Sunday, January 31, 2016

Weekly Prompt Story: Camera

http://oneadayuntilthedayidie.com/?p=28382

My Camera
By Christopher Munroe

I’ve bought a Polaroid camera.

And film, obviously. It would’ve been pointless without film.

I bought it just in case I meet a girl with brown hair and glasses, who loves The Smiths and wants to teach me to love life again the way a child does.

We’ll lay by the river, talking about our hopes and dreams while I snap Polaroids of the two of us, falling in love.

I don’t have a specific bespectacled brunette in mind, yet, I bought it just in case…


After all, if I ever DO meet her, I’d hate not to be ready…

Thursday, January 28, 2016

My Restaurant

Although I’ve worked as a waiter, off and on, for years, I never wanted to open a restaurant myself…

Until, that is, a friend suggested I open a gaming themed breakfast nook.

Space enough for whatever tabletop game you might want to partake in over a pleasant morning meal, along with delicious breakfast delicacies prepared for you while you played, it seemed the natural next step in the evolution of the gaming café.

Though I admit, I didn’t fully sign on ‘til it was pointed out to me that opening a gaming-themed breakfast restaurant would allow me to name three of the menu items “Waffle Good,” “Waffle Evil,” and “Waffle Neutral.”

Waffle Evil, we decided after careful consideration, would be bacon and ghost pepper sauce waffles, the sort of spicy treat that’s guaranteed to punch you right in the taste buds, an assault upon your senses that left you reeling. People might wonder if they could order it sans ghost pepper sauce. And the answer would be: No.

Waffle Good, on the other hand, would be dessert waffles, piled high with fresh fruit, syrup, cream both iced and whipped, and then sprinkled in chocolate shavings, a decadent feast that even the most humourless of taste buds would be forced to stop and take appreciative note of…

Waffle Neutral would just be waffles, with butter. Waffles and butter. That’s it.

This notion tickled us so much that we knew we had to open the restaurant, and to our surprise, the young woman we talked to at the bank agreed, and our loan was approved immediately! It took a lot of hard work getting the place up and running, but six months later we had our own little breakfast and gaming parlour, open for business!

And then, six months after that, closed for business, our operating capital gone and what few customers we’d found calling for our blood, the games they’d invested so much money and emotional energy into ruined, forever.


Waffles, it turns out, should not be combined with tabletop gaming. The syrup gets EVERYWHERE…

Wednesday, January 27, 2016

Weekly Prompt Story: Thoughts

http://oneadayuntilthedayidie.com/?p=28253

On Filmgoing
By Christopher Munroe

I’ve seen Inception.

Presumably.

I mean, it’s the type of movie I WOULD see. I love Chris Nolan, he makes interesting, thinky blockbusters that blend spectacular visual effects with densely packed ideas, and I respond consistently well to his films.

Also: Batman.

Plus, I remember watching the film, enjoying the performances and talking on my way home about whether Leo had woken up or not. I remember it vividly.


But, in spite of all that, if it were just a case of somebody putting the MEMORY of the movie Inception in my mind while I slept, how would I know?

Thursday, January 21, 2016

The Morning After

I wake with the worst hangover of my life, and discover I’m wearing a Starbucks uniform.

I don’t remember much about last night, an evening, a bar, a group of friendly strangers, rounds of Jager shots and, past that, nothing at all until this moment…

I find the note by my bed and know what it will say even before I open it.

“Your shift begins at three.” It reads, along with an address.


“Well,” I think to myself, resigned to my fate and rising to prepare myself for my new job, “it would appear I have been French-Press ganged.”

Sunday, January 17, 2016

Weekly Prompt Story: The Line

http://oneadayuntilthedayidie.com/?p=28242

My New Program
By Christopher Munroe

Here’s my pitch:

Our contestants, wild, sexy twentysomethings all, arrive at the house on the first day and are told to wait for the host to come and let them in.

The host, obviously, never comes, and the series is filmed in front of the house as, over the course of several days, without provisions beyond whatever they might have brought with them, they give up on ever being on TV and walk away...

The last, half starved, exhausted contestant still waiting, once the others have left, will be declared the winner.


“The Line” will premier this autumn, on NBC.

Thursday, January 14, 2016

Bitcoin

Good news! I’ve started accepting Bitcoin!

Which, I think you’ll all agree, was only ever a matter of time.

Normal currencies are, after all, only ever backed by governments, and really, what are governments other than instruments through which people deal collectively with the problems they collectively face? Nothing, that’s exactly right! So why on earth would we allow these entities be in charge of ensuring the safety and stability of a currency, when the much simpler “Nobody in charge of anything and try not to worry about it!” option exists!

There is no reason! I know!

Now, don’t get me wrong, Bitcoin isn’t based on nothing at all, that would obviously be insane. A currency needs a stable platform upon which to rest, otherwise how would it function in the global economy as a real reflection of value, rather than a speculative bubble that could pop at any moment? No, a foundation is needed upon which to build your currency, clearly, that it might stand the test of time and win the trust of the wider world, it just needs to be something deeper and more meaningful than the useful collective fiction that is a national government.

In this specific case, Bitcoin is built upon two main economic pillars, “Libertarianism” and “Wishing.”

Now, as a white cis-male who mostly sleeps with women, the idea of Libertarianism has always appealed to me, I like that it tells me I’ve earned everything I have and need never examine my life any more deeply than that. It comforts me enormously, being told what I want to hear and then encouraged not to think about it. And as far as Wishing goes, who among us has never held a wish near to our breast and hoped for the best?

This, essentially, is Bitcoin. And I think you’ll agree that it’s the sort of basis for an actual currency that real people actually use that absolutely won’t result in the complete collapse of the system like the over-elaborate house of cards that it definitely isn’t.

So it’s with a song in my heart that I jump aboard the Bitcoin train now, after it’s left the station but before it goes completely off the rails, in order to be a part of history. Not a part of history insomuch as it’s the first time an economic scheme of this sort has been attempted, but insomuch as it’s the first time the scheme’s been tried online.

And as we all know, adding the Internet to a business venture is a sure fire winner, the late ‘90s and early 2000s notwithstanding. Bitcoin will no doubt be every bit as great a success as we’ve come to expect from these sorts of ventures!


So: Give me all your Bitcoins. And please, do it quickly, I suspect that they won’t be useful to me much longer, and I’m certainly not willing to pay real money for them while they are…

Sunday, January 10, 2016

Weekly Prompt Story: Pound

http://oneadayuntilthedayidie.com/?p=28233

Pound Cake
By Christopher Munroe

Pound cake is delicious cake, made with flour, butter, eggs and sugar in a 1:1:1:1 ratio, baked in either a loaf pan or Bundt mold, then either dusted with powdered sugar, glazed or on rare occasion served with a coat of icing.

Recipes vary by region, but that’s the basics no matter where you go and, ordering a slice of pound cake, that’s approximately what you should expect.

“Pound Cake” is also a kiss off you can say to someone in the heat of anger, but it’s a confusing one that I wouldn’t recommend.


But that’s neither here nor there…

Friday, January 8, 2016

Random thoughts regarding the Marvel Cinematic Universe...

Something occurred to me the other day…

In the popular film Iron Man II, Justin Hammer of Hammer Industries hires Ivan Vanko, AKA Whiplash, to design and build a fleet of killer robots for military use. Vanko sets these robots on a rampage and Iron Man, with the help of War Machine, must stop them.

In its sequel, Iron Man III, Aldrich Killian and the Advanced Idea Mechanics develop and then attempt to use the experimental drug Extremis to give themselves powers sufficient to defeat Iron Man, failing to do so when he calls in a literal fleet of semi-autonomous Iron Man Armours to fight by his side.

Which raises the question:

Is there a vulture capitalist firm whose business model involves buying up the remains of evil corporations that have tried and failed to kill Iron Man for pennies on the dollar? Because while that seems VERY specific, I feel like enough evil corporations are destroyed by Iron Man over the course of his exploits that in spite of this it would be a fairly successful model. After all, Hammer and Killian are imprisoned or dead by the end of their films, but their multibillion dollar trans-national corporations, their infrastructure, their R&D departments, all of this remains more or less intact, and I can only imagine how their stock price must plunge, between the sudden loss of their CEO and the fact that they’re all over the news as “Evil Corporate Entity Du-jour Tries and Fails to Kill Iron Man!!!”

Some enterprising investor with an eye for tech firms could easily swoop in, buy up what was left of the company that Iron Man had destroyed and publicly humiliated, carve up the remaining infrastructure and resources and repurpose it in ways whereby no one would realize that the company had once been evil.

Perhaps this investor fold them into his own existing tech company, rebranding them along the way.

What was once the Advanced Idea Mechanics becomes just another pert of Stark Industries.

It would make a lot of sense, if you think about it.

Tony Stark lost a lot of contracts when his company stopped developed lethal weaponry, and he’s gotta make his money where he can. And if the destruction of his corporate rivals leaves money on the table, it’s only natural that he’d think to pick that money up…


Iron Man suits ain’t free, after all, and he does go through a lot of ‘em…

Sunday, January 3, 2016

Weekly Prompt Story: Early

http://oneadayuntilthedayidie.com/?p=28225

On Birds
By Christopher Munroe

The early bird, it’s been said, gets the worm.

The burly bird, then, presumably gets the larger, more muscular worm.

The Hurley bird? Dude, he gets the worm.

And the Mr. Furley bird THINKS he’ll get the worm, but finds out at the end of half an hour that it’s all been a misunderstanding.

The Larry, Moe and Curly birds attempt to get the worm, but fail due to a combination of incompetence and shenanigans.

And, obviously, the rural-ley bird absolutely crushes worm-getting.


Thus concludes my presentation. I hope you found it useful, though I suspect that you did not.

Friday, January 1, 2016

Nope...

...no story this week. This week brutalized me and it'll be a while before i recover. Also: Come on, it's new year's eve :P