mystery hotel meme: one… two… three
Another day… another meme.
But this one’s got moxie. Seems Shane Nickerson found himself a picture. A mysterious picture. A mysterious picture of a hotel. And he’s trying to figure out where it’s from.
But, spiralling into the realm of unforeseen consequences, the esteemed Wil Wheaton suggested that he get people to write short stories (less than 300 words) inspired by the picture, so that even if they “can’t crack the mystery, we can invent one“.
So… here’s my story of the Mystery Hotel.
one… two… three
“… two hundred fifty-two… Two hundred fifty-three… Two hundred fifty-four…
“Pa?”
“… Yes, son?”
“How long we gotta stand here?”
“Until I get to five hundred.”
“Oh.”
“Two hundred fifty-five… two hundred fifty-six… two hundred fifty-seven… two hundred fifty-eight…”
“Pa?”
“… Yes?”
“My foot’s itching somethin’ awful.”
“You just ignore that itch there, boy. It’ll go away as long as you ignore it.”
“But it’s real bad.”
“Well, you just buck up there! It’s somethin’ you just gotta bear. Now you just leave me be here. I gotta finish this. Two hundred… fifty-nine… two hundred sixty. Two hundred sixty-one… Two hundred-”
“Pa!”
“Goddammit what is it?!”
“… I gotta go.”
“You’ll go when we’re done here.”
“No… I… gotta ‘go’…”
“Aw damn, boy! You just damn well hold it in! Quit it with all this whinin’ here!”
“But I really gotta-”
“So help me, if you don’t quit your bellyachin’ I swear I will whallop you both ways to Sunday when I’m done here!… Where was I?… Ah, dammit! I gotta start over.”
“Pa… maybe they won’t come back?”
“You willing to take that chance, boy?”
“…”
“I didn’t think so. One… two… three…”
April 4th, 2006 at 6:54 pm
Haha, hilarious and well done. Kudos!
April 5th, 2006 at 8:32 am
Thanks! You never know if people are going to “get” what you are going for.
April 7th, 2006 at 11:30 am
Right now I only have one kudo to spare, but it’s yours, definitely yours.
You really should be doing more of that stuff.
Tiny, tiny hitch. Did you mean to leave out a pronoun in “How long gotta stand here?” Maybe you did it on purpose, but it broke the flow for me.
Tangent. Did you see the movie “The Inside Man”? I enjoyed it, but there was definitely one stylistic device that Spike used which really broke the flow big-time. For me anyway. Worse than leaving out a pronoun.
Very cool story, Little Guy.
April 7th, 2006 at 11:42 am
I guess you assume everyone knows what a “meme” is. I’ve seen the word a few times and maybe at one point had an idea what it meant. But now there’s not even a glimmer.
My initial reaction is that it’s one of those online techy blogger-people words. I just asked three other reasonably intelligent, young, with-it Flash developers if they knew the word. Nuh-uh.
Google it, they said.
Actually I went straight to Dictionary.com. There I found the following:
meme
/meem/ n. [coined by analogy with `gene', by Richard
Dawkins] An idea considered as a replicator, esp. with the
connotation that memes parasitize people into propagating them much
as viruses do. Used esp. in the phrase `meme complex’ denoting a
group of mutually supporting memes that form an organized belief
system, such as a religion. This lexicon is an (epidemiological)
vector of the `hacker subculture’ meme complex; each entry might be
considered a meme. However, `meme’ is often misused to mean `meme
complex’. Use of the term connotes acceptance of the idea that in
humans (and presumably other tool- and language-using sophonts)
cultural evolution by selection of adaptive ideas has superseded
biological evolution by selection of hereditary traits. Hackers
find this idea congenial for tolerably obvious reasons.
I read parts of that aloud. Much hilarity ensued.
If you’ve gotta use the word, maybe you could at least footnote it or hyperlink it to an explanation. Or not, if you want to be pretentious.
April 7th, 2006 at 11:58 am
Thanks for the correction on the pronoun — it was a mistake. (See what happens when you write something in ten minutes?)
Blog memes — which this is an example of — are post ideas/forms that spread from blog to blog. Examples can be found in this site’s Meme category. I was using the word “meme” in this sense. I apologise for not explaining it better.
But now I know how rarely you must read this site, if this is the first time you’ve seen “meme” here. Sheesh.