#unrelated but i just rediscovered some posts i was tagged in that never made it out of my drafts

[sarah-sandwich-writes]

Find the Word Tag Game!

@lungs-and-gills MARKO!!! Thanks for tagging me 🥰 This is my most favorite game.

My words are tired, weapon, red, and pierce. These are all coming from Blue like don't forget about me a childhood friends to estranged almost lovers to rivals to Best Friends (remix edition!) to lovers but for real this time original novel.

Tired:

"Nashery Owens, just where have you been?"

He jumps, but it's only Jo standin' on his bed with her dolls all around her and her hands on her hips. Her hair is thick, dark, and wired into frizzy braids on either side of her head. She's got freckles like him but hers are neat and contained over the bridge of her nose like the kids on TV, not like the explosion that's all over his face and shoulders and throat.

She's round, even for an almost five-year-old. Her birthday's comin' up right before Thanksgiving and she won't shut up about how that means she'll finally be old enough to follow him along to school. That means takin' the bus together, shooing her off during lunch, dodging her at recess, and then getting back on the bus with her at the end of he day. He's tired just thinking about it.

"You know that ain't my name."

Weapon: None 😩

Red:

Nash blinks at him. "What did Jo say?"

His sister says a lot of things, most of which he filters out until she says something that actually matters. Weeks can pass that way.

"She— On the bus? About— About us?" His cheeks flare red but he screws up his mouth and holds Nash's stare like he dared himself not to look away. "About us kissing and stuff."

"Oh." Nash does recall her going on about that, but he hadn't taken her seriously. Looking at Teddy now, he wonders if he should have. Or if at least he should have checked with Teddy sooner to make sure he wasn't. "She was just messing around."

"Yeah, I know, but did her saying it bother you?"

"No, why would it?"

Teddy's embarrassment burns away to a familiar irritation.

"I don't know, maybe because lot of people get all weird about guys kissing and I didn't know if you were one of them."

"Oh. Well, I guess I'm not. Are you?"

"Am I what?"

"Weirded out by guys kissing?"

Teddy clams up, searching Nash's eyes through clear lenses. He takes a breath and pushes it out. Steps back. "No. See you tomorrow."

Nash watches him spin on his heel and strike off down the road with a peculiar twist in his belly. Like Teddy was tryin' to tell him something important and he just wasn't quick enough to pick it up.

Pierce:

It’s never been this bad before.

Something sharp like fire pierces his chest and he cries out, more a whimper than a shout. He curls up to protect himself but moving only makes everything worse until he’s spinning and even the floor holding him up feels distant.

“It’s okay, it’s okay. Uncle Aaron’s coming. You’re gonna be okay.”

That’s Teddy’s voice but he shouldn’t be here. That’ll only set Daddy off all over again and then… Well, he’d take it out on Nash like usual, but he doesn’t think there’s any more he could take so maybe he’d just go after Teddy direct, or even Jo.

He fights to open his eyes, to tell Teddy to get out, to run, to hide, anything. Anything but be here for Daddy to find. But his eyes are swollen shut. Try as he might, he can’t open them, can’t see. He can’t move his arm neither and a bone deep shock of pain shoots up his leg and into his hip every time he so much as twitches.

Now the crying is coming from him, crawling out of his chest in great heaves, and it hurts, oh God it hurts. He’s never been strong enough to stop Daddy, but he could at least stand between him and Jo. Now he can’t even stand. He can’t even open his eyes.

Tagging (with no pressure): @arionawrites @thoughts-of-a-trying-tree @emelkae @jmrothwell @dontjudgemeimawriter @theschoolofathena @cataclysmicwriting

Your words are: dream, hope, crush, and fail

[sufficientlylargen]

Six Almost-Selfies Sort-of-from 2015

Once upon a time, @marbleflan tagged me in the six selfies of 2015 meme. 

Because I am a Functional Adult™, I thought “Hmm, could be fun”, saved it to my drafts, and forgot about it entirely.

Now that it’s aged in my cellar for nearly two years, I have rediscovered this draft, but I have a problem: I don’t take very many selfies, and as far as I can tell, I didn’t take any in 2015.

I could take some now, but they couldn’t be 2015 selfies, at least as I understand the nature of time.

But! Let it never be said that Sufficiently Large N backed down from a meme simply because it was literally impossible under our current understanding of physics!

So without further ado, I present:

Six things that aren’t selfies but could maybe be mistaken for them somehow (loosely of 2015)!

#1. A seal in a business suit

I’m not much of an artist, but a seal is basically just a blob with a face and a suit is just a couple of triangles, so I think this worked out well enough. The suit should make it obvious that this is no ordinary seal - she is, in fact, a selkie, a creature from Gaelic folklore that can shift between seal and human forms; she’s wearing a suit because she’s on her way to a business meeting.

She was brought in as CEO of major sealant manufacturer when the company was having trouble keeping its head above water. The previous CEO had really been floundering - he’d gotten in over his head and was under a lot of pressure. Most people thought the company was all washed up, but the CEO did a deep dive into their processes and really streamlined things. Thanks to her leadership they landed a couple of big contracts and now have a huge volume of liquid assets (managed though several shell companies).

The easiest way to confuse a selfie and a selkie is via typo. The f and k keys aren’t particularly close to each other on most keyboards, but after exhaustive and thorough internet research that took more than fifteen entire minutes I did discover that they are, in fact, adjacent on the TNWMLC keyboard. This keyboard was designed by the folks at carpalx by running keyboard-optimization software backwards to find the worst possible keyboard layout for typical English-language typing.

This is “of 2015″ because I drew this picture in 2015 specifically intending to make a selfie/selkie pun, but never got around to using it until now.

#2. SMS charges

It’s money you pay for using a cellular telephone. It’s a fee for your cell phone. It’s a cell fee.

Crickets chirp. In the distance, a lone tumbleweed rolls forlornly by.

I wasn’t sure how to represent this pictorially. So this photo is of my phone from 2015 surrounded by fake money. The money, by the way, is from Cheapass Games - their business model used to be producing games that they could sell very cheaply by not including things like dice, playing pieces, or paper money, because you probably had those bits lying around already from other games and there was no reason you should pay to buy more of it. These days they mainly publish via Kickstarter, but they’re still producing awesome games. One of my favorites, Unexploded Cow, has players trying to solve the problems of mad cows in England and undenotated WWII bombs in France by simply applying one of these problems to the other, and the game is a lot of fun.

#3. Wildfire

To confuse “selfie” with “wildfire”, type “selfie” on a swiping-based phone keyboard using only your nose.

Your mileage may vary.

The picture is a screenshot from Undertale, The Friendly RPG Where Nobody Has To Die, which came out in 2015 and is one of the best games I’ve played. If you haven’t played it, I would recommend that you stop what you’re doing and go play it right now. But don’t yell at the snails too much or you’ll give them anxiety.

#4. A Shelfie

Shelfies: like selfies, but for your shelves! This was A Thing™ at some point, I think in late 2015 or early 2016.

As it happens, I actually do have a picture of one of my bookshelves from 2015! Except I wasn’t using it for books, as you can probably tell from the picture.

I consider my quantity of board games to be entirely reasonable, on the grounds that I know people with collections orders of magnitude larger than mine and therefore mine is normal.

#5. Else ifs

To mistake “else ifs” for “selfies”, just nag a ram.

I’m a software engineer, so I write a lot of these (else-ifs, that is, though I do write a lot of anagrams too for unrelated reasons). Of course, I mainly program in python, where it’s shortened to “elif”, so the anagram doesn’t work unless you spell it “Selfi”, which sounds like it should be a failed internet startup that tried to capitalize on what “the kids” were up to these days.

Anyway, I think this code snippet actually predates 2015, but I did work on this project during 2015 so it still counts. It’s part of a time-travel-based chess variant that I really need to go clean up and put back online. The game itself worked, but I wanted to set up a usable web interface so that I could play it with other people at a distance. I should also probably implement some minichess variants, because with normal chess the state space of time chess explodes far too quickly (@aiffe also suggested pawn games as another way to make it a little more playable). All of this is on a to-do list that’s been around since at least 2015.

#6. My head on a pedestal

This is from long ago, but I rediscovered it on a DVD in a closet in 2015, so I’m counting it. It’s also the closest thing to a selfie in this entire post. I took a computer animation class as an undergrad, and one of the projects was a lighting exercise in a museum scene. To get the centerpiece for our scenes, the professor had us all scan our heads in a laser scanner. So this is my face, from a decade ago, if it were made of cheaply-rendered stone and full of scanning glitches! You can’t really tell from this picture, but that little bump on my nose near my right eye is about three inches of spike sticking out of my face for no obvious reason.

And that wraps up the selfies meme from 2015! Tune in again in several years to see whatever meme ends up being popular this year that I draft and then forget about!