Tag Archives: Fiction

Silence

Posted on by
Reply

for Eric


I’ve heard a silence described as “smoth­er­ing”, a kind of dense and envelop­ing silence that crushes not just sound but even the thought that you could make a sound.  I was quite fond of that fig­ure of speech, until I started work­ing at Elm Park Library.

At Elm Park Library, the silence is smoth­er­ing.  And once in a while, we find the bod­ies; asphyx­i­ated as if smoth­ered by some cloth that is never left behind.

It’s always the loud­est patrons, those who don’t afford the library the respect it deserves. They’ll make too much noise, then they’ll grow qui­eter and we’ll go about our busi­ness assum­ing some other patron has just asked them to keep it down.  Then the clos­ing time bell will ring, and all bar one will head for the exit.  One who sits, eyes open, not breath­ing, gaze locked on what­ever book was in their hands when the silence came and smoth­ered them.

They closed us down every time, of course.  Police and foren­sics scoured the scene, but it was always the same.  Asphyx­i­a­tion, no prints, no DNA, no fibres, and the library re-opened until the next time.

The final straw came in the Autumn one year, when they knocked down the the­atre oppo­site us.  Demo­li­tion balls and pneu­matic drills, ham­mers and shov­els banged and crashed at all hours, and my once-peaceful library was peace­ful no more.  Fewer patrons came each day, leav­ing me alone with that awful noise, until again the smoth­er­ing silence came.  One day at noon, it struck.  Builders, plumbers, elec­tri­cians, twenty-seven in all, their last breaths taken in har­mony as they fell to the ground.

That was the end of Elm Park Library, then, though of course they could prove noth­ing. The doors were bat­tened shut, books left on shelves since no-one dared enter to take them. Per­haps the silence itself reads them as it drifts through the deserted aisles, finally at peace.

Between musty hard­backs and set­tling dust, Elm Park Library has noth­ing now but silence, a smoth­er­ing silence, a dense and envelop­ing silence.

Edge Case

Posted on by
Reply

The man I assumed to be George sits down heav­ily across the table from me, sighs, and brushes a sweat-drenched lock of hair back behind his ears.  He wears the same exhausted expres­sion as all Amer­i­cans who come over here think­ing the humid­ity and the smog “can’t be that bad”, and dis­cover that they are in fact much, much worse.

“Vikram, right?” he asks.  I nod, expect­ing an intro­duc­tion on his part, though none is forthcoming.

“So,” he jumps straight in with, “you know what the machine is, right?”

I nod again.  “The first 3D printer capa­ble of print­ing its own parts.  I expect the whole town knows that by now.”  Today the town, tomor­row the world.  “But tell me, why here?  Why now?”

George closes his eyes and almost whis­pers his answer.  “The algorithm.”

The algo­rithm is as much of a suc­cess as the machine itself, maybe much more so, and cer­tainly more jeal­ously guarded by the company’s lawyers.

“Could you explain what it does, why it is so successful?”

The man looks even more weary now.  Although I’m the first jour­nal­ist to score an inter­view, I get the feel­ing he’s explained it to share­hold­ers a hun­dred times before.

“It started with a cou­ple of Cal­i­for­ni­ans, a few years back,” he begins.  “They invented this machine, the first one that could build all its own parts.  That was the cru­cial moment in the tech­nol­ogy, their ‘sin­gu­lar­ity’, if you will.  They realised that this thing could boot­strap the mar­ket, rev­o­lu­tionise the world.  But they were too expen­sive, and no-one was buy­ing them.”

A waiter deposits two beers in front of us, but George doesn’t look up.

“So they hit on this idea of expo­nen­tial growth, economies of scale.  They could set their printer mak­ing another one.  Then once that cycle was com­plete, their two machines could get on with mak­ing another two.  Even­tu­ally they’d be so quick and easy to pro­duce that the only cost would be the raw chem­i­cals, the plas­tic, and cheap man­ual labour.”

“So that’s why they chose India?”

“Not yet.  Back in the States, they started this web­site, with the algo­rithm behind it.  It said:  ‘Right now, these things are expen­sive, but even­tu­ally they’ll be dirt cheap.  Pay us now — if you pay a lot, you can have one tomor­row.  Pay us lit­tle more than the base cost, and you can have one when the economies of scale make them that cheap.’  So they were expect­ing a few thousand-dollar cus­tomers, and maybe a few hun­dred cus­tomers that would be hap­pier pay­ing a hun­dred dol­lars if they had to wait a cou­ple of months.”

“There’s more than a few hun­dred machines out there,” I say, recall­ing row after row, ware­house after ware­house filled with clack­ing machines and the smell of hot plas­tic.  “What happened?”

“China hap­pened.  Brazil.  Nige­ria.  India, too.  It turns out that the algo­rithm had some­thing of an edge case — the price went as low as thirty dol­lars, pro­vided you didn’t mind wait­ing years for your unit.  Amer­i­cans were too rich and too impa­tient to even con­sider that.  But it appears that thirty dol­lars is afford­able by a lot of peo­ple in the devel­op­ing world, espe­cially when the machine is pitched to them as a trans­for­ma­tive technology.”

“So how many of these thirty dol­lar orders did you get?”

“Two hun­dred and fifty million.”

We make eye con­tact across the table.  He knows I’m doing the math; there’s no way you can’t when given num­bers like that.

“Seven and a half bil­lion dol­lars,” I say.

His reply is sim­ply, “Yeah.”

That sim­ple fig­ure, that immense sum of money, is the one sim­ple rea­son for the craze sweep­ing this town and doubt­less oth­ers like it.  The one sim­ple rea­son that shops are clos­ing, offer­ing their floor space up to the machines.  The one sim­ple rea­son that living-rooms have chairs piled up against the wall while these click­ing, clat­ter­ing, self-replicating machines take pride of place.

“Will this craze die out?” I ask George.  “Will it take over the cities too before it’s done?”

“I don’t know,” is his answer.  “I just don’t know.”

George him­self seems sym­pa­thetic, though per­haps it’s just exhaus­tion.  But some­where out there is a face­less body of share­hold­ers, for whom we are not peo­ple liv­ing in a bustling port town.  We are labour­ers, liv­ing in a ram­shackle town-sized fac­tory, gen­er­at­ing unimag­in­able prof­its, tire­lessly ful­fill­ing orders at the edge case of their algorithm.

International Date Line

Posted on by
Reply

My eyes snapped open, jolted from the depths of sleep by a slow burn­ing some­where in my hypo­thal­a­mus. Heart-rate ris­ing, breaths quick­en­ing from once a minute to once every few sec­onds. The hum of the engines and the light of the glar­ing LCD screen in the back of the next seat slowly worked their way into my consciousness.

I enjoyed it for a moment, that feel­ing of wak­ing up after a Win­ter hiber­na­tion. It had been at most six hours since take-off, but in that bliss­ful minute where the cyno­prene wears off and the axi­to­gen kicks in, it might as well have been six months. I counted off the sec­onds since I’d woken. 70, 71, 72. The shiv­ers set in, right on cue, as my body fig­ured out that it could reg­u­late its own tem­per­a­ture again. I felt every tick­ling scratch of the point­less in-flight blan­ket and every creak of my neck as I shook the sleep out of my sys­tem. 80, 81, 82. I grimly held my focus on the screen in front of me until at last my pupils con­tracted, and let me see the lit­tle icon of a plane inch­ing its way closer and closer to a dot­ted ver­ti­cal line. Another thirty sec­onds, maybe.

My eyes flashed from seat to ceil­ing and back again, speed­ing up now. Every­thing was brighter, clearer, every touch like a tiny bolt of light­ning. 115, 116. The lit­tle plane was so close now. “04:15 Feb­ru­ary 11″, read the tiny white text in the cor­ner of the screen, and then, as if noth­ing was even slightly strange about it, “04:15 Feb­ru­ary 10″. That’s it. Inter­na­tional Date Line. The mid­dle of the Pacific, so far from land that not even the satel­lite net­works both­ered to cover it. A com­plete com­mu­ni­ca­tion blackspot. Perfect.

I clicked off my seat­belt and stood up, cor­rect­ing myself in a microsec­ond as my leg mus­cles briefly rejected my con­trol.  Syringe in my right pocket, alco­hol swab in my left.  I pat­ted my pock­ets to make sure, as if there was ever a rea­son to doubt.  Tun­nel vision was kick­ing in then, the whole of my expe­ri­ence nar­row­ing down and speed­ing up.  One glance up the near-empty cabin, one back down.  Silence.  I slipped out into the aisle, adopt­ing a non­cha­lant walk that could eas­ily belong to an inno­cent pas­sen­ger.  And there was the tar­get, sit­ting alone, hand stuck out from under his blan­ket.  I passed him on my left, one lightning-fast swipe with the alco­hol swab, not stop­ping.  Into the bath­room.  Wait thirty sec­onds for the anaes­thetic to do its work.  Flush, to main­tain cover.  Then back down the aisle, him on my right this time, syringe out, jab down, the com­pressed air forc­ing what­ever was in there straight through the skin and into the blood­stream.  He didn’t stir.  Back to my seat, not look­ing back.  Sit down.  Check no-one’s looking.

Breathe.

No-one had noticed me, I was sure, and it had to be that way.  Fail at the first stage, and I’d be rep­ri­manded; fail at this and I’d be going down for murder.

Back down the aisle again, one sly reach to the side, and I plucked his mon­i­tor out of his pocket.  A tiny LED blinked furi­ously, the device so full of rage that its owner’s heart had stopped, but too far from satel­lite cov­er­age to report it.  I almost felt sorry for it in the bath­room a minute later, as I took the sharp edge of a plas­tic air­line dinner-knife and lev­ered its bat­tery out.

I could feel my own heart rate slow­ing as I neared the end.  I grabbed the small sachet of pow­der from my back pocket and mixed it care­fully into a sink full of water.  In went the swab and the syringe, all traces of my DNA burn­ing off them.  As I slid the mon­i­tor in too, I noticed what else I’d taken from his pocket — a pho­to­graph, clipped to pocket size.  A man, woman and child, smil­ing for the cam­era.  A family.

Into the solu­tion it went, pig­ments slowly drift­ing from the paper, eras­ing the memory.

I drained the sink, pick­ing each item out with rub­ber gloves and drop­ping them care­fully into the bin before flush­ing again and head­ing calmly back to my seat.

50mg cyno­prine, tablet, dry-swallowed.  And sleep claimed me again, tears still rolling down my cheeks as the lit­tle icon of a plane flew on, ever fur­ther from the dot­ted ver­ti­cal line.

Memoirs of a Goldfish

Posted on by
Reply

With apolo­gies to Arthur Golden and @Tontonis.

Sup­pose that you and I were sit­ting in a quiet fish bowl,

We’re sit­ting in a quiet fish bowl.

We’re swim­ming in a quiet fish bowl.

Because we’re fish.

I’m not a fisherman’s daughter.

I’m a fish’s daugh­ter. Yes. Maybe.

I don’t remem­ber my father.

Because I’m a fish.

Was that bub­bling thing in here yesterday?

Any­way, what were you say­ing about geisha?

My sis­ter was a geisha, you know.

Or maybe just a koi carp. I forget.

Oh look, food!

Yummy pel­lety food.

Did I men­tion that I was a fish?

De-Li’s Little Mistake

Posted on by
2

Oh boy. Yet again, a children’s tele­vi­sion pro­gramme has dri­ven me to the brink of insan­ity. I return bear­ing this. The worst thing of all is that I’m sober, though I have the sud­den desire not to be.

If you haven’t watched Way­bu­loo before, you should prob­a­bly expe­ri­ence the sac­cha­rine hor­ror on iPlayer before read­ing this travesty.

Crack-crack-crack, came the noise from the sky.

“Look! Whizz-cracker!” said Lau-Lau, and the other Piplings joined her to watch.

“That not whizz-cracker,” said De-Li.

“Not whizz-cracker?”

“Not whizz-cracker. 90-millimetre anti-aircraft gun.”

“Oh. Pretty 90-millimetre anti-aircraft gun.”

Just then, the Piplings heard the famil­iar chimes of the mys­ti­cal device that some­how con­trolled their lives, and like every other day, they were com­pelled to obey its call.

“Yogo?” asked Yojojo.

“Yogo!”

“Debate finer points of anti-aircraft war­fare after Yogo,” said De-Li.

And off they went.

Lined up in front of the name­less device, each Pipling took their allot­ted turn in the rit­ual, announc­ing a shape into which they would have to con­tort themselves.

“Tree!” said Nok-Tok. And they tried to look like trees.

“Shell!” said De-Li. And they tried to look like shells.

“Mon­key!” said Yojojo, which all the oth­ers thought was prob­a­bly cheat­ing. But the machine was watch­ing, so they did it anyway.

“Fish!” said Lau-Lau. They tried to look like fish.

Then, at long last, the device began to chime its song again. It had been appeased for now, and the Piplings tip­toed qui­etly out of the clear­ing in case it heard them and sum­moned them back to dance once more for its enter­tain­ment.

Back near their houses, the Piplings were look­ing out again at what lay beyond their tiny ver­dant world.

“Why rest of Nara so brown?” asked Nok-Tok.

“Chee­bie last week say End Times com­ing,” said Yojojo. “Chee­bie par­ents say some­thing about ‘Jee-sus’.”

“Lau-Lau won­der why Chee­bies leave, go back to brown place,” said Lau-Lau.

“Chee­bies say some­thing about ‘Soma’ wear­ing off,” said Yojojo. “Chee­bies go back to get more.”

“Oh,” said Nok-Tok. “Make sense.”

Another noise entered the Piplings’ world from across the hori­zon — this time, a more human noise.

“Chee­bies?” asked Yojojo.

“Chee­bies!” exclaimed Lau-Lau. But they turned and looked, and didn’t see quite what they were expect­ing to see.

“Why Chee­bies so old?” asked Nok-Tok.

“Why Chee­bies carry assault rifles?” asked De-Li.

“Play Peeka?” asked Lau-Lau, who was always a lit­tle slow on the up-take.

“Yes, Lau-Lau,” said De-Li. “Play Peeka right now. Play Peeka really, really well.”

So the Piplings hid them­selves in logs and pots and up trees, not sure what to make of the new kind of Chee­bies they had seen.

It soon became clear that, not being five-year-olds asked to look for CGI crea­tures they couldn’t see, the new Chee­bies had some­what of an unfair advan­tage when play­ing Peeka. The Piplings were soon rounded up and made to sit back-to-back in the Yogo clearing.

“What new Chee­bies names?” said Lau-Lau, still not fully grasp­ing the sit­u­a­tion at hand.

One of the Chee­bies stepped forward.

“Sergeant Arrow­smith, US Marine Corp,” he said. “Are you the inhab­i­tants of this place?”

“Lau-Lau not know word in-habbit-uns.”

The sergeant sighed. “Do you live here?”

“Yes!” said Lau-Lau hap­pily. “Piplings live here!”

“And do I under­stand cor­rectly that you are in pos­ses­sion of a machine known as the ‘Any­thing Machine’, which is capa­ble of gen­er­at­ing any object known to the user?”

“Yes! Any­thing machine!”

De-Li kicked Lau-Lau’s ankle sharply, and got a gun pointed at her for her trouble.

“Play nice,” said the Marine on the other end of the gun. He sneered down the barrel.

“You will take us to this machine,” said the sergeant.

The Piplings were marched at gun­point to another clear­ing, where the Any­thing Machine sat.

“Good,” said Arrow­smith. “You will now use this machine to pro­duce for me an LGM-30 Min­ute­man bal­lis­tic mis­sile with a sin­gle war­head, tar­geted at Moscow.”

“No!” gasped De-Li, and wished she hadn’t.

“Nok-Tok not know what that is,” Nok-Tok said. “Machine not work when not know what making.”

“The pink one knows, sir,” said the Marine who’d pointed the gun earlier.

“Pink crea­ture,” said the sergeant, point­ing his own rifle at Lau-Lau. “Make the fuck­ing mis­sile, or I shoot the stu­pid one. No tricks.”

De-Li took one look into Lau-Lau’s wide star­ing eyes, and turned her atten­tion to the machine. A few sec­onds of think­ing, a few sec­onds of trem­bling ground and burn­ing air, and off the mis­sile flew into the sky.

They waited, and waited. Min­utes passed.

Then, over the hori­zon, a bril­liant flash lit up Nara’s sky.

“Good,” said the sergeant, heft­ing the Any­thing Machine onto his shoul­der. “Tie the crea­tures up and make them walk. We’re head­ing back to base.“

Years later, the once-green patch of Nara was as scorched and black­ened as the rest of the land. A gust of wind sep­a­rated the last of the four glit­ter­ing crys­tals from the Yogo device, and it splin­tered into a thou­sand tiny pieces on the ground. Never again would it call the Piplings to per­form for it — the Piplings were free at last. But the Piplings had not been seen since that day they and the Any­thing Machine were taken. If they still some­how lived, they were the last things to live on Nara.

“Dreaming Awake”: Time to Stop Pretending

Posted on by
Reply

A lit­tle over ten years ago, my friends and I began a col­lab­o­ra­tive fic­tion project that we named “The Fan­fic”, though it bore lit­tle resem­blance to fan­fic­tion as it is com­monly known. Rather, it was some­thing like a ‘fan­fic’ of our own invented char­ac­ters, thrown together in a neu­tral setting.

Over time, like most poorly-thought-out teenage ideas, it fell by the way­side — it was sim­ply too dif­fi­cult to man­age, and too dif­fi­cult to get the writ­ers to write to any kind of schedule.

After that was aban­doned, I took on the char­ac­ters and the set­ting that had devel­oped, and they became the first inklings of a com­puter role­play­ing game to be called “Dragon’s Claw”. But back then I had pre­cious few of the skills required to cre­ate a game, so that one sunk under the weight of prac­ti­cal real­i­ties too.

It was reborn once more in around 2002, when I fig­ured that I should go the one route that didn’t involve per­ster­ing other writ­ers or learn­ing to write a game — mak­ing it a book instead. Under the new title of “Dream­ing Awake”, the char­ac­ters and set­tings devel­oped much more fully. But again, there it stopped.

Why did it stop, and why am I now declar­ing it to have, in all like­li­hood, stopped for good?

Though I love the set­ting — I have explored it in many short sto­ries and even shorter biogra­phies for some of the orig­i­nal char­ac­ters — it’s the other char­ac­ters that I have dif­fi­culty with. I don’t mean to belit­tle the effort my friends put into defin­ing their char­ac­ters in the early days, of course, but writ­ing about them feels some­how wrong. It’s the same rea­son I don’t write fan­fic­tion (unless extremely drunk); it’s just so strange to write for char­ac­ters that are fun­da­men­tally not my own.

And therein lies the sec­ond prob­lem. One of the char­ac­ters that has stuck around from the early days of the project is very much my own: Tsuki. As a hum­ble farm­boy who nev­er­the­less has Ulti­mate Cos­mic Power sealed away inside him, read­ing TV Tropes’ “Marty Stu” page is like read­ing the kid’s life story. And though I love him dearly as a char­ac­ter, I just can’t write about him with a straight face now I’m not 17 years old.

So, all in all, I think it’s prob­a­bly high time I stopped pre­tend­ing that “Dream­ing Awake” will ever be a novel in its own right. I have writ­ten plenty of short sto­ries set in its world, and doubt­less I’ll write many more. But as a story itself, it’s too firmly wed­ded to char­ac­ters I can no longer write for.

Deus Ex Macchiato

Posted on by
Reply

This story was orig­i­nally writ­ten for the web­site “a thou­sand words”. You can see this story on “a thou­sand words”, plus rate it, com­ment on it, and post your own short sto­ries by cre­at­ing an account!

“There are pat­terns in every­thing,” the woman said, her eyes still focussing some­where far beyond the table. “In the cards of the Tarot, the flick­ers of light in a crys­tal ball, the leaves twist­ing and turn­ing in a pot of tea.” Tiny pock­ets of air bub­bled to the sur­face of her cup as an ice­berg of cream broke off and sank into the abyss. “And so there are pat­terns in this.“

“But why not tea leaves, any­way?” I said. “I mean, this is a cafe. They sell tea.“

“I don’t like tea.“

I paused, wait­ing for the cun­ning response that never came. “Fair enough,” is all my brain could manage.

“Ah!” the woman almost shouted, and I looked around guiltily. If any­one else had been star­tled as much as me, they weren’t show­ing it.

“Mmm,” she said, wav­ing her hands over her cup, waft­ing the vapours toward her face.

“What is it?” I asked, “What can you see?“

“Mmm, yes, yes… Yep, this is def­i­nitely good coffee.“

“What?“

“Good cof­fee. Thank you.“

“Are you tak­ing this seriously?“

“Oh, yeah, yeah, right,” she said. I shot her a with­er­ing look, but I don’t think she noticed.

“Mmm,” she said again, as the cream slowly spread white rip­ples over the sur­face of the cof­fee. “You will meet a tall, dark, hand­some stranger.“

“Oh, come on.“

“Well, you will! I mean, how many tall, dark-haired men are there in this coun­try? A mil­lion, ten mil­lion? Chances are you’ll find one of them attractive.“

“Prob­a­bly. But that’s not exactly help­ful, is it?“

Another dol­lop of cream dipped below the surface.

“Wait!” she said. “You’ll marry this one.“

“Really? How hand­some, exactly?“

“Oh, very, very.“

She wafted the smell of cof­fee towards her again.

“Def­i­nitely. You will meet him not far from here, in a shop, maybe a clothes shop. Yes. Not long after your divorce, maybe only a week.“

“My divorce?“

“I’m afraid so. But things aren’t exactly going well at home, are they? It’ll be worth it in the end.“

“How do you–“

“You’re intrigued enough about tall, dark and hand­some strangers that you’re will­ing to pay a crazy lady to stare at cof­fee, for a start.“

“But–“

“Nice ring, too.“

I cov­ered my left hand with my right, hid­ing the ring, though for the life of me I couldn’t fig­ure out why.

“Plat­inum, lotta’ dia­monds. Couldn’t have come cheap. Must be a big earner, this man of yours, money’s impor­tant to him; too impor­tant. But it’s not to you.“

“What­ever makes you–“

“Pay­ing, crazy lady, coffee?“

“Oh.“

“It’ll hurt at first, but it’ll be for the best in the end, trust me. It’ll be bet­ter for him, too, if that’s any con­so­la­tion. And for your daughter.“

“Oh come on, how do you know about Isobel?“

The fortune-teller peered closer into her cup.

“See this lit­tle blob of cream here, the way it’s spi­ralling slowly out towards the edge of the cup?“

“Really? That rep­re­sents my daughter?“

“Nah, there’s a pic­ture of her in your purse. Saw it when you were buy­ing the coffee.“

“Oh.“

I fin­ished the last of my cof­fee, picked up my bag, and stood.

“Look,” I said, “no offence or any­thing, and I admire your detec­tive work, it’s just… I was expect­ing some­thing a bit more, you know, mystical.“

She was engrossed in her cup again, star­ing down some­thing invis­i­ble deep inside it.

“Huh,” I said, not really know­ing what else would be appro­pri­ate, and turned to leave.

“The twelfth of Novem­ber, twenty-thirteen,” the fortune-teller said to my reced­ing back. I stopped.

“What?“

“Twelfth of Novem­ber, year of our Lord, twenty-thirteen. Write it down. Thanks for the coffee.“

I started walk­ing again, not sure what to make of our encounter. Clearly, the woman was a quack. She’d not gleaned a sin­gle mys­ti­cal bit of infor­ma­tion out of that cup. And what was with the date?

Some time later, the date thing was still bug­ging me, so I wrote it down just to get it out of my head.


Time passed, and that scrap of paper got buried in my hand­bag, then found and played with by Iso­bel, and ended up who knows where. By the time win­ter came around, the divorce had gone through, and my daugh­ter and I were alone in the house. But by that time, I’d for­got­ten all about the strange woman who told peo­ple she could see the future in the melt­ing cream of a macchiato.


Year upon year fell behind us, until the day we were redec­o­rat­ing the kitchen, and my then-husband pulled a tiny scrap of a note­book page from under­neath the fridge.

“Honey,” he asked, “why’s there a piece of paper with our wed­ding date on it down here?“

I took the note from him, stared at it, my eyes widen­ing by the sec­ond. I looked up at my hus­band, his hand­some face under a mop of dark hair. I didn’t say a word, just sprinted for the car, drove across town as fast as I could to the old cafe where the woman had sat, asked every­one, breath­lessly, if they could remem­ber her, if they knew where she was, where she lived.

“But one of them gypsy folk, she was,” the owner said. “They never hang around, and just as well, for every­one reck­ons they cause no end of trouble.“

“Though they do say,” he con­tin­ued in a whis­per, “that some of their women have a gift, and can tell your future from the twist­ing, twirling pat­terns of the leaves in a pot of tea.”

a thousand words: Finishing Touches

Posted on by
Reply

The vast major­ity of user-reported bugs and requested fea­tures on “a thou­sand words” have now been sorted out. As requested by my co-conspirator Eric, we now have an ‘adult con­tent’ fil­ter based on a date of birth field in users’ pro­files, and a ‘report’ but­ton to bring prob­lem­atic sto­ries and pic­tures to the atten­tion of the mod­er­a­tors. There’s also a DeviantArt-style “request cri­tique” option to let users know what kind of com­ments you’re look­ing for.

Time­stamps have been fixed, “no stars yet” rat­ings intro­duced, and text field poli­cies such as “mustn’t be empty” have been added across the site. A few ren­der­ing issues in IE have been sorted out, so it now looks much the same across all platforms.

The biggest change is unfor­tu­nately some­thing most of you will never see — the mod­er­a­tor con­sole. Pic­ture sub­mis­sions and reported stories/pictures now sit in queues that can be dealt with by mod­er­a­tors. An item enter­ing a queue trig­gers an e-mail to all mods, who are invited to review it and make changes as appro­pri­ate. Once changes are made, the affected users are then e-mailed to let them know what hap­pened (and in the case of reported items, to give them a chance to chal­lenge it).

There’s one major fea­ture request that’s not yet been imple­mented: file uploads. Once in the sys­tem this would allow users to sub­mit pic­tures from their hard dri­ves rather than from the web by URL, and would allow mod­er­a­tors to copy URL-linked pic­tures to the site to avoid hotlink­ing. (At present we don’t hotlink, but we do there­fore have to copy pic­tures to the site man­u­ally using FTP.) It could also allow users to use a non–Gra­vatar pic­ture for their profile.

Depend­ing on how things go, that may or may not be ready by tomor­row night. On Sat­ur­day morn­ing I jet off to sunny Saudi Ara­bia, so any changes not made by then are going to remain unmade for a while. From that point it’s in Eric’s capa­ble hands as to whether she wants to release the site or not. Even if the site does advance to release sta­tus, I’m still tak­ing bug reports (they’ll sit in my inbox until I get back), so keep on let­ting me know what’s bro­ken and what you’d like to see added!

a thousand words: Alpha, Beta

Posted on by
2

“a thou­sand words” has now reached a stage where every fea­ture that I give a damn about is imple­mented. Thus, we’re open­ing it up to a lim­ited beta test to iron out the wrin­kles and get a list of any fea­tures poten­tial users would like to see us launch with. If you’re bored or sim­ply have a love of break­ing other people’s shit, head along to http://athousandwords.org.uk and see what hell you can raise. As the Big Red Box Text warns you, really don’t sub­mit any work of fic­tion you care about, just in case some kind soul finds an SQL injec­tion vul­ner­a­bil­ity and trashes the database.

Since last time I bored the hell out of you all, vot­ing and com­ment­ing has been imple­mented, reg­is­tra­tion has been fixed, fil­ter­ing HTML tags from sub­mis­sions has been added, as has a word count and the pic­ture selec­tor on story sub­mis­sion. There’s been a bunch of behind-the-scenes tweaks to improve secu­rity too.

The one fea­ture that Eric def­i­nitely wants is a way to mark sto­ries accord­ing to their con­tent. We could do this in sev­eral ways — I would pre­fer, if any­thing, to just have a “not for kids” option on each post and a Date of Birth field asso­ci­ated with user accounts, so we can hide sto­ries as required. Other options include a range of rat­ings (U, PG, 12, 15, 18…) or tags for cer­tain con­tent (vio­lence, sex, lan­guage) so peo­ple can avoid what­ever they’re picky about.

This prob­a­bly ought to come with a Report but­ton so that users can report incor­rectly rated sto­ries, and I would add a sim­i­lar fea­ture to report pic­tures. (Pic­ture sub­mis­sions are mod­er­ated, so Goatse isn’t going to make it through any­way, but the mod team might miss sub­tler things like licenc­ing terms and copy­right infringement.)

At that point, all that’s left on my list is the admin inter­face and any­thing that users sug­gest dur­ing this beta. Hope­fully we’ll be ready to launch by the time I depart for sandier shores at the end of the week!

a thousand words: Hot Profilin’ Action

Posted on by
Reply

A few days’ lazi­ness (by which I mean a few days’ Star­craft) have passed with not much work being done on “a thou­sand words”. That came to an end tonight, with a pro­duc­tive evening result­ing in a work­ing pro­file sys­tem so that users can now add and dis­play per­sonal infor­ma­tion, change their reg­is­tered e-mail address and pass­word, etc.

There’s now a data­base back­end for the vot­ing and com­ment­ing sys­tems, which will be com­ple­mented by their GUI pages tomor­row night.

Once that’s done, that’s the last of the main func­tions out of the way and we’re basi­cally down to tweaks. I think we ought to, in no par­tic­u­lar order:

  • Decide on what for­mat­ting users can add to sto­ries, and fil­ter for it
  • Add a word count, and pos­si­bly limit sub­mis­sions to e.g. 600‑1400 words
  • Add a means of report­ing sto­ries and pic­tures for e.g. copy­right issues
  • Add a means of rat­ing sto­ries, so users can mark them as con­tain­ing sex, vio­lence etc.
  • Cre­ate an admin inter­face, so we don’t just have to run the site with raw SQL queries
  • Add ranks, etc. (incen­tives for achiev­ing high Total Stars)
  • jQuery up some of the main bits to improve user experience
  • Imple­ment the scrolling list of pic­tures for users to select when cre­at­ing a new story

At that point, I think it should be ready for open beta. Hope­fully we can get it all done within a week, before I depart for internet-less shores!