Louche
Carved TMO on her clit just to make you feel bad
posted
I have been reading this book on the train. It is recommended reading, except, perhaps, for people whose paranoia lives perpetually on their shoulder, digging sharp claws into their whirling minds. Essentially, it’s a lovely dissection of all the ways humanity could propel itself to ‘utter destruction’ in the course of, say, the next fifty odd years or so. Apparently, it’s highly likely that we’re all going to die.
With credible calmness, the author dissects undismantled nuclear warheads, total global warming overload, civil war between the ‘genetically enriched’ and ‘naturals’, robot insurrection and good, old-fashioned natural disasters like half of mount St. Helen’s falling off. So far, he’s only mentioned biotechnology in passing, but I imagine you can add in a Stephen King The Stand scenario, perhaps without the bad performance from Gary Sinise and the devil in Nevada. Add to this the kind of oil related doom mongering that Kuang is so fond of, and let’s face it, there’s thousands of means of mutually assured destruction out there.
So. Entertaining Friday thread. Which way would you like to see ‘utter destruction’ visited on massed humanity? Should we take the planet with us? Do you favour the ‘pockets of survivors’ version? Would you like those pockets of survivors to be mutant, deformed, light-fearing creatures, living to a bible which is actually Bridget Jones’ Diary? Name your Doomsday.
Poster Fried It starts unalarmingly, with inconsequential chatter in the supermarket and in the office. These bananas are getting bigger, aren’t they? Jenny had one yesterday that was as long as her arm…. Nah, I don’t believe you. The first time one moves there are sensationalist and disbelieving reports in the tabloid press. Woman claims banana escapes kitchen. It wouldn’t have made it to the press at all, but it’s the silly season, the weather’s warm, and the world’s politicians are sunning themselves on the beautiful Northumberland Riviera. Perhaps that’s why no-one notices the slow but inexorable shut down of some of the main banana producing countries. The Dominican Republic is the first to close off, and at the tail end of the news one night in early autumn, there’s a few, badly shot, moments of footage of screaming people piling haphazardly into boats off a paradise shoreline. In the distance, what looks like trees are moving. But not much, perhaps not more than they would in a light breeze. The announcer mutters about civil unrest, but few notice, because it’s a common enough foreign occurrence.
The reports of expanding, moving bananas become slightly more commonplace, slightly less urban legend. As is the manner of massed humanity, this development is noted, exclaimed over, and then thoroughly ignored. The government insist they are doing something about it. There are a few raggle-taggle groups of blanket-bearing, sun hat wearing protesters seen outside parliament, as the news covers other stories. A few of Britain’s small banana plantations are torched by young and drunken locals. A fund is set up for study, and another for recompense.
Then the bananas start being seen on the streets. In gangs. They’re as big as people. If not bigger. The news again is slow. Again, they’re patronising, assuming an over excitable pressure groups staging stunts. Then the first death and there’s suddenly a moment of countrywide, then worldwide pause. A collective intake of breath expelled in humanity, in a variety of languages, incredulously asking what the fuck? The bananas are attacking. They are animated by some hideous and uncanny force. They’re virtually indestructible, and no-one knows how. The allegations fly like bottles in a street war. It’s Russia, no it’s Africa, no it’s the US, no it’s global warming, no it’s genetic engineering, no it’s aliens. No-one quite knows what it is, but they know that people are dying, in droves, and at the skins of a favourite, yellow fruit. Some people just drop dead of ridiculous overload on the street and the rabid, possessed bananas hoover up their remains. Eventually, a small and canny group of unlikely heroes ascertain that the bananas can’t stand cold and they need the daily radiation of ozone-burnt-off sunlight to survive. Our heroes hole up in the damp cellar of a stately home, chugging hundred year old wine and rigging the aircon through an ingenious means of running the generator with recycled pig lard. But they’re the only survivors….humanity has more or less ended at the hands of a carbohydrate rich fruit….
Posts: 5776
| IP: Logged
quote:Originally posted by Louche: So. Entertaining Friday thread.
bbbut, it's only Thursday, isn't it?
Also, how do the bananas actually kill people?
-------------------- What I object to is the colour of some of these wheelie bins and where they are left, in some areas outside all week in the front garden. Posts: 4941
| IP: Logged
quote:Originally posted by Vogon Poetess: Also, how do the bananas actually kill people?
Obviously they'd saturate the streets with bits of their own skin and the population would be slapsticking themselves to death in no time, the cities a mass of fly-blown bodies and decaying yellow flesh.
Posts: 3502
| IP: Logged
posted
Louche did you see the bananas in Trafalgar Square on Tuesday? I think your doomsday scenario has already begun.
End of the world? I'm old school. I can still see the Jack Chick track in my head. The believers are huddled in a cave. Some of them are dying of starvation. There is an outstretched hand: but who will help them? They do not have the Number on their heads. Their bodies will die, but their souls will be saved. I wanna see this. I want Jack's pen and ink scribblings to take form before my eyes. I want Revelations to come true word for word, just so that I can know for sure and certain that all the bullshit Christianity I was raised with was actually true, and that ever since I turned my back on it I've been making a fantastic, enormous mistake, and I'm going to be damned forever and ever and burn in hell. Certainty, that's all I'm after.
posted
Well, it was like, dreamland where everything feels real and yet nothing makes sense either. In the dream, we were experiencing certain elements of a nuclear attack that I'm aware of. Sort of jumbled up so of course this story isn't going to make sense, but I'll try to explain what happened.
I'm walking through a London street. It's not particularly busy and the area I'm in is more like a clearing, or a square. It is twighlight because everything has that smoky focus, where the light is not reflected and so I'm assuming it must be around five or six o'clock. It is firmly autumn because there are a lot of leaves on the ground. Great thing about dreams? I have proper hearing in them. So I hear a loud piercing sound whistle from above my head but I can't see anything. There is a massive bang, and as if what I see is sped up briefly via the media of film, a giant mushroom stretches out and up into the sky. People fall down quickly and glass cracks as is quickly thrown to the floor. Then evrything turns to slo-mo and cars are tipping over and telephone lines are (dramatically) splitting apart and sending wires thrashing to the ground. Now, it looks like it is say 100 ft away, but I look close and the smoke is dancing around like tiny ants so I get the impression that it is actually very far away. Once the bomb has gone off, everything is painted in a colour scheme. A deep purple blue and cerise. When anything moves, it crackles bright white. The rest of the dream seems to be filtered with this color scheme from here on in.
I am stumbling into a tv repair shop and the screens are cracked but there is one out the back that is still on. There is a news report showing and it seems that they have missed London, and that we have been effected by radiation and that we should stay put. In the shop, there is a guy sat in a chair watching the tv, but his eyes have burst out of his head, although I am fine. I sit in the corner of the room and tuck my head into my folded arms as I sit in the corner. The rest of the dream is made up of listening to the tv reportand helicopter noises overhead.
It was then that I woke up, absoloutely petrified.
Louche
Carved TMO on her clit just to make you feel bad
posted
quote:Originally posted by Vogon Poetess: bbbut, it's only Thursday, isn't it?
Um. Yes. But I'm not in work tomorrow, so it's Friday in my mind.
quote:Also, how do the bananas actually kill people?
I hadn't really thought that through. I think by splitting their skins and enveloping people into a sticky morass of yellowed and semi rancid banana flesh, where they are slowly digested, thus powering the banana in question for further depredations. That sounds about right, if ever so slightly ripped off from around a hundred B movies, starting with The Blob.
quote:Louche did you see the bananas in Trafalgar Square on Tuesday?
Nooo! Oh, that is excellent. They should try that in St. Annes square now the cows have all moo'd their weary way off to auction.
Posts: 5776
| IP: Logged
quote:Originally posted by squeegy: Apparently a few hundred people get killed by falling coconuts each year. What an embarassing way to die.
a man was actually killed by a plane dumping its sewage waste over the sea. He was standing on the deck of a ship on the cruise of a liftime, this falling shit was frozen at 33,000ft and comically (or sadly if your not a billy connolly fan) landed on his head, went right through him and the deck to land in the bilge! imagine if we all went like that, extingtion at the hands of excrement!
quote:Originally posted by Louche: I think you might have stolen that from a Douglas Coupland novel.
if this is to me i never read any coupland, it may be where it originated. it sounds like quite a boring book or maybe just short "guy dies from being hit on the head by a bewinged frozen stool" THE END
Astromariner
Going the right way for a smacked bottom
posted
quote:Originally posted by New Way Of Decay: In the shop, there is a guy sat in a chair watching the tv, but his eyes have burst out of his head
Jesus. Freaks out of ten: 9.5.
I remember listening to the 70's musical adaptation of War of the Worlds when I was little. The martians' battle cry - like OOUUUGGHYAAA - and Richard Burton's voice describing the relentless march of the machines, and people trying to escape on boats in the Thames, and proud battleships being instantly destroyed, and priests going mad - these images sparked my earliest ideas of what the end of the world would be like. I still think that an alien invasion would be by far the most exciting and spectacular doomsday scenario. A dark shadow over the sun! Big silver space ships! Death rays! Terrible creatures with tentacles and one unblinking eye! Bring it on.
Posts: 2814
| IP: Logged
posted
I remember seeing a painting, or it might even have been a really old photo, of the Collisseum in Rome in about 1750 or something (right, it might not have been a photo then) and it's all overgrown and crumbling and there's some sort of goatherder wandering around with his, er, herd. Of goats.
Anyway, that's how I would see the decline of the human race, rather than some sort of Domesday event. The population will reduce, the old centres of business and industry will be abandoned to goats and be of little use to anyone as buildings. Motorways and roads will revert to tracks, overgrown and cracked but still in use (see pictures of old railway lines for the rquired imagery).
Domesday stories and films always seem to depict a few scavenging survivors, dressed in rags and with a cold, post-nuclear wind blowing around their asses, but I think it'll be rather pleasant and quiet for the most part. The odd bust up with the next village perhaps, but people won't bother with the conquering army bit any more.
With no oil and manufacturing industry we'll put the old grey matter to new use and get the canals fixed up and extended (they're already in very good condition of course, due to excellent investment and hard work - a very unusual story these days). We'll get the old sailing skills back in order and just rewind things a bit, but still have cool music and solar power for the radio and that so it won't be like the Dark Ages or anything. I'm rather looking forward to it.
Although the meteor which hits the Earth in 2094 will be a bit of a nuisance and kill everyone.
Posts: 8467
| IP: Logged
posted
Sounds like you've got The London Fear. You want to get your ass back to Swindon before they drop the big one. You'll be safe there, as anyone flying overhead would think it had already been hit.
Joking aside for a moment, I've had a few frightmeres which were similar. One was a short but intense, apocalyptic piece, set in London and shot in a similar light to the that of the first part of Pitch Black, the movie (four) starring Vin Diesel. I had been reading about Hiroshima and the dream was an amalgamation of nuke attack and tidal wave. As the bomb hit Central London, I was walking around the streets of Muswell Hill. For a fraction of a second I could see in X-ray vision as skeletons shielded their non-existant eyes from the blast. Luckily I was immune to the blast!
The tsunami was actually the most frightening part of all, as I was standing by Alexandra Palace and could see London being engulfed from the South. The wave was twice the height of Canary Wharf, and I could hear a terrible noise wash toward me, "as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were slowly silenced". I looked up as the wave approached and then towered over me, threatening to fall at any moment.
posted
I'm not quite sure of the mechanism of the civilisation-stomping event, but I like the idea of the Earth being plunged back into Pre-History.
Ragged, bickering hordes of survivors have to rely on half-remembered bits of Time Team and that school trip when they went to a reconstructed Iron Age village once. Their soft, office-weakened fingers fumble to knap flint and make bows, while countless hungry animal eyes gleam patiently in the bushes.
People like Stefanos will become kings.
-------------------- What I object to is the colour of some of these wheelie bins and where they are left, in some areas outside all week in the front garden. Posts: 4941
| IP: Logged
Astromariner
Going the right way for a smacked bottom
posted
Dang's mention of the Dark Ages reminded me of an Anglo Saxon poem I studied once (in translation!) called the Wanderer, which is an eloquent illustration of how there has always been a preoccupation with the end of the world, or at least the end of civilisation. It's an interesting poem because it gives a real sense of how it must have felt to be living among the ruins of the end of an age, in the knowledge that the writer's time would also soon be over:
A wise man may grasp how ghastly it shall be When all this world's wealth standeth waste, Even as now, in many places, over the earth Walls stand, wind-beaten, Hung with hoar-frost; ruined habitations. The wine-halls crumble; their wielders lie Bereft of bliss, the band all fallen Proud by the wall. War took off some, Carried them on their course hence; one a bird bore Over the high sea; one the hoar wolf Dealt to death; one his drear-checked Earl stretched in an earthen trench.
quote:Originally posted by Astromariner: The wine-halls crumble;
.....the band all fallen
It appears the poet was mainly concerned about the drink and entertainment running out. Saxons ROCK.
-------------------- What I object to is the colour of some of these wheelie bins and where they are left, in some areas outside all week in the front garden. Posts: 4941
| IP: Logged
quote:Originally posted by dang65: I remember seeing a painting, or photo, of the Collisseum in Rome in about 1750 or something... all overgrown and crumbling and there's some sort of... goats.
[Terry Wogan]Ah, the old memory cells, eh? They're failing the old fellow now, don't y'see...blah blah blarney[/Terry Wogan]
Not a bad recollection really. God knows when I saw the picture. It's rather beautiful, something to look forward to in many ways.
Posts: 8467
| IP: Logged
quote:Originally posted by Astromariner: an Anglo Saxon poem I studied once (in translation!)
I know that translation! In the same collection there's a fragment about a ruined city. After a couple of generations, the Anglo-Saxons just presumed Roman remains were the work of a race of giants.
![[Wink]](wink.gif)
![[Roll Eyes]](rolleyes.gif)
Printer-friendly view of this topic