I write little online story games, and this post announces one of them is newly available for you to play!
The blurb goes–
“Unicorn Story – A lyrical piece by Conrad Cook, hosted here for your pleasure. Not only it looks gorgeous, it also uses the medium in a fairly intriguing way.”
Many thanks, Felix, for the kind words and for supplying a web space for the game!
This game is also mirrored, so you can also play it here. Ralphmerridew hosts the mirror — thanks too!
CONSERVATIVES – Now look. This really isn’t my thing, but: if you really honestly want to reduce the number of abortions — all those souls — why the FK wouldn’t you want Uncle Sam to fund contraception? Doesn’t it occur to you that you are creating the problem?
One of my old poems. I’m told people like to repurpose this one… feel free to use it for any purpose.
Who would you love if you didn’t love me?
If you weren’t who you are, who would you be?
If you don’t push it too far it fits like a glove
‘Cause you are who you are and you love who you love.
Happy V-D!
She responded to his love-making with a bored kind of awe, an honest and spontaneous emotion secretly calculated, he knew, to satisfy and enrage him. It was only at that moment when he felt her completely beyond his reach, when the emptiness of her face reached doll-like authenticity, as her gasps and Gods and Oh, daddies transcended their ordinary rote quality to attain a flat, mechanical passion, when he knew she felt he brought her great pleasure, not for any reason having to do with her, but simply to prove that he could, that his member was able to return, via its brief hidden moment of triumph, to its regular inert state.
He began to dress quickly. “No,” she protested, holding her arms out to him: “cuddle.”
“You know I only have twenty minutes before I fall asleep,” he told her. “I have to drive home.”
“Yes, before your wife gets home,” she muttered. “No, don’t show me her picture again — why do you always want to show me her picture afterwards?”
“Do I?” he asked, putting his wallet back into his pants pocket and snatching up his keys.
“Turn the light out,” she called — but either she spoke too late, or he pretended not to hear her as he walked out the door.
*** Continue reading
There is nothing I must not look at, no truth I must hide from, nothing I will not see. Yes, no doubt there will be much I never will understand, through failure to read the right books, or failure of curiosity, or outright stupidity. But I will never be willfully ignorant. I decided that a long time ago. How long ago? When I learned of Freud and unconscious motivations. That hiding your own ugliness from yourself makes you sick. But it seems now that that choice was already there, as if it were waiting for me to discover it, as if I had somehow made it long before, during childhood, and like an old stuffed animal, an old favorite, it was waiting all of that time for me to come back to it. Continue reading
The guy from the Bangor Daily really didn’t like what I said, and covered it correspondingly. I think it was at 39:00, the part he didn’t like.
Anyway, I wasn’t thinking of it as a photo op.
Click to play the video. (At Bangor's website.)
A short video explaining Occupy.
THE SCENE: An upscale, middle-American kitchen. The remains of a big baking project lie piled in and around the sink.
There are THREE GINGERBREAD HOUSES on the countertop, each with a GINGERBREAD COUPLE out front. One couple is clearly Caucasian — a man and a woman — one clearly African-American, and one two men.
THE CHARACTERS:
Three to five SMALL CHILDREN. Each child is dressed as a bank, somehow, with the appropriate logo worn prominently.
A WORKING CORPORATE MOM, who somehow balances the demands of motherhood with a successful carreer. She is at first partially dressed up in her costume, then leaves and returns, fully in the role of “Aunt Sam” (a female Uncle Sam).
THE GUY BEHIND THE CAMERA, who we hear but never see. Male gaze.
OPENING SHOT of normal pandemonium in the kitchen, of the kind you’d get with a bunch of kids milling around.
GUY BEHIND CAMERA: So explain to me what we’re doing here.
CORPORATE MOM: Getting ready.
GUY: No, for the camera. What’s the project?
MOM: Oh — Well with Christmas coming and everyone still being so angry and bitter about the poor banks, who are just trying to survive in hard economic times like anyone else, I thought this year we’d have the kids put on a little skit representing America!
So every kid is a bank. This is Bank of America, this is Chase bank [and so on]. When we get to Grandma’s and the cousins are all together –
GUY: Wait, who are you? Continue reading
Gentlemen and Ladies of the City Council,
Regarding the recent police action against Occupy, I thought I would direct to you some public comments I have made recently on BDN’s public BBoard.
I think I do not exceed my authority as the Encampment Legal point person in saying that, while we all consider this police action to be very unfortunate, we nevertheless remain guardedly optimistic about working with the city to find a mutually satisfactory solution within the existing legal code. Continue reading
*correction to the Bangor Daily article* Alba Briggs said that uprooting the camp would mean throwing away the last month of work we’ve put in. Not me.
I said that, yes, we may be the top-clicked story on the Bangor Daily website (partly no doubt because of all you beloved “Get A Job” trolls venting your spleens) — but we pull up our tents, we’re a flash in the pan and forgotten by Bangor.
America is sick. Terribly sick. It should be possible for a man making minimum wage to support a wife and three kids, without a dime of government assistance. We had that once. But now, minimum wage isn’t enough to support yourself.
We need to *push* American society off its present self-destructive course and onto a more reasonable one. This takes *time*. We *need* to keep at this.
Our white-collar organizational leaders, who put forth the proposal to pull up the camp, without actually *telling* anyone who lived at camp ahead of time, tell us maintaining the camp takes too much time, too much energy. Some of the ones saying this, like Valerie, really put their heart and soul into keeping the camp alive.
Now I know something about photography, and this picture -- in that light? -- is a real accomplishment
Other of those leaders, I can’t tell you what they do to keep camp running. Sunny once called the encampment the “heart and soul” of Bangor’s Occupy movement. Was up in arms when the city wanted us just to apply for a permit. Now she wants us shut down.
What I said was, we decamp, and we become just another white-collar activist group doing deskwork and promotional stunts. Camping out in Maine weather *means* something, and this is what has the nice old women from the Peace and Justice center running scared. Trying to uproot our camp for our own good.
It’s amazing to me that we have to fight not only City Hall, but our own leadership to stay alive.
