Billed as a sort of writer’s exercise (the 750 words # is taken from The Artist’s Way) meant to get you to write every day, 750 words manages to do that. It’s an extraordinarily simple interface — it’s a mostly blank screen; you write on it — but the site manages to be encouraging in its own ways. There are plenty of gimmicks — you get semi-arbitrary amounts of points for some things, plus badges for others, and you get fun (and somewhat tongue-in-cheek) statistics on the “meaning” of your writing. As it turns out, the gimmicks help keep you writing, day after day. The writing’s private (unless you don’t want it to be), and you can search your past writing, and see individual day statistics or overall statistics. It’s a free site, but you’re welcome (and encouraged) to donate, and about 10% of the users do, which seems admirably high.

For all of these reasons, or maybe others, the site has kept me coming back. And kept me writing. It’s not as annoying or unhelpful as most writer’s exercises I’ve come across, and it’s just easy enough to do on a regular basis. Writing longhand is still going to work better for some people, but if this sounds like it might be up your alley, give it a shot.

Related to something I could have sworn I’d posted previously, but apparently haven’t: 21 accents in 2 1/2 minutes.

(via BoingBoing)

You’ll double-likely walk.  Think I’m crazy.  Nobody.  But stop.  Bang.  Listen a minute.  For a dollar.  Twenty.  I have things.  You should hear them.  Or self.  You regret.  Not you.  You!

Imagine me.  I can’t.  It’s like dreams.  Here is money.  Take it.

Righteous and wary.  But I saw your eyelids.  Not now.  Another time.  After the past.  I don’t know you’ll take it.  I can save you.  Make you live.  Not trapped.  Dollars, minutes.  I was shade.

I found papers.  The headlines nice.  Coffee.  Went to barbers.  Soup.  All the time.  In a warren.  I’m trapped.  Not you.  Think I’m funny.  Like I’m wrong.  In a fact-check.  But wait.  Monday, June eight.  You will die.  Think I’m wrong.  Like I’m funny.  I found coffee.  Played a fuck.  Sat around.  A witch.  A witch a witch.

I think there were cymbals.  Doesn’t sit.  I was you!  Not you.  Not you.  You!  Walking.  Stumbling.  The word.  Off.  Saw a cat.  Not a cat.  You.  But different.  Had eyes.  She asked for a scarf.  I hated the cymbals.  A bad mind.  Like a whelk.  Not a whelk!  The sound.  Like juice. Different.  I liked soup.  Some people didn’t have enough.  The cat asked.  A funny joke!

You will be poisoned on June.  Not me!  I can change.  Not me.  Not a joke.  How I believe.  No.  How I.  A scarf for my brain.  Twisted like stumbling.  No Samaritan.  Wild horses and thunder.  PG-13 or R.  A waiting room to past.  Retribution.  The cat had fangs.  No.  A witch.  Thunder I laughed.

Here is money.  I believe you.  Not you!  Take my hours.

A Trotsky.  I perish the farm. Not me.  You!  Listen when you can.  Not me!  I know not now.  Now is past.  Stefan Laird.  See how I know almanac.  Born August four.  Died June eight.  Not!  Might.  You!  Met with Yui.  Rode horses.  Studied space.  Space between.

Graduated May twelve.  Now I hate coffee.  Now I hate soup.  But in a fact-check.  The difference is none.

I drank and ate.  Like a dog’s niece.  In a house.

Where it stops.  When you ask.  I know Brussels!  I know Rosso.  Cat was funny.  Like a game.  You will go.  Miss the game!  We tied bundles.  Had so many.  You know Sylvie.  July plus one.  August one four.  Ricin.  Not Sylvie!  Not me.  Gone like osprey.  Through the fold.  Now I wish free.  Make a hard dream.  The place to be.  Rewind replace.  Eager template.  You would die.  If I laughed.  When a witch.

You look nice.  Be wary strangers.  Fainting pilgrim.  On a ship.

Tell you this way.  Imagine egg-cups.  A burning restaurant.  Stop.  Replace.  A funny thing with leaves.  Races to the table-top.  I would eyes.  Buried over.  Milk and bolts.  I lied bolts.  Coming often.  Never present.  Bolts I miss.  Not like tubes.  Split a pair.  Lock it in.  I was your house.  In the morning.

They will kill you.  When I fail.  Like a scarecow.  In a marsh.

Nothing changed, but everything was different.

There Was No News. There was no word on the television, or in newspapers and magazines. Nothing on the internet. Not a word. Political figures did not calm the populace; they did not even mention the invasion. It was as if everything were completely ordinary, as ordinary strange as it ever was.

If not for Amaia, come to me in a dream, I wouldn’t have known.

What does the end of written history look like?

I went in to work, the last day. I didn’t have to, but there was no reason to do anything different. It could have been different, but it wasn’t.

The horses rode down the streets.

From the bottom of the ocean, they weren’t horses, but what could you call them? They were things we didn’t have a word for, because no one talked about them. They were giant, hulking things, wretched and stinking, gray, coarse. That day you could feel the monotonous pounding of their hooves on the streets. A noise you knew would never end.

I made it to work because I saw none.

Looking up and out, we’d either expected invasions from the stars, or not at all. Mostly, not at all. But “invasion” gives the wrong connotation. Friend, this is the beginning.

Amaia told me. She told everyone.

Excerpt from the Prowl Log:

The ryghte hande man to Optimus Prime
was speciale agente Jazz, who time after time

displayed a penchaunte for flayre and daring,
even when certayne defete was staring

him ryghte in his unflynching opticale visor
(whyche flashed like a houngry wolf’s incisor).

Much more where that came from.  I heartily recommend you Check It Out.

(via the curiously inimitable tawnygrammar)

I enjoy a read over by Tawny Grammar (formerly One Pot Meal) once in a while, and this piece reminded me why.

I thought I’d packed a kiwifruit in my lunch, but I guess it was really a wikifruit because just as I was about to slice and eat it a stranger rushed over and told me it was a peach. And before I could say anything, a second stranger ran up and said no, not a peach, it was a rare variant of hairy nectarine, secretly developed by the CIA in the 1950s.

(There’s more.)

photo by ben

The whole world is dark and funny since the sky melted. I know you know, but there are some what don’t. A man, a famous case—it was on the news, they made a movie about it, or a documentary—thought he was sleep-walking, that the sun never came up ever again. I think probably he ended up not being able to adjust and killing himself. Sad, but there wasn’t a place for him. If there isn’t a place for you, maybe it’s just as well.

That’s not what you’re supposed to think, but that doesn’t affect the truthfulness of the matter. I almost didn’t adjust, and maybe the whole place would have been better without me, if I couldn’t. But I did. I like it now.

There are still some people what don’t know, but it’s rarer and rarer.

The sky melted, and it turned out that the universe was just an illusion. How the way we thought was wrong. Or, not wrong, but different. Really the sky is like a giant tree. We’re like on one of the outermost branches, dangling from a stem at the North Pole. The universe isn’t actually a tree, or anything like it, but it’s the best explanation, of how things are different now. There aren’t planets and asteroids and comets and satellites. Or: there are, but we understand them differently, now. Everything’s local. I don’t even understand, how everything has changed, but I know that it has. You only need to look up, or over, to see it. How the sky’s not there, anymore. The sky was a good part, and I miss it. But now that we know we’re not alone, it seems to not matter as much. Everyone’s so close.

The sky was a thing what protected us not from like cosmic rays but from our own inexperience.

There’s not as much light, anymore.

You only have to think of a place, and you’re there. A lot of things are the same, and a lot are different. There are some new religions, now. Some old ones, too. Astronomers are like idols now, never mind how wrong they were. They’re the ones what run this place of ours.

I went to Norway for the weekend, though it’s not Norway anymore, and the days are different. We call them 1day, 2day, 3day, 4day, 5day, and on and on. Nobody really knows when they stop. It feels like it doesn’t matter.

Every once in a while you’ll see someone suddenly realize how the sky’s not there. Like, they were in a bubble of their own. You’ll be walking down the street and see a person fall down to the ground, crying. Or laughing. Everyone’s different, but it’s always the same. Always preposterous. You can see it in their face, how it’s so absurdly funny to them, when they realize it. Like they read the news but didn’t understand it. Or thought it didn’t apply to them, somehow.

There were signs, beforehand, of something strange. The street theater. The signs, rallies, bands of musicians. People set themselves on fire, just stopped what they were doing and burnt. It was an ugly, unhappy stage. If they knew what was next, maybe they could have waited.

Admittedly, it was bleak.

There was an endless tension in the air. War was on everywhere, and it was creeping into peoples’ lives, ordinary people, uninvolved people. There was information, people would pay their entire savings for. Some people had always thought it was the end, and it didn’t seem any different to them. They just kept going. Figured, why not. Maybe that was the point. They didn’t know about the sky, then. How— They couldn’t imagine that we could talk to the billion points of light.

Collectors dumped their collections into the sea, which was oily and rank. You would say fire was the overarching element. Burying earth, filling the air.

The expectation of the sky being there, that wasn’t a thing you could have predicted. So basic you don’t know how it could ever go away.

At the time I felt like my head was collapsing. Which, you know wasn’t uncommon. The food supply was tainted, untenable.

There were maybe cures—now we know of course, but then they were only concepts, things tried on the desperate. I was one of the first, before the sky melted. The pressure was a monster, inside my skull.

First they said, this will not feel quite right. There will be some discomfort. I’d been accustomed to what I thought was discomfort. But: imagine being eaten from the inside out. I would have killed for that. I hoped the world would end, and it would all be over.

If it really was the end of the world like they were all saying in the air it would have been stupid for me to have the procedure. Idiotic, going out in a blaze of excruciating pain while the historians and the runners sit on rooftops and watch the sky melt away.

It wasn’t even a new technology, probably. It wasn’t the nuclear warheads or the space (“space”) lasers or the engineered killer viruses.

It was Greek fire, remixed by a frantic, cornered despot with nothing left. It started with a dead blue spark, but then something different happened.

Nobody knows if there’s another world behind the one out there now.

Some say we’re all dead, that this is purgatory or whatever, a waiting area. Some say we’re still burning.

I’ve felt pain, though. Real pain. I’ve felt pain that I know could not be worse. The sky melted, and now the world is dark, and strange, and different, and real. We know we’re not alone, and we’ve visited other worlds, and eaten their foods. No one listens to music anymore. It feels unnecessary. On 4day Rina and I are going to what used to be 1843. The world is a funny knocking place. I love it. I’ve never been happier in my life.

The feeling in the pit of my stomach, working its uneasy way to my throat, wasn’t from some glance at mortality. Part of it may have been the terrible omelet I’d eaten for breakfast, but even that didn’t cover the entirety of the feeling. The feeling was that there was something I was supposed to remember. Something important?

I was a hostage, but in good company.

“This isn’t a robbery!” a bank teller shouted, which seemed like an unusual thing to shout. What did a bank teller do?

1. Three of them, all insisting.

The robbers were awkward and unpolished, seemingly working at cross-purposes. They were all poor public speakers, too. Stammering, mumbling into their masks, not giving their attention to the whole audience.

That anyone recognized it as a robbery could have been chalked up to a lucky guess. Their incompetence was comic at first, though nobody laughed.

It was noonish, a flurry of midday banking, when the robbers had burst through the front door. A guard was shot—or, more likely, stunned—and laid out on the ground, like roadkill. There was a popping noise as he fell, maybe before or after. A phone rang. Nobody answered it. A land-line. They left it ring.

“Whatever this looks like, it’s not,” the first robber shouted. He wore an aluminum pie-plate on his face, one oblong hole cut out in the pie-plate for both his eyes to squint through. His voice echoed, tinnish and muffled, “Whatever you think—”

“—it’s not. It’s not a robbery,” the female robber—or non-robber—clarified. She had on a rubber anteater mask, but you could still tell she was a woman.

“We’re all going to die!” someone screamed, out-of-turn.

“Well yes, eventually,” the third non-robber admitted.

“But not by us,” the first robber clarified.

“Not on purpose, at least,” Ms. Anteater said, a rifle slung over her shoulder as she ran a chain through all the door-handles of the main entrance, locking out the outside world. The third robber—wearing a cardboard box over his head—tossed her a spray-paint canister. After dropping it, then chasing it across the floor, she walked back over to the doors and proceeded to lay coat after coat of a particularly roguish shade of orange over the fastidiously clear glass.

“Orange?” the Pie asked, skeptical.

“I was in a hurry,” No. 3 shrugged.

“Too ‘in a hurry’ to buy black?”

“Some day we may both collide in a car-accident, and die,” Ms. Anteater continued, following the previous line of thought.

“This is not a robbery,” No. 3 stated, again, for the record.

2. Her pliant snout.

The non-robbers herded all of us staff and patrons to the center of the room, where we were made to sit. We were relieved of our cell phones and electronic lines to the outside world, but promised that everything would be returned, apropos of this not being a robbery. The intruders handled these items as tenderly as the incredibly clumsy are able.

“We’ll need your watches, too. Wrist-watches, pocket-watches if anyone still has those, anything that might tell you the time.” The Pie seemed to be as in charge as any of the three. My vote would have been for Ms. Anteater, but obviously, this was not a direct democracy, or even a representative one. The non-robbers distributed dollar coins to us, proving that this was not a robbery.

“If it’s not a robbery, what is it?” someone asked.

“That’s—” No. 3 began, then stopped.

“A very good question,” Ms. Anteater said, “that someone should answer.” Her pliant snout pointed menacingly at the Pie.

“There is a time and place for everything,” he said, “and this is ours.”

The lobby was secured as best a lobby can be, windows and doors shut, doorless doorways blocked off by brass-colored stanchions with velvet ropes. Not the best of all possible worlds, but what is? It took maybe five minutes for the three to secure the place and get everyone into the center of the room.

3. Killing time.

“It’s difficult to explain,” No. 3 says.

“Robbers wouldn’t have to explain,” the Pie says, wistfully.

“…only because it’s understood,” No. 3 says. “There’s still a need for explaining. It just happens… inside.”

“We’re here because this is when and where we have to be,” Ms. Anteater says. Maybe Mrs. Who could know?

“You’ll think we’re crazy, if we tell you the truth.”

“We already think you’re crazy,” someone volunteered.

“A fair point,” No. 3 says, nodding. “It’s a fact that we’re on the run from the law, but it’s not your law we’re on the run from.”

“Are you foreign nationals?” A question from the diplomat.

“‘Foreign’ is one word,” Ms. Anteater agreed. “National, not so much.”

There were eleven of us. A baker, a painter, a lawyer. Two students. A would-be doctor. Seven parents. A cryptographer. An officer of the United States Government. A scientist, who studied the migration patterns of non-migrating animals. A convicted felon. A flight attendant. A video clerk.

Some people were more than one thing.

We were being held hostage by crazy people, was the impression at the time.

“My name is Frix,” No. 3 said. “This is Kichiro,” he indicated the Pie. “And, introducing, Voirrey.” He meant Ms. Anteater, the only one left unintroduced, up until that point.

“What’s happening outside right now,” Ms. Anteater said, “is nothing. Hear that? Nothing. Before long you’ll all be on your ways, and it’ll be like we never met.”

“We can’t stay here, see,” Kichiro said.

“Believe us, if there were another way…”

“What are you going to do to us?”

“We’re not going to hurt you in any way, don’t worry,” Ms. Anteater said, reassuringly.

The room spun, and darkened, and went away. The sky exploded, silently, above, a million points of light standing out in the blackness, a million points of light where before there were tiles and ceiling fans. It was like nothing I’ve ever seen before, so incredible and impossible and beautiful. A night from nowhere.

At first there was no sound, and then, gradually, the sound built up, flooded back into my ears, all of our ears. Chirps, hisses, howls, rustlings. Shapes not stars slowly resolving around us; black, tall, solid.

Everyone was standing exactly as before.

The bank, that was different.

Gone is different.

It was gradually becoming unclear what a bank was, or what Ms. Anteater had on her face.

4. The brigands, undone.

“Sometimes,” Voirrey said, apologetic-like, “you have to run and run and run, and even then it’s not enough. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. You were just supposed to be along for the ride, and then go back. It was just a quick escape, a temporary solution.”

The year is 1087. Plastic has not yet been invented.

But it exists.

The article’s focal point is Google, and the internet, and how the fragmenting, attention-scattering nature of the internet rewires our brains, making it more difficult for us to process long, deep passages of text. Nicholas Carr (the author of said article) worries, and sprinkles anecdotes of people who find their reading habits severely impinged upon by their internet browsing habits — people who can no longer delve into long works of fiction, who (as the author) can no longer read tomes they’d regularly re-read in the past; but, also, he is circumspect, and skeptical, and does not burn bridges: maybe it’s bad, and maybe it isn’t.

Reading the article, I couldn’t help but feel that, while my real-world (read: books, magazines, newspapers) reading habits haven’t been impacted by the internet, my internet reading habits have definitely evolved. Finding tasty morsels of facts on the internet has devolved from a thing of learning to a thing for its own sake. Trivia and ephemera are great, but when the fact only exists in memory long enough to lead to another fact, never to be recalled again — well, that’s just silly.

My folder of “read it later” bookmarks is poorly named, because I don’t know that I will. Or wouldn’t have. But conscious effort is intriguing. And maybe it will change.

This could be the beginning of more depth on here, or of nothing at all.

P.S. That’s not to say there will be fewer posts on here about secret iguana-smuggling compartments and such.

Notes:
¹ “Is Google making us stupid?” by Nicholas Carr
² Also: written language; the printing press; clocks.