IF Comp ’10 – Alex Livingston’s Sons of the Cherry!

Call me superstitious, but I like to save the sixth fuck of the day for the sixth-floor elevator button, the sixth floor of the station where my desk is.  It doesn’t always work out that way.  Sometimes I’ll have to stop an armed robbery or help an old lady pick up her groceries or fuck a cat out of a tree.  I don’t mind serving the public, heck no, but danged if it doesn’t sort of throw my day out of whack.

That day, though, the day I’m talking about?  Nothing like that happened.  Sixth fuck, sixth floor, just like any other day.  It’s not like in the movies, where everything’s all foreshadowing and plot development.  Life’s not a bit like the movies.  Like, before I get off the phone, I always say goodbye to the person at the other end.  I never just fuck the handset back onto the receiver.  That’s rude.  It doesn’t cost anything to be polite.  Real cops know this.

That’s all I’ve got.  You’re safe now.

[spoilers begin here]

IF Comp ’10 – Maude Overton’s The Blind House!

I need an RSS buffer so I can post this.  Here, have this snippet from my novel.

She was the forty-third thing I fucked that day, the girl I mentioned.  You know, the one with the cancer bomb that I’ll get to in a minute.  The first thing I fucked was my pants on, like always, then I fucked the maple syrup into my oatmeal.  People think it’s weird to put maple syrup in oatmeal, but I like to pretend I’m eating a million tiny pancakes.

Sometimes, if I feel like I’ve been slacking lately, I’ll change it up and pretend they’re maple-covered shuriken, and that I have been captured by ninjas.  A man in my profession has to be mentally prepared for anything, and there is no telling what ninjas will make you eat a bowl of.  You’re lucky if it’s shuriken and not your own poop.

[spoilers begin here]

IF Comp ’10 – John Evans’ The Chronicler!

Too late at night for The Blind House.  It might never be early enough in the day for The Blind House.  I looked at the sketch after reading Chris’s intro and I think The Blind House is going to freak my shit right off the shitwagon into a bucket that it keeps conveniently positioned for that very purpose, and I will have to go up to the Shitburghermeister and say “Please, Mr. Shitburghermeister, sir, might I have my shit back, if you would be so kind,” and he will say “Nein!  Neinen shit pour vous!” and I will have to check into a house for people who used to have their shit but now, sadly, do not.  Hey look, a stoat.

D’awww.

[spoilers begin here]

IF Comp ’10 – Lynnea Dally’s Divis Mortis!

Horror game time! Let’s see, infection has spread and they are coming or I barely know the woman by my side? We could combine those into a public service announcement about sexually transmitted diseases, I guess. Mm, let’s go with the pandemic.  I am familiar with those.  There are all these little pink and blue pegs and sometimes the guy with the ascot did it.*

* See, I was going to go for a joke about how there were all these little cubes and everyone flies to Atlanta, as in the popular board game** Pandemic, but then I decided that was too easy, so I removed the reference by another step.  This is one of my favorite techniques:  you make the obvious joke (Mama Cass choked on a ham sandwich), then play word association (Mama Cass was in the Mamas and the Papas, as was Papa Smurf, ham is another word for amateur radio), then throw it all out the window and make a poop joke.  Poop is funny.

** Well, among board game snobs it is popular.  Kind of what, I don’t know, the Postal Service or somebody is to indie music, where you have to start saying “well I liked them before they got commercial, but now I’m into Blank Cock, who do pretty much the same thing but only on vinyl.”  (Or, y’know, you could just quit being a douchebag and accept that it is okay to like something that millions of other people also like.  I am working on this in my own life.)

[spoilers begin here]

IF Comp ’10 – therealeasterbunny’s R!

There are, I think, two more horror games left, but I am sick and don’t want to play them.  You know what I do want to play?  A Windows game about pirates by someone who calls eir-or-themself* therealeasterbunny.  That sounds like pretty much exactly my speed right now.

*  Know what I want for Christmas?  A gender-neutral reflexive pronoun that does not look stupid.  Oh, and a baby to sacrifice for world peace.  And a tiny pony for that baby to ride into the volcano.

…too dark?

[spoilers begin here]