ITT: Original Story Ideas

[Prelate Diogenes Shandor]

That's a pretty neat idea

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

A unique combination of gamification and transcranial direct current stimulation is found to significantly speed up language learning, to the point where regular people with little training can very quickly become professional-level real-time translators. This drops the bottom out of both professional translation and real-time machine translation markets, because professional-level translators have become so common as to be cheap -- so long as their heads remained juiced (because 24 hours after the power is switched off, the translators lose 90% of their fluency). Unfortunately, there is an extant patent on the technology -- one company owns all legitimate units and makes the language learning software. There is a strange feedback loop between several of their language learning programs -- minor semantic distortions end up piggybacking on each other when translators are switched and retrained too often -- and this ends up causing initially subtle shifts in pretty much all professional translation, including in diplomatic communications. Over time, the accidental biases of this language learning software slowly shifts the focus of diplomatic communication. Now, all countries with sufficiently different languages seem overly concerned with the tariff situation surrounding small dogs, antique pocket-watches, sand, and digestive biscuits. This has major global economic ramifications, as industries shift to meet apparent demand in these areas, leading to a series of bubbles.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

In a world where reality changes itself to conform to particular patterns in any language of equivalent expressiveness to set theory, a war breaks out between families of mages -- a knotcraft dynasty must join forces with a family of origami-gami practitioners in order to defeat a sudden intrusion of native lojban speakers who accidentally cause natural disasters by making spelling errors.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

A group of occultists infiltrated the works progress association, subverting it in such a way that many of the structures built were designed to be large-scale mana accumulators. They are approaching maximum capacity, and must be identified and their mana drained before they cause serious causal warps.

[Prelate Diogenes Shandor]

A raunchy horror-comedy in which the story of the Headless Horseman is conflated with the story of the resurrection of Osiris. The action focuses on a reanimated mummy with a large cucumber for a penis who appears at night and tries to steal the main character's genitals.

[Prelate Diogenes Shandor]

"Frankula"- the results of a mad scientist's reanimation experiment are largely invalidated when it turns out that unbeknownst to him most of the pieces of his monster came from dormant vampires.

[Prelate Diogenes Shandor]

In the future, humans have made contact with space aliens. Though said contact was peaceful not much travel or trade occurs between them as both races are only just barely capable of interstellar travel. One of the few human travelers to the alien world experiences a mishap and crash lands in an out of the way region of the alien planet far from any space ports, airports, or major city centers. He now has just a few hours to find his way to a chemistry laboratory before he runs out of oxygen, which is not abundant in the planet's atmosphere or heavily utilized by the natives' metabolism.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

In the future, humans have made contact with space aliens. Though said contact was peaceful not much travel or trade occurs between them as both races are only just barely capable of interstellar travel. One of the few human travelers to the alien world experiences a mishap and crash lands in an out of the way region of the alien planet far from any space ports, airports, or major city centers. He now has just a few hours to find his way to a chemistry laboratory before he runs out of oxygen, which is not abundant in the planet's atmosphere or heavily utilized by the natives' metabolism.

This is wonderful.

[Prelate Diogenes Shandor]

Edit:  "Blood for the Blood God."

I would like to take this opportunity to point out that a friend of mine worked this exact phrase into his Philosophy midterm paper. The teacher gave no comment and he got a B+.

That's another idea in itself:  The antics, struggles, and victories of a college club devoted to missionary work in the name of laying more skulls before the throne of their lord.  "Campus Crusade for Khorne"

Also, this same guy worked "skulls for the skull throne" into his final, but that was overshadowed by the fact that his whole paper was an analysis of the D&D 9 alignments system.

I was just rereading this thread and came across this old post, and if you still remember I've got to ask if he threw it back to Greyface and Negativism as that deals with concepts closely resembling the nine alignments? More generally, can you get a copy of that essay from him to post here somewhere?

In the future, humans have made contact with space aliens. Though said contact was peaceful not much travel or trade occurs between them as both races are only just barely capable of interstellar travel. One of the few human travelers to the alien world experiences a mishap and crash lands in an out of the way region of the alien planet far from any space ports, airports, or major city centers. He now has just a few hours to find his way to a chemistry laboratory before he runs out of oxygen, which is not abundant in the planet's atmosphere or heavily utilized by the natives' metabolism.

This is wonderful.

Thanks. The basic idea came to me in a dream, though after I woke up I had to clean up several plot holes and remove references to existing intellectual properties (in the dream it was a Federation starship from Star Trek that crashed and furthermore the landing site was, in retrospect, not rural enough for there not to be a chemical plant, laboratory, science university, or multi-species medical center in relatively easy reach or for it to be definitely inconvenient or too slow to fly help in from a space-port town or the embassy or whatever.)

EDIT:

Another MORE story ideaS:
*A group of excitable morons  panics about the end of the world after noticing that their calendar doesn't go past December 31st

*A sappy romance movie about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky

*The Year is 2125 and the Church of the SubGenius has expanded into mediocrity.

*Heavy-metal song: a pro-copyright recording industry lobbyist is kidnapped in the dead of night by the song's protagonists and then taken out to sea where he is keel-hauled to death.

*Artwork idea: statue of "blind justice" where instead of having the traditional blindfold, lady justice is instead depicted as using her free hand to drink a bottle of antifreeze (or some other methanol-heavy liquid)

*A sci-fi-horror-thriller/comedy of errors in which the twin towers were actually accidentally melted by some kind of experimental military heat-beam superweapon. To cover it up people were brainwashed into believing that they were destroyed by plane-hijacking terrorists and into believing that this is what they saw happening. Many resisted this brainwashing and retain memories of seeing what actually happened; however, their resistance to the brainwashing was so total and natural that they were completely unaware it was happening, leading to miscommunications when talking to those who didn't resist; thus leading to the old "jet fuel can't melt steel beams" arguments and their immediate dismissal by the general public because the two sides don't realize that one group saw the towers fall down and the other one saw them melt.

*When a set of neanderthal remains is discovered a feud breaks out between the archaeology and paleontology departments of a local university, as they vie against each other for control of the dig site

*A Kaiju film shot mostly in real time (save for a few scenes at the very beginning and end) focusing primarily on a military officer's mad dash to make his way across the wrecked terrain to retriece a tactical nuclear grenade launcher from the remains of a military base crushed by the monster in order to stop the creature before it reaches any major cities.

*Dracula's bug and rat eating minion Renfield becomes a multimillionaire after writing a best selling fad diet book.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

A twist on the standard harem/slice of life style anime. A shut-in student, concerned and disillusioned about how he expected college to be the place where his social life finally bloomed, one day unexpectedly meets a mysterious female student on his way to get his dinner from a vending machine at 3am. This student offers him a strange deal: he can have a 'golden school life' so long as he pledges to help her attain her own goals. Unnerved and confused but ultimately unable to believe the offer is legitimate, he agrees. The next day, his life begins to strongly resemble a slice-of-life harem show, beginning with a 'childhood friend' character literally living in his dorm room. It turns out that the mysterious female student is a witch attending on scholarship, and she can create 'students' with backstories and memories who attend classes and believe themselves to be human out of nearby animals (and furthermore modify the memories of school employees) so long as the contract is in place. However, she's terrible at math and is at risk of failing out, and so she made a contract with the hikkikomori in the room next door who won math championships in high school in order to force him to tutor her. Every time she fears that she'll fail a test, the huge cast of young women surrounding the protagonist begin to slowly and painfully mutate back into birds, stray cats, mice, or whatever other animals were used as their substrates -- a process with a lot of blood, gore, and shrill screaming.

[Chelagoras The Boulder]

A twist on the standard harem/slice of life style anime. A shut-in student, concerned and disillusioned about how he expected college to be the place where his social life finally bloomed, one day unexpectedly meets a mysterious female student on his way to get his dinner from a vending machine at 3am. This student offers him a strange deal: he can have a 'golden school life' so long as he pledges to help her attain her own goals. Unnerved and confused but ultimately unable to believe the offer is legitimate, he agrees. The next day, his life begins to strongly resemble a slice-of-life harem show, beginning with a 'childhood friend' character literally living in his dorm room. It turns out that the mysterious female student is a witch attending on scholarship, and she can create 'students' with backstories and memories who attend classes and believe themselves to be human out of nearby animals (and furthermore modify the memories of school employees) so long as the contract is in place. However, she's terrible at math and is at risk of failing out, and so she made a contract with the hikkikomori in the room next door who won math championships in high school in order to force him to tutor her. Every time she fears that she'll fail a test, the huge cast of young women surrounding the protagonist begin to slowly and painfully mutate back into birds, stray cats, mice, or whatever other animals were used as their substrates -- a process with a lot of blood, gore, and shrill screaming.

I would watch the shit out of that.

[Prelate Diogenes Shandor]

How about a comedy show where the topical and political humor is directed not at real world events but at a detailed and comprehensive fictional world devised beforehand by either the show's writers, an outside author hired for the purpose, or some kind of procedural generation program. The fact that this is being done is not made explicit on the show.

(I got this idea from the realization that a few things on Monty Python which I had previously thought were just random silliness were actually satire that went over my head because I don't live in either England or the 1970's. And so I realized that this process could potentially be profitably reversed; you could generate humorous silliness by generating a random setting and then satirizing it)

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

A professional troll, a professional political straw-man, a paid-audience-member, and a guy who gets paid to insert references to brands during smalltalk meet & befriend one-another, and decide to form a union for workers who professionally pretend to be genuine in situations of socially ambiguous genuine-ness.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

A gambling syndicate run by a group of sorcerers who use elaborate architectural sigil-systems to harvest luck from gamblers must protect their casinos from a rival family who want to harvest despair instead.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

The proteins that allow octopodes to be as intelligent as they are without myelinated axons are identified along with the genes that code for them, however, they are not trivial to synthesize. Despite this, they grow popular as nootropic supplements. As a result, a black market has sprung up for them -- leading to the use of CRISPR to produce the proteins in less expensive mollusks -- notably cuttlefish, who are already bred commercially for the purpose of harvesting cuttlefish bones as bird toys. Unfortunately, this produces a race of transgenic cuttlefish with above-human intelligence -- whose very existence is kept secret in order to feed the market for counterfeit octopus myelination-replacement proteins.