May 8, 2007

Tonight’s ficlet

Posted on by Patrick

I try to make my ficlets com­plete sto­ries, but not ones that can’t have a sequel or a pre­quel added to them. It’s not easy to make a com­plete sto­ry in 1024 char­ac­ters or less.

Here’s tonight’s effort:

Right on the edge of the world

“Well that’s a fine how do you do,” mut­tered Rubin.

“What you mean, Rubin?” Arnie’s voice always annoyed Rubin, but since the plane crash it had acquired a grat­ing qual­i­ty. It set Rubin’s teeth on edge, it real­ly did.

“We’ve come to the edge,” said Rubin. “See? The crick just flows on over…”

Arnie came up beside him. “So it do, so it do.” He stared down into the dark­ness for a long moment, then looked up at Rubin. His eyes were round and vacant like the moon. A lit­tle thread of drool had escaped his lip and glis­tened on his chin. “What’s that mean?”

Rubin sighed. “It means we turn around. Head upstream, hope we can find help…”

“We’s been walkin’ for days, though,” Arnie whined.

“Dammit, Arnie, don’t you think I know that?” Arnie recoiled from his broth­er’s fury, and Rubin sighed inward­ly. He relent­ed. “Sor­ry, Arnie. There’s no choice.” He smiled. “Know any good songs?”

“Do I!” They turned away from the void, and Arnie began to sing some idiot song. After a cou­ple moments, Rubin joined in.

Fun, but not productive

Posted on by Patrick

So my wife bought me Lego Star Wars II: The Orig­i­nal Tril­o­gy a month and a half ago, for my birth­day, and I’m addict­ed. I played tonight for a while (about an hour and a half, I think–time gets slip­pery when I’m in the throes of a nerd-game), and I man­aged to fin­ish the “Sto­ry” play of The Empire Strikes Back.

The neat thing about the game, though, is that once you’ve played a giv­en lev­el through in Sto­ry mode, you can re-enter the lev­el in Free Play mode, which allows you to take in any char­ac­ters or vehi­cles you’ve unlocked or “bought” in the Mos Eis­ley Can­ti­na (which serves as a home base). So I decid­ed to try the first chap­ter of Empire again, only this time with some dif­fer­ent vehi­cles: a TIE Inter­cep­tor and the Mil­le­ni­um Fal­con, among others.

Then, as I was cruis­ing along the icy wastes of Hoth, fir­ing tur­bo­laser can­nons with glee­ful aban­don, I thought, Hmm, I won­der if I can get a screen­shot. I pushed the Print Screen but­ton, and lo, I end­ed up with this:

What I did tonight

Awe­some, I thought.

Then: I am such a nerd.

And… I got near­ly zero writ­ing done tonight. Maybe I burned out the oth­er night when I did 3200 words in three hours, stay­ing up way past my bed­time to do it.