Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Micro-Fiction

I decided to use the  "first and last sentance" format from this NPR site http://n.pr/cE1d63

Some people swore that the house was haunted. However, Chazz Darby, a typical high school football player, was not one of these people.  One Saturday evening in early October, Chazz and a two of his teammates were high off their big win against arch rival Pinkerton Academy.  They wanted to celebrate their big win, but didn’t have anywhere to hold the celebration.  While the three boys were brainstorming possible locations, Chazz recommended the abandoned house on Blossom road.  The two friends, shocked at such an outrageous idea stared at Chazz and that the same time blurted out, “are you fucking serious?”  Chazz stood up and sarcastically said, “come on guys, you don’t buy that haunted BS do you?” The two boys, stared at each other, and then one of them said, “I ain’t saying I believe in ghosts or nothin’, but that house is just creepy.”  Chazz replied, “That’s good enough for me, we just found our location to party!  Get on the horn, rally the troops and let’s get after it tonight.”  The two friends were not enthused by the plan, but as they often did, they followed Chazz’s lead, pulled out their phones, and started to plan the party.  The three high school jocks decided to meet outside the house on Blossom rd at eight thirty. 
 As planned, all three friends met, as scheduled, at eight thirty.  Chazz, who was often the ring leader amongst this group, took it upon himself to break a window on the first floor of the abandoned house.  The three boys climbed through the broken window and began to walk around the house.  The house seemed unusually in good condition, especially for a house that was vacant for five years.  Chazz commented on the house “wow place is in good shape.” The two boys were really sketched out by the good condition of the house.  One of them said, “Let’s get out of here, I am not comfortable.”  As they were just about to about to be done circling the bottom floor, one of the boys grabbed Chazz by the back of his letterman jacket and spun him around so he was facing the once broken window that they had all climbed through less than five minutes ago.  All three boys jaw’s hit the floor as the window was no longer broken, and there was no broken glass anywhere to be found.  They all looked at each other in disarray.   Immediately, all three of them raced towards the front door, the door was locked, and wasn’t budging.  The cliché horror movie that Chazz did not believe in was coming true right before his eyes.  The boys whispered amongst each other, “Is this really happening?”  Soon after, the lights flickered off, and the boys reached for their phones as a light source, the phones were gone; the three boys were not ready for what was about to happen to them.  Nothing was ever the same after that…

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

TMI

TMI , aka "too much information" is showing up a lot throughout various social networks. I am a facebook user and see it every day. It has gotten to the point where I literally have to block people so that their status updates do not appear on my live feed every minute of every day. TMI can occur in many ways, however, I seem to see it in two specific ways. Some people are "guilty" of TMI with the number of status updates they post in a day and some people are guilty because of the content in which they post. I find it somewhat entertaining at times, but most of the time its flat out annoying. It's hard to understand how someone can update their status on facebook more times in one day then I have in my whole facebook career. It is also very annoying when someone shares "too much information" on a content level via a status update. Why would you publicly post a private matter on facebook so that your whole social network can see? Clearly you are desperate for attention. All in all TMI is becoming a problem amongst most social networks. In my opinion it stems for the media, which pushes that sort of thing. Hopefully people start to become more aware of TMI, especially some of my "facebook friends" so that my feed gets less polluted. I found a good read on this topic here.