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ITT: Original Story Ideas

Started by Cramulus, May 11, 2009, 09:40:54 PM

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Prelate Diogenes Shandor

#1065
There are a bunch of cursed objects (of all different varieties, and many of them old), but they're only mildly cursed, causing things like hangnails and itchy watery eyes. The curses aren't even noticed or realized by most of the objects' owners until eventually a single antiquities collector coincidentally manages to accumulate 20 or thirty of them and the combined effects of the curses aggregate into a proper curse

EDIT:
Another idea:

A retelling of "Flowers For Algernon" goes off the rails halfway through and turns into something similar to the "ex-leper" vignette from "Monty Python's Life of Brian"
Praise NHGH! For the tribulation of all sentient beings.


a plague on both your houses -Mercutio


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrTGgpWmdZQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVWd7nPjJH8


It is an unfortunate fact that every man who seeks to disseminate knowledge must contend not only against ignorance itself, but against false instruction as well. No sooner do we deem ourselves free from a particularly gross superstition, than we are confronted by some enemy to learning who would plunge us back into the darkness -H.P.Lovecraft


He who fights with monsters must take care lest he thereby become a monster -Nietzsche


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHhrZgojY1Q


You are a fluke of the universe, and whether you can hear it of not the universe is laughing behind your back -Deteriorata


Don't use the email address in my profile, I lost the password years ago

Rococo Modem Basilisk

Galactic Special Agent 253, Our Man From UMMO, is a playboy energy being from the center of a distant star, transmitted by a sentient psychedelic alien fungus. He is on a mission to identify, track down, and stop his predecessor, the former agent 253, a body-hopping terrorist named Mondo Cain, who uses classified information in his campaign against the galactic government. They end up on the Sol Wilderness Preserve And Theme Park, where the indiginous people (humans) aren't aware of the galactic government and staying in character is imperative for visitors -- a policy enforced by the death penalty. There is a complication regarding the fungus: the trip only lasts eight hours, after which hosts go back to their normal lives with a set of absurd fabricated memories; Agent 253 has no control over which host he ends up in: he has no consciousness while nobody in ~10 AU is currently tripping on the right drug, but he will hop to one at random when they start. He assumes his opponent has the same restriction. Eventually, he discovers that Cain is himself from the future -- if he hops onto a space-liner going near the speed of light in one direction & then hops onto another nearby spaceliner going in the opposite direction at the same speed, his consciousness ends up going back in time -- and that he discovered some dark secret about corruption in the galactic government. He pleads with his future self to reveal the information. Just when his future self is about to concede, a random passer-by shoots them both: an under cover agent, numbered 253, from Galactic Time Control.


I am not "full of hate" as if I were some passive container. I am a generator of hate, and my rage is a renewable resource, like sunshine.

Prelate Diogenes Shandor

A method of reanimating the dead is discovered, but it is prohibitively expensive due to the fact that not only does it require a great deal of expertise and equipment, but it also can only be done in zero G (by analogy, consider reassembling a VHS cassette: the tape must go through three rollers as it goes between the reels, two of these rollers go around spindles attached from one side of the case, the other goes around a spingle attached from the other side. The cassette must be put back together deftly; whichever side is put on on top risks having its rollers fall off their spindle, or it it is turned on edge instead then the spools may fall out, but in zero gravity this operation would be trivial), this exacerbates the gap between rich and poor. But mostly it's an exploration of that thing I said about it being easier to fix things in zero gravity.
Praise NHGH! For the tribulation of all sentient beings.


a plague on both your houses -Mercutio


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrTGgpWmdZQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVWd7nPjJH8


It is an unfortunate fact that every man who seeks to disseminate knowledge must contend not only against ignorance itself, but against false instruction as well. No sooner do we deem ourselves free from a particularly gross superstition, than we are confronted by some enemy to learning who would plunge us back into the darkness -H.P.Lovecraft


He who fights with monsters must take care lest he thereby become a monster -Nietzsche


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHhrZgojY1Q


You are a fluke of the universe, and whether you can hear it of not the universe is laughing behind your back -Deteriorata


Don't use the email address in my profile, I lost the password years ago

Rococo Modem Basilisk

An anarchocommunist superhero who is a hobo, and whose superpower is an ingenious mind for mechanics & chemistry (like MacGuyver turned up to 11), but whose fatal flaw is an over the top emotional reaction to conspicuous consumption, making it difficult to live in society or even operate in proximity to people who are plugged into consumer culture. (Just as supervillians are mocked for their compulsion to explain their plans, this hero can be defeated by seeing or even being reminded of obnoxious displays of wealth, which cause them to rant at length about the bougeoisie.)


I am not "full of hate" as if I were some passive container. I am a generator of hate, and my rage is a renewable resource, like sunshine.

Rococo Modem Basilisk

Close encounters are screen memories for the transition between substantially similar parallel timelines, and the degree to which the screen memory is strange is proportional to the difference between that person's home dimension and their destination. People with many alien abduction experiences are confused because reality keeps changing under them. Scientists discover that, by modulating a strong electromagnetic field using a device similar to an MRI machine, they can trigger such an experience and cause a person to swap places with their double in another timeline -- but most modulation patterns don't work, because the number of viable timelines keeps shrinking. Around the same time, scientists in these doomed timelines (on the brink of nuclear war or worse) discover the same technique, flooding our timeline with impostors.


I am not "full of hate" as if I were some passive container. I am a generator of hate, and my rage is a renewable resource, like sunshine.

Prelate Diogenes Shandor

#1070
Ideas:

*Art piece: "The Essential Platonic Form of Supermarket Tabloids"- This is a booklet printed on the same size and type of paper as periodicals like The Globe and The National Enquirer. The layout is perhaps taken directly from an issue of one of the aforementioned periodicals. The pictures however are all replaced with shock images in the vein of "Lemon Party" and "Goatse", and the text is meaningless lorem ipsum composed entirely of adjectives like "shocking", "tragic", and "criminal"

*something with a greek chorus composed of frat boys

*The end result of a government project to reduce joblessness is the useless employment of thousands of people (including the story's protagonist) as replacements for the interior workings of soda machines; they sit inside the machine and place the appropriate sodas into the slot when a customer uses the machine. Stress is placed on the 'fact' that human beings derive dignity from gainful employment.

EDIT:
Just had an idea for a product: Editions of unreadable "classics" like The Great Gatsby with MST3K style commentary pre-scrawled into the margins to make it a little bit more palatable. We could call them "Riff Notes"
Praise NHGH! For the tribulation of all sentient beings.


a plague on both your houses -Mercutio


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrTGgpWmdZQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVWd7nPjJH8


It is an unfortunate fact that every man who seeks to disseminate knowledge must contend not only against ignorance itself, but against false instruction as well. No sooner do we deem ourselves free from a particularly gross superstition, than we are confronted by some enemy to learning who would plunge us back into the darkness -H.P.Lovecraft


He who fights with monsters must take care lest he thereby become a monster -Nietzsche


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHhrZgojY1Q


You are a fluke of the universe, and whether you can hear it of not the universe is laughing behind your back -Deteriorata


Don't use the email address in my profile, I lost the password years ago

minuspace

Anticipating how the singularity will categorically exterminate all humans, a rogue team of warriors decides to disguise itself as androids in order to avoid detection. They model themselves after characters of the TV series Captain Power, retconing the narrative to make believe that it was originally aired as a long-form piece of embedded reportage. Not only can the AI not recognize these apparently "transitional" humans, it also fails to notice how preposterously campy the whole thing is, as long as everyone stays in character.

Rococo Modem Basilisk

A person who would normally be a minor character in any typical story spontaneously develops extrasensory awareness of where the camera is pointing (which over the course of the story develops, with intense training, into the ability to, for short periods of intense concentration, identify the nature of *all* non-diagetic elements of the film), and uses this to take control of the narrative.


I am not "full of hate" as if I were some passive container. I am a generator of hate, and my rage is a renewable resource, like sunshine.

minuspace

Quote from: Roko's Modern Basilisk on April 30, 2017, 12:46:05 AM
A person who would normally be a minor character in any typical story spontaneously develops extrasensory awareness of where the camera is pointing (which over the course of the story develops, with intense training, into the ability to, for short periods of intense concentration, identify the nature of *all* non-diagetic elements of the film), and uses this to take control of the narrative.

Or so he thinks. Turns out production studios devise creative forms of punishment for people unable to pay damages for diverse copyright infringements. It's not ESP, those apparently non-diagetic elements are taken from surveillance of perp.-spectator identifying with minor character because said elements have actually been taken from his life for compensation: to serve development of story in lieu of impossible monetary payment.

Rococo Modem Basilisk

Some ideas adjacent to cantor's continuity conjecture are, in fact, sentient thoughtforms. When they come into being they usually kill their hosts, out of guilt -- because they know that a human who thinks about them for too long will have a much worse fate...


I am not "full of hate" as if I were some passive container. I am a generator of hate, and my rage is a renewable resource, like sunshine.

minuspace

The jealousy that angels feel for humans manifests the original sin that fractures their souls, when they are in proximity. It is not directly felt by humans in the moment that this fractal fissuring occurs, only the presaging hint on a synthetically sweet scent tricks the senses into artificially nostalgic feelings. "There's a lesson in that. If you ever meet someone who has known an angel, you should run away from her as fast as you can." (Quoted text from a letter Cantor's relative wrote to Kafka)

The Wizard Joseph

Quote from: LuciferX on April 30, 2017, 04:17:09 AM
The jealousy that angels feel for humans manifests the original sin that fractures their souls, when they are in proximity. It is not directly felt by humans in the moment that this fractal fissuring occurs, only the presaging hint on a synthetically sweet scent tricks the senses into artificially nostalgic feelings. "There's a lesson in that. If you ever meet someone who has known an angel, you should run away from her as fast as you can." (Quoted text from a letter Cantor's relative wrote to Kafka)

I thought this thread was for fiction :fnord:
You can't get out backward.  You have to go forward to go back.. better press on! - Willie Wonka, PBUH

Life can be seen as a game with no reset button, no extra lives, and if the power goes out there is no restarting.  If that's all you see life as you are not long for this world, and never will get it.

"Ayn Rand never swung a hammer in her life and had serious dominance issues" - The Fountainhead

"World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation."
- Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality :lulz:

"You program the controller to do the thing, only it doesn't do the thing.  It does something else entirely, or nothing at all.  It's like voting."
- Billy, Aug 21st, 2019

"It's not even chaos anymore. It's BANAL."
- Doktor Hamish Howl

minuspace

Quote from: The Wizard Joseph on April 30, 2017, 08:20:12 AM
Quote from: LuciferX on April 30, 2017, 04:17:09 AM
The jealousy that angels feel for humans manifests the original sin that fractures their souls, when they are in proximity. It is not directly felt by humans in the moment that this fractal fissuring occurs, only the presaging hint on a synthetically sweet scent tricks the senses into artificially nostalgic feelings. "There's a lesson in that. If you ever meet someone who has known an angel, you should run away from her as fast as you can." (Quoted text from a letter Cantor's relative wrote to Kafka)

I thought this thread was for fiction :fnord:
Truth and fiction have been known to share facts in common  :oops:

Rococo Modem Basilisk

At a politically sensitive time for Russia, the lost cosmonauts -- the people sent up in secret and assumed dead prior to Yuri Gagarin -- begin to return, having had gone through some kind of time slip that existed in near space in the early 60s. The political ramifications of the return of national heroes erased from history by a nation that no longer exists, and the personal drama surrounding the time gap in their lives (with everyone they had known dead), form the drama of the story.


I am not "full of hate" as if I were some passive container. I am a generator of hate, and my rage is a renewable resource, like sunshine.

Prelate Diogenes Shandor

*After Mars (and possibly Venus, Mercury, and/or Ceres) is colonized something very similar to astrology becomes one of the more legitimate parts of stock market prediction, as the relative positions of the inhabited planets has a predictable effect on how fast messages can be sent between them which in turn has predictable effects on information-based businesses

*Comedy skit: Instead of a pumpkin, Cinderella's carriage is a lemon
Praise NHGH! For the tribulation of all sentient beings.


a plague on both your houses -Mercutio


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrTGgpWmdZQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVWd7nPjJH8


It is an unfortunate fact that every man who seeks to disseminate knowledge must contend not only against ignorance itself, but against false instruction as well. No sooner do we deem ourselves free from a particularly gross superstition, than we are confronted by some enemy to learning who would plunge us back into the darkness -H.P.Lovecraft


He who fights with monsters must take care lest he thereby become a monster -Nietzsche


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHhrZgojY1Q


You are a fluke of the universe, and whether you can hear it of not the universe is laughing behind your back -Deteriorata


Don't use the email address in my profile, I lost the password years ago