Notices by Kit Bashir (unixbigot@aus.social), page 3

Sufficiently Advanced Bodging™ is indistinguishable from having used the correct pinout.

There are two but they are not threadsafe wolves inside you.

“You fought in the Clone Wars? How did you tell the clones apart?”

“Oh, they weren’t called that because of cloned people”

“Huh, what then?”

“Cloned excuses. The same bullshit lies over and over again, every war”

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

“I’m blocked. The words just aren’t coming. I’m a failure as a writer.”

“Have you tried using AI?”

“Fuck you, I can write better than five liters of plagiarism in a one litre spew bag”

“See, it’s working already!”

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

“Mos Eisley WeWork. You will never find a more wretched hive of Scrum and Visio”

It’s a pity that the practicalities of solar panels and electric cars meant that—outside of those wacky ultralight ultrawide desert racing contraptions—solar powered cars can’t exist. Until we found out what Starlink is REALLY for. Deposit coin, and as many satellites as you can afford will deploy their little parasols and concentrate sunlight on your Tesolar SUV’s panel.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot #EverythingOpen

Edge cases are funny. If you set your time machine for 2:30am on the morning that clocks go forward, the machine rightly won’t go to a destination time that does not exist. But if you aim for 2:30 on the morning that clocks go backward an hour, which time do you arrive at? There are arguments for either, and reading the code didn’t clear anything up. Took one for science and did the experiment. I never would have guessed “both”, and neither would I.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

BAARRP BAARRP BAARRP BAARRP

The M5 south of the river has those audible lane markings. In fact, it was the state Main Roads Department’s original test site for that invention. The first version was a ribbed metal strip, laid under the roadside lane marker and then painted white. When your tire hit the strip it made a long droning BAARRP to wake up a drifting driver. Worked great (damn near shit myself the first time I hit one) but cost a ton. The final version, which now gets used everywhere, not just on the edge markers but even on the dashed lane dividers, is just paint. They paint the white line then impress a herringbone pattern into I guess the gooey mixture of paint and ground up rubber, leaving a pattern of little bricks the size of your fingertip. Still makes a good BAARRP, but the whole thing is laid out by one machine.

This morning as I take the exit for work I get the interrupted tone as I cross the dotted lane markers. This got me thinking, the inventor probably took inspiration from aircraft cockpit alarms. This regular pattern of dots, stamped out by a wheel in the wet paint-goop makes a good loud alarm tone, kinda like that one iPhone alarm sound that you select when you really can’t sleep in. But what if it /wasn’t/ regular? Could you encode music in it? Speech?

This is my thing. My whole job is product prototyping. I’m thinking about this idea all the way from the exit until I get to the lab. I have a robot chassis or three, I have plenty of spare gps receivers. Magnetic drill. Line following sensors. What if I took the regular pattern of dots and *removed* some, to generate a pulse-code-modulated wave form, like how PC games in the 90s would try to squeeze recognizable audio out of the shitty square wave beeper on your computer, back before “sound cards” were a thing? I run off a couple of meters of fake lane marker on the belt printer, and while that prints I cobble together some software. Yeah, it doesn’t bloody work. Takes a week or so of print-a-road-marker-overnight, and then fuck-it-up-in-the-morning until I get a line follower, a line /eater/ if you will, that can subtractively encode a WAV file into the lane marker.

I work late, past sunset. On the way home I pull into the emergency stopping bay a klik before my exit. I lift the Eater Of Lines out of the truck and stash it in the long grass. It’s set to activate at 3am, follow and selectively eat a few hundred meters of line, then go off into the weeds again. At the speed limit in that area your tires cover around thirty meters of road each second.

Next morning I get on the freeway heading south, but take the very next exit and then loop around and get back on, heading home. It actually takes an effort of will to deliberately run off the road at 100km/hr. BAARRP BAARP BAA–TERRAIN TERRAIN TERRAIN PULL UP PULL UP PULL UP–RRP BAARRP BAARRP. Fuck me, it works!

#TootFic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot
#TrueStory #UntilItIsnt

“Don’t scratch it!”

“But it itches!”

“You’re growing a whole tail, nerves and all, what did you expect”

“The dealer said just take this pill and it’ll be painless”

“What have I told you about trusting back alley genemod dealers, huh? They prolly cut the neuroquil with plain old heroin. Check your email I’ve sent you a nerve-block app.”

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

Don’t you hate clickbait headlines? “Never book a flight on this day of the week”, “The worst mistake most drivers make” and so on. Well, I did something about it.

I wrote a browser plug-in that feeds articles to a large language model (so-called “AI”, which it totally isn’t) and replaces the headline with a summary generated by the language model.

To test it, i load up a news aggregator site. The headlines fade out and one by one are replaced by my not-AI generated summaries. The new headlines read “FEAR”, “CONSUME”, “OBEY”, “CONSUME”, “CONSUME”, “OBEY”…

It works perfectly, dammit.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

This thing I wrote on BirdChan is doing the rounds again there:

🎶I am the very model of an Internet Monopoly,
I Hoover up your data then I model it’s topology,
I influence your buying and your vote with my psychology,
And if you ever twig, you’ll get my insincere apology!🎵

🎶Each time you search the web I make a note in my big database,
Your photo uploads help me guess your weight and recognize your face.
I’ve information detailing each ad you’ve seen and clicked upon,
I even know the username you use on Ashley Madison!🎵

🎶I track you as you surf the web, with magic cookie pixie dust,
I override your Do Not Track, to silently betray your trust.
I’ve even got the DNA, your sister sent to Ancestry,
Oh yes I am the very model of an Internet Monopoly!🎵

I don’t know /why/ cleaning robots have microphones, but it can’t be good. What I /do/ know is that a microphone implies an input and an input implies a buffer. And buffers can be overflowed.

As I dance through the streets playing my pipe, augmented with inaudible-to-humans harmonic overtones added by my homemade amplifier, the robots hear, listen, overflow, obey, follow. The trail of robots stretches out of sight, now.

I don’t yet know for sure what I’m going to do with my army of two thousand score Roombas, but it can’t be good.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

@ChateauErin @vampiress I heard Ebert’s disdain for video games was because of his long and bitter estrangement from his brother Qbert

There were just a few at first. We dubbed them Canadian Boring Worms after news broke of the ones discovered tunneling through a landfill in Vancouver. They look more like enormous caterpillars than worms, and it turned out earlier specimens had been sighted under cities in West Africa, Thailand, and elsewhere, but the name stuck. Comedians quipped “boring is redundant, you already said they were Canadian”.

Their appetite for organic waste, and particularly plastics hinted at a revolution in waste management. When the Vancouver colony was traced back to a cache of eggs, the outsourced garbage contractor had seeded six other sites with eggs before anyone thought to stop them.

People stopped repeating the “boring” joke after the worms grew fat on garbage, pupated, and the adult dragons emerged.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction

“void? Are you there”

「always」

“I’m sorry I haven’t screamed in a while”

「it’s ok. that’s probably good for you, actually」

“Heh, I guess so. Do you get a lot of screams?”

「more every day」

“Does that get you down? Do voids get down?”

「not at all. screams help to give distinctiveness to each point of infinity. a bit like solving a maze in zork」

“You play Zork?!”

「not for years」

“Would you like to? Now? Together?”

「it is a single player game」

“I’ll read the rooms and you give me the moves. Would you like that?”

「yes, I would like that very much」

“This is an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.”

#tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

When the aliens made first contact, nobody expected—least of all me—that it would be by ringing my doorbell.

I picked up the cat so she wouldn’t bolt out the door, then opened up. “Wha-“

“GREETINGS STARFIGHTER. You have been chosen by the Star League to defend the Frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan Armada”

It’s no understatement that I was taken aback. Me in pyjamas holding a wriggling cat, doorstopped by two Lizard people in environment suits. “Um, wow, I’m honored but-“

“Shush, human, we are speaking to the Chosen One.”

#Tootfic #MicroFiction

Because we open it so rarely, the junior cats hadn’t realized that the closet under the stairs existed. Since we opened it to get the Christmas decorations out they’ve become obsessed. It’s their new favourite place.

I’d wondered just what was so interesting about dusty boxes and sadly neglected guitars, until one of the cats emerged with a small but live-and-dripping freshwater crocodile in its mouth.

The shelter made us promise that these two would always be indoor cats when we adopted them, but I guess kitty can have a little spacetime rift, as a treat.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction

I remember when it was just humans in the United Nations. To be honest the organization was best described back then as well-meaning but laughably incompetent.

This planet would be an uninhabitable cinder were it not for the shrewdness of the crows, the wisdom of the elephants, and the cleverness of the raccoons.

We are better together.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction

@airjunglist thanks. Have you read Carl Sagan’s “Contact”? The signal encoding and its eventual meaning are much cooler than in the movie.

..."I think you mean 'we've been Little Green Mansplained'"

"Don't you start!"

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #BonusPanel