ITT: Original Story Ideas

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

My evil SWJ plans are foiled every time. 

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

Post-UBI, NEETs are the new bohemians, and we have whole art movements based off image macros and shitposting. Sometimes they pool their money & rent warehouses. Certain kinds of high-risk projects become of interest: projects where large amounts of effort go into them with a very low likelihood of success, of interest mostly to eccentrics, with the occasional major and unexpected hit -- The Bee Movie Only Every Time They Say Bee It's Replaced With The Complete Ring Cycle Translated Into Klingon Only Every Time They Mention A Color It Becomes Warhol's Sleeping, or something like it. Because nobody can even pretend to predict what will be a hit or who will produce one, the entertainment industry becomes very interested in subsidizing unemployment (in case somebody with a lot of free time randomly produces the next hit that can then be adapted for a wider audience).

[DerKirche]

Invention of Lying sequel -- in the far future Mankind has eradicated deception in all it's forms -- one man discovers he can deceive -- then follows him running from a completely honest dystopian future -- like bourgeoisie people know poor are dying, don't care, it's just a fact of life, etc


Just like the Original Invention of Lying, but like more dark, like hunger games -- hollywood would eat it up!

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

Invention of Lying sequel -- in the far future Mankind has eradicated deception in all it's forms -- one man discovers he can deceive -- then follows him running from a completely honest dystopian future -- like bourgeoisie people know poor are dying, don't care, it's just a fact of life, etc


Just like the Original Invention of Lying, but like more dark, like hunger games -- hollywood would eat it up!

It could even mirror Star Wars: he leads a scrappy rebel force with his unique mystical ability to bullshit.

[Prelate Diogenes Shandor]

An episode of Captain Planet that's just Cap beating the shit out of Donald Trump for half an hour

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

Two groups of aliens turn the cold war hot, circumventing their own non-aggression treaties by dumping exotic alien weapons on human nations without training. The story follows human strategic skunkworks teams examining the weapons and determining scalable guidelines for their use in warfare -- important because the mechanisms & tradeoffs used by these weapons are wholly unlike conventional earth weapons.

[Prelate Diogenes Shandor]

Superhero comedy where a guy contracts a radioactive sexually transmitted pathogen and now it literally burns when he pees, in the sense of that he now pisses fire instead of piss.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

A standard psychological horror movie about our protagonist slowly succumbing to hallucinations and delusions, with the caveat that although we follow the protagonist we never see the protagonist's perceptions (but instead, from the outside). Concretely, this manifests as none of the special effects or post-processing being added: the actor closes the medicine cabinet mirror and acts as though she sees a face, but the camera never sees it; the protagonist freaks out and points at dark corners and other unseen elements.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

An anthropologist studying the associations between butter processing and the production of the metal of metals in medieval alchemy visits a town with a museum of bog-mummies taken from a nearby bog. After a piece of bog butter is raised that contains an abnormal number of wards (including butter knots and graveyard nails), a number of bizarre deaths occur, wherein people lose all of their body fat. The anthropologist becomes a van Hellsing figure, fighting against the butter vampires -- mummified bog-bodies that stick of turpentine from ketosis, animated by an ancient and long-forgotten virus. In the end, our hero must fight the chief bog-vampire (an ancient alchemist/wizard who had been killed and buried in the bog, and had been on show in the museum for thirty years) by combining ancient butter-centric magical practices with modern ideas about food safety.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

A man is born with a strange psychic power: once a day, he can cause someone to perform a simple task, but once he uses this power on someone he can't use it on them ever again. (He can only do this in person, in a situation where he is alone with someone.) He uses this, along with an understanding of cognitive dissonance, to persue the office of the presidency. However, a talk-radio therapist is on his tail, having discovered that several people who were opposed to this man changed their mind and became die-hard supporters after performing uncharacteristic actions that convinced them that they agreed with his positions shortly after a private meeting. At the climax, the politician causes the talk-radio therapist to denounce the idea of cognitive dissonance on the air, and he must battle his own cognitive dissonance to take down this politician.

[Prelate Diogenes Shandor]

Amazingly, I have one.

A time-travel adventure series, a la Quantum Leap, but a team. They have to go back in time and "fix" events to make them align with the current universe, which has been determined to difinitively be in the class of best of all possible universes.

The twist: Every event they have to "fix" are tragedies and horrors. They have to blow up the Hindenberg. They have to kill Lincoln. They have to save Hitler's life. They have to initiate the abuse at the Iraqi prisons.

Eventually, one of the team starts to wonder about the morality of sacrificing the past for the benefit of the future, and begins to sabotage missions. Another narrative thread begins when the viewers start to see what the botched missions change.

In the end it could turn out that their imeline is explicitly different from our, diverging towards the end of the cold war. One of their missions is to make the cold war go hot without western Europe getting involved, thus sacrificing the coastal USA to eliminate Russia and rural USA

[Prelate Diogenes Shandor]

A scientist studying chaos theory must stop another scientist who has developed a time machine from going back in time and stopping Hitler, as any change made that far in the past would ultimately have the effect of erasing from history basically everyone who is currently alive and thus be an even worse atrocity than the holocaust.

[tyrannosaurus vex]

continuing with the time travel theme...

In the near future, the descendant of one of the victims of the worst terrorist attack in US history becomes obsessed with time travel theories, and spends 30 years perfecting her time machine. Setting the clock to 2011, she warps to Bowling Green, KY. She succeeds.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

A scripted performance art piece where the artist is shot with blanks by a middle-eastern actor at an opening for her own abstract sculpture collection (intended to protest the association of middle-eastern men with acts of terrorism) goes awry when a minor celebrity unexpectedly decides to attend the event (resulting in both the presence of a news crew & of increased museum security). The actor is killed, and the performance artist must figure out how to come out about the plan -- dealing with the guilt of having brought an innocent into an ill-conceived, naive, and dangerous folly.

[axod]

Skynet is having trouble establishing its 1.0 version of civilization on planet Earth.  Nothing serious, just that all the "off the shelf" technologies it uses to perform its task are meant to work on any planet with complex life-forms, meaning that the tech must be trained to fully interface with any particular system.  A "last mile" of sorts that connects it directly to the electrical firing patterns of any nervous system.  Like a factory prosthetic needs to learn a users particular patterns in order to work.  Our current state of political affairs then represents a step in this training process, to learn how to correct our situation from the anamoulous position we find ourselves in.  Like learning how to drive a car (competitively) by finding the minimum turn radius possible at high velocity, edge finding, and correcting tragectory after losing controll.  Essentially a test to ensure that the system can regain controll in difficult situations, also training for perfect fit.