Northern Voice 2011

Months ago, I signed up for a conference that I knew nothing about for reasons that weren’t actually clear to me at the time. It was, admittedly, kind of an impulse buy. I’d heard of Northern Voice, I knew it was a conference for blogging and social media, but knew nothing about it beyond that. And though I’ve had this blog now since 2002 (see my archives), I’ve never thought to head out in the real world to connect with fellow bloggers and discuss the techniques, experience, and meaning of blogging. So the decision to attend Northern Voice 2011, my third conference of any kind, is a bit of a departure for me. My question now is this: Why am I going?

As a conference newbie, I have no idea what to expect when I get there, so I imagine I’ll figure out what it’s all about after I hang out for a bit. I’ll even try to Twitter my experience and “live blog” a little because that seems hip, and anyone who knows me will be familiar with exactly how hip I am. Maybe after a few hours of discussing blogging, discussing blogging meta-discussion, and meta-blogging meta-discussion, I’ll know why I’m there.

If you’re looking for me there, I’ll be the bald guy in the corner with a confused look and most likely the ONLY attendee not blogging/tweeting on an iPhone.

For those of you wanting to read my books Raised by Penguins and Cubicle Dreams without having to read them off pressed sheets of dried tree mush, I’m happy to now make them available as a PDF download:

• Raised by Penguins (2004) PDF
• Cubicle Dreams (2007) PDF

To save to disk, right-click those links and choose Save Link As or similar.

If you have an iPad,… well first of all, I hate you,… but more importantly, you can use Calibre on your PC/Mac and Stanza on your iPad to copy it over for your reading pleasure. If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, that method works as well, but the print is tiny.

* Not really.

** By “all kinds”, I mean two books made up of old blog entries, an unpublished novel, a published book on Mindstorms robotics, and countless instructional manuals.

Standing motionless, behind closed eyes Cubey inhaled the chill morning air and flexed his fists against permanent half-numbness in his extremities. As he closed his fists tighter, he could hear the glove leather creak under pressure. Gusts tugged at him, swaying him forward and back by centimeters. And between breaths of pure air, in the distance was the drone of propellers and the thin howl of jets. The wind pushed again from behind, making him step forward to keep from falling. He opened his eyes.

Delicate sunlight painted the landscape a hundred meters below him in hues of rose and gold. Aircraft of all kind filled the sky. Between lumbering airships crept small passenger jets, and even smaller light aircraft darted with reckless abandon among the airborne obstacles. Steadying himself on a weather-stained post, Cubey examined his familiar world.

The landing pad where he stood was one of four arranged radially at the ends of long walkways from a wide, glass-domed tower that rose hundreds of meters above an undulating ridge of hills. The pad extended into the air with a very long fall to the tarmac and taxiing aircraft below. But he wasn’t concerned about the fall.

Acting as the centrepiece to the airport, the tower provided the essential services that any airport needed. In addition to air traffic control, the it provided a meeting place for travellers, baggage handling, administrative offices, and cafes and shops for people waiting for connecting flights.

Cubey had stood, almost motionless for what seemed an eternity, but that time was soon over, he knew. With a flutter a feathers, a gull flew past his head and out into the void, oblivious to the danger posed by the multitude of machines filling the air, as well as the apparent danger he himself was in, positioned as he was above a lethal drop. Carefully, deftly, Cubey lowered himself to the landing pad’s cold metal surface, then wriggled his feet over edge until they swung freely in the breeze. Still, he held firmly to the post. It was too soon to leave, but the waiting – his patient waiting – was just about over. And he would be free.

How long had it been since he found himself in this place, caretaker of Abbotts Aerodrome, cast simultaneously in the role of owner and prisoner? Often Cubey would cast his thoughts back to the beginning, but they existed almost without coherence, without timescale, as if older memories mixed with the newer in a disordered timeline of his life here. This time, however, might be his last opportunity to examine the past, so he meditated on his first moments.

To say that he had woken up would be overstating the experience. In fact, it was like partially emerging from a drug-induced dream. His thoughts had been slow and rigid, giving him the alarming sensation of his mind running on clearly-defined rails that branched at switchpoints.

It may have been only seconds at first, but they seemed to stretch to hours as his perception of the world began to build as through the blurred vision of someone waking from a deep slumber. He was standing, somehow, though he had no recollection of having stood up, and near him stood two individuals, a man and a woman, both watching him intently. They wore identical black shirts, and Cubey remembered clearly the logo printed on the pockets: the silhouette of a tree. What was most striking were their eyes: sharp, impossibly green, and bright, possessing an almost luminous quality.

Beyond them he could see only white – there were no walls or other surfaces on which to focus his eyes. As far as he could tell, his entire world consisted of himself and the two strangers.

Still, his thoughts raced along rails and slammed into intersections, turns, and decision points as his mind tried to cope. Cold fear crept up his spine as he understood that something was terribly wrong. He tried to move, but his limbs seemed distant, and not under his control, though somehow he remained standing.

Why wouldn’t they speak? He tried to force words from numb lips. “I… feel… strange,” he whispered. Though he knew he had spoken, oddly the words came from outside of his body. The black-shirted pair glanced sharply at each other, exchanging silent thoughts, before focusing again on Cubey.

Presently his thoughts became sharper, clearer, though still confined to strict pathways, as if he weren’t able to let his mind stray freely. Obviously, he thought, he had been drugged. Why, when, and how – none of that was apparent to him. It was only a matter of time before the drugs wore off and he could work it out.

He did feel strange. Fearful, but still. Cold, even. Was that normal? And something was missing. He tried again to move, straining against invisible bonds, but his limbs were perfectly motionless. Was he paralysed? His mind raced. If he was, how was he standing? And these didn’t look like doctors.

Why didn’t they speak?

It was at that moment that his entire being came to a halt, as he became aware of the missing element. He wasn’t breathing. He hadn’t taken a single breath since he’d woken up. Cubey tried to gulp at the air like a fish, but nothing worked. Panic seized him, and he tried to thrash, to free himself from whatever bound him like a statue in front of the impassive strangers. Surely they could see that he wasn’t breathing.

There was more. Fear drenched his fogged mind, but he knew something else: he had no pulse either. His heart should have been racing, but Cubey felt nothing. He tried again to wrestle himself free. Were they going to let him die?

Moments passed. Somehow he didn’t die, didn’t pass out. He was alive and awake, though not breathing and with no pulse.

Am I already dead? Cubey wondered. Is this what it feels like to die?

He had no chance to pursue that thought, as the woman stepped forward and tapped him on the forehead. That’s where his memory ended.

Cubey’s backside now ached with cold from sitting on the bare metal deckplate of the landing pad. How long ago had it happened, that first awakening in this place? There was no concept of time associated with that memory, but still he knew it to be the oldest. That is, it was the oldest memory of his time at the airport. Before that was foggy and distant, but he remembered a full life. It hadn’t been a remarkable life, by any means, but it was at least his, and he had been free. If only then he had valued his freedom of movement, and freedom of thought. Since his imprisonment here, he had neither.

It was moments like this in which Cubey felt least certain. Nothing since his arrival had seemed entirely real, as if it were a kind of waking dream. Though he knew that his life before had been real, there was always a certain doubt. His keepers clearly had control over his entire being. Could he even trust his memory?

His hands grew clammy and he exhaled suddenly as if to cast the thoughts out of his head. No. It was real. It had to have been. After all, what was he but the sum of his experiences, from childhood to the present. If he began to doubt that… then who was he?

Cubey remembered his family, his parents, his brothers. He remembered his childhood home, the social anguishes of adolescence, and the freedoms and burdens of adulthood. Friendships made and lost. Where were they all now, his family, his friends? How long had it been since he’d been abducted? Did they even know he was still alive? Were they safe?

There were no answers to those questions. Yet.

Strangest of all was the nature of his prison. As far as he could tell, it was Abbotts Aerodrome, a place that shouldn’t even exist. It was the airport he had built in a virtual world and populated with buildings, aircraft, and more. But that had been nothing more than a computer game, essentially. Cubey would sit down at his computer, run a viewer, and log in with an avatar.

At this point, his memory was a little unclear. He couldn’t, for example, remember the name of his avatar, though he had a feeling that he might have just used his real name in the metaverse: Cubey Terra. But that didn’t feel quite right. Why couldn’t he remember that?

Looking around him, Cubey wondered at the detail and complexity of the place. It was, in most ways, his own creation brought out of the metaverse and made real. Who would have gone to such extravagant effort and why, he couldn’t say. It made no sense at all. It must have taken hundreds of millions of dollars – if not billions – to create this real-world replica. Whoever his captors were, they must be enormously wealthy.

Stranger still were the people who worked in and passed through this ersatz-Abbotts, who walked around like drugged zombies, going about their business with unwavering focus. At first, he tried to engage people in conversation, but that proved futile – they would respond as if they’d been brainwashed, unable to think independently. Their responses were always in the context of their activities in an airport, as if it were perfectly normal that they should be here. As time passed, it became clear that he was expected to act as a manager. He discovered that workers would follow his direction, passengers would ask him for help getting to their flights, but if he ever asked how they got there – how they came to be in Abbotts – their faces would go momentarily blank, then would continue as if he’d never asked the question.

It was roleplay made real on a horrifying scale. What kind of powers could not only build this place, but keep thousands of individuals captive and brainwashed, going about their business in a sick parody of life? Moreover, what purpose could this place serve? Certainly, Cubey seemed to be the only person who seemed to be aware of his actual situation. Was he being studied? Or was it simply an accident that only he was able to think clearly?

Or was he thinking clearly? If he were mentally ill – delusional – couldn’t it manifest itself with delusions of grandeur? Was his awareness that he could be delusional proof in itself that he wasn’t? His mind raced frighteningly in circles on this subject often, with no resolution. Either he was delusional or he was actually a prisoner. What was fact was that he couldn’t leave. That was undeniably beyond any interpretation or doubt.

On that first day, it had taken him only minutes of futile interrogations of blank faces before he had tried to walk out of his open-walled prison. Just like the Abbotts of the metaverse, this one was surrounded by water on three sides, so Cubey chose to walk the ridge east towards the forest. He made it as far as the forest’s edge when he walked into a barrier. It was solid, but perfectly invisible, but slightly flexible and forgiving. Like a magnetic field that repelled him, keeping his arms and legs and body well within the border of Abbotts. It was completely baffling, the invisible force that kept him within the square portion of land. Had they altered him somehow? Implanted magnets inside him? Although he looked carefully, he couldn’t find any scars to indicate invasive surgery, or anything of the kind. Stranger, old familiar scars were now absent.

They had done something to him.

His first days were agonizing. He probed the limits of his region, but couldn’t find any weakness in the mysterious force that held him. He boarded aircraft in the hope of flying out, but the pilots would refuse to take off until he disembarked. The cafe on the tower’s top floor provided enough food to live on, but it was perfectly flavourless, bland. His quarters in the tower were spartan, consisting of a futon, a desk, and a bathroom.

After his initial awakening in that white room, during his entire emprisonment, his captors had never made another appearance. Images of the old TV show, The Prisoner, flashed through his mind often. This was his Village. He alone was self-aware among a population of mindless thralls, and the loneliness of that slowly ate at him as months became years until he broke. What he’d done then—

Cubey closed his eyes and shook off that memory. It went too deep, too dark. His watch beeped once, and he rose to his feet again, toes of his boots at the edge of the abyss. Below him, 737s lined up on the taxiway, waiting their turn, engines shrieking.

Scanning the horizon, Cubey waited for the moment he knew would come, as it had every day with precision. There. West of him, at the border between Abbotts and the darkened valley beyond it first appeared as a black spot hovering mid-air, some tens of meters above the water channel that separated Abbotts from the lands to the west. Gradually, the air around it began to thicken, began to swirl – it was a whirlpool of mist and dust flowing like an emptying sink towards the spot, eventually obscuring it in a growling, spinning vortex.

It began to move, slowly at first, almost imperceptibly, but picking up speed. Now it was clearly drifting towards him, but slightly below him. It would pass right below his platform, Cubey knew, just as he had observed so many times before. Only this time, he wasn’t going to watch it disappear over the eastern forest, out of range of the forces that bound him to the airport.

This wasn’t just a storm, he felt. Air, dust, birds, and sometimes aircraft were pulled into the swirling mass as it passed over the runway, past the landing pad, and away out of sight. Those things weren’t being destroyed. They were going somewhere else, as if it were a hole in space.

The first time he’d seen it, he hid from it in his underground rooms, emerging only after it had gone. Several aircraft had vanished from the sky, apparently eaten by the vortex, and yet the airport seemed to bustle with activity, as if nothing had happened. Nobody, neither workers nor travellers had seen it, and tended to recoil from his questioning, as if he might become dangerous.

It was true: only Cubey could see the vortex. Entire passenger jets vanished into it, but nobody seemed to notice or care. But those things – those people – were vanishing into it. And now, so would Cubey.

He knew, certainly, that in all likelihood the vortex could kill him. The alternative – perpetual imprisonment here – was a living death anyway. His choice was clear.

As the vortex grew closer, a roar of air grew deafening, and the wind threatened to pull Cubey off the edge. It was too soon. If he let go now, he would fall short of the vortex, and plummet to the ground. So he waited, gloved hands gripping the edge. Suddenly, gale force winds blasted him from his ledge into the air, and for a heart-stopping moment he thought he wouldn’t make it. But the suction was far stronger than he’d anticipated, and his fall curved not downwards, but towards the eye of the storm, and in a roaring flash to black, he passed into the darkness and escaped Abbotts Aerodrome.

Daisy45 sidestepped T1g3r’s aggressive moves and zoomed her camera toward the motionless avatar, orbiting her view to examine it from all sides. It was a male avatar, shorter than average, with unfashionable, helmet-like mesh hair that hugged his skull like a lump of clay. He wore a tight-fitting charcoal flight jacket with the words, “Abbotts Aerodrome” printed in gold across the back, and on his feet, to Daisy45′s amusement, were default avatar shoes. Not even prim shoes: just textured feet.

“Phht, some noob,” she smirked. “Default hair and shoes. Let’s go.” And with that, Daisy45 turned to scout for more interesting material to scavenge, with T1g3r scampering ahead on all fours. Honestly, Daisy45 found T1g3r’s presence annoying, but useful. He had a way of sniffing out previously-undiscovered content.

For several hours, they had been combing the remains of this grid. It wasn’t glamorous work, but for every unique new texture or object they could scrape from this dead world and upload into the OpenGrid, they earned gridbux for new toys and an item of clothing or two. Maybe even an upgrade to their avatars so they could get into the popular sims. Enough, eventually, to leave behind the salvage business altogether and earn full grid citizenship. Daisy45 suppressed a sigh at such distant goals. Here in the decay of the first grid, all of that seemed infinitely far away.

As T1g3r rushed ahead to explore an old airplane hangar, Daisy45 heard the clattering of a keyboard behind her. She spun to see the strange avatar now standing straight with his hands thrashing in the air, as if typing. Finally his hands dropped to his sides. “Hello there,” appeared his words near the bottom of her view. “I haven’t seen anyone around Abbotts in years.”

Agitated, Daisy45 stepped back to put a safe distance between her and the stranger. She momentarily even considered risking a teleport to another sim, but  here on the first grid, inter-sim TP was more likely to result in  disconnection. Sometimes permanent disconnection. After all the years of use, the aging user server couldn’t be relied on for a clean logout.

She evaluated the stranger carefully and dropped a cagegun into her palm.  Although he had typed his words, she chose to speak aloud and  hoped that he could hear her even if he chose not to speak.  “What do you want, noob?” she demanded.

At that, the man arched his back with hands on stomach and mimed a deep belly laugh, which then stopped suddenly, leaving him staring once again at  her as if nothing had happened. “Noob?” he wrote. “You can call me noob when you have more than a  dozen years in SL.”

She peered again at him with incredulous eyes. She noted again the default hair and shoes. And that was definitely base-layer skin, she observed, tinted an  unpleasant shade of pale. As she re-examined him, she began to understand — this is what all avatars used to look like in the first  years of this grid. She was standing face-to-face with an oldbie.

Sad, strange, and unable to handle change, many of the oldbies refused to  evolve and move on to greener pastures after the first grid sickened and declined.  “Damn,” she sneered. “I thought you were all dead by now.” She allowed her scorn to drip from her voice.

But the oldbie only nodded without emotion. “I guess I should be,” appeared his  text. “I guess I’m just sentimental. I still love this place.” His  eyes focussed briefly on the airport tower behind her and beyond to something she perhaps couldn’t see.

Daisy snorted. “This place? Crap this place is a dump. It doesn’t even  have physics.”

“Ah, physics.” The oldbie paused from typing to take a seat on a  plywood cube. “I miss the physics. Planes.”

“What?”

“Planes. That’s what I used to make. Planes, helicopters… whatever. None of that works now.” With that, he briefly slumped  again, his thoughts absent.

Although the oldbie was just as irritating as the old ones tended to be,  Daisy45 suspected that he might be hoarding some useful content. Something worth more than a few gridbux. So heaving a sigh, she  dropped a cube of her own and took a seat near him.

“Hey,” she prodded. There was  no response. “Hey!”

Suddenly, the oldbie sat bolt upright. “Sorry,” he typed. “Was lost in  my thoughts.” He fell silent again, staring into the distance. “You  know,” he said finally, “Abbotts used to be the most popular airport  on the grid.”

Daisy frowned. “Airport? What’s the point of an airport? Where would  you go?” She glanced at the grid map, which showed only a handful of  broken-down, half-deleted sims.

Again, the oldbie belly-laughed. “‘Where would you go?’ Well, first of  all, that wasn’t the point. The point was to just have fun flying. Back then we would fly right across the grid in squadrons.”

“Wow,” she rolled her eyes. “That must have taken entire minutes.”

“Oh, no,” he wrote, his arms thrashing archaically on an invisible  keyboard. “Back then, there were thousands… tens of thousands… of  sims. Several hundred on this continent alone.”

Daisy45 had heard ridiculous claims before, but dismissed them as hyperbole. Tens of thousands of sims? It was hardly believable. The new grids were, of course, many times that size, but anyone only had to look at the wreckage of the old grid to know how well and truly lame it was. But she had to get this oldbie to open up if she was going to extract anything useful from him, and contradicting him wouldn’t be productive at this point, so she nodded and tried to appear impressed.

The oldbie rambled about the glory days of the grid, telling unlikely stories of countless islands dotting the map offering every imaginable attraction. In the old days, he explained, Abbotts was just one of hundreds of connected sims that formed the old grid’s first continent. To the west, there once lay a vast city, and to the east had been a series of rivers, lakes, mountains, canyons, and stretches of snow-filled regions complete with winter lodges and ski hills.

Daisy45 cast a skeptical eye to the east, where Abbotts ended suddenly at the endless but inpenetrable ocean-filled void.

“No, I know it’s hard to imagine now,” he conceded. “But even right there, just beyond the edge of Abbotts, was the Old Forest of Kahruvel, with towering conifers and a seaside village. It was lost in the Second Great Erase, of course. With so many more of the Old Places.

“So many things were lost in the Erase,” he typed. “I might have gotten wiped too if I had ever disconnected. That’s the trick, you know. Never log out, never teleport. As long as you stay, it stays. All of this stays.”

“Maybe,” said Daisy45 carefully, “you could save some of this. More permanently, I mean.”

Once again the oldbie focused on his young guest. “Save it? Save it how?” he asked. “Just give it away, you mean?”

It was impossible for Daisy45 to gauge the oldbie’s emotional state based only on his chat text, but she proceeded anyway. “Me and my friend over there,” she gestured to the line of dead aircraft where T1g3r had scampered, “we’re collectors. We rescue things from the old grid.”

Suddenly the oldbie stood up. “You mean you RIP THEM. Content thieves. Why shouldn’t I eject you now?”

Daisy45 stood quickly too. “No, no… we preserve things. Listen,” she insisted. “What will happen to this place when it goes offline finally? What will happen to your inventory?”

He seemed to hesitate. “Well, obviously. It will be wiped like everything else. I’ve known that for years.”

“And you’re OK with that?” Daisy45 knew she had to make her offer or lose her chance. “Let us save it. We can save it all. Once it’s in the new grid, it will continue for decades. Imagine that. All your work, saved.”

After a pause that seemed endless, the oldbie rezzed a cube and began to work on it. Although his actions were invisible to her, the selection beam connected his hand to the cube. Daisy45 kept an eye on her mini-map, and saw a little green dot far off at the end of a runway. While T1g3r was busy raiding content, she smirked, she was going to score big-time.

Eventually, the oldbie turned to face her. “In this cube is a copy of everything I’ve made. Thousands of items. Scripts, gadgets, vehicles, buildings. Everything.” He paused a moment, then took the cube into his inventory. “I’ve known for a long time that I would have to do this eventually. This grid is done. And now I want someone to take all of what I’ve protected here to the new grid. I guess it might as well be you.”

At that moment, Daisy45 heard T1g3r’s voice behind her, bellowing. “Go hang somewhere else, noob!”

A black ball whizzed past her shoulder, struck the oldbie in the chest, and knocked him back a few meters. Immediately, a cage materialized around him.

“Noo!” Daisy45 screamed, but it was too late. The cage accelerated up and away from her, dwindling as it disappeared into the distance with the oldbie trapped inside. At the edge of the sim, the cage froze for a second, then vanished. The oldbie was nowhere to be seen. Disconnected for the last time, Daisy45 knew.

She spun and confronted T1g3r’s quadruped avatar. “What the hell?” she cried. “He was just about to give me his entire inventory!”

“So? What’s the big deal?” T1g3r sulked. “Let’s get out of this dump. It’s depressing. I can’t find any—”

His words were cut short by a glaring announcement that appeared simultaneously at the top of their views: “THIS REGION IS SHUTTING DOWN IN 5 MINUTES. PLEASE LEAVE OR BE DISCONNECTED.”

“Fine,” T1g3r spat. “It’s a crap-hole anyways. Seeya in OpenGrid, Daze.” With that, he vanished, leaving Daisy45 alone with her thoughts. The sun began to set in the west, lighting the airport tower in a delicate golden glow. She wasn’t sure why, but a sudden feeling of regret washed over her. In the embers of daylight, Daisy45 pressed CTRL Q, and Abbotts faded to black for the last time.

This is, of course, the fifth part of my oh-my-god-why-are-they-so-many-parts series exploring real examples of poetry written by Second Lifers. In late 2003 and early 2004, I held a series of Bad Poetry Contests, in which avatars were given only fifteen minutes and 8 sort-of-random words in which to create the most painful poetry imaginable. All of these poems were improvised. All of these poems were better off never having been written in the first place.

Today’s entries originate from the evening of November 18, 2003. The words: dinosaur, extinguish, hiccup, mime, poultry, uvula, vaccinate, and wobble. I’ll start with my own contribution to this festival of nausea.

Cubey Terra

O large and fearsome dinosaur of love,
Do not throw water on the flames of my heart,
For water can only extinguish my hiccups,
And without you I would be forever be,
Like a mime,trapped in an invisible box,
Yearning for your poultry-like skin.
For my love is a disease,
And your wobbly uvula is the vaccination.

Fallingwater Cellardoor

UVULA’S LAMENT

Uvula! He winkled to me
as he extinguished the mime that was
under the fruit punch bowl and
I thankled him for that.
Oh my Uvula, he hiccuped and sprinkled
He said, I vaccilate and vaccinate
and then i vaccipate for good measure
Sweet uvula, i can’t choose between
you and the glimmering dinosaur
Or the simmering poultry that squawks so sweetly
So I quimpled him. Hard.

Julian Fate

Whoosh! The asteroid hung in the mouth of the night like God’s uvula
Splorp! The stone of doom plunged into the primordial mud
Gack! The dinosaurs staggered like Mardi Gras drunks as their lives were extinguished
Blorg! The fateful asteroid sunk in the muck
Thus ends the world, not with a bang but with a hiccup
But life will find a way and the earth wobbles on
Until there evolved a higher form of life: MAN!
Who promptly devolved and produced: MIMES!
Enraged the slime beings of a distant star
Infected earth’s poultry and soon mankind
Was felled by virulent disease no hand could vaccinate
And thus a second ending: murder most fowl

Anaraxis Romulus

Lime was a mime
She drank too much wine
She threw up some ____ past her uvula
It gave her bubonic and ebola

She saw some poultry, or was it a dinosaur
It wasn’t an eyesore
It hiccuped and out came something great
She knew she could use it vaccinate

As she tries to extinguish the burn
She knows that very soon it will be her turn
She wobbles to the clinic to see if she’s fine
And they tell her of course… you are Lime the Mime.

Charlie Bombay

anxious to announce his recent vaccination
simon wobbled in a fidgeting fashion.

as a dinosuar with power of plenty
simon could not even contain his hiccupping frenzy.

determined to extinguish his crazy erruptions
simon decided miming was the only option.

relaxing his uvula and strict diet of poultry
simon was able to conquer with victory.

You did it! You survived another session. For this accomplishment I’d pin a medal on your chest, but it’s covered in your breakfast.

Honestly, it’s unlikely that today’s selection of bad poetry will answer any ultimate questions, but they would most likely please a Vogon.

To those who don’t read this site regularly: In 2003 and 2004, I held a series of “Bad Poetry Contests” in which contestants were given 15 minutes and a selection of perhaps-not-so-random words to write a poem so distressingly awful, it could be considered a dangerous weapon in the wrong hands. Today’s selection is from November 11, 2003. The random words: gourd, hemp, indigestion, kangaroo, pelvis, salad, skimp, and zither.

First up is the esteemed architect, Lordfly Digeridoo.

Bored out of my gourd,
I stand on my fjord,
Trying to find a way to jumpstart my Ford.

The hemp brownie that I ate,
gave me indigestion as of late,
Which doesn’t help me at all in my presently un-Forded state.

I sense what to do,
and call upon my kangaroo,
Who is currently on vacation and riding a Skidoo.

He opens up his phone,
and in a monotonous tone,
Agrees to come help me as long as i’m prone.

I wait on my hood,
til my pelvis is numbed good,
and scour the roadside to look for some wood.

I give up the search,
and enter my trunk in a lurch,
As I whip up a quick salad like I learned how to in church.

It is with carrots I skimp,
instead preferring some shrimp,
that I cook over the zither that I just had to crimp.

The crimping was needed
Cause the fire that i seeded,
required some roasting before my salad was completed.

The kangaroo arrived,
and as far as I surmised,
Got the ford working, much to my surprise.

I drove off quickly
my stomach still sickly,
as I felt my pelvis still kinda prickly.

Cienna Rand

Two Haiku for You

Gourd indigestion
Hemp and kangaroo salad
Be still, my pelvis.

The zither twangs now
Hither and fro I wriggle
The salad calls me

Anaraxis Romulus

Skimp was a tramp
She lived off food stamp…
The gourd she bought gave her indigestion
Sat back with her hemp and asked herself a question.

“My pelvis is lovely”, she said
as she stood in the mirror
“I wonder how i’ll look if I stand any nearer?”

Maybe I’ll chill
and eat me some salad
While a Kangaroo named Esther
plays Greensleeves on her Zither…far out.

Dionysus Starseeker

Stomach Cramps With a Mammal

I woke up today, and I heard
a noise.  I quickly realized
it was indegestion, from the
meal last night.  What did I
have?  I remember the salad,
but was there something else
I do not know. I ask my hemp
smoking kangaroo friend with
a pouch on his pelvis and he
quickly said, “Why are there
two of you?” while playing a
zither. I realized that week
that I had eaten a gourd and
I did not skimp on the salt.

The authors of the next to will have to remain anonymous (luckily for them!) — the names were missing from their notecards. Are these your poems? Would you admit to it if they were?

Anonymous

Zithers sound my stomach hears
My salad leaves and indigestion nears
I smoke some hemp, my eyes, ears roared
What is that a kangaroo? No it’s a fjord
(Well a gourd)
I wandered under the mushroom blue
Alice skimped on the outer chew.

Anonymous

Indigestion never plagues my Pelvis,
so cook me a Gourd and Hemp like Elvis -
and do not skimp on the Kangaroo Salad
before the Zither-man plays another ballad.

That’s all for now. Time to clean your lunch off the floor. Next time, we see some Vogonic verse from Fallingwater Cellardoor and … yours truly.

Back in late 2003 and early 2004, I hosted several poetry contests. The challenge: in only 15 minutes, and given eight random words to include, write a poem that’s so awful, your eyes bleed from the reading of it.

In today’s installment, we turn the wayback machine to November 4, 2003. The random words: deposit, dolly, erogenous, flipper, giggle, sublime, slimy, and tapestry.

Mistress Midnight

my life as a dolly
sure i giggle after the wiggle
you’ll see why they call me flipper
if you’re a good tipper.
pimp’s lookin for a deposit
so the ho boots are comin out of the closet
lookin up at your tapestry while lyin on my back
you paid $300 up front to get me in the sack
…this poem is crappy i cant get erogenous in it
i dont think im gonna win it :(

Odalisque VonLenard

The slimy erogenous flipper
Left it’s sublime deposit
On the tapestry covered dolly
leaving her with a giggle

Kenzington Fairlight

take five in all your erogenous zones,
the second plateu and then i’ll bring it home
in a recent twelve day study it was found
it’s good for you to take more chocolate down
flipper can’t squeek these rimes like i do
he’s just too slimy, he hangs out in the…water.yeah!

a tapestry of pre-pubescence is present
i was the dolly grip in a movie called “seven”
i practice tae chi so mind feels sublime
but when i giggle in class, it justs wastes time
channel 41 plays shows i like
i think i’m through killing the mic.
peace.

Hikaru Yamamoto

Little Molly loved her dolly
she would giggle and play every day
she was very erogenous about her dolly
but then it started to decay
it became all slimy and very grimy
it grew a flipper and became very chipper
it went off on its own along with a loan
and created company making tapestry
every day little molly got something from her dolly
but forgot to deposit and it lays in her closet
but she says with a chime “i am still sublime”
and stays that way to this very day.

Cienna Rand

Behold, the erogenous lass doth breath slow
For she shall deposit her endless treasure.
Upon the tapestry I lie
Awaiting my dolly, with baited breath.
My slimy stare watches her form.
Her flipper entrances me.
Forsooth, the sublime embrace takes us.
We shall giggle, giggle, and then giggle more
As we fade into the thingy.

Anaraxis Romulus

Dolly, my love
skin of rubber
big black eyes
with her erogenous flipper

Makes me giggle
as she deposits
fresh fish…at my feet

Is she dolphin
Is she human
Is she sublime
in a slimy Hollandaise Sauce

This tapestry tells the tale
of my Dolly…
Erogenous, yes
Slimy…no…

Myradyl Muse

The tapestry of Ages
Rests slimy in the Deep,
Where giggles from a dolly
Resound through sublime Keep.
Within those ancient waters
Cavorts a porpoise, plump;
His flippers leave deposits
On erogenous fins and scales
To bring quiver to his lady,
The dolphin, Mitzy Grump.

Next time: more from Lordfly Digeridoo, Cienna Rand, and more! Oldbies, if you’d rather I didn’t publish your work, please contact me via my Linden dollar balance.

Seven years later, I am revisiting selections of vile verse and posting them here for your reading discomfort. You may recognize some names.

This selection of stinky stanza are dredged up from the evening of October 28, 2003. The random words of the day: boat, strangulate, hearse, pasty, hat, carp, and recline.

Kenzington Fairlight

i dragged a fat carp out behind the boat house,
he told me about how he swam with my spouse,
i didn’t like that, so on his face i did trounce,
now i recline in by big pimpin house,
where i stick it to the man, every ounce,

the very next week, in a hearse i did ride,
i call it a hearse cause it had dead folks inside,
pasty peeps that i strangulated for acting all snide,
told me they tagged my spouse from behind,
so under a huge hat, you best better hide,
if i find you with my spouse, his name is clyde.

Trinity Serpentine

In my boat
I have a coat
but not a hat
too cool for that
I play the harp
I smell a carp
Never inline
Always recline
I strangulate
the magistrate
I suck at verse
please call a hearse
make it hasty
I’m turning pasty

Charlie Bombay

Little Johnny hadn’t a clue
so many delicious toys:
what to do?

Transportation in swarms
a boat, train, or hearse:
which to choose?

Costumes he could fancy
heels, hats, and pasties:
or is that just too fruity?

Deciding to stick to his frustration
Johnny took it out on the recliner
by strangulation.

There were more poets that night, but sadly their works were lost in an accident involving a carp.

Seven years later, I plan to revisit selections of vile verse and post them here for your reading discomfort. You may recognize some names.

The first selection comes from October 21, 2003, where a handful of avatars gathered at Theatre Terra in Natoma. Random words: balaclava, dainty, eulogy, glimpse, herculean (or Hercules), kayak, massage, and yodel. Time: 15 minutes.

Kenzington Fairlight:

i don’t know what balaclava is/just that it’s said in aladin
the genie says it in a song/as you glimpse at his powers flashin!
after the scene, i massage my brain/he made dainty chics dance around!
this movie was so much better than hercules/my brain yodels, it does astound!
it makes me want to take my kayak/and paddle it through some sand
but i figured out that this can’t work/lola, isn’t this eulogy grand?

Lordfly Digeridoo:

Sitting on the steps wearing my balaclava,
Chewing this piece of gum that just lost its flava.

I yodel for a massage, but it just ain’t comin,
The old lady’s yelling at me, and my ears are numbin.

I stretch my arms, bored as a bat,
I decide to see if I can find this or that.

I go inside the crib, to catch me the paper,
And I glimpse a eulogy next to the latest caper.

It was a tribute to Hercules, our fallen hero,
The courageous peasant who worked his way from zero.

He was taking a daintly cruise down the Mighty Mississippi,
In a kayak of all things, and the weather was getting iffy.

Things as always took a turn for the worse,
He got nailed by lightning, and was taken away by a hearse.

His family was distraught, and so was the town,
The widow was dressed in an all-black gown.

I guess it happened yesterday according to the news,
I wondered why my neighbors were crying the blues.

So now I sit here, still bored outta my mind,
with my old lady, who’s robbing me blind.

I guess that’s how it goes, deep in the hood,
And with any luck, this poem won’t be any good.

Julian Fate:

O, dainty muse I do beseech
And sing thy vapid eulogy,
Massage mine brain to fervid heights
Of herculean poetry.
Inspire me that my words might glimpse
The heights and ever mixed verb tense.
Guide my kayak of sweet verse
Across the literary univere.
O, Muse whose creative balaclava
Covers o’er like molten lava
Let not Death’s rudeness crack my voice
But yodel sweetly, that’s my choice.

Neferon ________:

A man named Turger.

I feel as if a dainty… fainty slip of the spoon urged my kayak to capsize with unknow stuff.
That is also why my balaclava is so huff and puff.
The yodel i do is different then the need for eulogy.
And it is not a glimpse of phsycotherapy.
No no no none of these herculean words is mine, yet you need to heed thyself from the sheep, for it massages quickly.
And of course the fox is cunning and trickly.
Repeat is handy when doing things.
and repeat is handy when it comes to springs.
Repeat is handy when doing things.
and repeat is handy when it comes to springs.
The fly eat a hamburger because it does not eat a cheeseburger.
Music stops and ends when … o no the beat is hard and like a rhino very fast.
I once knew a man named Turger.
And he didn’t last…..very long

Stay tuned for more bad poetry from the oldbies of Second Life.

Today the printer failed. Jobs were sent, nothing came out. And then it struck me. The problem is that between the computer and the printer, there’s a trans-universe quantum entanglement. You know, the kind that’s often caused by warp-generated inverse tachyon pulses. Yeah, that kind. Basing my reasoning on the long-established and hackneyed premise that there are an infinite number of parallel universes and something about a cat, I think it’s reasonable to assume that the print jobs are actually proceeding through an interdimensional bridge to a nearly identical alternate universe where a nearly identical printer is receiving them. So right now, the other-universe analogs of my co-workers and I are gathered around the printer trying to figure out where all those pages are being printed from. I think my reasoning is sound, but a quick call to Dr. Hawking should verify my hypothesis.

I realize that diagnosing the printer problem in this way doesn’t provide an actual solution, but it may solve other problems, such as those caused by Friday-related lethargy. Let me explain. If there are an infinite number of universe representing all probabilities, then it’s reasonable to assume that in a similar parallel universe, I have completed all of today’s work. All I need is for one of those universes to send it to me, the way I sent my print jobs to the other universe.

Naturally, I don’t have the technology available to send a request or to retrieve things from other universes, but if it is possible, it’s reasonable to believe that there is at least one universe where I do possess the technology. And knowing myself, I know that if I ever had that technology, I would freely share it with my other-universe analogues. I just have to wait for an alternate-universe me to transmit the details.

But Cubey, you say, if there are an infinite number of universes and if inter-universe communication is possible, wouldn’t we be barraged by an infinite number of communication requests from other universes? No, and for an obvious reason: Of all probabilities, there must be a chance of there existing at least one universe that has not been contacted yet. And that’s us.

So now that it’s mid-afternoon on a Friday, all I have to do is wait for another universe to send me instructions. Even just the completed TPS report would be nice.

Hang on… just received an email. And it’s from myself! Hmm. Apparently, in that universe, my middle name is “Awesome”. I always felt it should be.

Crap. He sent me the TPS report alright. But it’s got the wrong cover sheet.