A ball of lightning flashed across the sky, tracing nothing to be remembered by.

Miscellaneous Writings

The following are miscellaneous writings from 1991, 1992, and 1993, all of which were written for and posted to the Usenet newsgroup talk.bizarre. I graduated from college and moved to Texas in 1992, yet continued posting. In 1994 when I moved and entered the games industry I stopped contributing; then I started again in 1998 or so.

I wrote a lot more than this; this is just the better stuff. The best stuff (in my opinion) appears in boldface.

short bits of "fiction"
- automatic-she-said
- the color red
- code reuse: why write everything from scratch?
- unjustifiable: a very odd thing I wrote by taking a not-very-odd thing and doing something sneaky
longer bits of fiction
- how i spent my xmas vacation
- (and many others) part one of two (short)
- (and many others) part two of two (long)
- do not eat now: a collaborative post by talk.bizarre regulars, which I heavily rearranged
long fiction
- The Art of the Flame
- More (1995, written after a long abscence; the main person in the story is named after t.b'er Ron Echeverri, who went by "rone" on t.b but also had "5150" as his "real name" field; I've added a sentence to the story mentioning the "rone" nickname because the story is incomprehensible without it)
I before E: on the inappropriateness of spelling flames (1998)
structured free association
- (shorter) The following posts were constructed by two people taking turns adding a word.
  - educational experiences
  - in stitches
- (longer) The "construction/evolution" series was generated by a complex process where a new line was added once a day, prompted by a random line of what was already there; then at the end the lines were reordered manually.
manipulations of form; constrained writings
- Lipograms (avoidance of letters of the alphabet)
  - hapless alphabet: includes an only-odd-letters-of-the-alphabet lipogram in metered rhyme and an only-five-letters lipogram
  - addled al enabled: a longer, first-half-of-the-alphabet lipogram
  - chargen: port 19: an odd way of encoding a message
- Anagrams (letter rearranagement)
  - Anagrammatic Story: I posted many anagrams on talk.bizarre; this was my tour de force
- Palindromes (reading the same forwards and backwards)
  - word palindrome
- Word-length constraints
  - games: the mysterious powers of pyramids
  - poem: another tour de force
- Story-length constraints
  - Economies of Scale: vaguely inspired by the traditional talk.bizarre form "one-hundred-word-stories"
- Acrostics
  - to tired to think: a double acrostic
- Self-aware
  - eyes: a strange pun
  - different perspectives: a new way of looking at a text
brief non-fiction, strange, with manually aligned right-margins
- the twelve tribes: on prejudice
- by example: on filling time
- a christmas recipe: on creativity
- ilana: on small worlds
  ilana replied in this message. Four or five years later, we became online friends; now she lives on a boat.
series
- horoscopes for talk.bizarre regulars (hence steeped in in-jokes)
- musings: programmer's free verse
silly lyrics
- Net Loser: on the cliche obnoxious poster
- Short song to 1-4-5 progression
foretelling the future of the Internet:
- HyperNews: a better Usenet
- HyperNet: distributed computing
- spamming subject counts: envisioning a talk.bizarre archive