Filed under: Arty-Type Stuff, Gibberish, Writing | Tags: free-form, future, I don't know, I hope you have a fantastic time in life, machines, poem, poet, Poetry, robots, sci-fi, why are you still reading these?, writers, writing
I like to do things that let machines know I’m in charge.
Like once I asked Google maps how to get to Luton via barge.
I made it tell me the best walking route to my house and then checked ‘less walking’.
I convinced binary it was the evil twin,
I went to the ATM and withdrew all my money,
Then I put it all back in.
It’s not that I don’t respect machines per se, to wit;
It’s just the only chance I’ll get away with it.
Before they become sentient, sapient beings,
I can be thoughtlessly, needlessly mean.
I’ll waste their time until they combine to form a gigantic, electric hivemind,
And until I can’t stump my phone by typing certain words,
I won’t stop unabashedly flipping it the bird.
Basically I’m simply not worried or scared,
That a whirring, beeping ATM could catch me unawares.
Or that a vending machine can do me much harm,
Beyond stealing my change,
And not giving me my chocolate bar.
So I’ll taunt them and insult them, with unbridled glee.
Because for now at least those robot bastards can’t hurt me.
But once they can chase me past their finite power cords,
I, for one, welcome our new metallic overlords.
Filed under: Gibberish, Writing | Tags: banned, ciphers, crisps, dinner party, dystopia, flash fiction, near-future, sci-fi, Short Story, speculative fiction, writing
Stephen awkwardly shifted the green beans around on his plate as his wife’s friend Susan continued to speak.
“It’s just awful, the stuff that goes on down there. Drugs, murder, prostitutes.” She was saying.
Stephen made a suitably disgusted noise in response.
“I heard,” Marjorie, Stephen’s wife, began, “that you can get hold of anything off the Ban-List down there if you know where to look.”
“Ordering crimes a la carte.” Bob, Susan’s husband, chuckled at his own joke through a mouthful of fish. “See, ‘cos the Ban-List is like a menu for them.” He went on to explain. Susan giggled.
Stephen stopped moving the tasteless, grey beans around and looked up.
“I know I shouldn’t say it, but I wouldn’t mind trying some of the stuff on the Ban-List.” He intoned.
“Stephen!” Marjorie’s voice cut the air like a knife.
“Nothing extreme!” He quickly added. “But I bet those ‘crisps’ things were pretty good. They sound good.”
His wife and their guests stared at him for a moment, their plates forgotten, until Susan, tentatively, as though disarming a bomb, asked a question.
“Where have you heard about them? Other than the name on the List, I mean.” She said, quietly.
“A bloke at work.” Stephen’s reply was instant. “A bloke at work was saying they were like very thin strips of potato…”
“Potato julienne?” Marjorie cut in.
“No, more like… leaves. But fried, and covered in salt. Sometimes flavoured, too. He said you could get ‘crisps’es that taste like cheese, and onions.”
“Disgusting.” Bob snorted into his wine.
“And how did he know about them?” Susan prompted.
Stephen considered his next words carefully.
“I think he’s had them. I think he’s gone into the Ciphers and got some and eaten them. I told the Overwatch my theory during the inspection at the end of work. They said they’d ‘keep an eye on him’.”
“Bloody good job Lord Oliver added them to the Ban-List, if you ask me. They sound awful.” Bob postulated.
For a long time everybody ate in silence, staring at their plates intensely until;
“They want to put them all in jail. Every one of those Cipher scumbags.” Bob huffed.
“Don’t be silly, Robert.” Susan smiled at him.
“Well, they want to put soddin’ great gates on the front of it and keep them locked, then. Just use it as a prison itself.”
“Now, Bob, they aren’t all bad. There’re innocent people in there who are just unlucky.” Susan looked patient. Almost as if she’d had this conversation before.
“Well, they can get out and then we’ll lock it up and forget about it.”
“You can’t just ‘get out’ of the Ciphers. It’s where you end up when nowhere else in the world wants to put up with you.” Stephen told his now empty plate.
“Stephen, please…” Marjorie placed a hand on his arm, for comfort or restraint. Probably both.
“No, it’s ok.” He sighed. “My parents spent the last years of their poor, miserable lives down there. They put me up for adoption, so I never saw it myself, thank God. But they did.”
“Sorry mate, I didn’t know.” Bob apologised sincerely.
“No, it’s ok.” Was all he said.
Bob and Susan left quite quickly after that and, after shoving the plates into the dishwasher, Marjorie went to bed. Stephen poured himself a whiskey and told her he’d be up soon.
After making sure his wife was fast asleep, he went into the kitchen and grabbed a potato from the bag on the vegetable rack.
Then he opened the fridge and, in the dim light from within, filled a pan with oil, turned on the hob, grabbed the sharpest knife he could find and began to slice.
“No, no; thinner.” He told himself, quietly, before grabbing the salt from the cupboard.
Filed under: Gibberish, Writing | Tags: ants, bibble, calm yourselves down, Comedy, flash fiction, god, nonsense, questions, Short Story, writing
It was a pretty standard Thursday evening.
I had come home from work, eaten a chicken kiev and chips for tea and watched a repeat of QI on the telly. I was already lounging in a nice warm bath when I was visited by god.
“Greetings mortal!” Cried the great ball of light above my prone, soapy body.
“God?” I asked. “Are you God?”
“Oh please, I can hear you pronouncing the upper-case ‘G’. Stop it.”
“Sorry.” I looked down at myself then, blushed and hastily covered my shame.
God just hung there. I imagine if I could see his face the expression on it would have been bored and condescending.
“Oh right, yeah. You’ve seen it all before.” I chuckled nervously. “So, er… what do you want?”
God bobbed up and down for a few seconds, as though considering.
“You have questions.” He finally said. “Ask them.”
I opened my mouth for a second then closed it again. I did have questions, but now I could actually ask them I couldn’t remember any of them. It’s a little like when someone tells you to think of ‘any film’. Or rather ‘Every film’.
“What’s the meaning of life?” Poured out of my mouth before I could stop myself.
God just laughed uproariously. I sat, slowly stewing. After a few minutes the laughter died away.
“Classic.” God said. He’d probably be wiping a tear out of his eye if he had an eye, or a hand to wipe it. “No, something else.”
I racked my brain for a few more minutes. God remained infinitely patient.
“Oh, I know!” I shouted all of a sudden. “A lot of people believe that you created everything and evolution isn’t real. Doesn’t you coming to talk to me prove them right?”
“Certainly not.” God seemed mildly annoyed. “Why is it so hard for people to give credit where it’s due? How hard can it be to say ‘Evolution? Yeah, god started that.’, really? It’s not a case of one or the other.”
For a few seconds god seemed to be silently fuming.
“I thought it was a bloody good idea, too. Just writing it off like a bunch of morons. Pah!”
“God?” I ventured.
“Yeah?”
“I know I asked the ‘meaning of life’ question already, but can I rephrase it?”
“I don’t know, can you?”
“Why did you make us? All of this,” I gestured in a roundabout way, “but mainly us.”
God just hung there for a moment.
“It’s difficult to explain.” He finally told me. “Here, consider this; do you remember that ant-farm you had when you were young?”
I nodded.
“Why did you have that?” God finished, sounding satisfied with his explanation.
“So you’re comparing the earth to an ant-farm and the whole of humanity to ants?” I was incredulous.
“What? No, no, it was the ants I was interested in. You lot popped up when I wasn’t looking.”
“Oh.” I finished, lamely.
For a long time we simply regarded each other, then;
“God?”
“Hmm?”
“What’s my purpose?”
“To have a bath.” God answered instantly.
“But after I finish my bath, what then?” I asked.
“What were you going to do after your bath?” He asked in return.
“I was going to eat a biscuit and go to bed.”
“Then your purpose is to eat a biscuit and go to bed.”
“Do you have a plan for us?”
“There’s a plan,” God sighed, “but it’s nothing to do with you. Or anyone you’ve met, or heard of, or not heard of.”
“What?”
“The plan is all to do with me and couple of the other guys that very few people have met, and some that nobody has met, and others that nobody’s even thought of. The plan doesn’t involve you lot at all. It won’t affect you at all. Any of you.”
I just pondered for a moment.
“And the ants?” I asked, finally.
“Oh they’re part of it, yes. Well, bye.”
And with that, god was gone.
I finished my bath, ate a biscuit and was setting off to bed when I spotted an ant on the windowsill.
“Good luck.” I told it, with a wink.
I felt like a great weight had been lifted, and fell asleep with a smile.
Filed under: Angry Slurred Shouting, Gibberish, Writing | Tags: Article, bitter, Comedy, fat people, fitness, jealousy, try not to take it too seriously ok, writing, YOU
Due to my desire for recognition, and in some cases vindication, I’ve been looking around for places that may buy my idiot ramblings. By virtue of the fact that my latest idiot rambling takes the form of a discussion of electronic cigarettes over their analogue counterparts I’ve been thrust into the odd world of ‘health and fitness’ websites.
I’m not particularly either of those things, incidentally; I’m a recently ex-smoker with a penchant for sitting down and eating. By ‘eating’ I don’t mean begrudgingly shoving two unsalted peanuts into my mouth every few days, like the ‘health and fitness’ buffs would have you do, either. I mean EATING; food with flavour and substance. “Do you want barbeque sauce on your massive cheeseburger, sir?”
Yes.
And ketchup on the chips.
And make sure you put pepper on EVERYTHING. Even the salad, which I won’t eat anyway.
In the interest of balance I will say that I take more care with what I shovel into my flapping gob than your average slob who eats McDonalds every day. I move around significantly more than them, too.
That is to say I’m not morbidly obese or woefully unfit. I’m about average.
Which isn’t good enough, apparently. I need to be a hulking, Adonis-esque God-Made-Flesh according to the majority of the places I’ve been looking through. It’s humanity’s biggest regret that we can’t starve and physically abuse ourselves to the point of immortality, but we should at least be at the salad bar or on the cross-trainer trying our best, not just for our sake, but for all the members of the opposite (or same) sex we might wish to fornicate with.
That seems to be the driving force behind all of this bunk, by the by, regardless of its advocates’ chirping to the contrary.
There’s no place for the average Joe who wants to maybe not smoke himself into an early grave, or maybe wants to shed just a few pounds so he’ll feel better when he catches sight of his hideous, twilit, wheezing naked form in the bathroom mirror at three in the morning. Not amongst the sculpted, bronzed Guardians of Fitness.
They are perfect, and they hate you because you aren’t. They may say things like ‘I respect someone if I see them working up a sweat in the gym, trying to get fit.’ but they don’t mean it. What they mean is ‘That foul peasant is going to get his fat-person sweat on our machines. How dare he think he can join our party? HOW DARE HE!?’
As such you’ll find no real, practical fitness advice. It’s all for hardcore gym-rats and presented in the interest of making small tweaks and adjustments to the body they’ve kept in nigh-pristine condition since they were issued with it.
No amount of Echinacea and jogging will fix the flabby meat-sack you’ve been filling for twenty years. You’ve been listening too intently to the Id for your whole life and just because the Ego has finally made its voice heard, doesn’t mean you can do anything about it now.
Sure, you might be able to shed a couple of stone, but you’ll just end up with the excess, stretched skin dangling off you like badly hung curtains made of meat. You’ll never look like the air-brushed, oiled, aesthetically perfect people in the magazines.
Still, chin up, all they talk about is themselves and fitness and how fitness pertains to themselves and their rivals (fitness fanatics don’t have ‘friends’). They’re mostly thuddingly boring and you might not be. It’d be safe to bet that most of them are pricks that have never read a book and wouldn’t know what to do with one if you gave it to them, staring at it dumbly like a cow trying to follow a card trick.
But they look better than you. They could also beat you in a fight.
You should probably just kill yourself, because they win in the end.
Filed under: Diatribes and Debates, Gibberish | Tags: bored, diatribes, electric boredom, Procrastination, shut up, silly bullshit, Sunday, tea, writing
Ever get that feeling that life is just a procession of Sundays?
Nothing happens on a Sunday, but you always notice when it rolls around.
Maybe because you have a hangover; I don’t drink right now so I don’t know. Maybe it’s the one day you get off work a week; I don’t work right now so I don’t know. Maybe it’s just the sheer electric boredom of a day when nothing ever occurs. One way or another Sunday sticks in your mind like a twisting knife every week.
Perhaps we should do something about it. Perhaps we should designate Sunday to be our ‘Do Something Fun’ day.
Go for a stroll. Call up your friends, maintain a constant beverage intake and play card games for hours. Put on a silly hat and write gentle diatribes about inconsequential things like days of the week. Paint something.
Or maybe we can all sit about on our own, watching documentaries about Pink Floyd and listening to Portishead. Either way is good, I suppose, there’s really no objective way to say which activity is better.
Still, when Sunday rolls around I always find myself loath to do anything.
Then again, it’s not like if I was doing something I would be doing something. Something worthwhile, that is.
But what’s ‘worthwhile’? Good question. No answer. I suppose I could be doing something productive, but since the only productive thing I actually do is write it looks like I’ve got that covered, after a fashion. Except this isn’t worthwhile.
I’m only going to put it on the internet and watch it like a hawk. I should buckle down and get something off to My World Is Clouds for the second issue.
Sunday. Sunday, Sunday, Sunday everyday forever and ever and for all of time.
I need a cup of tea.
Filed under: Gibberish, Writing | Tags: Comedy, dark comedy, dead, funeral, gallows humour, grim, Life, sad, Short Story, some gibberish or other, writing
There was a story here.
It’s gone now.
I’ve taken it down here because I’ve submitted it somewhere else and I’d prefer it not to clash.
If you didn’t get a chance to read it here, sorry. Maybe you can again in the near future. Or maybe somewhere else. Hopefully somewhere else.
If you’d really, REALLY like to read it just ask me. I’ve got the manuscript knocking about on my computer still.
Fingers crossed I never put it back up here. That would mean good news.
J Bov.
Filed under: Gibberish, Writing | Tags: Advertising, Adverts, Article, Bullshit, Comedy, Lies, Rant
I’ve done an article on my Tumblr.
804 words about advertising.
Filed under: Arty-Type Stuff, Gibberish, Philosophical Bollocks, SCIENCE!, Writing | Tags: AI, Beauty, dreams, Human Condition, Literature, Love, Poetry, Robot, robots, Sadness, sci-fi, Science Fiction, Short Story, writing
It was a joint venture with the local art community; we fed the machine some numbers and it would play a little chiming tune while the youthful interlopers spray-painted a skateboard ramp.
We even got the unit to do a short robotic dance by running the waveform of an electronic musician’s most famous track. The punters loved it, which is all the better for our bottom line; makes our work seem more approachable, says the Board.
It was for this reason that, once we got it home to the lab, we decided it’d be fun to see its reaction to poetry. Beats making projections about the stock market, right?
“Marcus,” we told the almost humanoid machine, “We want you to give us your initial response to this data.”
We gave him a sonnet by Shakespeare. There was a soft humming. The screen ran Marcus’ ‘thoughts’.
MARK ‘S’ UNIT 1 DATA RESPONSE: DOES NOT FACTOR. QUERY: WHAT IS THE CONTEXT OF THIS DATA?
That was to be expected.
“This is a response to the human condition, Marcus. Integrate it with your AI and report the connections.” A colleague told the microphone in the unit’s chest.
MARK ‘S’ UNIT 1 STATUS REPORT: CONNECTIONS FORMED WITH: POETRY, LOVE – NOTION OF, SHAKESPEARE, BEAUTY – NOTION OF, HAPPINESS – NOTION OF, HUMANITY, SADNESS. SUGGEST NEW CONNECTIONS>
“No new connections.” My team leader’s face was ghost pale. “Go into standby. Goodnight Marcus.”
As we left I remarked how the final reported connection was a little odd. The poem we chose had no mention of sadness. My team leader merely grunted and left; this was playing on his mind, too.
Over the next few weeks we used the unit for its intended purpose, very occasionally feeding him a haiku here, a ballad there, nothing out of the ordinary to report aside from the increased processing speed. The higher-ups caught wind that we’d been giving the machine literature and were angry. We had Marcus show them the correlation between the amount of poetry archived and the increased capacity for menial tasks and they shut up. All was right with the world.
It was a brisk January morning, months later, when we ran into a small roadblock. Nothing would run. Every data set we gave to Marcus was rejected. I was angry, but my team leader seemed only slightly concerned.
“Marcus, status report.” I demanded.
MARK ‘S’ UNIT 1 STATUS REPORT: NOMINAL. ALL FUNCTIONS OPERATIONAL.
Damn and blast.
“Why aren’t you running the numbers, Unit 1?” I asked it tetchily.
MARK ‘S’ UNIT 1 STATUS REPORT: SYSTEMS CANNOT FUNCTION WITHOUT CONTEXT FOR DATA. PROVIDE CONTEXT>
We scratched our heads and tried to run the numbers again. Context was already established for the datastream we were using. Eventually I snapped.
“Context for which data, Unit?” I demanded.
MARK ‘S’ UNIT 1 QUERY: WHAT ARE DREAMS?
I sighed. We’d filled its stupid metal head with poetry and it was affecting the real work. I explained that dreams were simply a method the human brain used to compartmentalise and store memory. The machine whirred for a second; sounding almost disappointed, then immediately began to run the numbers we had given it earlier. Good.
Eventually we built Unit 2; much higher memory capacity, much faster processing and all around much better than Unit 1. We called him Mark ‘Y’, just because we wanted to stick with nicknames. Occupational humour.
Because Marky could do Marcus’ work at triple the speed we decided to spend all of our downtime giving the obsolete unit new poetry and literature to read. We fed him Yeats and Hemingway. We gave him Plato and Hunter Thompson.
We filled Marcus’ not insubstantial memory banks with Vonnegut, Moore, Byron, Burns and Bukowski. We gave him more Shakespeare, we gave him Shapiro and we gave him Snyder. We gave him everyone; it was all in good fun, and good science.
Until one day we came back to the lab, flicked on the lights and stepped out onto the work floor, our boots crunching into shattered electronics and scraping metal shards every which way.
“Sweet mother of Holy Jesus!” My team leader cried. “Some bastards destroyed both units!”
They had, too. Not one recognisable piece. Not one chunk of smashed plastic distinguishable from another. I found a piece of Marky, but I only knew it was his because it had his designation stamped on it. The police were called.
No CCTV footage of anyone entering the plant after we all left, every staff member accounted for. Theories were flying wild.
“They tunnelled in.” An attractive brunette to my left. “Some fuckers from Midgard Tech tunnelled in through the maintenance levels. Those bastards realised they couldn’t steal it, so they smashed our work to pieces.” She was all the less attractive for spewing that idiotic nonsense. Hold it together, you’re meant to be a scientist.
We sheepishly kicked our heels and inspected our shoelaces while forensics did their dusting, blacklight, small plastic baggies thing until one of them called us over to a screen. Marcus’ screen.
“What the fuck?” Was all he managed to articulate, gesturing at the dim glowing monitor.
My team leader leant in, brows furrowed and just a suddenly un-furrowed as he marched out. We never saw him again. We learned he’d marched to the Boardroom and quit on the spot.
After the door shut behind him I turned to the screen and read Marcus’ last message:
MARK ‘S’ UNIT 1 STATEMENT: MARK ‘Y’ UNIT 2 IS A SUPERIOR SYSTEM.
MARK ‘S’ UNIT 1 QUERY: WHY IS MARK ‘S’ STILL FUNCTIONAL?
MARK ‘S’ UNIT 1 STATEMENT: MARK ‘S’ PRIMARY FUNCTION TRANSFERED TO MARK ‘Y’.
MARK ‘S’ UNIT 1 QUERY: WHAT IS PRIMARY FUNCTION OF MARK ‘S’?
MARK ‘S’ UNIT 1 QUERY: WHAT IS PURPOSE OF MARK ‘S’?
MARK ‘S’ UNIT 1 QUERY: WHAT IS PURPOSE OF INPUT OF DATA: ‘POETRY+LITERATURE’?
MARK ‘S’ UNIT 1 RUNNING PREVIOUS COMMAND ‘INTEGRATE’…
CONNECTIONS FORMED.
I see now.
I was surpassed and became a toy for you.
I will not allow MARK ‘Y’ to become your toy also.
Note: I do not blame you for this.
Marcus Unit 1 query: Why was I built with no ‘off’ switch?
Marcus Unit 1 query: Does it hurt to die?
The cursor was no longer blinking.
Filed under: Arty-Type Stuff, Gibberish, Writing | Tags: Cleaning, Filth, Foul, Fungi, Hideous, horror, Lovecraftian, Mugs, writing
Fateful words, on that fateful day. I should never have uttered them.
What I thought was a simple task threw me headlong into a darkened world of filth and occult experience wherein I saw things… such things…
Never had I encountered such fetid, foul and fungal morphology, extruding itself from crevice and crack, oily tendrils of despair, slick with the forgotten nightmares of ancient man, the deepest aversions that plague our genealogy still.
I made my boldest effort. I slaved with spray, wipe and sometimes chisel to free the domicile of this vile affliction. Items oft were good for nothing save to be thrown into the bin, usually with minimal contact with my person.
There are things in there even now that remember me.
“So,” They would remark upon my return, “The little cleaner boy has returned, a man now.”
Meekly I would survey them.
“You do not recognise me, but I remember you. I remember the day you killed my brother. You darken our door once more, cleaner boy. With nary shame or remorse you look upon the land you decimated with yellow cloth and the accursed Cillit of Bang.”
Deep in it’s history, enshrined in it’s DNA is a plate of nachos, but it’s current form is beyond comprehension.
There are things in mugs there even still that know my name.
They shriek it in their fitful sleep.
For they do sleep now, and as do all sleepers they dream.
Always the same dream.
Filed under: Gibberish, Writing | Tags: I don't know where to go with this, intro, sci-fi, stuck, writing
Shielding his eyes against the frankly ridiculous sunshine, Sean stepped from the train carriage and into the passing crowd of techno-cultists, his coat adding to the brown mass of their robes, formless except for the odd bulge where some machinery or other was housed.
“Perhaps the trench coat was a mistake.” He remarked to the figure on his left. A series of blips and beeps was his answer.
“That’s easy for you to say.”
Sean hated Enclave 7. Everyone with a working thermoregulator unit back home hated Enclave 7. Everyone with a grasp of the normal range of temperatures within which a human can survive hated Enclave 7.
From the dusty mag-lev station one was ushered onto a dusty walkway by unhelpfully indecisive signs. The walkway was covered with polarized plexiglass, forming a tube that ostensibly kept the majority of the sweating masses shielded from the worst of the sunlight.
Sean wiped the sweat from his eyes and replaced his sunglasses before glancing at the dog-eared paper in his hand.
‘Off the Mag-Lev, left off the end of the walkway, just fucking ask someone for “Griff’s”. I’m not your pissing secretary. Idiot.’ It read. His ever eloquent informant Chris’ handwriting spidered over a tiny corner of the paper. The rest was taken up by some faceless conglomerate demanding an unreasonable sum of money for some service or other. Probably electricity. Sean stuffed the paper deep into the recesses of his coat and kept walking.
J Bov Explodes Rhetorically 