Stories about Midgets
I like short fiction. Not about midgets or dwarves per se, but story fragments. The kind of writing that does little but present one idea, one thought. I just found this (make sure to check the archives!) over at Boingboing, and think it's just wonderful. This is just the sort of thing I used to absolutely love reading over at the (now defunct) Die Puny Humans site. Maybe it's just my short attention span, but I think it's a great bang-for-your-buck style. Each piece of work paints a picture, so to speak, and leaves it at that.
Oh, and just to test the old adage, picking a story at random and running "wc -w" shows 597 words. That's about the same order as 1000, so I guess it holds!
Update: Don't read "Welcome to Hotel Kraken" unless... hrm, what's a good metric? Unless you know the name of one of the Gazebo's previous (possibly still current) computer, know why it's creepy, and don't mind. That ought to throw them off, yeah...
posted by Lemming @ 9/12/2005 10:12:00 AM
4 comments
4 Comments:
Dang. Some of those are fantastic (the remainder are only very good). I didn't actually think Hotel Kraken was creepy at all (although I don't recall Gazebo's computer's name), but Skin Deep was... deeply disturbing. They were all quite powerful, though I think the shorter ones, in general, affected me more than the (relatively) longer ones.
I've always liked short stories for the opposite reason you mentioned: my attention span for books is far too long, and any reasonably long book will completely derail the rest of my life until it's finished. Short stories have a much shorter length of derailment (although I did read all of that site at once, and it's a darn good thing no one tried to interrupt me).
"Tentacle." If the Gazebo stops by, maybe he can enlighten us as to the name of his current machine.
I still use Tentacle at home. My notebook's name is Aelia after the Valkyrie Profile character. The server in my office is of course named Inverse after Lina.
As it happens, several of the computers in my research group have cephalopod themed names: calamari, cuttlefish, qc-squid. But we do work with SQUIDs...
On the subject of computer names, I have to point out that my back-up harddrive is called Phylactery (as Tim knows but the rest of you don't).
My computer at work is Arkham and the root user is Cthulhu. I wonder if the CPI people will appreciated that when I hand the computer over after I leave?
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