Charlie Fish

This mildly amusing, very short story opens thus:
“It's a hot day and I hate my wife. We're playing Scrabble. That's how bad it is.”

The narrator is (intentionally) horrid, and the turn of events is both clever and predictable. It’s an enjoyable way to spend a few minutes if you don’t have anyone to play Scrabble with. (It took less time to read than to create the photo below.)

Image: Death by Scrabble - photo is less of a spoiler than the story’s title

“I don't think I've spoken show more to anyone except my wife since Thursday morning. On Thursday morning I spoke to the milkman.”

Although it was written in 2006, you could imagine it being set during the current Covid pandemic lockdown. I think we’ve all mused on the things we’d be doing if we weren't cooped up - sometimes resentfully and often unrealistically:

“If she wasn't around, I'd be doing something interesting right now. I'd be climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. I'd be starring in the latest Hollywood blockbuster. I'd be sailing the Vendee Globe on a 60-foot clipper called the New Horizons.”

You can read the three-page story, free, HERE.
Scroll to the bottom for links to other short stories with an element of wordplay in the plot, including:
* The Case of The Lower Case Letter by Jack Delaney
and
* A Case Of Displacement by Iain Grant show less

Even just remembering Asteroids still gives me panic attacks. That moment, as you progress through the levels, when an unbeatable number of space boulders are hurtling towards you and you know you're going to die. An early lesson in the futility of existence and the transience of 10 escudos. Nothing but disdain, I'm afraid for the players who allowed a couple of rocks to keep flying so they could tack up 100,000 points by picking off the little saucers. It's man v. rock or nothing!

“Track show more and field”: what a game. Remember playing it incessantly in my local arcade in Rua do Coliseu in Lisbon. One trick to make you run faster or jump/throw longer was to wedge a lighter between the speed and jump/throw button and with another lighter rub both buttons from side to side as fast as you could. I remember breaking world records on 100 meters by running under 9 seconds and jump well over 9 meters on long jump event. What a brilliant game.

When I was in my Raspberry Pi phase I attempted a DIY arcade cabinet scene: A bit of MDF, joysticks and buttons, Raspberry PI running RetroPie, and the MAME emulator (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) and I could have pretty much every arcade game ever made in one cabinet.

Pac-Man was my favourite ever but I soon figured out ways to beat it. No AI back then. AI requires an ability to learn or at least fitness behaviour in response to circumstances. Pac-Man didn't obviously do this; the ghosts followed precise mathematical rules for where they moved. The ghosts in any game would behave in exactly the same way regardless of who was playing. It was only the non-linear nature of some of the rules, combined with each named/coloured ghost having a different set of rules to the others, that appeared to give them different personalities. Perhaps we should call this in hindsight Artificial AI, or AAI. When I was doing SysAdmin stuff back in the day there was hidden away on Unix systems a game called Battlestar, a text adventure originally written in the 70s in the wake of Colossal Caves and Zork. Once navigating the space-based bits at the beginning you crash landed on a tropical planet and explored everything it had to offer. This simple game made with fewer than 6000 lines of code had me hooked for months (instead of doing UNIX SAP/R3 SysAdmin stuff when we pulled all-nighters…). I lived in the arcades in the early 80s, so I'd have difficulty just picking my favourite arcade games but as I wrote above I’d probably go with Pac-Man. With my beloved C64, and the Spectrum, and the consoles, and handhelds thrown in too, that was a huge selection to choose from and include here in this sort of review.

Fish does a good job of mentioning a lot of these games. But I’d have preferred to read personal stories regarding playing the games back then, and not just history. show less

I'm cleaning up my tablet desktop from the dozen or so short stories that are stubbornly cluttering up my browser tabs, waiting to be set free and closed...this short story being one that cropped up on the odd google search (a few months ago!) - and there it lay until this sleepless night. Very cute death-by-willing-it, careful-what-you-wish-for, two-minute-read of a story. I loved it. A tasty little snack to clean the palate in between other reads. Delicious!

The story can be read at this show more site: http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/DeatScra.shtml show less

A very short story extolling the power of words. Just look at that title! See? And it is exactly what it seems to be. Bee.

Let's ignore characterization and aim only for raw emotion, shall we? Ignore the story for the scene. Hell, ignore the scene for inexplicable wish-fulfillment. :)

Is it okay, tho? Sure. It is what it is.

Death. Grrrr. Is it hot in here?