What are you doing right now?

[EndOfTheEarth]

Besides posting on here and replying to this thread. Original credit for this goes back to Fate and Nathan on MX.

[Fake Fang]

[Omega]

GTFO.

[Fake Fang]

You said, "Black," and, "Friday."

 

...

[Omega]

And I'm very sorry for that. I skirted the line.

 

You crossed it.

 

*le glare*

[Omega]

Welp, that's our elections mostly over and done with (98% vote counted).

The National party won - big surprise. Not. They're our "republicans". Except, way less religious and bullshit and awful. As in, actually reasonable, and not trying to destroy the world. They also very nearly got a majority (60/120 so far, although the other parties won't co-operate to vote against, so it might as well be). They've got two friends (solo MP's from other paries) to make 62 total, and a majority.

Labour did worse than they've done in decades - not a surprise. Not many like the leader - he'd have been a shitty prime minister. Even though they're the socially minded party.

A party called NZ first went from no seats to 8 seats. This is huge considering that we only have 120 seats. Also, the leader is a dick, and would be holding NZ hostage for the next 3 years, if labour hadn't fucked up so badly HAHA. Fuck all you morons who voted for him.

The Greenies (who went respectable sometime in the last two years) have four more seats, up to 13. They're annoying, but can be ignored. Even though the greenies are probably closest to my personal political ideology, i just don't like them.

[Contradiction]

Tumbl'd for a couple of hours, did part of a jigsaw puzzle, went to the grocery store, ate a mediocre mini cheesecake.

 

My weekend life is so exciting you don't even know.

[Fake Fang]

The story I'm working on ATM:

 

" “Welcome,  dear guest,  to my Bazaar of the Bizarre,  Shop of the Strange,  Emporium of the Extraordinary,  Market of the Mystifying,  Gallery of the—oh. It’s you.”

 

Needless Things: A rather innocent looking store located at the crossroads of Salvation and Damnation; a mysterious little shop that you could have sworn wasn't there before. Inside,  you'll find row upon filled row of shelves,  holding useless junk and priceless antiques indiscriminately. (It's highly recommended that you don't touch anything. You break it,  you buy it,  and don't think that just because there aren't any security guards you can just waltz in and steal what you want...) Should you make it through the complex labyrinth,  you'll find a desk at which sits a bored teenage girl sitting in front of a computer,  who immediately perks up at the sight of you. After all,  in a Shop like this,  customers are rare,  and company even more so,  and when you work twenty five hour day shifts,  eight days a week,  three hundred sixty six days a year,  there's little time for socializing. The girl's name is Trader,  and she owns the Shop—or perhaps it's the other way around.

 

You can buy anything from Needless Things—dreams,  nightmares,  and everything in between. The Curio of the shop aren't limited to the tangible or even the real—you can buy a talent,  a memory,  immortality,  anything you want. For a price. Nothing in life is free,  and here the price for what you want isn't just money. The things being traded have to have equal value to you,  and it's almost impossible to come out of the deal ahead. Feel free to browse. Just,  whatever you do,  remember not to try and haggle."

 

I'm writing a series of short stories set in Needless Things. Got two done, but they're at school so I can't post them here yet.

 

Thoughts?

[EndOfTheEarth]

Will review at a later time. Busy at the moment.

[Fake Fang]

Space-time: The penultimate frontier.

 

Needless Things drifted through the currents of existence, floating along the great river that was reality as if it were a boat, rather than, well, a shop. Trader watched with a blasé expression as fact and fiction passed her by, glimpses of the future that might come to pass and pasts that never were. Eldritch Abominations peered curiously through the windows of the strange wooden structure that had interrupted their eternal slumbers, only to find, to their incredible surprise, a teenage girl making faces at them as she went by. A few of them, offended, grabbed at the structure with monstrously large tentacles, releasing horrific amounts of madness and insanity in their assault of the strange human girl, only to find their appendages erased from reality, their madness turned against them.

 

Trader smiled smugly to herself as the screams of agony and confusion resonated through the floorboards of the shop. Strictly speaking, no sound or light should have been able to get through from the Forgotten Planes, but Trader enjoyed toying with the locals, and it wouldn’t have been as much fun if she couldn’t hear their screams; see their blood. This might lead one to assume that Trader was sadistic or evil, assumptions which weren’t entirely without merit. However, given the nature of the creatures, and what they would do if they ever followed Trader into the Plane of Reason, Trader felt perfectly justified in enjoying the light show that ensued whenever the impossibly powerful local God’s made the mistake of trying to invade the Shop.

 

Trader yawned, and returned to her desk, throwing herself into the swivel chair that sat there, rotating a few times from the force which she hit it, before coming to a slow stop, facing the elaborate maze of shelves that separated her from the Shop’s entrance.

 

She turned her attention to the screen of her computer, thoughtfully watching the screen saver display meaningless colors and shapes that were impossible to associate with anything of the natural world. She resolved herself as she came to a conclusion, and reached out her hand to jiggle the mouse to awaken the machine.

 

She pressed a key on the elaborate keyboard before her—which was surprisingly compliant today, having all it’s keys in the right places and in the right language, making Trader sit motionlessly in a brief moment of stunned surprise before she moved on—and the microphones on the computer began tracking audio. As she spoke, the words she said were written down in an opened text document and presumably stored.

 

“Shopkeeper’s blog. Storedate: Eternity. We’ve had no contact with any Customers for at least a month. It’s been determined that one hundred percent of Shopkeepers on board are bored. Shop morale is at an all time low. Loneliness seems to be overtaking the crew. Also we’re out of tea.”

She stopped, staring sadly at the words that had appeared on the screen. Strictly speaking, she should have taken the weekly reports she had to write a bit more seriously, as they likely didn’t actually care about what kind of mood she was in and probably didn’t laugh at her jokes—hell, it was unlikely that they’d ever even heard of Star Trek—but she felt better at the confusion they caused. Besides, she was sure that someone up there—even if they were just a janitor going through the trash can her report had been carelessly, “Filed,” into—would appreciate her attempt at lightening the ever darkening mood.

She sat there, staring at the screen, and was surprised to hear the tinkle of the door opening as it rang through the air.

 

She held her breath, as she waited for the Customer to make it through the labyrinth—or at least to encounter one of the traps therein. The traps weren’t usually lethal; she didn’t want to kill her customers, after all. No, they just maimed people. She usually healed them afterwards, if she remembered, or at the very least gave them an expired discount coupon.

 

The purpose of the traps was both to amuse her—although their effects usually were far from amusing—and, more importantly, because the Rules called for them. Someone up the line had at one point decided that a maze filled with, “amusing,” traps was just what the shops needed to make them more ominous, and that, if at all possible, the Shopkeepers should meet the travelers inside and lead them to their goal, pretending to be searching for the Shop themselves, before revealing their true nature as the owner of the Store. She followed the rules, even if killing off her customers didn’t help her loneliness.

 

Though she agreed it worked better for the Store’s intimidation-factor than the automatic doors and greeters the Powers That Be had considered a few decades ago, and was infinitely preferable to the drive through window.

 

She tapped her nails against the counter of her desk impatiently as she sat there, occasionally hearing strange noises from the maze from ineffective traps as she waited for the person who’d found the Store to make it to her desk. Or become the latest source of Trader’s amusement.

 

Finally, after what felt like an amount of time that would feel like an eternity to a normal person—Trader, being older than she’d ever be compelled to admit, was always amused when people compared long waiting periods in their short, meaningless, almost-non-existent-in-the-grand-scale-of-things lives to the overwhelming absolute of infinity, and as such compared her long periods of waiting with theirs—a shadowy figure walked out o the only exit—or entrance, depending on what side of it you were on—of the labyrinth, and, seemingly unphased by how narrowly they had escaped the clutches of death, walked up to the front desk with an air of confidence, and, with an air of seriousness, rang the bell right in front of Trader with his right hand.

 

Trader blinked, only slightly confused, and the man—for she realized he was a man, now, or at least had a fairly good suspicion based on his figure and face that she didn’t particularly care to confirm—with a slight look of frustration, rang the bell again.

 

And again.

 

And again.

 

Trader became a bit irritated, although her expression didn’t really show it, and cleared her throat, both to make her presence clear and to ask the man what he was doing.

 

The man frowned, and stopped his hand a centimeter above the bell with slightly frightening precision—one second, the appendage was moving, the next, it wasn’t.

Trader wasn’t impressed.

“Can I help you?”

[Xuut]

17.19 GB on music on my iTunes (and steadily growing, I still have a bunch of new albums to download) but an 8 GB iPod...

 

This is going to be difficult to decide. 

[EndOfTheEarth]

Why difficult? 8gb of music is easily over a week's worth of audio. By the time you're done listening to the audio of one album, you could easily sync a new one without much of a breakdown, right?

[Xuut]

Not really. 

I get these random music urges sometimes and then it'll bother me forever if I can't listen to that particular artist. So I get that awful, "But what if I want to listen to X AND Y?" moment when I need to decide what to put on my iPod. 

 

Also I don't always have enough time to sync my iTunes. :\ Sadly.