic, hasn’t slept properly in months now. Burning the candle at both ends, obligations both day and night. He’s a philantropist, a man of his community, giving his all to a city that doesn’t know who he really is. Can’t even blame drinking or stimulants like what seems like the rest of the world, [...]
A note about definitions.*
Now, that aside, I would like to attack the attack the idea of morality within games. A game in this instance being (like a video or board game) a simplified set of rules which establish a context for an actor to navigate. The rules can be as simple or complex as need [...]
I’m bad with directions.
I don’t know what it is but by the second direction I’m given verbally and maybe the 6th on paper I start to have problems. Be it on buses, foot, and I’d imagine by car, it doesn’t seem to matter. Some part of me thinks that it’s a consequence of never having [...]
“They’re following us, you know,” she said to me one night as we were walking home from the theatre. We’d been joking and laughing; the ice slick and our giddy fear of slip-sliding down the hill or into traffic adding a nervous edge to the dialogue.
I stopped and looked around. “What do you mean? Who?” [...]
I hit F5 once more and wait a few moments while the screen repopulates, looking through the columns for the third time this morning. Nothing’s changed, of course, but once in a long while you hit that perfect point when you’re in sync with a guy in shipping/receiving somewhere when he’s scanning in that [...]
Is this you?
Cut to a pair of hands clawing at a roll of saran wrap, trying to find some purchase on the cylinder.
Has this ever happened to you?
Cut to a pair of hands haplessly attempting to form hamburgers out of cold beef.
I think we’ve all had enough of this!
Cut to a man grasping at the [...]
Second post in and I’m already breaking the longform rule, alas.
I just wanted to address some of the purpose of the blog in general and do something I hadn’t previously thought to do.
While this is definitely a place to showcase longform work specifically to the sort of people who are interested in longform work (it’s [...]
The two combatants squared off, regarding each other across the flat white plane of snow dotted only with the faint slender brushstrokes of a few sparse trees in the distance. Pete’s breath hung lazily in the frigid air as he considered Ragnar the Bandit King.
Ragnar was shorter than he’d expected, but no less fearsome for it. Clad in furs from only the fiercest and strongest of bears; kodiaks, polar bears. Some say the bears themselves were nine feet tall and that Ragnar wrestled them to death with his own bare hands. The furs were stained and filthy with dirt and blood but somehow still took on a regal cast. He hefted a massive bastard sword, taller than himself and notched from battles with foes past. His beard was a thing to behold, long and braided with the gleaming spoils of many a raid woven into it.