Quote:Sirrocco wrote:
After mishearing the lyrics to Rebel Yell,
Actually, I think that was supposed to be a reference to
More, More, More by the Andrea True Connection.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
Quote:Bob Schroeck wrote:
Quote:Sirrocco wrote:
After mishearing the lyrics to Rebel Yell,
Actually, I think that was supposed to be a reference to More, More, More by the Andrea True Connection.
You give the titles you give, you get the stories you get.
...and on that note:
Five Guys Who Are Moe: The core cast of K-ON takes on jobs at a particularly named pizza chain. Used primarily as an engine for yet more of the same humor/adorable seen in the original show. Alternately, a crackfic starring the Mighty Morphin' Adorable Rangers.
For those of you who like humor and don't mind the DiC translation of Sailor Moon then I'll chime in and say that Kitten Chow Main is hilarious in its own way. In this AU Serena apparently gets the hilarious idea that Luna just requires suitable motivation in order to regain her memories. The sequence of events which follows has the Moon Cat becoming more and more convinced that she is on the verge of being sold to a Chinese restaurant for use in one of their dishes while desperately searching for the other Sailor Scouts in order to put off this fate.
While originally a one-shot it was followed up about a year or so later with Hands of the Butcher where in Luna's paranoid fantasies are rekindled by overhearing a chance conversation between Serena and Lita about the later's cooking skills. The sequence where Luna lauds a preening Artemis with praises is hilarious for how the later takes it as compliments while the former is obviously, at least to the reader, trying to make the white Moon Cat seem to be the tastier meat.
After completing the official campaign in the Scion RPG books, what's a high level party to do, when they don't want to make new characters and start a new one? In The Art of Godsmanship they begin to learn how to balance hearing and answering the prayers of their faithful, while On Top of the World (and Still Going Up) just proves that even with power beyond mortal comprehension there is still always a bigger fish making new problems.
New - Don't Drop the Sky!
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows
Quote:ClassicDrogn wrote:
After completing the official campaign in the Scion RPG books, what's a high level party to do, when they don't want to make new characters and start a new one? In The Art of Godsmanship they begin to learn how to balance hearing and answering the prayers of their faithful, while On Top of the World (and Still Going Up) just proves that even with power beyond mortal comprehension there is still always a bigger fish making new problems.
New - Don't Drop the Sky!
Greek mythology crossed over with the Asterix and Obelix comicbook series. That thing which the Gauls fear more than anything has finally started to happen, the sky is falling onto that tiny village that still offers resistance to the mighty Roman
Empire Republic in the year 50 BC, and they send out Asterix and Obelix to figure out why.
Turns out Atlas has been getting bored, so he's let go of the sky. The guys replacing him aren't doing too great a job (until Obelix comes along and helps them out a bit (and places a few menhirs), but that's only a temporary solution. They've got to convince Atlas that he has to come back and carry the sky again.
Nice to see someone who knows their classics. Anybody know when the story changed from Atlas holding up the sky (which makes sense) to holding up the earth (which has the logistical problem of where to stand)?
Quote:Inquisitive Raven wrote:
Nice to see someone who knows their classics. Anybody know when the story changed from Atlas holding up the sky (which makes sense) to holding up the earth (which has the logistical problem of where to stand)?
If I had to guess, it was when they tried to make a statue of it. Sculpting the Earth is easier than sculpting the sky, and looks more impressive.
"...so you made a statue of a buff Greek guy holding up a fluffy white cloud. So what? There's no market for it!"
My
Unitarian Jihad Name is:
Brother Atom Bomb of Courteous Debate.
Get yours.
I've been writing a bit.
He's still holding up the sky - he just got bored, and is doing it in a modified handstand.
I don't think I've ever heard the idea that he was holding up the earth.
A series of military/bureaucracy farce books
In Surplus to Requirements, our heroes (a plucky band of soldiers) discover that due to a paperwork foul-up, they've all been assigned together to a small unit that has no mission, no orders, no oversight, and no chain of command. They also have no gear, housing, etc. Worse (or better) yet, the monolithic and impenetrable bureaucracy is byzantine enough that they're pretty much stuck that way - among other things, getting them back on the books properly would require actually admitting that someone had screwed up somewhere, and that's simply not going to happen. As far as Personnel is concerned, they don't exist, and that's that. The story follows our intrepid heroes as they attempt to scrounge up food and housing, figure out what's going on, and bond as a unit. About halfway through, they start to stumble across an Evil Plot (tm) - a treacherous administrator had assigned everyone away from a certain barracks so that the appropriate bits of wrongdoing wouldn't be caught, and they happily bunked down in it because it was the only empty space they could find. In the end, the villain is thwarted, and they find themselves with a patron higher up, who appreciates their ability to get things done outside of normal channels, and therefore *still* won't let them get their paperwork fixed.
In Ventures and Returns, OUr Heroes continue the process of making things better for themselves, accumulating money, contacts, and influence (all deeply unofficial) through back channels and trading favors. "No one's been allowed to do things like that." "Well, I have it on very good authority that I'm no one." About two thirds of the way through the book, their benefactor (who they've been exploiting a bit as the story goes on) calls upon them to do something generally considered impossible - he needs his entire division deployed to a specific far-off world, and he needs it done in a month - where the normal process usually takes a year or more. The world is going to be attacked, and he needs the troops moved post-haste. The rest of the book is a mad scramble to get that to happen, complete with calling in favors, pulling cons, and a few cases of breaking and entering and swapping carefully doctored paperwork. They manage to get it done, their patron gets the credit (and a promotion) and now he does pull them in officially as a specially formed unit working directly for him, with the mission of finding and fixing whatever may happen to be wrong with the other units under his command.
Nothing Exceeds like Excess is the troubleshooting arc - more a collected series of intertwined vignettes than a true story, as the various members of the unit travel across a decent chunk of the galaxy, finding difficulties, figuring out what the real problems are, and coming up with unorthodox solutions (often by swapping resources with one another). In the meantime, they continue working on their web of contacts and influence, eventually running some truly ridiculous tasks on the side and profiting handsomely. Some of the problems get hairier than others, but all are solved by the end of the book, significantly improving the overall effectiveness and efficiency of the units, with the final upshot being that their patron gets put in charge of the Personnel branch itself... and now he wants them to fix *that*.
Elephants all the way down is the story of them digging into the seemingly impenetrable bowels of the Personnel Branch, and trying to figure out (and fix) the source of its dysfunctions, through layer after layer of misdirection.
/-------------/
Eh. Not my best work. Still, I wanted to clear out a few more before I started in on new ones.
Bid the Wind to Blow
Bid the Earth to Move
Bid the Rain to Burn
I liked 'em! (most of those were mine, except the last, that was Bob's IIRC) but I'm getting into a bit of a slump over frustration with not having computer access, so nothing of substance to add here.
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows
Something very like that Surplus to Requirements was actually done as a Vietnam novel titled Parthian Shot: an A-Team somehow didn't get notified they were being transferred back Stateside, the fact that they didn't show up to ride the Freedom Bird somehow got missed by the bureaucracy, and as the senior noncom reported to the officer after he went to ask why they weren't receiving supplies anymore, "As near as I can find out, sir, we're all at Fort Benning, Georgia right now." The rest of the book was them trying to stay alive, scrounge ammo/food/equipment, and convince the admin boys to send them back to the U.S. for real.
-----
Big Brother is watching you. And damn, you are so bloody BORING.
Quote:Ebony wrote:
[Editors note: mass snippage] Special Cameo Guest Star: Carl Kolchak.
One of the things I'm really sad about losing (I
think by lending to a teacher) a UK RPG magazine that suggested an alternate X-Files universe in which Fox Mulder becomes a journalist rather than an FBI agent after an encounter with Carl Kolchak. (The local Waldenbooks got an interesting mix of magazines back in the day)
Totally unrelated, some title suggestions:
Standard DeviationPart Time SaviorExecutive Assistant's DayAll in the Cards
-----
Will the transhumanist future have catgirls? Does Japan still exist? Well, there is your answer.
Just one that came into my head a few minutes ago, that I need to get out of it:
A World of Pure Discriminationor, if you prefer,A World of Pure Recrimination.
And to take one out of the pool, "All in the Cards" would be a fic about YuGiOh playing Poker. Straight up Poker, no ifs, ands, or buts.
ThanksLuc "Necrogambler" French
RISE FROM YOUR GRAVE!
Standard Deviation: Sci-fi story. There's a statistically determined "average human being" and everyone has a rating on how far they are from that person. There are stereotypes about people who are varying degrees of distant, but no hard discrimination. Still, the "average person" has been heavily analyzed, as a tool for understanding those relatively close in. Then one day, someone is born who is a perfect 0 - and everyone knows *exactly* what to do with her. No one asks her what she wants in life. Why would they have to? those studies have been done. For a while, it's okay, but eventually, the fact that everyone is making all of her decisions for her gets stifling, and eventually she rebels against the system just so that she can have *some* choice that was not made for her - regularly struggling against the fact that, everywhere she goes, as soon as they hear her deviation number (and that's one of the first things people want to know) pretty much everyone has her instantly pigeonholed.
(blows dust off thread) One to re-launch the meme - it sounds nifty, but I have no idea what it's about:
Incense and Insensibility
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012
Perhaps someone gets high off of a bad batch of incense that causes said character to act like a jerk to everyone? That's just the first thing that came to my mind.
Clearly, it is the story of a straightlaced square who falls ever further into the mad, drugged debauchery of a bunch of dirty hippies, told as a regretful mamoir after returning to proer conservative family values later in life.
Ex... excuse me, I ... no, I can't keep a straight face long enough to think of a new title for the next guy...
(ROFLMAO)
ETA: Okay, I've got a couple.
A Place Far From the Sun
The Rainbow Bridge Club
Stone's Soup
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows
"To a true disciple of Ti Kwan Leep, a year is as a day," so eight years is still within reasonable necromancy limits, right? It's just that I thought of a title I wanted to share, you see:
The Duck Tape and a Trumpet - in which a youngster comes into their own while teaching themselves to play while improvising the other half of a duet with the music from an old, mysteriously labeled audio cassette. It turns out to have been the lost final recording session of a famous local celebrity. Hijinks ensue when a studio executive learns about it.
Looking back up the page a bit - Part Time Savior is the story of an ordinary young adult just out of high school and taking a gap year before college, who inexplicably gains the ability to hear prayers and grant miracles... just not in ways directly beneficial to themselves. Why does a savior still have to work a day job!?
Let's see, a few new ones for variety's sake, to try to restart the game properly...
Nowhere to Run, No Mister Hyde
Currant Events
All the Time in the World
Can You Hear Me, Mynah?
Quote:Looking back up the page a bit - Part Time Savior is the story of an ordinary young adult just out of high school and taking a gap year before college, who inexplicably gains the ability to hear prayers and grant miracles... just not in ways directly beneficial themselves. Why does a savior still have to work a day job!?
And it's obviously in the same continuity as
The Devil is a Part-Timer... with a possible crossover into
Bruce Almighty.
Still a few more:
Hell and Heaven Under One Roof
Go Ahead and Judge
While Twilight Lasts
A Place Far From the Sun meanwhile, is an Undertale/pre-Gurren Lagann crossover, and yes it is just as weird and crazy as that sounds.
(06-03-2021, 07:20 PM)classicdrogn Wrote: [ -> ]Hell and Heaven Under One Roof
Ah! My Goddess: Urd's mother moves in.
(No new title - I still have a few as-yet-undescribed)
Go Ahead and Judge -- It's take your daughter to work day in Mega City - 1 and nothing possibly can go wrong...
Titles:
Strictly Diesel
The Clown Always Knows
Laissez Faery
