I applaud the brethren and wish them well -- swindle, comrades! As for content quality, well, no accounting for taste. If you think a noir parody based on CPAC might give S.J. Perelman a run for his money, get a load:
I was surprised, though, at the differences: Young Republicans dressed in business casual with a hundred variations on the red tie, politicians in suits glad-handing the crowd, older women with Sarah Palin glasses and sweater sets, even a sprinkling of guys dressed in Continental Army attire, their tricorn hats occasionally bumping against long rifle props painted safety orange and pink. The last group looked at home near the faux colonial homes that provided space for shops and restaurants.
At least I wouldn't get copped for my gat today--an M1911 brown-handled beauty. She nestled in my trench coat's inside pocket along with her triplet of .45 ACP cartridges. The folks here understood the world was a dangerous place, and that the police were rarely within reach when you really, really needed them. There was an arsenal fit for a militia here, tucked away in purses and coat pockets and concealed bra holsters. It felt good. But, I reminded myself, at least one of those weapons had been used in the wrong way today.If you're vacillating, the dame in the tale is a popular conservative authoress named Ann, and the caper gives them a chance to say rude things about Michael Moore. Maybe some of the other stuff is better; let me know, life's too short.
UPDATE. Ha ha, commenters: "Farewell, My Homely" and "Forget it, Jake, it's Cheetotown." Thanks also for perusing the Island's other offerings. Big_Bad_Bald_Bastard finds an interesting personal essay -- "Our lives are always the eggs getting broken to make the Leftoid omelette. Why shouldn't they be the ones wondering if they'll get cracked?" -- that's a shoo-in for this year's Arthur Bremer Award.
Jeez. Non-politically-motivated fanfic is bad enough.
ReplyDeleteUgh was that bad. You just wish they'd shoot each other with muskets and end the story already.
ReplyDeletePage design reminds me of Lileks' Gallery of Regrettable Food. (Wonder where the artwork was stolen from.)
Finally, I'm here within minutes of a post going live and...I don't know what to say!
ReplyDeleteI mean, what can I say, other than "I've read better fanfic on deviantArt." It's been said before, but bears repeating yet again: conservatives and art just don't mix. Especially if the author thinks nothing of people dressed in continental army costumes doing anything other than re-enacting the revolutionary war. I mean, fuck. Do liberals go around dressed like commissars, or wearing Karl Marx wigs?
...You know, that might be fun.
Harpo wigs maybe.
ReplyDeleteThe title is "Murder at CPAC"?! Where's the effort? Not, "The Big, Big Sleep"? "The Not-Very-Thin Man"? "Farewell, My Homely"? Lazy.
ReplyDeleteI feel like the grandfather in Moonstruck. "I'm so confused."
ReplyDelete"My Gun is Hard".
ReplyDeleteMy favorite part about this is the PayPal "tip jar" next to the profile of each of the site's "creators."
ReplyDeleteFiction, eh? I'm looking forward to a libertarian Lord of the Rings. Of course the goal is to destroy the One Ring that would Rule Them All, but with lots of Rand-sized speeches along the way about how the lack of quality roads -- though it makes the journey hard -- is why the journey is worth making.
ReplyDeleteMaybe the Nazgul all wear Che T-shirts, and we don't put up with the elves because the elves seem kinda gay. I mean c'mon, we're libertarian because of how it upholds tradition.
I'm sure in the end Libertatian Frodo gets to the volcano only to be greeted by the Koch Brothers and that asshole who owns that pizza franchise. He's kind of shocked to find them, since they're the ones who encouraged him to leave the Shire, but he dutifully hands the ring over to make sure it's in good hands.
Then he goes back to the Shire and there's a really long last chapter about how every restaurant is now the same terrible pizza and Bag End has been lost to mountain-top-removal mining. Merry is killed by Pinkerton goons for trying to unionize foot barbers. But everyone pretends to love the new order because after all, this is the freedom they marched for.
Holy shit, it actually looks like a real website now.
ReplyDeleteThat's it, I'm totally submitting to this thing. I'm not doing it under my real name, and I'm definitely not giving them anything good (the serial I'm currently shopping around will not be tainted with Ben Shapiro's name), but I'm going to do it. I could bang something out in a week that these guys would accept.
We should crowdsource this thing.* Anyone know what kind of crap these guys like to read? Is it a lot of thrillers and SF like every other wingnut, or is there something else I could feed them?
*That's how energized I am - I just used a buzzphrase unironically.
In fairness, a lot of legit serial sites have that too. That being said, I can't wait to check out the standard terms on their site to see how they deal with payments and rights.
ReplyDeleteThat's some cow-college intro to fiction right there. It reminds me of having to come up with an interesting criticism of some vampire story besides This is shit, really. and knowing the other students in the class are thinking the same thing about your stuff, because it is shit. But they have to say something constructive.
ReplyDeleteI would like to think of these creators sitting around a table hating each other and having to say things like "The part about the demon being a seventh son is a nice touch ( but it is shit, really)."
That's where the fictive imagination struggles into being, I guess.
IT WAS A DARK AND STORMY BARACKOLYPSE
ReplyDeleteI wanted to write a left-wing parody of the quoted paragraphs, but realized that it was literally impossible.
ReplyDeleteI toyed with the idea of doing something with "rainbow-striped ties" and bongs and condoms (in the place of guns). Then I realized that would be what a wingnut would write if he were parodying lefties. You know, because all lefties are sex-crazed potheads.
Another bullet in the corpse of parody. Bummer.
No cognitive dissonance here. Perhaps if everyone wasn't packing, if no was was carrying concealed someone would not have just been killed. World might be safe enough with guns. Just saying.
ReplyDeleteI don't like to think of it as "fiction" so much as "friction" or "icktion" or "dicktion" or "OMFG I can't believe somebody wrote something that shitty" tion.
ReplyDeleteAt least I wouldn't get copped for my gat today--an M1911 brown-handled beauty. She nestled in my trench coat's inside pocket along with her triplet of .45 ACP cartridges.
ReplyDeleteOh, sweet blood of Jesus, are we about to encounter owner/gun slash fic? (Because I know just where the gun should be when it ejaculates.)
Also: "Get copped" for my gat?
Fantasizing about Michael Moore getting shot? But what about dreaming about him being the wingnuts' bestest friend forever? They're like Jack Nicholson in Prizzi's Honor: do we ice him? Do we marry him? Which one a' youse?
ReplyDeleteCan we skip to the ending: are guns the good or bad? Or are they, as Homer describes alcohol "the cause of and solution to all problems?"
ReplyDeleteWhat I want to know is: How do I get in on this? Should I just start sneaking tri-corner hats into my stuff?
ReplyDeleteImagine I put my comment below here.
ReplyDeleteAnother bullet in the corpse of parody.
ReplyDeleteNow we know who the victim was.
The Jaimie Wilson school just sticks a brown handled beauty up its arse, and walks tall.
ReplyDeleteWow, this is a really horrible website, and I ain't talking about the fiction.
ReplyDeleteTwo things I found out. First, Liberty Island contains no text protection at all. Most websites that host stories - from digital literary journals to writer's forums to fanfiction sites - use software to make it difficult to steal content. Typically, this disables highlighting, the copy function and the right-click menu. It's not exactly exotic technology - basic vanilla WordPress has multiple plugins that will do this. And it's important, because there have been many cases of people stealing stories from unprotected websites and selling them under their own names. There would be nothing to stop someone from copying the stories on Liberty Island, pasting them into a Word file and uploading it to KDP. That's beyond irresponsible.
The other thing is the rights. If I'm reading the terms of use correctly, anything uploaded to the site becomes the property of the site owners in perpetuity. That's harsh. For most of the sites I've dealt with, the author maintains the original rights in exchange for the content being exclusive to the site for some period of time (usually 6-12 months). It's especially hard to swallow as Liberty Island doesn't seem to pay its authors. Then again, it doesn't seem to screen them out, either - I'll investigate more, but this looks more like a fanfic site than a literary journal.
So what we have in Liberty Island is a place where the owners take content from their users and then take no measures to prevent others from taking content from them. And you're the guys who understand the free market, huh?
Ha! Nice.
ReplyDeleteThat gun bothers me. The M1911 is a large weapon - it's over eight inches long and weighs close to five pounds when it's loaded, and that's without the "tripled of .45 ACP cartridges." (And I'm assuming she meant "magazines," unless this detective has stray rounds rolling around in his coat). I'm not sure if that would even fit in a coat pocket, but I'm very sure that it wouldn't be comfortable - you'd end the day with a nice bruise on your ribs where the damn thing was swinging around all day.
ReplyDeleteThe firearm selection makes it sound like this was written by a seventeen year-old Call of Duty addict rather than someone with experience in the Armed Forces (which the author claims to have). There's a reason the Army phased this thing out. All the gun guys I know like the design and history of the 1911 line, but none of them consider it a terribly practical weapon.
That's seriously weird, Bethany. I like it.
ReplyDeleteShe nestled in my trench coat's inside pocket along with her triplet of .45 ACP cartridges.
ReplyDeleteOkay, that's all I want to know about this guy.
you'd end the day with a nice bruise on your ribs where the damn thing was swinging around all day.
ReplyDeleteIn this particular fantasy I think the bruise ends up on his thigh.
Forget it Jake, it's Cheetotown.
ReplyDeleteIt's less humiliating than getting "kindergarten teachered" or "dog catchered" or "champion chess-playered" for your gat.
ReplyDeleteYou take back every goddamn thing you said about vampire stories.
ReplyDeleteAt the corner of Free and Market, they harangue passers-by, wave misspelled manifestos, display damp gunpowder and proudly show off Hoverrounds with drained batteries and flat tires. . .
ReplyDeleteMaybe if you start hiding the word GUN in your work somewhere, sort of like those old slide shows of ads with SEX hidden in the ice cubes.
ReplyDeleteP.S. Don't hide the word SEX in there anywhere. doesn't seem to have nearly the same positive associations for them.
I dress up up like like Uncle Joe and people get the fuck out of my way in the snack bar line.
ReplyDelete"Dear Penthouse,
ReplyDeleteYou'll never guess what she had waiting for me in her pocket. It was even longer than me!"
You'd better bet that I'm staying safely in the boat. Not going there, no, nope, not a chance in hell.
Is Lileks still alive, or did his frenzy over 9/11 finally carry him off? Or did his child grow old enough to read the crap he wrote about her and snuff him?
ReplyDeleteIt probably wouldn't be impossible, or even difficult, to pass off some hastily written satire as a genuine alt-history parable of how an unnamed dusky-hued president destroyed America, until he was overthrown by Sarah Palin who saves the world by nuking Iran. And Russia. And Canada.
ReplyDeleteSorry, I'm not very good at this.
At least I wouldn't get copped for my gat today--an M1911 brown-handled beauty. She nestled in my trench coat's inside pocket along with her triplet of .45 ACP cartridges. The folks here understood the world was a dangerous place, and that the police were rarely within reach when you really, really needed them. There was an arsenal fit for a militia here, tucked away in purses and coat pockets and concealed bra holsters. It felt good. But, I reminded myself, at least one of those weapons had been used in the wrong way today.
ReplyDeleteIn case anyone was wondering this was ninety-five fucking words just for an excuse to say 'bra.'
All right, I read as many of these things as I could stand. My thoughts:
ReplyDeleteThe Wreck of the Hu Jintao - In a future ravaged by nuclear war, an astronaut on an abandoned orbiting weapons platform discovers that the platform was sabotaged by robot cats sent by the Americans. It's not as stupid as it sounds, but it's still pretty stupid.
Also, the writer doesn't understand how Chinese names work. It's a small thing, but it's the kind of thing I notice, dammit.
Tyler - In a dystopian future, a man saves his son from being enslaved by the government by feeding him drugs to make him stupid. Easily the best written thing I saw, although it's also one of those stories that's about 70% exposition so I feel that saying that it has a "plot" is being generous.
The most significant thing about this one is that the author tried to take competing right-wing narratives and combine them, and they don't exactly gel. In this nightmare scenario, the government forces people into careers, works them like slaves for years on end, pumps then full of drugs so that they keep working, and then once the plebes are too worn out to function, the sinister tyrants...give them awesome disability and pension payments for the rest of their lives. Oh, for people born too handicapped to ever do any work, the government demonstrates its disrespect for human life by supporting them for the rest of their lives.
Sacred Cows - An evil hippie kills evil businessmen, grinds them up into chuck, and makes burgers out of them. It is what it is, really. The only noteworthy part is that the protagonist actually talks the evil hippie into killing himself. And when I say "talked him into it," it went something like this:
Good Guy: "Hey, you hate people. You're a person. Kill yourself."
Bad Guy: "Okay." (shoots self in head)
Don't worry, though. It's satire, so it's okay that it makes no sense.
The Son of San Idro - A writer visits a tiny Mexican town, where he sees a crocodile kill and eat a dude. Later, after relating his tale to the locals, he's led to a church decorated with a crocodile motif. It was built by the son of a man who was killed by a monster crocodile. So the dude was a ghost, I guess? I...honestly don't know what happened in this story. I also don't know how it's "conservative," unless it's meant to be a Christ allegory and the crocodile is the devil.
---
In conclusion: Eh...They're not too bad. I've certainly read worse on some sites, but the political content seems really forced in most of them. I wonder if some of these people took existing stories and tarted them up a little for Ben Shapiro, which is a very sad thought.
Whenever I read about projects like these, I think of Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney: "Hey, let's put on our own show! That'd be different!" Of course, the "show" was a Hollywood fantasy: a fabulous production with really talented people.
ReplyDelete*whistles* Nice.
ReplyDeleteThe art over there is actually done pretty straight, much to my everlasting surprise.
You actually got off the boat? HUZZAH!!! And golf claps. You're a much stronger, braver person than I.
ReplyDeleteHaving owned a M1911 the idea of carrying it in a trench coat pocket with 3 magazines makes about as much sense as trying to conceal a small kindling axe and a socket wrench set.
ReplyDeletePlease tell me the Gary Stu author insert doesn't insert anything into the Coulter stand-in. Also, can Garrison Keillor sue for a ripoff of his "Guy Noir" schtick?
ReplyDeleteI guess I took it to heart when the teacher said write what you know. All of our vampire writers had stories that featured some David Bowie simulacrum with a suspiciously cheap taste for booze. The story I remember had him drinking lots ofAsti Spumante.
ReplyDeleteHe would have been the vampire who hadn't learned how to add water to his folks' stash of top shelf whisky yet.
I actually got to read one of Poppy Z. Brite's vampire stories back before she was in college. She gave me a copy to critique. She was already out of my league at that point. It was much, much better than the stuff I'd seen at school.
Teacher, mother, tactical lover.
ReplyDeleteThis reminds me of the stuff put out by Big Head Press, a libertarian comic publisher. While they have about a dozen different series, it's amazing how same-y and interchangable they are: near-future hard SF where perfect rational actors dump pages of worldbuilding on befuddled statists, and also everybody is constantly waving their sidearm around and bossing around subhuman slaves and/or robots.
ReplyDeleteTyler - In a dystopian future, a man saves his son from being enslaved by the government by feeding him drugs to make him stupid.
ReplyDeleteThe perfect distillation of 'bagged ism, with the drugs being a stand-in for right-wing propaganda. Alright, which one of you, by which I mean which one of us, wrote this?
Watch it, you. Regulation only hurts the job creators!
ReplyDeleteMake sure you get the bucks up front!
ReplyDeleteFemale author, believe it or not.
ReplyDeleteNo worries - nobody is.
ReplyDeleteDoesn't preclude insertions... See: Réage, Pauline:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.google.com/#q=pauline+reage
Umm, you're making the assumption that there's anything worth stealing there.
ReplyDeleteWorthlessness is a high-percentage defense against theft, I would think.
"Farewell, My Lovely Appetizer" but if you've got to pay the gat tax, "Somewhere a Roscoe" is the grist for my dark satiric mills.
ReplyDeleteDamn, Dr, that crap is worse than "Day by Day"... but I found a juicy little mango- maybe Raw Story can send Roy to this shindig.
ReplyDeleteOh, dear. Someone is writing about guns at CPAC the way NAMBLA writes about young boys.
ReplyDeleteThis will not end well.
Once I picked my way over all the other sampans to get here there's no way I'm getting off this craft unless I'm forced.
ReplyDeleteHis daughter Natalie ("The Gnat") must be about 12 or 13 now. I'm sure she regards dear old dad with the same eyeball-rolling disbelief that he brings to his studies of '50s Jello salad recipes.
ReplyDelete"dark satiric mills"
ReplyDeleteI'd like to take those words out for a drink, and maybe some frisky doings afterwards. [golf claps] Well done!
Yup, "Babes Bearing Arms"
ReplyDeleteI mean, Red Harvest is just there lying around for the taking.
ReplyDeleteGot out of the boat, found a particularly fetid mango from an internet tough guy:
ReplyDeleteOur lives are always the eggs getting broken to make the Leftoid
omelette. Why shouldn't they be the ones wondering if they'll get
cracked?
"If you want to make an omelet, you must be willing to break a few eggs."
Lots of eggs are getting broken in the name of glorious, social
omelettes these days. Five million people lose their insurance because
of Obamacare? Oh well. All those disrupted lives, all the lives lost
because treatments are terminated? A small price to pay so Leftoids can
use your money to buy votes.
See how this game works? Between your life and their power, it's an easy choice for them.
A lot of conservatives and libertarians have this quaint idea that
they can be left the hell alone. But when you're up against people that
don't mind shattering millions of lives, and expect to pay zero price
for it, well, sooner or later your life or that of someone you love is
bound to get cracked. And like the TSA going through your luggage,
they'll laugh as they do it.
In the end, you can't opt out. They won't let you. You're either the
one cracking eggs, or the one getting spilled into the other side's
crap omelette. You either rule, or you are ruled.
Which would you rather be?
Easier said than done, I know. Yes, Leftoids rule the administrative
state and the judiciary and the media. Even many of the corporations
that they hate pay homage to the Left's idiot orthodoxy. Often the
supposed opposition party seems merely a speed bump to them on its best
day, devolving into collaborators on issues like immigration.
So we start small. We begin by changing our worldview with a simple
realization: that the Left can and should be treated as they treat us.
And since they are were willing to ruin the lives of five million
people for their agenda, I'd say the sky is pretty much the limit.
Nice veiled threats there.
Hey, maybe some ridiculous theater is exactly what we need. A convention where people dress up as dead JFK, dead RFK, or dead MLK, or as SDS members waving around copies of the Port Huron Statement. Splinter groups could dress up like Weathermen or Black Panthers.
ReplyDeleteThe "Leftoid omelette."
ReplyDeleteIs that on the menu at Denny's?
"...rather than someone with experience in the Armed Forces (which the author claims to have)."
ReplyDelete"Jamie is the owner of conservativefiction.com and a Navy wife and mother of five. She has always been a writer."
To be honest, I read a few paragraphs and thought, "It could be worse." There's not a laff in a carload, but call it pastiche not parody. Go be shocked, though, that a text in which "Ann" is described admiringly and as an object of desire, is written by a mother of five.
Whatever, man, they're not "shitty," they're "untainted by success":
ReplyDeleteBut if rock 'n' roll has always been the music of
the counterculture, then musicians on the right are the only ones who can truly
claim to be countercultural today. The Left is The Man--and has been for some
time, at least as far as music is concerned.
Props to including what actually sounds like a good Cuban metal band, though someone who knows metal and Spanish better can judge whether they're either good or conservative. (I can't even decipher metal lyrics when they're in my native tongue, and Cuban Spanish was hard even when my Spanish was okay.)
"She has always been a writer."
ReplyDeleteEvidently, practice does not make perfect in the absence of talent.
Petticoat Junction cosplay is going to be the next big thing.
ReplyDeleteWe'll all be suing each other. Everybody's done a hardboiled p.i., either straight or for laffs.
ReplyDeleteExhibit A: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/89726
Exhibit B: http://tinyurl.com/mfnayh4
Oh man, if only Asti Spumante had hired David Bowie (with eyepatch) to be its spokesman. They'd have made a fortune!
ReplyDelete"Forget it Jake, it's Columbine"
ReplyDeleteYou know who else wore trench coats?
PorcFest? I love barbecue I'm there!
ReplyDeleteYou go as a Dead Kennedy, I'll go as a dead Vaughn Meader, it'll blow those squares' minds!
ReplyDeleteI never knew you were Norwegian.
ReplyDeleteThe technical solutions aren't really solutions. Many of them are bypassed by simply turning off javascript, and all of them can be defeated by using a proxy and snarfing the text as it comes down either in the html or json. I've never seen a javascript based text protection system that couldn't be beaten in less than 30 seconds.
ReplyDeleteYour only real defense against theft of IP is big government.
Nope. But I think you can find it at IHOP (International House Of Progressives). It's delicious, flavored with the tears of Teatards.
ReplyDeleteI couldn't get through it without thinking of breakfast.
ReplyDeleteMebbe so, but this is probably the real problem: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/48/My_Gun_is_Quick_Poster.jpg
ReplyDeleteO.K., one last attempt at putting this in the correct reply spot.
ReplyDeleteMebbe so, but this is probably the real problem: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/48/My_Gun_is_Quick_Poster.jpg
Hell, I wrote a noir that ended with Dick Cheney getting an arrow to the balls, so i'm really not in a position to mock anyone who chooses to mock their political enemies, but I am confused overall to the downfall of polite society, despite all the guns at a conservative convention. Shouldn't the person who did the shooting have already been gunned down in a hail of bullets shot by well-meaning good people with guns?
ReplyDeletewaving around copies of the Port Huron Statement.
ReplyDeleteLebowski Fest is in April in LA. https://lebowskifest.com/
"No Copping My Gat"
ReplyDeleteOf all the cheap gin joints in the world she had to walk into the Benghazi bar while I was sitting there minding my own business and plotting the umpteenth downfall of Obamacare, and its master the Kenyan imposter. Yeah in she waltzed with her girlfriend on her arm, grinding her way across the bar - trying to sell everyone a phony insurance scheme that'll end up costing them more. Yeah that's right it was that Billery bitch.
ReplyDeleteThis comment deserves something very special. Whatever it would like to drink or eat, I'll serve it up. Would it like to go out dancing?
ReplyDeleteAnyone who believes practice makes perfect has never ridden in a taxicab.
ReplyDeletegunned down in a hail of bullets
ReplyDeleteThe person who did the shooting, also too half the ninnies who thought they were J. Fuggin' Wayne & shot at the original shooter then at each other ("Because he had a gun, that's why!") as well as a yet undetermined no. of bystanders.
Of course, it's possible they'd be better shots than the NYPD, to pick one example, but I'm not seeing most CPACers putting in long hrs. at the range.
"use software to make it difficult to steal content. Typically, this disables highlighting, the copy function and the right-click menu."
ReplyDeleteI can understand the poor optics of them not using it, but I hope you don't think your work is in any serious way protected by these sorts of tools.
All these "content protection" plugins do is turn off certain things in the browser with Javascript. One can still get the content via "View Source". Or by going into the javascript console (apple-option-i on macs) and turning those hacks off. Or loading the page with Javascript disabled. Or using a screen scraper like scraperwiki. Or downloading with wget.
More powerful server-side techniques are also very easy to circumvent. There are tools that scramble the text in the HTML itself and then have javascript that unscrambles it in your browser, but then web crawlers can't read your content. And a bad actor can still get the content via screen-scraping with a headless browser like phantomJS (which is a command-line version of Google Chrome, so it executes all JavaScript, etc. on the page just like a real browser, but can be automated.)
So basically, you can prevent morons from stealing your stuff, but only if you don't want your website to show up in Google. But you can't prevent non-morons from stealing your stuff on the web, ever. All you can really do is catch them post-hoc and send them a DMCA notice, or report them to Google (who are pretty good about suspending Adsense accounts of sites making money off stolen content.)
Basically the only surefire recourse is to make it financially painful for site owners to host stolen content. There is no technological silver bullet for preventing the theft in the first place.
I was referring to Stalin.
ReplyDeleteWhere does Mr. Omelette get "Five million people lose their insurance because of Obamacare?" Not that I pay the slightest bit of attention, but I thought something like five million who'd been uninsured had signed up for insurance because of the ACA.
ReplyDeleteAnd that almost all the Wingnut Wurlitzer stories about people losing their insurance were turning out to be crap?
What the hell are we supposed to do w/ people who can not/will not be reasoned w/?
Which makes you perfect for it. Don't overthink the crap.
ReplyDeleteNah, I got dibs on dead milkman.
ReplyDelete... an affliction wrapped inside a contradiction.
ReplyDeleteSadly, Police Squad! (in color) did a better straight-up noir homage than this site.
ReplyDelete"It was one of those all-night wicker joints..."
Wait—are they trying for satire/parody/humor or homage? It's so bad, it's impossible to tell.
Soviet House of Pancakes.
ReplyDeleteI'd been waiting at the diner for hours, but Billery hadn't shown. I went to light a cigarette and found myself out of matches. Before I could mutter a curse of disgust, the comment — the well-shaped one with the sharp tongue and bright eyes — leaned in to light it for me. Then just as fast she was gone, taking drinks to the crowd at the next table without a look back. But the way she moved her hips as she turned away told me everything I needed to know. I knew I'd stay till closing. And I'd be buying this comment a drink.
ReplyDeleteOne: A Dame Walks In
ReplyDeleteIt always starts when a dame in trouble walks into your office.
I
shoved my hat back slowly, taking my time to look over the marvelous
gams that
...
At least I wouldn't get copped for my gat today--an M1911 brown-handled
beauty. She nestled in my trench coat's inside pocket along with her
triplet of .45 ACP cartridges.connected her to the floor
GAK! Now I have to head over to Better World Books and find me some old Phillip Marlowe or Mike Hammer to get the taste out of my brain. Even some Shell Scott might work...
Make an omelet out of them?
ReplyDeleteIn Soviet House of Pancakes, flapjacks stack you!
ReplyDeleteWatch out, these are libertarians, they don't believe in food safety regulations.
ReplyDelete"The Big Government Sleep"
ReplyDeleteI liked you, Krebs, you're not like the other Obots, here in the blogosphere.
ReplyDeleteHence "more difficult" and not "impossible."
ReplyDelete90% of all door locks on the market can be jimmied open with a bump key in five seconds. It would still be irresponsible to build a house without them.
ReplyDeleteMmmmmmmm. Concealed bra holsters.
ReplyDeleteOf course, it's possible they'd be better shots than the NYPD
ReplyDeleteMy Boy Scout Troop were better shots than the NYPD...
Bras are usually concealed (well, except for Madonna...). I'm curious about how you could conceal a holster that large in a bra. Having gotten older and chubbier my bras have gotten somewhat larger but even I couldn't hide a holster in one of them. I haz a confooze... (But than again I'm not writing Teatard Snuff FanFic.)
ReplyDeletehttp://thehousecalledabe.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/tumblr_meffj9xgj21rhnyg2o1_500.gif
ReplyDeleteProbably reads better in the original German...
ReplyDeleteThey'd probably want to pay you with equity. "Nice picture. We'll give you 5% of a share of the website."
ReplyDeleteThey fly a Gadsden flag that features a tapeworm in place of the snake.
ReplyDeleteMy reaction: Only three cartridges?
ReplyDeleteInternational House of Carbohydrates
ReplyDeleteThe rootin' tootin' stack of Putin keeps taking over the other breakfasts.
ReplyDeleteAlso, too:
ReplyDeleteMore chick gun carry options.
http://litreactor.com/columns/10-stories-we-never-need-to-see-in-workshops-again
ReplyDeleteMy favorite is "The Dead Baby Story (aka: amateurs imitating Hemingway's 'Hills Like White Elephants.')"
I forget where I heard this quote, but: "English professors always say to write what you know, which is why there are so many literary stories about English professors in loveless marriages who have affairs with their students."
ReplyDeleteAh, the wonderful world of awkward workshops where everyone claims to want brutal honesty but everyone's too scared to write "this is shit" on someone's paper. I seem to remember more people whose dream of being the next Raymond Carver produced lit-ficy exercises in mundanity less fun to read than tax returns, but experiences differ.
ReplyDeleteIn a dystopian future, a man saves his son from being enslaved by the government by feeding him drugs to make him stupid.
ReplyDeleteActually, I bet that could work as a prequel to why on earth the society in Divergent set itself up based on Briggs-Meyer test result-based ghettos. They were all descendants of people on brain-killing pills.
*That's how energized I am - I just used a buzzphrase unironically.
ReplyDeleteI feel so paradigmized!
Like Penniless Moocher says, these sites always seem to love dystopic fiction where all the characters are couldn't-be-more-obvious versions of real-world people, except in this case the Good Guys win. Or just, you know, 20 pages describing the specs of various assault rifles. It worked for Clancy.
that the Left can and should be treated as they treat us.
ReplyDeletePointing and laughing, with occasional bouts of head-shaking befuddlement? I think I can live with that.
That passage is such a masterful parody that I'm almost sad that it was almost certainly sincere. "Guns, guns, guns. Guns make me feel happy and safe! Everyone should carry one! But now someone's been shot, oh no! How did that happen?!"
ReplyDeleteOh, if ONLY my tits were still that young and springy!
ReplyDeleteNo one was talking down to you. What you wrote made sense, but didn't mention some relevant information that most people aren't aware of, therefore ADHDJ's comment also made sense.
ReplyDelete"Double Inderpnity."
ReplyDeleteIt has actually a serious Weimarian vibe and I write this as someone who is fluent in German and has read a bit about the era (though of course I'm a lay person). Of course the Weimar Era was way more violent because the German right were vicious men of conviction often veterans of WWI, former Freikorps members or both not pathetic blowhards behind keyboards.
ReplyDelete"Fucktion".
ReplyDeleteOh, sweet Bulwer & Lytton, you guys are on fire already.
ReplyDeleteI luxuriate in trembling anticipation of what lies ahead...
Bingo.
ReplyDelete- Jamie Wilson. :)
Fiction, eh?
ReplyDeleteInternet, eh?
CPAC, eh?
Dr. Mrs. Ol' Perfessor, eh?
Oh, for people born too handicapped to ever do any work, the government demonstrates its disrespect for human life by supporting them for the rest of their lives.
ReplyDeleteBut are their souls fed?
Poe's law is inescapable.
ReplyDeleteWell, me and six other guys.
ReplyDeleteOr "Babes In Khaki."
ReplyDeleteI like to think that each member of our glorious community here (raises clenched fist in salute) is inherently a much better and wittier writer that such an attempt at parody would fail.
ReplyDeleteEh...They're not too bad. I've certainly read worse on some sites
ReplyDeleteI've certainly read worse too, but come on, they are really bad and not because they are conservatives but because the writing is shit.
The artwork is all original work, sweetie. In fact, the art on my other story, Biscuit Boy, was done by my son and me.
ReplyDelete- Jamie Wilson
The five million was a mistake for the 2 million aggregate jobs that people were working just for the health insurance and would gladly quit the moment they could.
ReplyDeleteI want to slap this comment until it admits that it is both my favorite AND my best liked.
ReplyDeleteSomething tells me that if a Black Panther sharted out some turgid inner-monologue fantasy about him and his crew concealing "un-coppable gats" (or whatever gibberish means "big-arse guns") while swanning among the CPAC glibberati, the wingnuts would not be quite so amused.
ReplyDelete"Actually, what better place to murder someone than CPAC? A million potential weapons..."
ReplyDeleteChoosing who to shoot could be problematic, though.
Or who not to, as it were.
And cue the whiney faux-outrage at the "violence" of the left.
.
Well... overt politics in general and art don't mix. On the other hand, liberals tend to be more or less in favour of most True Art (by which I mean art that isn't trying to push a particular agenda, but rather delve deep into the human condition), since it tends to say that the world is very messy, complicated and full of pain, which is more or less what liberals are saying. Conservatives, whose basic thesis is that the world is clean, simple and would be just lovely if it weren't for Those People, tend to get along rather worse with it.
ReplyDeleteShort version: strong political opinions get in the way of art, but unpolitical art tend to look a lot more liberal than conservative.
There are exceptions, of course - for instance, having a douchebag libertarian worldview seem to allow you to write quite popular science fiction. Sad but true. :P
I am reading Divergent right now. It is indeed pretty stupid. Entertainingly so, sometimes, but stupid all the same.
ReplyDeleteI also feel kind of like I'm being ripped off - there are five factions, but the ones we get to see are the one that works like a convent and the one that works like the army. I want to know what the Erudite are up to, damn it! :P
Oh, I've got pretty high tolerance for cheesy plots (and from what I hear, in the third book, some of the more WTF elements are revealed to be not what they seem), but something about the plot summary just hit me the wrong way. Your entire society is predicated in the idea that no one can be brave and intellectual at the same time? Sheesh, they make the bitcoin guys look like geniuses.
ReplyDeleteAnd I just spent all day on my Floyd Smoot costume.
ReplyDeleteSome day the workers will control the Pixley Cannonball.
I was simply reminded always to be dubious of anyone who while using English refers to an inanimate object with a gendered pronoun (it's barely acceptable for boats, because of tradition).
ReplyDeleteThis goes double for killing-machines.
Didn't Vonnegut do this first and better with Harrison Bergeron?
ReplyDeleteYes ... to Satan!
ReplyDelete(By lesbian feminist vegan Wiccans, of course)
Like the amazons of legend, they have removed a breast in order the better to deploy a projectile weapon.
ReplyDeleteI think you mean, L'Internationale House Of Pancakes.
ReplyDeleteCocked-leg shooter is some weird shit, eh?
ReplyDeleteDudes, Mr Omelette is guy in an omelette suit. Yeah, it hurts.
ReplyDeleteYou sounded ignorant of all this in your original comment and other commenters kindly offered further information. Don't blame them for the fact that you came off as uninformed.
ReplyDeleteTwist! The writer's a lady!
ReplyDeleteMy personal prediction is that it's going to turn out that almost everyone is Divergent, but they all get told that they'll be in big, big trouble if anyone ever finds out, so everyone pretends that they're completely happy in the faction they've ended up in. That'd make the whole thing slightly less stupid, at least.
ReplyDeleteExactly why the system would be set up that way is another question, but it might be some kind of preachy sci-fi theory about how "the sheeple are easier to control when they behave like stereotypes" or whatnot.
Our lives are always the eggs getting broken to make the Leftoid
ReplyDeleteomelette. Why shouldn't they be the ones wondering if they'll get
cracked?
Dude, I always wonder if this year will be the year when some neocon asshole finally gets around to dismantling those laws that prevent the system from cracking me good and proper. Nutty McLoonypants can declare mission accomplished on that one!
I looked, but nowhere on Conservative Fiction did I see Paul Ryan's Budget.
ReplyDeleteSo very much this. Mr. Omelette Man probably thinks that the Stahlhelm is a new Porsche, and can't wait to get one.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Mark!
ReplyDeleteThanks, D. Well, the fiction isn't. I just read a short story over there that is--I know we overuse this phrase--beyond parody.
ReplyDeleteFuck righties and their hermit omelets! I like my omelets social!
ReplyDeleteThe gun went "kachow!" Her beezer bounced on the floor. She was dead as a mackerel." S.j perlman.
ReplyDeleteOh yes to both of these!
ReplyDeleteDisturbing lack of yetis.
ReplyDeleteIs this commment seeing anyone? If not, I'd like to take her out for a jaunt in my jalopy. Not to worry, old stick, I'll have her back by 11 not much worse for wear!
ReplyDeleteThat was my reading of it, after realizing that no one is going to get the fuck out of the way of Edgar Buchanan.
ReplyDeleteYeesh. Proofreader? Yes? No? That paragraph makes no sense. I even thought you had accidentally scrambled the sentences up.
ReplyDeleteFixed:
Rock 'n' roll has always been the music of the counterculture. But if The Left is The Man-- and has been for some time, at least as far as music is concerned-- then musicians on the right are the only ones who can truly claim to be countercultural today.
Logic-- how does that work?
Let's face it: you'd hardly have to get the fuck out of the way considering "he's movin' kinda slow."
ReplyDelete"Shut up," he explained.
ReplyDeleteTruth be told, I want to like black metal—it's intricate! it's fast! it's heavy!—but then the vocals always ruin it for me. I think growling connects with emotions I just don't have. A former colleague, a music editor who's an enormous and knowledgeable metal fan, describes my taste in vocals as "twerpy," which is about right. (I do like some instrumental metal, like Pelican.)
ReplyDeleteSorry for that, but I just wasn't in the mood for this last night. I carefully selected my words so as not to give the impression that text protection software was an absolute defense. That being said, I do track these kind of things, and every case of story theft I've ever seen came from a site that didn't employ text protection. So I really did not appreciate ADHDJ's "I'm sorry, Johnny, that's not correct" tone, with the presumption that I'm ignorant.
ReplyDeleteI'm tempted to track down a copy of that myself, as the premise is just so stunningly bad that I kind of have to see it for myself. I can understand how it sold - it was pitched during that period where publishers were snapping up every Hunger Games knockoff they could find - but it's still kind of amazing.
ReplyDeleteSad part is, there are some entries in that dystopia contest they were running that really do namedrop conservative outrages exactly like this.
ReplyDeleteThey all sound like Cookie Monster on meth.
ReplyDeleteHell, I wrote a noir that ended with Dick Cheney getting an arrow to the balls
ReplyDeleteThat was you? Take a bow, sir!
The gun went "kachow!"
ReplyDelete"Kachow"? What, did a shadowy third party then call out "Gesundheit"?
him and his crew concealing "un-coppable gats"
ReplyDeleteIYKWIMAITYD.
Gun porn, like the regular ol' funky kind, bears as little resemblance to real life as it can get away with, and with prose porn (which doesn't have the minimal constraints of video), it can get away with a lot. I'm surprised that she doesn't have him dual-wielding Desert Eagle .50s.
ReplyDeleteThat's what she said, anyway.
ReplyDeleteNononono. The imaginary strawman Left, not the one that actually exists (such as it does, in the U.S.)
ReplyDeleteThe motto is Caveat Emptor.
ReplyDeletePlus you'll get exposure.
ReplyDeleteWas he out fishing with Ted Nugent?
ReplyDeleteI got lucky that way - the only would-be mystery writer in my undergrad workshops wrote some not-very-noir stuff that swung wildly back and forth between awkward exposition and frank newlywed raunch. I wouldn't say it was good but it was very entertaining.
ReplyDeleteI did very nearly write "this is shit" on some submissions, and what I did write said it baldly enough, I guess. I made at least one enemy in every workshop class I took.
The first time I read "Hills Like White Elephants" I thought the young lady was talking about getting a lobotomy. I plead inebriation.
ReplyDeleteWORST. HONEYPOT. EVAR.
ReplyDeleteUgh--they got Mike Baron and Steven Grant. How the mighty &c.
ReplyDeleteA week in New Hampshire? Hell, I'd take that gig. (As long as the "classes" were optional.)
ReplyDeleteThis. Hell, even James Bond was happy with his .25 Beretta.
ReplyDelete"Software"? Fuck that... I just take a picture of the screen with my iphone...
ReplyDelete"Actually, I bet that could work as a prequel to why on earth the society in Divergent set itself up based on Briggs-Meyer test result-based ghettos."
ReplyDeleteAnd there you have why wingnuts go apeshit over Common Core.
Speaking of Gadsen flags, did you see this? The wingnuts are going full-bore apeshit, of course.
ReplyDeleteI did see that! I want to buy whoever is responsible a beer.
ReplyDelete"And since they are were(?) willing to ruin the lives of five million people for their agenda..."
ReplyDeleteHow... by pointing out that they had crap health insurance?
I'm kind of curious too, and it does sound pretty dumb, but I can also think of one big reason why it might have done well with teenagers: high schools have gone totally overboard with dividing people up into "tracks." When I took a look recently at the curriculum of my old high school, it seriously looked like a Brave New World parody— it was way beyond the typical "you can do vo-tech classes if you'd rather learn a trade than go to college" thing, they had like 6 different tracks and they were hyper-specialized and full of assumptions about what these kids would or wouldn't want to do for the whole rest of their lives. Interestingly, the one for "business" included basically no English or math.
ReplyDeleteOn twitter lately someone posted the following definition of dystopia: When white folks have to deal with the same stuff they've been doing to black people for years.
ReplyDeleteFive million is a vast overstatement too. The >a href="http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-insurance-canceled-20140307,0,3725306.story">LA Times said about 2 million were informed that what they had didn't actually count as insurance. Half of those got subsidies and so wound up with actual insurance for the same or less money. The other half made enough money that they didn't qualify for a subsidy and had to get their own insurance so they wouldn't become a burden on the state.
ReplyDeleteExcellent.
ReplyDeleteCookie Monster on meth would be the most metal muppet ever.
ReplyDelete