/* Dear everyone, everywhere: none of these characters are based on people I know personally. At least not yet. All of the names are based on what sounds cool, so if you see your own name, I sure as hell was not writing about you. However, if you're a girl, just because I'm not writing about you doesn't mean I'd rule anything out. Just an FYI. */
Dillon
The attractive biker woman was fastening her helmet. Dillon had maybe thirty steps from the door to where they parked to think of something to say. Not to ask her out...oh heavens no. She was like way older than him. Just to be cool around her. Something inside him, some primal urge was screaming that this was the moment, his moment, to act sort of cool around this woman that he'd probably never see again, or regret it forever for the rest of his life.
In all of that time the best he could up up with was "nice bike." Give him credit; he did spend a large part of the walk thinking about how much he would regret saying nothing. It wasn't a bad line anyway. Well, until he said it.
"Heyuhgh....nice b-bike." Dillon's face colored red from the neck up. His one chance and he sounded like a twelve year old.
"Thanks. It needs gas," said the woman. Dillon hurried to his truck, not looking at her. "You know where I can get some?" she asked.
Dillon realized he had an excuse to talk to her more and brightened up. "Sure! Yeah. There's a gas station down the street." He nodded in the direction.
"Which way, that way?" the woman pointed.
"Yeah. Actually, I need gas too, you can follow me."
At the gas station, Dillon pretended he was looking at the screen--well actually he was trying to look at the screen, but the woman's cleavage was clearly visible just past the gas machine. He could see her face too. Which meant, he then realized, she could see his.
"Shouldn't you buy me dinner first?" she asked.
Dillon's head snapped up to her face. Well practiced. He had to do it every day walking to class. "What?"
The woman shook her head. "I usually make guys buy me dinner first."
"Before what?"
"Well you're undressing me with your eyes...."
"Yeah," Dillon admitted.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
"Oh yeah?" she asked again.
Dillon nodded.
"Well..." The woman lifted the pump handle back onto its socket. She didn't let go first, and although it is odd to think that she'd just been standing there for five minutes resting her hand on the pump, it would be odder still if the average sportbike could take all that gas. The woman walked towards him. "I like steak."
Instead of speaking Dillon tried to work out what the hell she was talking about.
The woman grabbed his hand and wrote on it with a sharpie. Dillon didn't resist because she was hot.
Angela
100 Duff Road
8pm
xoxo
As Angela reached the xo's Dillon became increasingly nervous, as she was writing on the back of his hand in permanent marker. "I didn't need the x's...."
"I don't know. Sometimes guys chicken out." Angela winked at him. Then she walked away.
Avery
The officer looked at him smugly. "I'm sorry sir but your cycling license has been revoked by the State of Washington. Its going to be a while before you can put on a helmet." The man was not sorry.
Avery looked down at his bicycle and then up at the cop. As the tiniest gesture of defiance, he put his bicycle helmet on anyway as he walked away. The trick was to make it looked like you didn't know you were defiant; these privatized cops were real shitheads. Public servants sometimes shot unarmed people just because you were running away. The cops that worked in for-profit precincts shot you just because.
Avery was on hit motorcycle when he ran into the same cop again. The were both stopped at the same light. It seemed highly unlikely that he would happen to run into the same guy. Just as unlikely as the cop recognizing him with his helmet on, but it happened.
That's when the piano music started. Avery heard it clearly; the notes rang out as if there was a concert hall in his head. First a b flat, and then higher note twice, then coming back down.... It always preceded something rash. It was as if his subconscious knew beforehand when he was going to do something stupid. Avery was sure though, that this time, this time it was wrong. The bitchy ass cop was probably ecstatic to see him; profit cops got commissions on their tickets. The piano notes were wrong. He wasn't going to do anything rash. He had a "speeding" savings account set aside specifically for situations like this. He was just going to pull over and deal with the screwball again. The piano notes were louder. That was usually right before they stopped. They were going to stop this time, all on their own, with no incident. Avery was sure of it, until the stop turned on his lights, and accompanied their presence with just a single blip of the siren. The piano notes stopped.
Avery gunned the throttle. He'd been keeping tabs on traffic and had a hole ready in the crossing lanes. The cop followed, slowed slightly. Avery wondered how the cop had found him, first on the bicycle, and now on the bike. How did a cop so fortuitously discover his position on the one day that he absolutely had to drive? Then he remembered: his cell phone. By government mandate every cell phone produced after a certain date reported his gps location to the telco, which really meant to the goverment. Avery didn't know what that date was, but he should have. He worked at one of the companies that wrote the software to track people. Not really do the tracking, but ball it up nice and pretty on a map for law enforcement to look at.
Avery stopped the bike and threw his cell phone into a trash can. The action cost him precious seconds, during with the cop caught up. It is dangerous enough to ride a motorcycle in urban areas where you are just one idiot away from getting doored, but it is quite another to evade someone who passed specific training on how to catch you, especially when the only training you received was to find some random book called "The Art of Driving" and try to apply it to motorcycles. He hadn't even finished the book yet.
Avery needed to make up time. He rode like a man with a death wish until he spotted some oil on the road. It took some time to find; time enough to add two more cops on his ass. And it was not actual, real oil, because that only shows up in movies, but some substance that was clearly slippery. Avery headed for it, knee out, in a racing turn.
The average person can probably imagine happens to every motorcycle in the world when it hits oil, gravel, or even water while leaned over so far the rider sticks a knee out. The bike slams all the way down, slides away, and usually the rider at least survives. If you somehow had the acrobatic chops of a Circ De Soleil performer you would still have the problem of the throttle on the low handlebar, because your knees alone won't be able to hold the gas tank up.
If you made everything 2d, you could probably get a bunch of engineers to draw out the force equations, with the torque, and the momentum, and the angular momentum, and the coefficients of friction, and the coefficients of static friction, and the centripetal force, and the centrifugal "force." It would probably take them 20 minutes though.
Avery saw all of that in an instant. It blazed in his mind like a tiny snowflake, and every moment of the turn he watched the strands of that snowflake stretch and flex as he entered the turn, hit the oil patch, and the tires "lost traction." He could see all of the counteracting forces with his minds eye as he applied just the right pressure in all of the right places to keep the bike upright without redlining the throttle.
The bike appeared to do an impossible skid sideways on both wheels. Had, by some miracle, any other man made it that far he would have been thrown clear when the front tire gained traction and high sided him over the handlebars. Avery did not fly off. He felt the steel man take over, and grip with his hands, and the hundreds of frantic thoughts fell away in those endless moments as the bike skidded and he did not fall from the sharp jerk when the tires gained traction. Then he was away.
Behind him, the first cop was distracted by the side of a strafing motorcycle and was undone by the oil patch. The second cop could not have made a turn like that at high speed anyway, and drove through a wall. The third cop, however, had plenty of time and remained on Avery's tail.
The steel man was gone. Avery was all nerves and adrenaline. He jumped on the highway, because that's what he always did. Statistics show that most people got off the highway when they run, so he always got on.
The cop behind him shot at him. Avery tried to remember if the commission on a dead traffic violator was higher than a life one, but he drew a blank. Avery began dodging the bike side to side, but before long he was in a predictable pattern and the second bullet struck the top of his helmet. The entire thing split and it didn't take long before it impeded his vision. He ripped it off his head and gunned the throttle. If he could make it to the other side, he could get lost in the ghetto. It was surprisingly tough to local a motorcycle by sound alone in that area.
Ahead, he saw the bridge. There was no traffic. Just a line of police vehicles with their lights on. They were waiting for him.
Avery took the last exit, turned left, and turned left onto the high way. And that's when things got real shitty. Something flew in his eye. It was hard enough seeing anything at all with the amount of squinting he had to do; flying along the highway with a speck of debris in there felt like a tiny little knife stabbing him over and over again. But there was no stopping now.
Avery was in the second lane from the left. He closed his eyes, leaned into the gentle curve, and followed the road by listening to the cars around him. It was like a game of marco polo, only the objects were racing through the air like rockets. He followed their sounds, ignored the sirens, and stayed near one of two of them.
Then by reflex he blinked at the debris was out of his eye, or at least pushed to the corner where it hurt far less. Avery did a couple move he learned from the mysterious art of driving book and lost the cops.
You could ask Avery why he went through all that just to avoid a traffic stop, but he wouldn't understand the question.
Bella
"Yeah, that's what my girlfriend says," said Ed. They had transitioned to the park for a walk.
"Wait, what?" said Bella.
"Yeah my girlfriend."
"You have a girlfriend?!?"
"Yeah, what's the big deal?" said Ed. Bella felt her heart sink to the pit of her stomach and explode there.
"Then what are you doing this for?"
"Oh, no, see, I'm poly."
"What?"
"Poly-amorous."
"So, what does that mean, you cheat on your girlfriend?"
"No, oh no no no its not cheating. Have you ever heard of an open relationship?"
"Uh, isn't that like, what creepy people do, like swingers and orgies and stuff?"
"Yes--no! Orgies aren't creepy," said Ed. "Oh Bella, the things I am going to teach you...." He touched her shoulder awkwardly as he trailed off. The trailing off part of his speech took too long. Bella noted that this moment was the creepiest part of their conversation so far. "Polyamory is like open relationships, only more meaningful."
"How is sleeping with a bunch of different people meaningful?"
"We're not limiting ourselves to a single partner. We're not shackled by ignorance or victorian morality. The vanillas--that's our word for closed minded people like you--think we're weird but we're actually more free."
"So your girlfriend is seeing other people?"
"Yeah, see the way it works is she's my primary, and the five other guys are-"
'Five?"
"Yeah. Five. Yeah she's really hot," said Ed with a dreamy face.
"So how many others you seeing?" asked Bella.
"Oh, well, uh...let's see...well just the one, right now...I mean I'm on this date with you."
Wilbur
Weirdly, Wilbur was not hungry. He was walking through an upscale back yard--fuck the 1%--when he spotted a chair that looked completely out of place on the deck of a jacuzzi. Little did he know, thanks to a poor understanding of statistics, that the property he trespassed on, elegant as it was, was owned by someone no where near the top 1% of income.
Wilbur had an inexplicable urge to sit in the chair.
"Huh," he said. "Well if I was a rich motherfucker I could see how this chair would really tie the room together.
"Take a picture," said a female voice, "it'll last longer."
Kim had just happened to be sunbathing in the nude when the stranger entered her backyard and failed to notice her. She also had no problem with him wandering around until he sat in the chair.
Fern
Fern found the park road easily enough. She parked on the side behind Gideon and followed him into the forest.
"There they are," said Gideon.
"Did you call it in?"
"Not everyone is as prompt as you."
Fern raised her eyebrows and donned a pair of gloves. She stepped over the bodies. The jeans of the male were around his knees. The female was covered in bruises. Fern raised one of the arms and looked at the bite marks Gideon had told her about.
"What do you reckon?" asked Gideon.
"Well..." Fern paused.
"Go on."
"It looks kind of human."
"Human? You're saying a person did this? Did they do it to each other?'
Fern looked more closely at the bite. "Human, only...hm." She pushed the dead man's lips apart, and then the girl's. "I don't think so. But the bites look every close to human. I'll know more when we get these two back to the lab.
"The lab? Why do you have to go back to the lab? What are you going to do there?" asked Gideon.
Fern rolled her eyes. "Just go with it."
Character #34
Character 34 found a small mini mart called Templeton's. There was a girl behind the counter. She probably wasn't Templeton. Unless Templeton was her last name? Character 34 looked at the food. Weirdly, he wasn't hungry.
Dillon
Dillon scrubbed his hand furiously. There was no way his mom could see this. He had written Angela's address down, yes. Written it down, written it down again, copied it, typed it, emailed it to himself and backed up the text just to be sure. It was strange that Angela hadn't given him her number and only an address. There was a chance that people were waiting there to kidnap him and harvest his organs. He would have to take that chance. And he couldn't tell anyone where he was going.
The scrubbing results were not satisfactory. Maybe a bandage? Pretend he hurt his hand? That wouldn't fly--his mom would ask even more questions. He made it in managing to keep at least one hand in a pocket, but he'd drawn enough suspicion. There was no way he'd make it back out.
Then he thought of it: hold something! He tried every object in his room but eventually settled on a duffel bag. He cut the straps and reattached them with duct tape so they would be shorter and his hand would be closer to the top of the bag, which is where he casually added a sweatshirt on top, twisted just enough to cover the writing on his hand. What would he do when he came back home? Who knew.
Monday, July 30, 2012
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
On the Rocks
Tonight I have failed to do something that I don't understand and now my girlfriend is mad at me. Here is the conversation:
Her: :)
Me: What's up
Her: Hi
Me: Hello
Her: It is like pulling teeth with you babe...
Me: Sorry
Me: I'm hungry
Her: That's not helping your cause
Me: hunger is always a worthy cause Especially mine
Her: Omg. You genuinely don't get it.
And that was the last text I received from her tonight. I know for certain that she is mad or disappointed but I am not sure what the issue is. I thought she just wanted me to try to make conversation with her but it seems like something else.
I think past adventures have conditioned me to pull back and say less at the first sign of trouble, and that is the opposite of what she wants, which is to be showered with affection. I could be wrong though.
Whatever happens, it was nice to be with someone for a while. She was a lot more pleasant than a lot of the girls I've hung around.
Weirdly, now I'm not hungry.
Her: :)
Me: What's up
Her: Hi
Me: Hello
Her: It is like pulling teeth with you babe...
Me: Sorry
Me: I'm hungry
Her: That's not helping your cause
Me: hunger is always a worthy cause Especially mine
Her: Omg. You genuinely don't get it.
And that was the last text I received from her tonight. I know for certain that she is mad or disappointed but I am not sure what the issue is. I thought she just wanted me to try to make conversation with her but it seems like something else.
I think past adventures have conditioned me to pull back and say less at the first sign of trouble, and that is the opposite of what she wants, which is to be showered with affection. I could be wrong though.
Whatever happens, it was nice to be with someone for a while. She was a lot more pleasant than a lot of the girls I've hung around.
Weirdly, now I'm not hungry.
Sunday, July 22, 2012
I'm not going to completely spoil Dark Knight Rises for you....
However the movie kinds of sucks. It is about two and a half hours of Bane destroying Batman and Gotham city in a completely not-fun-to-watch way, and then like a half hour of what the entire movie should have been.
Seriously...I am so disappointed I don't know how to handle it. This is like the last ten times a girl I was in love with rejected me, only less painful, and with a strong desire to tell everyone I know that I didn't like the movie. Why do I have this desire? No one cares. But I have this burning need to tell everyone that the movie was not the epic conclusion I was hoping it out to be.
Would you like to be as disappointed about the movie as I am? Watch The Saint first.
Seriously...I am so disappointed I don't know how to handle it. This is like the last ten times a girl I was in love with rejected me, only less painful, and with a strong desire to tell everyone I know that I didn't like the movie. Why do I have this desire? No one cares. But I have this burning need to tell everyone that the movie was not the epic conclusion I was hoping it out to be.
Would you like to be as disappointed about the movie as I am? Watch The Saint first.
Friday, July 20, 2012
Three Hours of Sex
Well, shit.
Secondly, this post is not about what you think it is. If it was, I would have titled it...actually I probably shouldn't share that.
Anyway.
I am getting fat. Yeah...I know...me. So that's happening. I've always told myself that all you need to do to change your body weight is just completely change your lifestyle. Well, turns out that your lifestyle isn't actually that easy to change.
Instead, I've begun looking at what I eat. For reference, the whole...juice made from fruit thing is not going well because I don't have an extra hour every day to run and clean the juicer. Sometimes I have a spare 60 seconds in the morning. Anyway.
I think the culprit is soda. I still drink a fair bit of soda, especially when I buy something spicy. I tried reducing the amount of soda I drink. I've gotten it down to about 3 sodas a day. You don't want to know how much I used to drink. Seriously you don't--especially based on the reactions I get when I tell people about the 3 sodas.
It is very difficult for me to go less than three sodas a day because it is so tasty--especially "Mexican Code" which contains sugar and not corn syrup. Here is my new strategy: what if I just give in to three sodas a day? Three should hold me over: zero for breakfast because it is too early for my digestive track to deal with CO2, two for lunch, and one for dinner. What if I just gave in and simply added the minimum amount of physical activity that I needed in order to cancel out the sodas to my daily routine?
After an extensive study based mostly on the first website I found after a google search, I have some numbers. Strangely enough, no one seems interesting in calculating the grams of sugar per ounce of soda. People just keep listing the exact amounts of sugar in various products. I can't remember all that! I'm just going to be standing in a restaurant picking a drink size. So I did some calculations:
Soda appears to have between 3 and 4 grams of sugar per ounce.
There are somewhere between 3.87 and 4 calories in a gram of sugar.
If we assume that I drink 3 soft drinks a day, and if we assume, for a nice upper bound, that they are each 20 oz, we get:
3 * 20 oz * 4 g/oz * 4 cal/g = 960 calories
Well, shit.
I had no idea I was taking in an extra thousand calories every day. I mean...damn. This explains a lot. Anyway. To the exercise!
I could have looked up various activities, but lets face it, you aren't going to be surprised one bit that the first and only activity I looked up was sex:
288 cal / h
That seems a bit low. Like, really low. Like people usually burn thousands during a marathon, and I think the two are comparable. But I digress. How many hours of sex do I need to make up for the soda?
960 cal * 1/288 h/cal = 3 hours of sex
I'm not going to go into detail, but you might say that some people would think that 3 hours of sex every day is a phenomenal idea, and some people think that figure is not very much fun at all.
Hmm...apparently you only burn 124 calories while running. Maybe the sex number is not that inac--hey wait a minute. 3 sodas? 3 hours of sex? Does sex burn 1 20oz soda per hour?
1 can of soda * 20oz * 4g/oz * 4cal/g * 1h/288cal = 1.11 hours
Maybe I did the math wrong but if I did that's boring so don't look at it too closely because
Think about that.
[Edit]
Ok 10 full minutes of pushups would burn a whopping....96 calories. I can't do pushups for 10 minutes.
Maybe I should make one of the sodas a diet.
[Edit]
Also: Dear Chris, the interview went well. Thanks for asking.
[Edit]
Ok Rob pointed out that actually the 124 calories is per mile. So maybe that is doable.
Secondly, this post is not about what you think it is. If it was, I would have titled it...actually I probably shouldn't share that.
Anyway.
I am getting fat. Yeah...I know...me. So that's happening. I've always told myself that all you need to do to change your body weight is just completely change your lifestyle. Well, turns out that your lifestyle isn't actually that easy to change.
Instead, I've begun looking at what I eat. For reference, the whole...juice made from fruit thing is not going well because I don't have an extra hour every day to run and clean the juicer. Sometimes I have a spare 60 seconds in the morning. Anyway.
I think the culprit is soda. I still drink a fair bit of soda, especially when I buy something spicy. I tried reducing the amount of soda I drink. I've gotten it down to about 3 sodas a day. You don't want to know how much I used to drink. Seriously you don't--especially based on the reactions I get when I tell people about the 3 sodas.
It is very difficult for me to go less than three sodas a day because it is so tasty--especially "Mexican Code" which contains sugar and not corn syrup. Here is my new strategy: what if I just give in to three sodas a day? Three should hold me over: zero for breakfast because it is too early for my digestive track to deal with CO2, two for lunch, and one for dinner. What if I just gave in and simply added the minimum amount of physical activity that I needed in order to cancel out the sodas to my daily routine?
After an extensive study based mostly on the first website I found after a google search, I have some numbers. Strangely enough, no one seems interesting in calculating the grams of sugar per ounce of soda. People just keep listing the exact amounts of sugar in various products. I can't remember all that! I'm just going to be standing in a restaurant picking a drink size. So I did some calculations:
Soda appears to have between 3 and 4 grams of sugar per ounce.
There are somewhere between 3.87 and 4 calories in a gram of sugar.
If we assume that I drink 3 soft drinks a day, and if we assume, for a nice upper bound, that they are each 20 oz, we get:
3 * 20 oz * 4 g/oz * 4 cal/g = 960 calories
Well, shit.
I had no idea I was taking in an extra thousand calories every day. I mean...damn. This explains a lot. Anyway. To the exercise!
I could have looked up various activities, but lets face it, you aren't going to be surprised one bit that the first and only activity I looked up was sex:
288 cal / h
That seems a bit low. Like, really low. Like people usually burn thousands during a marathon, and I think the two are comparable. But I digress. How many hours of sex do I need to make up for the soda?
960 cal * 1/288 h/cal = 3 hours of sex
I'm not going to go into detail, but you might say that some people would think that 3 hours of sex every day is a phenomenal idea, and some people think that figure is not very much fun at all.
Hmm...apparently you only burn 124 calories while running. Maybe the sex number is not that inac--hey wait a minute. 3 sodas? 3 hours of sex? Does sex burn 1 20oz soda per hour?
1 can of soda * 20oz * 4g/oz * 4cal/g * 1h/288cal = 1.11 hours
Maybe I did the math wrong but if I did that's boring so don't look at it too closely because
EVERY SODA YOU DRINK REQUIRES AN HOUR OF SEX TO WORK OFF
Think about that.
[Edit]
Ok 10 full minutes of pushups would burn a whopping....96 calories. I can't do pushups for 10 minutes.
Maybe I should make one of the sodas a diet.
[Edit]
Also: Dear Chris, the interview went well. Thanks for asking.
[Edit]
Ok Rob pointed out that actually the 124 calories is per mile. So maybe that is doable.
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
[fiction] Fifty Thrones of Shade - Part 2
Dillon
When Dillon entered the Church sanctuary the part with the standing and singing had just concluded in favor of the part with the sitting an talking. Everyone in the room was doing that gay thing where you are supposed to turn to your neighboor and whisper some retarded phrase that middle aged people love.
There was a noticable hold near the back, in the center. No one was talking to purple biker girl. At first Dillon thought she was lucky, and then he realized that people were glaring at her. Her bike outfit had a tiny little red cartoon devil on it, which Dillon, being a learned boy himself, easily recognized was the BSD Mascot. The old ladies near purple biker girl, however, did not, and were not amused!
Dillon glanced down to where his family sat. Always there, in this wedge shaped block of pews that was there to--you know what? Its not important. There was like no room down there. Dillon slid into the pew next to the biker woman. Every foot he slid raised the tent in his pants higher and higher until his was forced to stop moving simply to avoid making it noticeable.
There is a point in time, that probably varies by person, which is about 72 hours after the last time a man has had sex, that his testosterone levels have returned to normal and his hormones are once again at full blast. When that man is a boy, and when that boy hasn't had sex or any kind of one-person fascimile for over three weeks because of some kind of cultural religious thing, and when that boy spends every waking moment with his blood frothing with the chemical hormonal mixture of a typical 18 year old...well...you can't expect that boy so hear a single fucking word from the talking guy on the sanctuary dais.
Dillon grabbed a Bible from the back of the bench in front of him and opened it, trying to get a good angle so that he could see the woman's boobs out of the corner of his eye. To his surprise, the woman slowly reached up and grabbed the zipper, unzipping it slowly, slowly, every so slowly, presumably to avoid making any distracting noise...one notch at a time down until the V was a very vertical V and just the tinest bit of side boob was in view. Then she lowered her hand. For a second, as she did so, her finger trailed the zipper line below her cleavage.
Weirdly, Dillon was not hungry.
/*note: biker girl is Angela */
Scott
Scott sat at the kitchen table, twirling the pan. He had to decisions to make.
Pancakes?
Pancakes.
Waffles? Pancakes. Waffles? Pancakes?
Waffles.
Strawberries?
Waffles and Strawberries?
Waffles.
Ham steak? Waffles. Ham steak and waffles?
Waffles.
Cold pizza? Cold pizza. Waffles? Cold fucking piz--
The doorbell rang.
Scott cracked the screen door open and peered around it. "Officer," he said.
"Name's Gideon," said the cop. Gideon could smell the bacon smell. Weirdly, he wasn't hungry. "Got a few questions."
"Uhhhhh" Scott groaned.
"Someone broke into the Plankerton's last night. Stole a chair from their living room."
"No..."
"I'm afraid so."
"Not the..."
"Yes," affirmed Gideon.
"But that really tied the room together."
"So everyone tells me. You have a truck that could carry chair, right?"
"Oh sure, yeah you could get a chair in there. Maybe brush it out first. Wait...noooo..."
"Where were you between...last night and this morning, last night?"
"I was asleep! You can't think it was me; I was asleep! I can show you the drool its on my desk."
Gideon frowned.
Jim
"What was that?" asked Jess.
Jim looked up from the military style compass in his hands. Then he shrugged. "I didn't hear anything. Lets go. This way."
Due South. Roughly two miles of it. That's all they needed, Jim hoped, to get frisky without a pesky park ranger ruining their sexventure. Sexscapade? Sexventure. Jim planned to work on the title later.
"So did you ever hear the one about the grizzle bears?" said Jess. She followed Jim down a short, leaf covered hill.
"No."
"It goes something like...'instructions for avoiding bears.' The best thing to do is wear bells, so the bear hears and avoids you, and bear mace in case they come too close. It is also important to tell black bears and grizzly bears apart by their droppings. Black bear droppings often contains berries and other food items. Grizzly bear droppings often contain little bells and smell like bear mace."
Jim laughed. Then he stopped and looked at his military grade compass again.
"Oh would you stop that?" Jess slapped the compass out of his hand. "No one in around." Then the grinned.
Jim thought he heard a sound in the woods, but was distracted by the sight of Jess sinking to her knees, her skirt billowing out around her folded legs, her soft flesh sinking into the pine needles on the forest floor.
"Did you hear..." Jim trailed off to the sound of his zipper being undone, and his visual survey of the forest was quickly interrupted as his eyes rolled up into his head and he moaned.
He looked down, watching Jess's head bobing. Then there was a large, unmistakeable crash. Jess' head stopped bobing. Jim looked up.
Jim screamed.
Bella
The waitress came with their final bill.
Ed looked up. "Actually we're going to split it, um...?"
"Lisa," said waitress Lisa. She took the bill back to split it.
"That's what people do now," said Ed with a smile.
"I wouldn't know," said Bella, "its been so long since I've been on a date...." A total lie.
"Me too." The truth. "There are like no girls on the internets," explained Ed. "Speaking of which, do you play anything? World of Warcraft? Doda? Diablo? Maybe a little Nethack?"
"Um...Softball?" asked Bella.
"What is that, like Madden?" asked Ed.
"Here you go. Thanks a lot," said Lisa.
When they were out of the cafe Ed brought up the contract again.
"So this contract thing, I think the first thing we'll do, you know if you're interested, is you'll be under my protection."
"And that means, what, exactly? You save me from muggers?"
"No no no, I don't lower myself to such thuggery. Being under protection means that if someone wants to talk to you, they have to talk to me first. And then you know we can talk about collaring, and...."
"What if they talk to me?" asked Bella.
"They just have to talk to me first. It's not a big deal," said Ed.
"What if they don't bother talking to you first?" asked Bella.
Ed stopped walking. He looked as if she had just asked what if mothers leave their babies in the hospital. "Woah. That is a big deal. That is totally breaking the protocol. They can't just talk to you first. They have to talk to me first, because you are under my protection."
"But what if they don't?"
Ed shifted his weight back and forth between his feet. "I didn't want to get into the particulars about this, but they sort of have to ask permission."
"What prevents them from just, you know, sending me an email, without talking to you first?" asked Bella.
"Because you're under my protection!" said Ed.
Dillon
The church service ended. Dillon elected to remain in his seat because his raging boner precluded a timely exit. Dillon wondered if there was a psalm for praising God that you happened to be wearing jeans that day. There should be.
Anyway people started emptying out of the sanctuary. Dillon looked in front of him and found a "welcome card" that visitors were supposed to fill out so that the church could email them a pdf file that would save their soul. This particular welcome card was folded back on itself and held in that position by what was probably month-old gum. The other cards were too far away to reach, not without flashing his boner in church. Dillon did his best to told the card like the fold didn't matter and pretended filling it out.
Name.
Ok name, uh, that was easy. Shit. He was running out of fields on this side. Dillon traced over his name again. He sensed someone to his left. Fuck! Why couldn't they do out the other side? He was totally closer to the right side of the pew; they should have exited left. Where there old people on the end? He should have pretended he was praying. No one bothers you if you're praying.
"Excuse me." The voice sounded like music, like if G major had had sex with E minor and out popped a little angel with a voice box that could make even God cry.
Dillon looked up. His jaw dropped.
The purple biker was looking down at him, smiling. She had auburn hair and very, very, very smooth skin. Her rack was quite noticeable. She looked kind of like an angel...so heavenly and pure. Dillon wanted to fuck her face.
"Uh, sorry," said Dillon. He twisted his knees around to let her pass.
The woman faced the front of the sanctuary as she stepped past Dillon. Her ass was pushed out, and passed inches in front of Dillon's face. He could not stop himself from watching it.
Dillon forced his eyes away and looked to the left, down to the far side of the bench. There was no one there. Just people streaming past in the aisle. When Dillon looked back the biker chick still had her eye on him for just an instant. Then she turned her head and left, the old people behind her glaring at the cartoon devil on her jacket.
Kim
Kim woke first, Allison in her arms, both of them still in the hot tub and both of them still exhausted from a very erotic hour of lovemaking, which you missed because the scenes flipped to other characters. Just to recap. Allison, beatiful with smooth skin in a swimsuit-model kind of way. Kim, more of your average female-tennis-player-next-door type, with bodacious curves and just a few tiny freckles on her cheeks. Both incredibly hot, and incredibly lively and who knows what they did together in Kim's backyard when no one was watching? We don't. We had characters to establish!
Kim thought she could hear the faint sound of the door bell. She slipped away, leaving Allison propped up so that she wouldn't drown in her sleep.
There was someone at the door. Kim opened it.
"Brandon!"
Brandon had a full hipster beard, and was sporting his typical shorts, hunter belt and hoodie. Today he was packing the guitar on his back too.
"'Sup," he said, and moved to enter.
Kim blocked him. "You can't be here. Allison is here."
"No shit!"
"I told you to call first," Kim hissed.
"She still doesn't know about us?"
"I haven't found the right time yet."
Brandon grabbed her ass and pulled her close to him. "Well there's not time like now."
"Not now." Kim pulled away, She pushed him back out of the doorway.
"Seriously? That's got to be a crazy ass friend you got-"
"She's a great friend."
"-if you can't even-"
"Goodbye, Brandon," said Kim. Kim watched him leave through the frosted glass. Then she turned to go back outside.
As she turned, she noticed Allison standing right behind her with her arms crossed.
Allison was furious.
Lisa
Lisa found a card on the floor next to the table where those two nerds--the creepy kid and the pale faced chick--had been talking about sex for an hour.
Weirdly, Lisa was not hungry.
The card was a typical business card, for some kind of furniture store. There was some writing on the back. Lisa shrugged and stashed it in her pocket.
Little did she know, Character#34 was watching her from a doorway.
Gideon
On the leaf-covered but well-paved back roads, a police cruiser with a vanity plate that spelled "Red" on the back wound around the curves line and ant crawling swifly over a hand.
Inside, Gideon was getting frustrated. He had stopped at the residences of 15 dumbasses so far, ever widening his search. So far each one of them either did not own a vehicle capable of transporting a large chair, or they had an alibi for the previous night, or the bed of their truck was covered in rust and dust that had clearly not been disturbed by anything in the past two months, let alone a chair.
Gideon shifted in his seat and re-gripped the wheel. The next dumbass on his list of usual suspects was Character#34, who he strongly suspected had a meth lab in is fucking basement. Just his fucking luck. A beautiful Sunday and he had to spend it chasing down leads for a stolen chair.
Gideon, though, had seen pictures of the chair in the room. He did have to admit that it really did tie the room together.
Then Gideon's eye caught something unexpected. He slowed, pulled over on the should and backed up slowly. The gate to one of the access roads of the park had been left open. That was highly suspicious, because Gideon was not only one of the towns only cops, he was also one of the town's only park rangers, and he knew there was no good reason for that gate to be left open.
Gideon frowned, and drove into the access road. Probably kids getting high. He kept telling the other rangers they needed a padlock on that gate. He suspected one of them wanted it open for late night rendesvous, but maybe that was just the crazy thoughts of a bored cop.
There was a jeep wrangler off to the side of the road. Gideon pulled up behind it and started searching the woods. The was an obvious foot trail due South. Gideon followed it as best he could until it mostly petered out.
There was a object glinting at him from the forest floor. As Gideon picked it up he realized it was most definitely a military grade compass. That was strange. What was a military grade compass doing in the forest? There weren't any army bases around here.
Then Gideon noticed the compass was partly covered in blood. Perhaps out of some kind of habit, Gideon sniffed the compass, as if that could tell him whether the blood was human or animal.
Somewhere farther down the hill, some kind of animal made a screeching noise. Then there was a large crash.
Gideon unsnapped the strap over his sidearm.
Character#34
Character 34 picked his nose.
When Dillon entered the Church sanctuary the part with the standing and singing had just concluded in favor of the part with the sitting an talking. Everyone in the room was doing that gay thing where you are supposed to turn to your neighboor and whisper some retarded phrase that middle aged people love.
There was a noticable hold near the back, in the center. No one was talking to purple biker girl. At first Dillon thought she was lucky, and then he realized that people were glaring at her. Her bike outfit had a tiny little red cartoon devil on it, which Dillon, being a learned boy himself, easily recognized was the BSD Mascot. The old ladies near purple biker girl, however, did not, and were not amused!
Dillon glanced down to where his family sat. Always there, in this wedge shaped block of pews that was there to--you know what? Its not important. There was like no room down there. Dillon slid into the pew next to the biker woman. Every foot he slid raised the tent in his pants higher and higher until his was forced to stop moving simply to avoid making it noticeable.
There is a point in time, that probably varies by person, which is about 72 hours after the last time a man has had sex, that his testosterone levels have returned to normal and his hormones are once again at full blast. When that man is a boy, and when that boy hasn't had sex or any kind of one-person fascimile for over three weeks because of some kind of cultural religious thing, and when that boy spends every waking moment with his blood frothing with the chemical hormonal mixture of a typical 18 year old...well...you can't expect that boy so hear a single fucking word from the talking guy on the sanctuary dais.
Dillon grabbed a Bible from the back of the bench in front of him and opened it, trying to get a good angle so that he could see the woman's boobs out of the corner of his eye. To his surprise, the woman slowly reached up and grabbed the zipper, unzipping it slowly, slowly, every so slowly, presumably to avoid making any distracting noise...one notch at a time down until the V was a very vertical V and just the tinest bit of side boob was in view. Then she lowered her hand. For a second, as she did so, her finger trailed the zipper line below her cleavage.
Weirdly, Dillon was not hungry.
/*note: biker girl is Angela */
Scott
Scott sat at the kitchen table, twirling the pan. He had to decisions to make.
Pancakes?
Pancakes.
Waffles? Pancakes. Waffles? Pancakes?
Waffles.
Strawberries?
Waffles and Strawberries?
Waffles.
Ham steak? Waffles. Ham steak and waffles?
Waffles.
Cold pizza? Cold pizza. Waffles? Cold fucking piz--
The doorbell rang.
Scott cracked the screen door open and peered around it. "Officer," he said.
"Name's Gideon," said the cop. Gideon could smell the bacon smell. Weirdly, he wasn't hungry. "Got a few questions."
"Uhhhhh" Scott groaned.
"Someone broke into the Plankerton's last night. Stole a chair from their living room."
"No..."
"I'm afraid so."
"Not the..."
"Yes," affirmed Gideon.
"But that really tied the room together."
"So everyone tells me. You have a truck that could carry chair, right?"
"Oh sure, yeah you could get a chair in there. Maybe brush it out first. Wait...noooo..."
"Where were you between...last night and this morning, last night?"
"I was asleep! You can't think it was me; I was asleep! I can show you the drool its on my desk."
Gideon frowned.
Jim
"What was that?" asked Jess.
Jim looked up from the military style compass in his hands. Then he shrugged. "I didn't hear anything. Lets go. This way."
Due South. Roughly two miles of it. That's all they needed, Jim hoped, to get frisky without a pesky park ranger ruining their sexventure. Sexscapade? Sexventure. Jim planned to work on the title later.
"So did you ever hear the one about the grizzle bears?" said Jess. She followed Jim down a short, leaf covered hill.
"No."
"It goes something like...'instructions for avoiding bears.' The best thing to do is wear bells, so the bear hears and avoids you, and bear mace in case they come too close. It is also important to tell black bears and grizzly bears apart by their droppings. Black bear droppings often contains berries and other food items. Grizzly bear droppings often contain little bells and smell like bear mace."
Jim laughed. Then he stopped and looked at his military grade compass again.
"Oh would you stop that?" Jess slapped the compass out of his hand. "No one in around." Then the grinned.
Jim thought he heard a sound in the woods, but was distracted by the sight of Jess sinking to her knees, her skirt billowing out around her folded legs, her soft flesh sinking into the pine needles on the forest floor.
"Did you hear..." Jim trailed off to the sound of his zipper being undone, and his visual survey of the forest was quickly interrupted as his eyes rolled up into his head and he moaned.
He looked down, watching Jess's head bobing. Then there was a large, unmistakeable crash. Jess' head stopped bobing. Jim looked up.
Jim screamed.
Bella
The waitress came with their final bill.
Ed looked up. "Actually we're going to split it, um...?"
"Lisa," said waitress Lisa. She took the bill back to split it.
"That's what people do now," said Ed with a smile.
"I wouldn't know," said Bella, "its been so long since I've been on a date...." A total lie.
"Me too." The truth. "There are like no girls on the internets," explained Ed. "Speaking of which, do you play anything? World of Warcraft? Doda? Diablo? Maybe a little Nethack?"
"Um...Softball?" asked Bella.
"What is that, like Madden?" asked Ed.
"Here you go. Thanks a lot," said Lisa.
When they were out of the cafe Ed brought up the contract again.
"So this contract thing, I think the first thing we'll do, you know if you're interested, is you'll be under my protection."
"And that means, what, exactly? You save me from muggers?"
"No no no, I don't lower myself to such thuggery. Being under protection means that if someone wants to talk to you, they have to talk to me first. And then you know we can talk about collaring, and...."
"What if they talk to me?" asked Bella.
"They just have to talk to me first. It's not a big deal," said Ed.
"What if they don't bother talking to you first?" asked Bella.
Ed stopped walking. He looked as if she had just asked what if mothers leave their babies in the hospital. "Woah. That is a big deal. That is totally breaking the protocol. They can't just talk to you first. They have to talk to me first, because you are under my protection."
"But what if they don't?"
Ed shifted his weight back and forth between his feet. "I didn't want to get into the particulars about this, but they sort of have to ask permission."
"What prevents them from just, you know, sending me an email, without talking to you first?" asked Bella.
"Because you're under my protection!" said Ed.
Dillon
The church service ended. Dillon elected to remain in his seat because his raging boner precluded a timely exit. Dillon wondered if there was a psalm for praising God that you happened to be wearing jeans that day. There should be.
Anyway people started emptying out of the sanctuary. Dillon looked in front of him and found a "welcome card" that visitors were supposed to fill out so that the church could email them a pdf file that would save their soul. This particular welcome card was folded back on itself and held in that position by what was probably month-old gum. The other cards were too far away to reach, not without flashing his boner in church. Dillon did his best to told the card like the fold didn't matter and pretended filling it out.
Name.
Ok name, uh, that was easy. Shit. He was running out of fields on this side. Dillon traced over his name again. He sensed someone to his left. Fuck! Why couldn't they do out the other side? He was totally closer to the right side of the pew; they should have exited left. Where there old people on the end? He should have pretended he was praying. No one bothers you if you're praying.
"Excuse me." The voice sounded like music, like if G major had had sex with E minor and out popped a little angel with a voice box that could make even God cry.
Dillon looked up. His jaw dropped.
The purple biker was looking down at him, smiling. She had auburn hair and very, very, very smooth skin. Her rack was quite noticeable. She looked kind of like an angel...so heavenly and pure. Dillon wanted to fuck her face.
"Uh, sorry," said Dillon. He twisted his knees around to let her pass.
The woman faced the front of the sanctuary as she stepped past Dillon. Her ass was pushed out, and passed inches in front of Dillon's face. He could not stop himself from watching it.
Dillon forced his eyes away and looked to the left, down to the far side of the bench. There was no one there. Just people streaming past in the aisle. When Dillon looked back the biker chick still had her eye on him for just an instant. Then she turned her head and left, the old people behind her glaring at the cartoon devil on her jacket.
Kim
Kim woke first, Allison in her arms, both of them still in the hot tub and both of them still exhausted from a very erotic hour of lovemaking, which you missed because the scenes flipped to other characters. Just to recap. Allison, beatiful with smooth skin in a swimsuit-model kind of way. Kim, more of your average female-tennis-player-next-door type, with bodacious curves and just a few tiny freckles on her cheeks. Both incredibly hot, and incredibly lively and who knows what they did together in Kim's backyard when no one was watching? We don't. We had characters to establish!
Kim thought she could hear the faint sound of the door bell. She slipped away, leaving Allison propped up so that she wouldn't drown in her sleep.
There was someone at the door. Kim opened it.
"Brandon!"
Brandon had a full hipster beard, and was sporting his typical shorts, hunter belt and hoodie. Today he was packing the guitar on his back too.
"'Sup," he said, and moved to enter.
Kim blocked him. "You can't be here. Allison is here."
"No shit!"
"I told you to call first," Kim hissed.
"She still doesn't know about us?"
"I haven't found the right time yet."
Brandon grabbed her ass and pulled her close to him. "Well there's not time like now."
"Not now." Kim pulled away, She pushed him back out of the doorway.
"Seriously? That's got to be a crazy ass friend you got-"
"She's a great friend."
"-if you can't even-"
"Goodbye, Brandon," said Kim. Kim watched him leave through the frosted glass. Then she turned to go back outside.
As she turned, she noticed Allison standing right behind her with her arms crossed.
Allison was furious.
Lisa
Lisa found a card on the floor next to the table where those two nerds--the creepy kid and the pale faced chick--had been talking about sex for an hour.
Weirdly, Lisa was not hungry.
The card was a typical business card, for some kind of furniture store. There was some writing on the back. Lisa shrugged and stashed it in her pocket.
Little did she know, Character#34 was watching her from a doorway.
Gideon
On the leaf-covered but well-paved back roads, a police cruiser with a vanity plate that spelled "Red" on the back wound around the curves line and ant crawling swifly over a hand.
Inside, Gideon was getting frustrated. He had stopped at the residences of 15 dumbasses so far, ever widening his search. So far each one of them either did not own a vehicle capable of transporting a large chair, or they had an alibi for the previous night, or the bed of their truck was covered in rust and dust that had clearly not been disturbed by anything in the past two months, let alone a chair.
Gideon shifted in his seat and re-gripped the wheel. The next dumbass on his list of usual suspects was Character#34, who he strongly suspected had a meth lab in is fucking basement. Just his fucking luck. A beautiful Sunday and he had to spend it chasing down leads for a stolen chair.
Gideon, though, had seen pictures of the chair in the room. He did have to admit that it really did tie the room together.
Then Gideon's eye caught something unexpected. He slowed, pulled over on the should and backed up slowly. The gate to one of the access roads of the park had been left open. That was highly suspicious, because Gideon was not only one of the towns only cops, he was also one of the town's only park rangers, and he knew there was no good reason for that gate to be left open.
Gideon frowned, and drove into the access road. Probably kids getting high. He kept telling the other rangers they needed a padlock on that gate. He suspected one of them wanted it open for late night rendesvous, but maybe that was just the crazy thoughts of a bored cop.
There was a jeep wrangler off to the side of the road. Gideon pulled up behind it and started searching the woods. The was an obvious foot trail due South. Gideon followed it as best he could until it mostly petered out.
There was a object glinting at him from the forest floor. As Gideon picked it up he realized it was most definitely a military grade compass. That was strange. What was a military grade compass doing in the forest? There weren't any army bases around here.
Then Gideon noticed the compass was partly covered in blood. Perhaps out of some kind of habit, Gideon sniffed the compass, as if that could tell him whether the blood was human or animal.
Somewhere farther down the hill, some kind of animal made a screeching noise. Then there was a large crash.
Gideon unsnapped the strap over his sidearm.
Character#34
Character 34 picked his nose.
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
[fiction] Fifty Thrones of Shade - Part 1
"Weirdly, I wasn't hungry any more."
--awful prose found in 50 Shades of Grey
/* Someone once made some kind of statement that I don't remember about ...something about a story with lots of interconnectedness is supposed to be impressive. I also don't remember what was said after that, but I remember claiming that I could write something as intricate. Also, 50 Shades of Grey was discussed...a lot, but most of my memories are shrouded in a drunken haze so we are just going to roll that in there for fun.
Second introduction: what is it about Game of Thrones that stands out, that is new, that thinks out of the mold and breaks the box? Incest. That's what Game of Thrones brings to the table: incest. So lets just pause and think about that while you are wondering if you should stop reading this. You should. There is going to explicit, graphic, explicitly graphic and graphically incestual scenes all over the place and they will not be in good taste. Maybe...skip this one.
Anyway.... */
Dillon
The shaded, orange-and-brown groves of Macklebee Drive gave way to open sunlight as Dillon turned his work truck into the long driveway of the Plankerton estate. He could already see the flashes of cop lights competing with the mid morning sun. Dillon, a naturally shy person, parked well away from the cop car and walked the rest of the way. Weirdly, Dillon was not hungry even though he had skipped breakfast. A police offer glared at him but before Dillon could react John Plankerton found him.
"Dillon! My boy, how are things?"
"Things are good. Whats up? Oh....wow." Dillon spied the large, missing, two-story window and the pile of glass in the lawn that it had become overnight.
"Some asshole broke in last night and stole one of our chairs. That over detecting shit there is Gideon," John motioned at the cop, "he's a detective with the local station."
Dillon looked at Gideon. Gideon regarded the boy briefly from behind his mirrored aviators.
"What a shame," said Dillon. "That chair really tied the room together."
"So how much is this going to cost me?" asked John.
Dillon look at what was left of the window, the little bits and pieces that were still hanging onto the frame. "Well, uh...let me go call my boss."
Kim
Allison walked out of Kim's back door with all of the Sultry style that had first attracted Kim to the brunette. Kim watched here from the hot tub with lustful eyes. With a subtle flick of the wrist, Allison dropped her towel on the deck stairs, revealing her tanned legs and leaving only the bright white two piece. She paused, looking down at Kim with a smile, before walking to an ornate, upholstered living room chair that looked completely out of place on the deck. Kim hated being teased. Weirdly, she was not hungry.
"Isn't this a bit...odd for deck furniture?" asked Allison.
"Yes, well..." said Kim. "Its my prize, and I'm keeping it."
"Mmmm," said Allison.
"Why don't you take that top off?" Kim reclined farther in the hot tub. "You're wearing far too much clothing."
"Oh like this?" asked Allison. She reached up to the front of her top, took the clasp, and--
Dillon
Dillon was late for Church. That business at the Plankerton's had taken longer than expected, and now he was stuck taking his work truck to Church. :(. The only spot was next to a hot girl getting off of a purple sportbike, probably a Honda or a Suzuki. She had her own matching purple motorcycle jacket, and a matching purple motorcycle helmet, and purple pants...oh that ass. Suddenly Dillon got a boner. He closed his eyes and tried to recite bible verses to himself but then he fucked up his hole parking operation and bumped into a sign. Fortunately he did not bump over the purple sport bike, because if he had done that he would be dead right now, like before I even finish typing this sentence. Dillon fixed his parking error, feeling the blood rush straight to his face. He sat in the seat for a while, frozen, unable to master the courage to turn his head. When the embarrassment subsided, he looked and found the hot girl biker gone.
Scott
Scott woke up at his desk, which oddly enough, was the place where he had fallen asleep the night before. Weirdly, he was not hungry. Scott ate a banana. He was still not hungry. Definitely not a hungry guy, nope, not him. Not Scott. Scott was hunger-less. Him and hunger were like strangers.
Bacon!
Scott smelled bacon. Scott ran for the kitchen. But when he arrived downstairs, the bacon was gone. There was a pan on the stove. He licked it. Cold, but absolutely delicious. Clearly, the bacon had already left the premises. Scott sat down in a chair holding the pan, wearing a sad face.
Then Scott--
Bella
Bella sat down at the cafe and looked around for her date. She received a text from her internet date. Long story short, he turned out to be the guy who awkwardly ignored her while she was waiting to be seated.
"Hi, uh, sorry about that," said Ed.
"Its ok," said Bella.
"No really, I thought you were like, someone else, because you just got seated when you got here. Sorry."
"Its ok."
"Oh and sorry I'm late...man this D&D game went long," said Ed.
"What's D&D?"
"Oh its the best thing ever..." Ed started to explain, but he was interrupted by the waitress. When she left, Ed had forgotten his train of thought.
Bella looked as his shirt. "What does 'No place like 127.0.0.1' mean?"
"Oh its a joke for smart people. You wouldn't get it. Hey did you read the sex contract?"
"Um...yeah I looked over it."
"I wrote it last night. Took me like three hours to get it right, and then the power went out in my Mom's basement but it was ok because my computer has an incorruptible power supply. Anyway so what did you think?"
The 'sex contract' Ed was referring to is a---you know what? Its not important. All you need to know is that Bella was tired of meeting normal, well-rounded boys so she posted a photo of herself on a creepy website for unbalanced sex-obsessed internet dwellers and picked the best option out of the replies. There sat Ed.
"Um...yeah I guess I could do that," said Bella. "I mean I'm trying to be open minded. I like trying new things."
"Do you have a Sailor Moon outfit?" asked Ed.
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
I quit.
I quit today.
I elected to forgo any kind of theatrical event, even thought I had been fantasizing about overreacting to another dumbass ticket and storming out, tossing my badge on the security desk without looking at them.
My manager seemed surprised. Then I was surprised because he said I was vital or something and he was sad to see me go. I seriously wasn't expecting that.
I haven't actually nailed down another job. I'm just excited that I'm free.
In two weeks.
Maybe more...I told him I could be somewhat flexible.
I elected to forgo any kind of theatrical event, even thought I had been fantasizing about overreacting to another dumbass ticket and storming out, tossing my badge on the security desk without looking at them.
My manager seemed surprised. Then I was surprised because he said I was vital or something and he was sad to see me go. I seriously wasn't expecting that.
I haven't actually nailed down another job. I'm just excited that I'm free.
In two weeks.
Maybe more...I told him I could be somewhat flexible.
Solving Code Reviews
At Large Online Retailer, me and code reviews have a bit of a history. They are kind of a pain in the ass, mostly because every time you make a change you basically have to drop what you are doing while you wait for someone else to look at it. No one really wants to read your code, though, so it will be a while unless you personally pester people.
I tried to experiment with developing methods where we streamlined the reviewing process and decoupled checkins from the reviewing. That is when I found out that code reviews have religious status in the minds of...pretty much everyone at Large Online Retailer.
So that's fine. Add it to the list: death, taxes, and code reviews. Attempt to escape any of them at your own risk.
What about dealing with them then? Sure, the advice from senior devs that I respect has always been helpful, and taught me a lot, but what about retarded advice from stupid devs who are pushing their lame style religions (tabs vs spaces) or just asking you to move stuff around for no functional reason?
Fighting them over stupid things is actually not an option either. I tried to keep my code nice, and to fight people so that the final check in was still something I would be proud of (or at least not ashamed to have my name on it), but then I got a shit ton of comments in my performance review about me being "defensive" or argumentative or some bullshit.
In order to remedy that, and since I hate my job and am planning to leave anyway, and since the senior devs with good advice are all gone, I started to simply acquiesce to all of the dumb reviews requests.
This did not work either. I just watched a code change, which my manager was riding me for, get delayed for days because even though I made every little renaming and shuffling change, the person doing the code review kept finding more things we wanted renamed, or shuffled. By the time we were done stirring everything around my exasperation was becoming visible.
Therefore, the best solution I can think of, which I will implement after switching companies, is to start keeping secret notes on everyone I might need a code review from. The notes would include what stupid stylistic things they will have a fit over (when to break a line, what order to compare things in, etc), and it would also note how often they make ridiculous requests (like splitting a small function into two smaller functions for no reason) that I cannot anticipate ahead of time.
Using this information, I would hopefully be better armed to navigate the political landscape of code reviews. For example, if one code reviewer insists on fucking up my code, the next time I make a change, if I know I'm going to have a different review with different flavors of style angst, I could use that as an opportunity to fix the code.
This might not actually be a real problem though. I suspect that if I were to make it to a team with great developers, they would probably also be great, helpful, insightful code reviewers. So maybe I can leave the politics here with the rotting code.
I tried to experiment with developing methods where we streamlined the reviewing process and decoupled checkins from the reviewing. That is when I found out that code reviews have religious status in the minds of...pretty much everyone at Large Online Retailer.
So that's fine. Add it to the list: death, taxes, and code reviews. Attempt to escape any of them at your own risk.
What about dealing with them then? Sure, the advice from senior devs that I respect has always been helpful, and taught me a lot, but what about retarded advice from stupid devs who are pushing their lame style religions (tabs vs spaces) or just asking you to move stuff around for no functional reason?
Fighting them over stupid things is actually not an option either. I tried to keep my code nice, and to fight people so that the final check in was still something I would be proud of (or at least not ashamed to have my name on it), but then I got a shit ton of comments in my performance review about me being "defensive" or argumentative or some bullshit.
In order to remedy that, and since I hate my job and am planning to leave anyway, and since the senior devs with good advice are all gone, I started to simply acquiesce to all of the dumb reviews requests.
This did not work either. I just watched a code change, which my manager was riding me for, get delayed for days because even though I made every little renaming and shuffling change, the person doing the code review kept finding more things we wanted renamed, or shuffled. By the time we were done stirring everything around my exasperation was becoming visible.
Therefore, the best solution I can think of, which I will implement after switching companies, is to start keeping secret notes on everyone I might need a code review from. The notes would include what stupid stylistic things they will have a fit over (when to break a line, what order to compare things in, etc), and it would also note how often they make ridiculous requests (like splitting a small function into two smaller functions for no reason) that I cannot anticipate ahead of time.
Using this information, I would hopefully be better armed to navigate the political landscape of code reviews. For example, if one code reviewer insists on fucking up my code, the next time I make a change, if I know I'm going to have a different review with different flavors of style angst, I could use that as an opportunity to fix the code.
This might not actually be a real problem though. I suspect that if I were to make it to a team with great developers, they would probably also be great, helpful, insightful code reviewers. So maybe I can leave the politics here with the rotting code.
Monday, July 9, 2012
[Fiction] The Mobius Doorway
Second sight. That's what I was doing Friday night when I discovered the door. Its just a parlor trick, like reading palms or talking to dead people, except there is no cold reading and the girl is more likely to sleep with you. My girl. Well, she already sleeps with me but the point is to impress her even more. I'm not going to tell you how second sight works, but the effect is you are driving a car, and it involves a hood and blindfold, and she thinks you are seeing the road through her eyes.
Anyway.
I was on my ninja 600 scouting a road for doing this--need a closed loop where cops wont notice you driving with a blindfold--when I stopped the oddest road sign. NE Drive. Northeast Drive? The sign wasn't missing any other words. I knew from the map that it was a squiggly line and not a loop, however I was through with my search and figured carving some twisties would be a great way to end the night.
The road took me back to the city where it ended at an abandoned building. I looked up and finally caught the name of the road: "Non Euclidean Drive." That's a pretty badass name for a road. I wondered what it meant, when I saw the doorway. Maybe, door frame is more correct. It was just standing there, by itself. Not really on the road...that sort of ended in some gravel, near a building...grass...bit of fence...the other details aren't important, actually. This door was just, in the ground. Not connected to anyway. And I mean the frame, not the door. The door has apparently been ripped off. The hinges were bent and ripped. And then I found 20 dollars.
Ok I didn't actually find any money...I'll skip ahead. I dreamed about a door. Doorway. Not the one I found, but this one was in a field, a sort of dark field at night, and the door was still attached, and it was very much like the doors from Stephen King's The Dark Tower series. Then I woke up.
The next day I was back at the doorway. Call it boredom. Normally on a Saturday I might spend all morning watching TV, but on this particular Saturday I chose to watch "The Killing," and the first episode made me realize the entire series was just a long-ass episode of Law and Order, so I read the plot synopsis on wikipedia and left my apartment to wander the city. For some reason I wandered straight to the doorway.
And stepped through.
Not sure what made me. Maybe I was looking at the frame. While reading the Dark Tower I always imagined myself doing weird shit with those doors, like trying to wrap my arms around the frames, or go through in the wrong direction, or break the frame. I didn't do any of that, though, because this wasn't some magic portal doorway. Just a frame someone installed in the middle of a gravel lot. Also it was not my frame, so I felt negatively about damaging it.
Anyway, I walked through it exactly once, and then went home to play video games. And that is when shit got weird. Why? Because my apartment building...um...moved. Every other building on the street seemed the same, but my building...my building...well, that morning it was called Renoa Apartments, and it was an old-ass mostly-concrete shithole left over from the 70s. It was between a nice apartment building on one side, and a weird looking apartment building on the other side that had like wood walls, which was totally weird. In between them, though, was...um...a different building. This building was called Everfield, and it had glass shit. Like big glass doors, big glass bay windows into the lobby, and big windows for every apartment. And it was twice as tall. What the fuck?
When watching movies or TV shows like Dr. Who, I always imagined that if I were ever in a weird situation, I wouldn't freak out. I would just stare. Turns out I was wrong, because instead of staring, I looked around to check the street name, even though I knew exactly where I was, and then I got this sick sense of scary vertigo shooting up from the pit of my stomach and I had to sit down. I buried my head in my hands and it still felt like I was falling. Then I heard someone behind me. I looked up. And saw....
...someone I didn't recognize at all. So, not Jesus. Or Batman. Or a blue police box. Anyway. The person stared at me briefly, and I recognized that look. It was the quick glance you give someone you've seen before--many times--but never talked to, someone's whose plight you are quite curious about but can't show it because you don't want to engage them at all. There is only one class of people who are capable of giving that look: passive aggressive neighboors.
Someone about that made me feel ok, like the world wasn't just going to slip out from under my feet. I've been dislocated before, whether it was chasing after a girl, or locking my keys in my car, or getting lost in a small beach town in high school...it's always the same problem and the same next step: feel your jeans to make sure you will have a wallet, find a coffee shop or a bar, buy something, and sit for a while. Tell yourself you'll splurge on a hotel room until you get things sorted out.
So it was with courage that I approached the interloper and studied the call box. And that's when I saw my name: Forkk. Yeah, with two K's. I know. Pretty strange fucking name. Either this was somehow my apartment, or I was about to meet the only other Forkk in the country. Had to be the second one though. This place took key cards and all I had was a set of keys. I dialed the other Forkk using the call box.
And my phone rang.
Unrecognizable number. I declined the call. Then the call box fucked up so I called again. Then I got another call. Damn fucking spammers. Respond to a craigslist ad about taking two girls out to dinner and forever get the occasional call from people who could only have gotten your number by buying it from scammers. Anyway, I suddenly realized that maybe this was about Microsoft calling me back for an interview (on a Saturday...) and I picked up. And then I heard my own voice come out of the fucking speaker box of the apartment. And that is when my spine...hell my feet, legs, hands, everything went cold. I was shaking and disoriented but I moved my thumb and pressed the "7" key on my phone. The call box blared a single tone and I heard the front door unlock.
I stood in the lobby, briefly, thinking, "what the fuck?" When someone got out of the elevator and gave me another passive-aggressive curiosity look as the passed. That woke me up. I dashed into the elevator just before it closed and pressed "5" -- what I had seen on the call box.
Ever walk into an apartment, a really nice apartment, and appreciate how everything is cool and layed out, and then later you return to your own and wonder why it seems to drab and messy to you, as if, no matter what you do, you can't seem to make the right decisions when you go to ikea, perhaps never realizing that the other people's apartment wasn't furnished from Ikea in the first place? That feeling. I had it walking into this apartment.
Everything was sort of ugly, or misplaced...maybe looking good by itself, but not with the rest of the ensemble. And everything was very much the kind of thing I would buy, right down to the Lego pirate ship on the shelves. Except that my real apartment had a different pirate ship.
There was a basket near the doorway with keys in it. The keys had a pink object on them. Girl keys! I never put pink objects on my key ring. But if my girlfriend is here why didn't she text me first? Shit! It's my birthday. Could they have remodeled the building just to really get me? Oh shit quit being such a narcissist.
Then I went into the bedroom, and that is when shit got real. Why did shit get real? Shit got real, so very real, because there was a hot readhead tied up on the--my?--bed with a giant red bow going over her boobs. Yeah, it was my birthday. I'm always forgetting about that shit! Only probably was this wasn't my girlfriend.
I'm not going to tell you all of the things I thought about right then. We can skip that. Yeah we'll just skip right to...well I left. Without touching her. I left and headed for my favorite bar to think things over. Except my favorite bar wasn't there either. My favorite bar was an Irish pub that makes the best damn flaming dr peppers you've ever tasted. The bar in its place was some random sports bar. What the fuck?
I always imagined, if I was in an episode of the Twilight Zone, or whatever, that I'd figure it out a lot sooner. Well, I didn't, and I felt pretty sheepish when I finally realized that my next move should be to go back to that doorway, especially since I had a dream about it. There was no indication that it led to another planet, but it would be best to at least rule it out. On the way to the door I stopped and asked someone on the street what the date was. Yup. Same day, just one day after yesterday. Haven't been, like, hibernating long enough for buildings to change.
When I got back to the doorway I didn't run around it or any shit like that. I walked back through it, careful to go through only once, and in the exact opposite direction. I didn't even pause, although I wanted to. There was absolutely no indication that I had been transported anywhere. The entire lot, every detail, appeared to be the same on both sides of the door frame.
Whatever.
I ran back to my apartment...and my apartment building was back! Yay! Wait. What the fuck?
The feeling of vertigo was back, but this time I didn't stop as I went inside and up the stairs. There was a note on my door. Shit. Only my girlfriend writes me notes like that, and she only puts them on the outside when she's mad at me. It read:
What?
Shit. Also: what the fuck? Who was in my apartment? Who cares. Back in reality. Should go to work...get a few hours in...even though I'm planning to quit.
I was halfway there before I turned around and headed straight for the doorway. Then I arrived and started detecting shit. I was a detective.
I walked around it, both directions. Nothing special. Stuck my hand through, just a little. Then I got scared and ran all the way back to my apartment just to make sure it was still there. It was. Note to self: leave that detail out. Anyway, then I threw a rock through the door. Nothing special. And when I peeked around the door frame, even walked around it, the rock was still there. The rock I threw went through the doorway and I didn't, and here I was on the other side.
Then I tried wrapping my arms around the frame. My left arm made it as far as touching my right arm. I could see and fell them both touching. For some reason, though, I wasn't satisfied. Something was wrong, and I was still sick to my stomach thinking about that other version of my apartment building.
That is when I threw my badge through. My badge is blue, mostly blue, with an ugly ass picture of my face that makes it look like I'm a hitman for the mob. I could see it through the doorway, but when I went around, it turned white. I walked over and picked it up. Microsoft. What? I don't work for Microsoft.
I sat down and tried to sketch the door in the gravel, trying to figure out which side you'd go in...it didn't make any sense.
"I draw faster than you," came the voice. I looked up and felt a brief flash of vertigo. I was looking at me. "You didn't drawing class at university, did you?"
"What? No they didn't let C.S. majors take those classes.
"You just had to ask politely. Anyway, here's your badge," other me said.
I rose and we traded badges. Brief silence.
"Ned Stark dies," I said.
"Oh thank you for telling me, you saved me from reading that terrible book."
"Really?" I asked.
"No, I just wanted you to feel good about doing that. I read it...Nothing can give those ten hours of my life back. Wait...what time is it on your side?" he said.
"July 8th," I answered. "And its like 5 pm."
Other me looked at his watch. "Shit. So, no playing the stock market."
"They'd be the wrong stocks, probably," I volunteered.
Awkward silence.
"I'm not having sex with you," said other me.
"Cool," I said. More silence. "Is Uncle Owen still alive?"
"Yeah. You?"
"Yup. Did you solve 3 sat?"
"No. I'm starting to question myself about whether or not P really equals NP."
"Yeah me too."
"Shit."
"Did you ever ask Jen out, like for real, in high school?"
"No I just took her to prom and kissed her this one time."
"Oh. I was hoping at least one of us did. What about Linda?"
"No dice."
"I guess everything is the same." We both shrugged. I mean, I shrugged. Lot of shrug action. Then I asked: "Did you get run over by the ride-the-duck assholes?"
His eyes grew wide. "Those tour boats? No."
"Oh, well stay away from those fuckers. They ran me...." and on I went.
We tried to work out some manner in which having two of us would lead to profit, but aside from both of us banging one of our girlfriends, we couldn't think of anything.
Truth be told neither of us really wanted much information from the other, because neither of us wanted to find out if they had made the poorer decisions. I knew this because I thought that way, and I was talking to myself.
Then we went our separate ways, and after double checking we were in the right, um, dimension, we, or at least I, went back and tore down the doorway. Just before I did so, I glanced behind me, just in case Jesus, or Batman, or The Doctor was about to give me a whoopin for wasting such a precious occurrence, but there was no one.
Anyway.
I was on my ninja 600 scouting a road for doing this--need a closed loop where cops wont notice you driving with a blindfold--when I stopped the oddest road sign. NE Drive. Northeast Drive? The sign wasn't missing any other words. I knew from the map that it was a squiggly line and not a loop, however I was through with my search and figured carving some twisties would be a great way to end the night.
The road took me back to the city where it ended at an abandoned building. I looked up and finally caught the name of the road: "Non Euclidean Drive." That's a pretty badass name for a road. I wondered what it meant, when I saw the doorway. Maybe, door frame is more correct. It was just standing there, by itself. Not really on the road...that sort of ended in some gravel, near a building...grass...bit of fence...the other details aren't important, actually. This door was just, in the ground. Not connected to anyway. And I mean the frame, not the door. The door has apparently been ripped off. The hinges were bent and ripped. And then I found 20 dollars.
Ok I didn't actually find any money...I'll skip ahead. I dreamed about a door. Doorway. Not the one I found, but this one was in a field, a sort of dark field at night, and the door was still attached, and it was very much like the doors from Stephen King's The Dark Tower series. Then I woke up.
The next day I was back at the doorway. Call it boredom. Normally on a Saturday I might spend all morning watching TV, but on this particular Saturday I chose to watch "The Killing," and the first episode made me realize the entire series was just a long-ass episode of Law and Order, so I read the plot synopsis on wikipedia and left my apartment to wander the city. For some reason I wandered straight to the doorway.
And stepped through.
Not sure what made me. Maybe I was looking at the frame. While reading the Dark Tower I always imagined myself doing weird shit with those doors, like trying to wrap my arms around the frames, or go through in the wrong direction, or break the frame. I didn't do any of that, though, because this wasn't some magic portal doorway. Just a frame someone installed in the middle of a gravel lot. Also it was not my frame, so I felt negatively about damaging it.
Anyway, I walked through it exactly once, and then went home to play video games. And that is when shit got weird. Why? Because my apartment building...um...moved. Every other building on the street seemed the same, but my building...my building...well, that morning it was called Renoa Apartments, and it was an old-ass mostly-concrete shithole left over from the 70s. It was between a nice apartment building on one side, and a weird looking apartment building on the other side that had like wood walls, which was totally weird. In between them, though, was...um...a different building. This building was called Everfield, and it had glass shit. Like big glass doors, big glass bay windows into the lobby, and big windows for every apartment. And it was twice as tall. What the fuck?
When watching movies or TV shows like Dr. Who, I always imagined that if I were ever in a weird situation, I wouldn't freak out. I would just stare. Turns out I was wrong, because instead of staring, I looked around to check the street name, even though I knew exactly where I was, and then I got this sick sense of scary vertigo shooting up from the pit of my stomach and I had to sit down. I buried my head in my hands and it still felt like I was falling. Then I heard someone behind me. I looked up. And saw....
...someone I didn't recognize at all. So, not Jesus. Or Batman. Or a blue police box. Anyway. The person stared at me briefly, and I recognized that look. It was the quick glance you give someone you've seen before--many times--but never talked to, someone's whose plight you are quite curious about but can't show it because you don't want to engage them at all. There is only one class of people who are capable of giving that look: passive aggressive neighboors.
Someone about that made me feel ok, like the world wasn't just going to slip out from under my feet. I've been dislocated before, whether it was chasing after a girl, or locking my keys in my car, or getting lost in a small beach town in high school...it's always the same problem and the same next step: feel your jeans to make sure you will have a wallet, find a coffee shop or a bar, buy something, and sit for a while. Tell yourself you'll splurge on a hotel room until you get things sorted out.
So it was with courage that I approached the interloper and studied the call box. And that's when I saw my name: Forkk. Yeah, with two K's. I know. Pretty strange fucking name. Either this was somehow my apartment, or I was about to meet the only other Forkk in the country. Had to be the second one though. This place took key cards and all I had was a set of keys. I dialed the other Forkk using the call box.
And my phone rang.
Unrecognizable number. I declined the call. Then the call box fucked up so I called again. Then I got another call. Damn fucking spammers. Respond to a craigslist ad about taking two girls out to dinner and forever get the occasional call from people who could only have gotten your number by buying it from scammers. Anyway, I suddenly realized that maybe this was about Microsoft calling me back for an interview (on a Saturday...) and I picked up. And then I heard my own voice come out of the fucking speaker box of the apartment. And that is when my spine...hell my feet, legs, hands, everything went cold. I was shaking and disoriented but I moved my thumb and pressed the "7" key on my phone. The call box blared a single tone and I heard the front door unlock.
I stood in the lobby, briefly, thinking, "what the fuck?" When someone got out of the elevator and gave me another passive-aggressive curiosity look as the passed. That woke me up. I dashed into the elevator just before it closed and pressed "5" -- what I had seen on the call box.
Ever walk into an apartment, a really nice apartment, and appreciate how everything is cool and layed out, and then later you return to your own and wonder why it seems to drab and messy to you, as if, no matter what you do, you can't seem to make the right decisions when you go to ikea, perhaps never realizing that the other people's apartment wasn't furnished from Ikea in the first place? That feeling. I had it walking into this apartment.
Everything was sort of ugly, or misplaced...maybe looking good by itself, but not with the rest of the ensemble. And everything was very much the kind of thing I would buy, right down to the Lego pirate ship on the shelves. Except that my real apartment had a different pirate ship.
There was a basket near the doorway with keys in it. The keys had a pink object on them. Girl keys! I never put pink objects on my key ring. But if my girlfriend is here why didn't she text me first? Shit! It's my birthday. Could they have remodeled the building just to really get me? Oh shit quit being such a narcissist.
Then I went into the bedroom, and that is when shit got real. Why did shit get real? Shit got real, so very real, because there was a hot readhead tied up on the--my?--bed with a giant red bow going over her boobs. Yeah, it was my birthday. I'm always forgetting about that shit! Only probably was this wasn't my girlfriend.
I'm not going to tell you all of the things I thought about right then. We can skip that. Yeah we'll just skip right to...well I left. Without touching her. I left and headed for my favorite bar to think things over. Except my favorite bar wasn't there either. My favorite bar was an Irish pub that makes the best damn flaming dr peppers you've ever tasted. The bar in its place was some random sports bar. What the fuck?
I always imagined, if I was in an episode of the Twilight Zone, or whatever, that I'd figure it out a lot sooner. Well, I didn't, and I felt pretty sheepish when I finally realized that my next move should be to go back to that doorway, especially since I had a dream about it. There was no indication that it led to another planet, but it would be best to at least rule it out. On the way to the door I stopped and asked someone on the street what the date was. Yup. Same day, just one day after yesterday. Haven't been, like, hibernating long enough for buildings to change.
When I got back to the doorway I didn't run around it or any shit like that. I walked back through it, careful to go through only once, and in the exact opposite direction. I didn't even pause, although I wanted to. There was absolutely no indication that I had been transported anywhere. The entire lot, every detail, appeared to be the same on both sides of the door frame.
Whatever.
I ran back to my apartment...and my apartment building was back! Yay! Wait. What the fuck?
The feeling of vertigo was back, but this time I didn't stop as I went inside and up the stairs. There was a note on my door. Shit. Only my girlfriend writes me notes like that, and she only puts them on the outside when she's mad at me. It read:
Hey dumbass. I was here waiting for you in my fuckin hot ass french maid outfit. I waited three fucking hours for you and I know you came in because I heard you-
What?
-but then you left before I even saw you. You forgot it was your birthday again, didn't you?
Shit. Also: what the fuck? Who was in my apartment? Who cares. Back in reality. Should go to work...get a few hours in...even though I'm planning to quit.
I was halfway there before I turned around and headed straight for the doorway. Then I arrived and started detecting shit. I was a detective.
I walked around it, both directions. Nothing special. Stuck my hand through, just a little. Then I got scared and ran all the way back to my apartment just to make sure it was still there. It was. Note to self: leave that detail out. Anyway, then I threw a rock through the door. Nothing special. And when I peeked around the door frame, even walked around it, the rock was still there. The rock I threw went through the doorway and I didn't, and here I was on the other side.
Then I tried wrapping my arms around the frame. My left arm made it as far as touching my right arm. I could see and fell them both touching. For some reason, though, I wasn't satisfied. Something was wrong, and I was still sick to my stomach thinking about that other version of my apartment building.
That is when I threw my badge through. My badge is blue, mostly blue, with an ugly ass picture of my face that makes it look like I'm a hitman for the mob. I could see it through the doorway, but when I went around, it turned white. I walked over and picked it up. Microsoft. What? I don't work for Microsoft.
I sat down and tried to sketch the door in the gravel, trying to figure out which side you'd go in...it didn't make any sense.
"I draw faster than you," came the voice. I looked up and felt a brief flash of vertigo. I was looking at me. "You didn't drawing class at university, did you?"
"What? No they didn't let C.S. majors take those classes.
"You just had to ask politely. Anyway, here's your badge," other me said.
I rose and we traded badges. Brief silence.
"Ned Stark dies," I said.
"Oh thank you for telling me, you saved me from reading that terrible book."
"Really?" I asked.
"No, I just wanted you to feel good about doing that. I read it...Nothing can give those ten hours of my life back. Wait...what time is it on your side?" he said.
"July 8th," I answered. "And its like 5 pm."
Other me looked at his watch. "Shit. So, no playing the stock market."
"They'd be the wrong stocks, probably," I volunteered.
Awkward silence.
"I'm not having sex with you," said other me.
"Cool," I said. More silence. "Is Uncle Owen still alive?"
"Yeah. You?"
"Yup. Did you solve 3 sat?"
"No. I'm starting to question myself about whether or not P really equals NP."
"Yeah me too."
"Shit."
"Did you ever ask Jen out, like for real, in high school?"
"No I just took her to prom and kissed her this one time."
"Oh. I was hoping at least one of us did. What about Linda?"
"No dice."
"I guess everything is the same." We both shrugged. I mean, I shrugged. Lot of shrug action. Then I asked: "Did you get run over by the ride-the-duck assholes?"
His eyes grew wide. "Those tour boats? No."
"Oh, well stay away from those fuckers. They ran me...." and on I went.
We tried to work out some manner in which having two of us would lead to profit, but aside from both of us banging one of our girlfriends, we couldn't think of anything.
Truth be told neither of us really wanted much information from the other, because neither of us wanted to find out if they had made the poorer decisions. I knew this because I thought that way, and I was talking to myself.
Then we went our separate ways, and after double checking we were in the right, um, dimension, we, or at least I, went back and tore down the doorway. Just before I did so, I glanced behind me, just in case Jesus, or Batman, or The Doctor was about to give me a whoopin for wasting such a precious occurrence, but there was no one.
Sunday, July 8, 2012
Honesty
My apartment got flooded. Now my door, which already had a doorknob that was falling off, is even more difficult to open because its sticking on the frame and all my stuff has been shifted around. However, today I learned a valuable lesson:
Falsehood (for comparison)
I did not clean the kitchen floor.
Honesty Type 1 (or, what girls think is honesty)
I used this as an opportunity to clean the kitchen floor.
Honesty Type 2 (what I am famous for telling people)
I texted you because I was buying a mop down the street and I didn't know what soap you are supposed to use with a mop but luckily I found a bucket out on my porch where everything is covered in a thick layer of highway soot and it still had a glob of soap in it which probably leaked out of some laundry detergent five months ago. My kitchen totally looks like its been cleaned now.
I think I am going to continue using type 1 for the foreseeable future.
Falsehood (for comparison)
I did not clean the kitchen floor.
Honesty Type 1 (or, what girls think is honesty)
I used this as an opportunity to clean the kitchen floor.
Honesty Type 2 (what I am famous for telling people)
I texted you because I was buying a mop down the street and I didn't know what soap you are supposed to use with a mop but luckily I found a bucket out on my porch where everything is covered in a thick layer of highway soot and it still had a glob of soap in it which probably leaked out of some laundry detergent five months ago. My kitchen totally looks like its been cleaned now.
I think I am going to continue using type 1 for the foreseeable future.
Saturday, July 7, 2012
Picking Your Battles
When I'm around you, I kind of feel like I'm on drugs. Not that I do drugs. Unless you do drugs, in which case I do them all the time. All of them.
--Scott Pilgrim
My girlfriend sent me a link to an article on how to be a good boyfriend. Based on the prose and arguments it made, it could have been written by someone in high school. Then she said she wants more from me, but she doesn't want to tell me what she wants; I have to guess. That is when this whole thing became very familiar to me. I've been here before**, and more than once.
I know this thing that girls do is cute and makes for good material for stand up comedians, but must we tolerate it with smiling faces? Do we have to sit back and shrug and declare that's just how girls work? Submit to half of the world's populate being out of touch with reality or common sense?
Yes.
At least, I am. I don't care what you do. I don't care about my opinions on how anything should work anymore. It is too tiring and too impossible. There are only three--well, four--things ...oh shit five. Ok there are only five things that I can remember off the top of my head that I can do for hours upon hours, even forgetting to eat: programming, level editing, playing some $5 internet game called terraria, girls, and messing around with legos. Only one of those things pays well.
I never really thought about my programming career as a thing. Certainly not as a thing that had to be planned out and cared for. I just looked at the world with big eyes and said "let me write!" Seems like we need a different approach. From my own perspective, I need to improve my people skills, and I need to do massive amounts of coding.
People skills are starting to improve. Just today, I came across a ticket that infuriated me. These "tickets" I'm referring to are used to track defects in our software. Naturally, we have thousands of them flying around constantly (many of which could be avoided by testing code and other sound engineering practices). In theory, an entire team should have, maybe, 10 of these, if its a bad week. My team typically has about 100 assigned to them (down from 400), and between the tickets assigned to us, AND the tickets we assigned to other teams, for customer facing issues, that are being ignored for more than three months (I am SO not kidding), we are pretty busy. There are some properties of tickets, like "estimated completion date" and "sla" that, since my first day, I've never even known how to edit, because they are so unimportant compared to the actual customer pain caused by these problems*. To this day I actually have no idea at all where the estimated completion date comes from, except to say that it has no bearing whatsoever on when the ticket will actually be solved. Especially when people ignore the tickets assigned to them. Well. Someone in another department--one of ones that cause us a lot of operational pain--decided they were going to start caring about this shit. We have assigned tickets to them because their fucking software sucks, and they have apparently just assigned those tickets back to us, because, well, the tickets were already beyond their "estimated completion date." Some stupid fucking bitch actually wrote "it is our policy not to accept tickets into our queue that are already past the" fucking whatever. I stood at my computer, arm muscles clenched, fingers poised over the keyboard, as every neuron in my brain poured over possible responses, my entire being dedicated to a fast and furious search algorithm in search of the most sarcastic, viscerally bitter and effective response. I was probably like that for ten minutes. After a while I had mostly settled on "It is [my team name]'s policy not to accept tickets into our queue that were assigned back for bullshit like estimated completion date." This wasn't good enough though--all this did was call her out. To truly respond appropriately, I knew I would have to fuck up their metrics. That bitch assigned the ticket back to us for a reason, and that reason was that some fuckup of a manager had decided that they wanted to start measuring random shit, and was holding their teams accountable to metrics that mean nothing, all the while we have customers who ordered shit three months ago and aren't getting it. I could assign them a shitload of tickets that were past their date. I began exploring all of the spectacular responses I could make--especially, oh 'specially given the fact that I wanted to leave the company anyway. And then I walked away.
As far as doing massive amounts of coding, that plan is still forming.
*I can tell you how to make an order that will get stuck in our system. Not sure why you would bother though...they no longer act as poison pills that shut down the entire pipeline...just sort of inconvenience someone like me for a day. So I guess actually I'm not going to tell you.
**This one time, my then-girlfriend told me that she was very mad at me and didn't know why. And I know I say this all the time, but I'm really not making this up.
Friday, July 6, 2012
Decisions
I don't have a girlfriend, I just know a girl who would get really mad if she heard me say that.
--Mitch Hedburg
If the job I'm trying to apply for works out, I'm probably going to take that. However since I fumbled with the interview schedule, it seems prudent to consider my options.
Decision A
1. stay in Seattle
2. home to Philly
Decision B
1. major tech company
2. startup
3. work for myself
When I think about making any sort of commitment, at all, to this girl I'm dating, beyond "hey I'm not gonna hook up with anyone else" I get this sort of fear reaction all the way up and down my spine. I think that's normal. The weird thing is, I like her enough to stay on this coast. So I guess I just made decision A. Better take a break to celebrate.
Wednesday, July 4, 2012
AX to the Not
I''ve been pining for the East Coast, or at least a programming job I like, practically since I've moved here, and now that everything is getting shaken up and I'm actually getting off my ass and doing something about it, I have a girl I don't want to move away from. Seems like incredibly poor timing to me. What I should have done is dated someone for the past three years and then break up now...basically the opposite of what I'm doing.
I suppose thats the cost of treating life as an adventure. I'm a leaf on the wind. Leaves probably shouldn't complain about where they end up.
I had an interview with a local company scheduled for Tuesday, as in, today. Unfortunately I read the email incorrectly and scheduled it for Thursday in my calendar, shuffled around shit at work, and told everyone that I had the interview Thursday.
The silver lining is that my one manager--the one who liked to call me into his office and tell me I'm doing everything wrong--isn't around to rub it in.
3-SAT
Anyway, here is a 3-sat algorithm I have been thinking about. For all I know it has been done before. In developing it, I made a fatal flaw somewhere because the algorithm doesn't actually work. It does, however, end up with an interesting property. So here it is.
First, the most brutal of the brute force methods. Replacing a variable, say x, with 0, recursively seeing if the problem is solvable, and if it is not, declaring that x must be 1 and then solving what's left. Runs in 2 ^ number of variables.
Consider a problem that includes these:
(x y z)(!x a b)
Assigning actual values
let x = 0: (x y z)(!x a b) => (y z)
if that ends up being unsat, then x = 1: (x y z)(!x a b) => (a b)
Replacing with other variables
let x = y: (x y z)(!x a b) => (y z)(!y a b)
if that ends up being unsat, x must equal !y: (!y y z)(y a b) => (y a b)
Replacing with expressions of other variables
let x = y+w: (x y z)(!x a b) => (y w y z)(...yeah this didn't really go anywhere.
Replacing with expressions of other variables, part 2
let x = xa (lack of space means "and" as in, intersection": (x y z) => (xa y z)
however, we only do that to x. We don't change !x:
(x y z)(!x a b) => (xa y z)(!x a b)
Why the hell would you do this? Two reasons. Well, at least two. First, it makes the problem strictly less satisfiable. Draw a truth table for variables x,y,z,a and expressions (x y z),(xa y z) and you will see why: it adds a single extra 0 in the (xz y z) column. I would give you the table here but I am too lazy to write an html table right now.
Second, if saying x = xa makes the problem unsat, well then, x must not equal to xa. Actually that statement is probably the one that is not true, but I don't understand why. Anyway, thanks to some guy named DeMorgan:
x != xa => x = (!x !a) [that is: not x, or not a]
So:
let x = xa: (x y z)(!x a b) => unsat? well then x = !(xa) = (!x !a) so (x y z)(!x a b) => (!x !a y z)(!x a b)
The interesting point here is that x becomes !x. Sure there is a !a also, but there are no more x literals, only !x. We can set !x to true and eliminate all of those expressions.
Replacing with expressions and taking it way, way to far
So we have this trick where we let x = xa. Intuitively, (xa y z) should make the problem easier to solve because now that expression conflicts with all expressions that contain a !a. But lets not bother with that. No one said we could only intersect/and x with one other literal.
What if we did something like let x = xyzabw ? It would make the SAT instance much harder to solve, making our job so much easier in the sub problem.
And then, what if we chose these other variables in such a way that eliminates all of the non-standard and'd expressions? For example:
(x y z)
(x w a)
(x g h)
(x j k)
let x = xywgj
Thanks to the simple theorem that x*y + y == y:
(x y z) => (xywgj y z) => (y z)
(x w a) => (xywgj w a) => (w a)
(x g h) => (xywgj g h) => (g h)
(x j k) => (xywgj j k) => (j k)
And, if we find that instance unsolvable, well then x != xywgj, and in fact x = (!x !y !w !g !j). Fancy that:
(x y z) => (!x !y !w !g !j y z) => TRUE
The expression becomes satisfied not only because there are no x's to conflict with !x, but because the expression has both a !y and a y in it. Effectively, but solving a subproblem where x = xywgj and finding it unsat, we can simply eliminate every expression with an x OR a !x.
Important: eliminating every expression (sorry, clause) with both literals of a variable in it (ex: x and !x) makes the problem strictly more solvable. Interesting.
Something is wrong here
Some of you may be thinking "wait, this can't be right." You are right. This approach is flawed. Not sure why, but its probably related to the fact that I'm only changing x. If my approach was correct, you could simply write an algorithm that removes all of the clauses for every variable until it finds the problem unsat. Clearly, that isn't the case: removing clauses willy nilly has this strange effect of making any sat instance satisfiable, even if I found it in the "unsat" category of satlib.
Binary Search
But we can't give up yet! I never like to give up on a SAT algorithm until long after repeated experiments have proven me a hopeful idiot. What to do?
This is where two properties I discovered become interesting. Long have I searched for a way to use binary search on 3-SAT. If only we had some way, I thought, to test a solution, and if finding it unsat, had some way to know if the real solution was to the left or to the right of the one we tested. In this context to the left or right can mean anything...more 1's in the solution, a higher integer represented by the 1s and 0s in the solution...whatever you want.
Guess what: we can kind of construct such a search! Doing my crazy shit with the x = xabcd... nonsense (which effectively sets x to 0) makes the problem strictly less solvable (technically, it guarantees that the new problem is at least as hard as the old one...usually harder). This means that if we did that "and" trick with a whole bunch of variables without any of them causing the instance to be unsat, and then at the end discovered that what we had was satisfiable, well, we'd be done: we made the problem harder to satisfy, and still found it satisfiable. Game over; we won.
To go the other direction, we do the thing that makes it strictly more solvable (in reality the new problem is guaranteed to be at least as easy to solve as the previous one, to "stricly" is the wrong word to use).
So for a given variable, x, we know that x=xabc... makes an instance that is less solvable, and x != xabc... makes an instance that is more solvable. Lets say that the less solvable route is taking us "to the left" and the more solvable route is "to the right." Also, lets say that we must always investigate these variables in the same order, that is, if we go left (choose x = xabc...) on x and then act upon y, and then other variables until we reach some result at the bottom of the tree, the next time, when we go right on x (choose x != xabc...), we MUST do y next, again.
Once you do this, I think, you can take some arbitrary path down the search tree. Sure, the number of nodes in the tree, or even along the bottom, is exponential, but once we DO get to the bottom, depending on our answer (sat vs unsat), we know which direction to go in: if we got a SAT answer, we need to search to the left. If we got an UNSAT answer, we need to search to the right.
For example, lets sat for variables x,y,z,a,b we went LRRRR (this actually takes us to the half-way point) and then we got a SAT answer. We should go to the left. We can go half way between our current position, and the left side of the tree, by taking the search path LLRRR. If that new position was SAT, we could move on to LLLRR and if it was unsat... LRLRR. Just draw a binary tree and this will make sense.
What exactly are we searching for? Well, we can find the place where the leaf instances switch from UNSAT to SAT in what I believe is a polynomial number of steps (something like log2(2^n) ) although I could be wrong about that also.
Here is the problem: I can't decide what we accomplish but doing so. Sure, intuitively, the farther left you are (where it changes from UNSAT to SAT), the more likely it is that the original problem was satisfiable, and the more right you are, the more likely it is to be unsat. But can we infer an exact solution without doing more work? I'm not sure we can.
Maybe this approach can help us find the "critical section," as in the subset of clauses in the instance that by themselves make the instance unsatisfiable.
So that was fun. I think I'm going to put this algorithm away until I can figure out some use for what it provides. Just thought I'd share.
[edit]
the-25-best-tech-companies-to-work-at-in-2012-2012-6
I suppose thats the cost of treating life as an adventure. I'm a leaf on the wind. Leaves probably shouldn't complain about where they end up.
I had an interview with a local company scheduled for Tuesday, as in, today. Unfortunately I read the email incorrectly and scheduled it for Thursday in my calendar, shuffled around shit at work, and told everyone that I had the interview Thursday.
The silver lining is that my one manager--the one who liked to call me into his office and tell me I'm doing everything wrong--isn't around to rub it in.
3-SAT
Anyway, here is a 3-sat algorithm I have been thinking about. For all I know it has been done before. In developing it, I made a fatal flaw somewhere because the algorithm doesn't actually work. It does, however, end up with an interesting property. So here it is.
First, the most brutal of the brute force methods. Replacing a variable, say x, with 0, recursively seeing if the problem is solvable, and if it is not, declaring that x must be 1 and then solving what's left. Runs in 2 ^ number of variables.
Consider a problem that includes these:
(x y z)(!x a b)
Assigning actual values
let x = 0: (x y z)(!x a b) => (y z)
if that ends up being unsat, then x = 1: (x y z)(!x a b) => (a b)
Replacing with other variables
let x = y: (x y z)(!x a b) => (y z)(!y a b)
if that ends up being unsat, x must equal !y: (!y y z)(y a b) => (y a b)
Replacing with expressions of other variables
let x = y+w: (x y z)(!x a b) => (y w y z)(...yeah this didn't really go anywhere.
Replacing with expressions of other variables, part 2
let x = xa (lack of space means "and" as in, intersection": (x y z) => (xa y z)
however, we only do that to x. We don't change !x:
(x y z)(!x a b) => (xa y z)(!x a b)
Why the hell would you do this? Two reasons. Well, at least two. First, it makes the problem strictly less satisfiable. Draw a truth table for variables x,y,z,a and expressions (x y z),(xa y z) and you will see why: it adds a single extra 0 in the (xz y z) column. I would give you the table here but I am too lazy to write an html table right now.
Second, if saying x = xa makes the problem unsat, well then, x must not equal to xa. Actually that statement is probably the one that is not true, but I don't understand why. Anyway, thanks to some guy named DeMorgan:
x != xa => x = (!x !a) [that is: not x, or not a]
So:
let x = xa: (x y z)(!x a b) => unsat? well then x = !(xa) = (!x !a) so (x y z)(!x a b) => (!x !a y z)(!x a b)
The interesting point here is that x becomes !x. Sure there is a !a also, but there are no more x literals, only !x. We can set !x to true and eliminate all of those expressions.
Replacing with expressions and taking it way, way to far
So we have this trick where we let x = xa. Intuitively, (xa y z) should make the problem easier to solve because now that expression conflicts with all expressions that contain a !a. But lets not bother with that. No one said we could only intersect/and x with one other literal.
What if we did something like let x = xyzabw ? It would make the SAT instance much harder to solve, making our job so much easier in the sub problem.
And then, what if we chose these other variables in such a way that eliminates all of the non-standard and'd expressions? For example:
(x y z)
(x w a)
(x g h)
(x j k)
let x = xywgj
Thanks to the simple theorem that x*y + y == y:
(x y z) => (xywgj y z) => (y z)
(x w a) => (xywgj w a) => (w a)
(x g h) => (xywgj g h) => (g h)
(x j k) => (xywgj j k) => (j k)
And, if we find that instance unsolvable, well then x != xywgj, and in fact x = (!x !y !w !g !j). Fancy that:
(x y z) => (!x !y !w !g !j y z) => TRUE
The expression becomes satisfied not only because there are no x's to conflict with !x, but because the expression has both a !y and a y in it. Effectively, but solving a subproblem where x = xywgj and finding it unsat, we can simply eliminate every expression with an x OR a !x.
Important: eliminating every expression (sorry, clause) with both literals of a variable in it (ex: x and !x) makes the problem strictly more solvable. Interesting.
Something is wrong here
Some of you may be thinking "wait, this can't be right." You are right. This approach is flawed. Not sure why, but its probably related to the fact that I'm only changing x. If my approach was correct, you could simply write an algorithm that removes all of the clauses for every variable until it finds the problem unsat. Clearly, that isn't the case: removing clauses willy nilly has this strange effect of making any sat instance satisfiable, even if I found it in the "unsat" category of satlib.
Binary Search
But we can't give up yet! I never like to give up on a SAT algorithm until long after repeated experiments have proven me a hopeful idiot. What to do?
This is where two properties I discovered become interesting. Long have I searched for a way to use binary search on 3-SAT. If only we had some way, I thought, to test a solution, and if finding it unsat, had some way to know if the real solution was to the left or to the right of the one we tested. In this context to the left or right can mean anything...more 1's in the solution, a higher integer represented by the 1s and 0s in the solution...whatever you want.
Guess what: we can kind of construct such a search! Doing my crazy shit with the x = xabcd... nonsense (which effectively sets x to 0) makes the problem strictly less solvable (technically, it guarantees that the new problem is at least as hard as the old one...usually harder). This means that if we did that "and" trick with a whole bunch of variables without any of them causing the instance to be unsat, and then at the end discovered that what we had was satisfiable, well, we'd be done: we made the problem harder to satisfy, and still found it satisfiable. Game over; we won.
To go the other direction, we do the thing that makes it strictly more solvable (in reality the new problem is guaranteed to be at least as easy to solve as the previous one, to "stricly" is the wrong word to use).
So for a given variable, x, we know that x=xabc... makes an instance that is less solvable, and x != xabc... makes an instance that is more solvable. Lets say that the less solvable route is taking us "to the left" and the more solvable route is "to the right." Also, lets say that we must always investigate these variables in the same order, that is, if we go left (choose x = xabc...) on x and then act upon y, and then other variables until we reach some result at the bottom of the tree, the next time, when we go right on x (choose x != xabc...), we MUST do y next, again.
Once you do this, I think, you can take some arbitrary path down the search tree. Sure, the number of nodes in the tree, or even along the bottom, is exponential, but once we DO get to the bottom, depending on our answer (sat vs unsat), we know which direction to go in: if we got a SAT answer, we need to search to the left. If we got an UNSAT answer, we need to search to the right.
For example, lets sat for variables x,y,z,a,b we went LRRRR (this actually takes us to the half-way point) and then we got a SAT answer. We should go to the left. We can go half way between our current position, and the left side of the tree, by taking the search path LLRRR. If that new position was SAT, we could move on to LLLRR and if it was unsat... LRLRR. Just draw a binary tree and this will make sense.
What exactly are we searching for? Well, we can find the place where the leaf instances switch from UNSAT to SAT in what I believe is a polynomial number of steps (something like log2(2^n) ) although I could be wrong about that also.
Here is the problem: I can't decide what we accomplish but doing so. Sure, intuitively, the farther left you are (where it changes from UNSAT to SAT), the more likely it is that the original problem was satisfiable, and the more right you are, the more likely it is to be unsat. But can we infer an exact solution without doing more work? I'm not sure we can.
Maybe this approach can help us find the "critical section," as in the subset of clauses in the instance that by themselves make the instance unsatisfiable.
So that was fun. I think I'm going to put this algorithm away until I can figure out some use for what it provides. Just thought I'd share.
[edit]
the-25-best-tech-companies-to-work-at-in-2012-2012-6
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