#stories

"No," I say. "It chose 'stone' because statistically, in the petabytes of training data scraped without consent from the internet, the word 'stone' appears in proximity to 'lump in throat' with a probability of 0.04 percent, which is higher than 'wet creature.' It isn't a choice. It's a math problem. It is a predictive text algorithm on steroids. It doesn't know what a throat is. It doesn't know what fear feels like. It is predicting the next token based on mediocrity."

It is not a taskmaster, telling you what to do in order to achieve some foreign goal. It always tells you what will make you happiest. If it would make you happiest to succeed at your work, it will tell you how best to complete it. If it would make you happiest to do a half-assed job at your work and then go home and spend the rest of the day in bed having vague sexual fantasies, the earring will tell you to do that. The earring is never wrong.

"The friend-guild shows up for all kinds of people in need. We're visiting nurses. We're aid advocates. We're often first responders. My grandma lost her legs to a mine in the Horrors, and there wasn't enough medicine to keep it from getting a lot worse. I volunteered when I was sixteen so I could be the one appointed to feed her and bathe her, because she found it more dignified when it was family. She spent her last years in pain, but the guy who laid the mine? Who knows if they'll ever think about it? What would it change, if they did? The mine was laid. We can disarm the mines, we can demolish the munitions factories, we can even abolish war itself, but there was no restoring her. We have to live with the damage. We have to live in reality."

Sarah is Hebrew name. So, it is common, and has been in use for thousands and thousands of years. It does not take long (for him) to find a dark haired girl named Sarah, who has a younger sibling, and who feels that she is treated unfairly by her step mother. In a fit of rage he kidnaps this other child and spirits it away to the fairy world. Perhaps this new Sarah dies in the quest to find the child, perhaps she wins her sibling back and flees.

wow. what an amazing punchline

"Identify a character in your idea. 1) What does that character WANT? 2) What does that character need to do to GET what they want? 3) What are they prepared to DO to get what they want?"

"l.m.orchard Joined May 2009 and calls 0xDECAFBAD home."

"ficlets is no more. AOL decided to kill the product, but thankfully, since all the content on the site was licensed under Creative Commons, I decided that there's no reason to let the content die. So, consider this the ficlets memorial. I will keep this site up as long as I'm able (it's extremely simple and not costing me anything)."

"PLEASE KEEP IN MIND WHILE READING THIS WAS WRITTEN BY A FOURTH GRADER. THAT SIMPLE FACT WILL MAKE THE STORY ONLY A THOUSAND TIMES BETTER."

"Chalcedony wasn't built for crying. She didn't have it in her, not unless her tears were cold tapered glass droplets annealed by the inferno heat that had crippled her."

"Creepypasta are short stories designed to unnerve, disturb or scare the readers of a Creepy Thread on /b/."

"Weeping is like a five-dollar chocolate bar. Someone else could enjoy it but I feel guilty opening the wrapper. I have a girlfriend and Halo."

"Twitfics are extremely short stories that I've been writing on Twitter. The maximum length of a Twitter message is 140 characters; however, the maximum length of a twitfic is 131 characters, because each one begins with the word TWITFIC! and a space."

"Do: Leave at least one hatch interlock open while on EVA."

"So, Paul, you’re profiting off of the crimes and careers of 123 of the world’s greatest criminals."

"Therefore, I must be the center of the universe. Everything does revolve around me."

"Did it ever occur to you that simply no one’s interested in what you have to say?"

"I wonder if survival is different for some people, like we evolved from different apes. Some people panic, scream and run while some people just turn off and sublimate."

"Omigod. You're serious then. They're made out of meat."

"She had no choice but to let him die tonight. She knew neither of them could survive him ever being killed again."

Whoo... like a very good, grim O Henry story.

"Although we cannot see Saturn, I’m sure the view of your new mini-star is quite spectacular from Earth, especially at night."

"Wait. Do you think the girls might be able to tell if I dyed my feathers?"

"When the rains came, Mahmoud packed his wives into a large canister and loaded them onto the truck."

"You can't buy weather like that. Somewhere, its always sunny and its always summer. The trick is to find that place and build a house."

"Microfiction is very short fiction, usually around 300 words long."

"Got to force myself to sit down, sluice, educe the force that through these carpal tunnels drives the florid." Such an awesome story, reads like William Gibson mashed up with Douglas Hofstader.

"On the eighteenth day the sun didn't rise, we locked ourselves in our homes and apartments."

"They interpret our words as bugs in the programming." Sounds a bit like a cousin to Bomb #20 in Dark Star.

"Girls like assholes."

This absolutely rocks. "The ronin bowed to his fellow barista and thanked him for the exquisite coffee."

"...biological sub-life are using true-life as uncompensated slave labor..."

"Most women had their children early and put them in stasis until they had enough savings to provide for housing and education."

"Like someone ripping through your brain, tossing shit around, tearing things up."

This totally sounds like a side-story in the Firefly universe

""No! It's not just the breathing! Its everything! I can feel her pulse. I can hear her stomach gurgling. She eats! Its disgusting!""

"Since your action took advantage of the female nature of Ilexya Eiin Dephryn, to properly experience the victim's role your body will be surgically altered to reflect the feminine characteristics of your species."

"All I had to do was stop taking the big one, the one with the odd lump in the middle and the diamond shape."

""Thank you," the subject said. Thank you for fixing me."

"Do... do you have blue?" "No." "Then I don't want to talk to you."

"At fourteen, I had never before been exposed to the idea that people, young people, could die and not be fixed."