Month: September 2016

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

ilzolende:

goddamnshinyrock:

please take a moment to imagine the Federation version of Eurovision as @swordfern and I have envisioned it, in a post-DS9 peaceful future:
-Bajor does something very soothing with hand percussion and like…. background eurythmy dancing but the lyrics are utterly heart-wrenching.
-Betazed is always a fan favorite- they really get into the pop ballads and impressive choreography, and of course always cause ~feelings~
-Romulans do the super intimidating acts like that one song about Moskau.
-Klingons just do fucking opera every time.
-Andorians do… whatever the andorian version of death metal is. imagine andorian headbanging. just imagine it.
-the new Cardassian Republic, when it finally gains admittance, is intensely earnest and a bit disco. No one really knows how to react to this.
-Vulcan sends one person with a Vulcan lute and they play an extremely logical arrangement extremely well, with no dancers or any illogical frippery… and they repeat this each year. No one ever votes for Vulcan.

  • Okay, but what we really want to know is “who sings the equivalent to ‘Irlande Douze Pointe’?”.
  • “We are Bajorans, so why is our song almost completely in Reduced-Ambiguity Simplified Vulcan every. single. year?”
  • “Who invited the Ferengi, this is the Federation Video Media Association Song Contest, and are they in the Federation? I sure don’t think so.”
  • Ganymede separatists getting upset that they can’t bring their flag because it’s political, and why are they stuck being treated as just “part of the set of human habitations around Jupiter” anyway, why must people take “United Federation of Planets” so literally these days, ugh.
  • Actually, is this by species or by planet or what?

Tags:

#Star Trek #story ideas I will never write #Eurovision

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

ilzolende:

slatestarscratchpad:

A couple of years ago I went out camping in the woods with a few of my friends. It was a dark and stormy night, and we felt very alone in our little tent, so we started telling scary stories.

I described how the hills we were in used to be coal mining country, and the coal mines were dark and dangerous. If you didn’t die from coal lung you’d die from cave-ins, and if you didn’t die from either of those, you’d starve to death on the miniscule wages they paid you. The mine just up the hill from us was the worst. The manager had an extortion racket that he was keeping hidden from the owners – he would demand a “tribute” of 50% of the day’s wages from each of his miners, or he would think up a reason to get them fired. Pay was starvation level even without giving the manager his cut, and so after a few months of this tribute the miners became pale, sickly, and emaciated. Paradoxically, they started working harder and harder, hoping they would strike it rich enough to get a bonus that they could use to get out of that awful place.

One of the miners worked even harder than the others. He just kept digging and digging, and when he looked back, he’d gone too far, left everyone else behind, and couldn’t find his way back. Life out there was so bad he found he barely cared. He just kept digging and digging and digging, figuring that working himself to death was as good a way to go as any other.

Finally he came to a vein of rock darker than any he’d ever seen before, and when he broke through it – wham! – he had dug all the way to Hell. Satan came over to meet him, and told the miner that they had a problem. He couldn’t stay in Hell, because he wasn’t a sinner. But he couldn’t go back either, because the rules say no mortal may leave Hell alive. So Satan offered him a deal – he would transform the man into a vengeful ghost, who could spend eternity possessing mortals and driving them to madness.

The miner thought a bit, but he wasn’t convinced. The only guy he wanted to possess and drive to madness was his evil manager who had stolen a tribute from every one of his paychecks. After getting revenge on him, he wasn’t sure he wanted an eternity of possessing random other people. Satan suggested that maybe he could spend eternity possessing people and talking about how evil his manager was, so as to make his name forever dishonored. The man thought that was a good idea, and so with a word Satan transformed him into a spirit. He spent a while haunting his evil manager, then after that possessed random other people in the area to give monologues on how exploitative his manager’s labor practices were.

And so, I finished, sometimes, on nights much like tonight, with groups of campers much like our own…

“Hold on,” interrupted my friend. “Is this going to end with you saying that you’re possessed right now, and that’s why you’re telling us this story?”

“Um,” I said…“I guess that…”

Just then the police burst into our tent. “Stop right there!” said one of the officers. “You’re under arrest!”

“For what?” I asked.

“Possession by a miner within tent to diss tribute.”

This was hilarious.

(ignoring the last 3 lines) For a ghost story featuring Hell, this is a remarkably non-terrible resolution, too.

Tags:

#ghost #puns #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(knew from the start this was leading up to a joke) #(but didn’t predict which joke)