my last question is did anybody actually read that horribly LLLLLoooooooooooonnnnnnnnnnnnnnnngggggggggggggggg post?? thats like 1.5 hours of reading. thats an afternoon gone

I'd look up "speed reading" if it took you one and a half hours to read through that.

And yes most of us who posted did. 

 in what way at all was that a short story?

a short story would be:

"One day a man and his dog were walking down the pathway when a burglar jumped out with a gun. he took the mans dog and shot the man. Police showed up and investigated the crime. A witness identified the burglar and the police got a warrant and searched his house. they found the gun, and the victims blood on the burglars clothes. The police waited at the perps house till he showed up, they arrested him. Case Closed. He got a life sentance for 2nd degree murder. He got out on parole after 20 years. He now bags groceries at the local supermarket.

@coolestguy - you do know what a short story is don't you? That one was considerably shorter than most.

Here's what Wikipedia has to say


Determining what exactly separates a short story from longer fictional formats is problematic. A classic definition of a short story is that one should be able to be read it in one sitting, a point most notably made in Edgar Allan Poe's essay "The Philosophy of Composition" (1846). Other definitions place the maximum word length at 7,500 words. In contemporary usage, the term short story most often refers to a work of fiction no longer than 20,000 words and no shorter than 1,000. Stories less than 1,000 words are usually referred to either as "short short fiction" or "short shorts."

I'd love to post some of my favourite short stories, but some of them are far too long for a forum post. Instead I'll just recommend that everyone read some Kafka. Metamorphasis and In the Penal Colony are my favourites, though they may leave many people scratching their heads as to what the hell they're about.

I was under the impression short shorts were:

I had no idea they had to do with stories

@coolestguy

That is disturbing on 23 different levels.

@iclim

I'll use your idea. A short story every Saturday.

We should oversee the first VGchartz book club! We can all touch and talk about how amazing Michael Crichton is.

If anybody wants to indulge in some after hours spooning, this is acceptable

Isn't basically what I'm doing?

I post a short story every week, and then we discuss.

So, it would be the VGChartz Book Meetings.

This was VGChartz Book Meeting #1: The Last Question.

there is still far too little that we know, and far too much that we think we know.
i myself believe the universe is infinite.
by the first law of thermodynamics.
nobody is really giving the "universe speeding up" thing any credit either. to me, i think it proves that the universe is elliptical, which means that because of gravity, the universe is either

a) is a constant state of "Big Bang"
b) winding its way back to the strongest magnetic pull (imagine being slingshotted by the most powerful gravity in the universe. now, after long enough time, the traveling thing would start to lose the energy and before you know it be zipped at a higher speed along an elliptical trajectory back to the start)
basically to quantify for every possible angle before 180 degrees the only, imho, sensible picture is a donut shaped universe.
in either case i think we are going, eventually, behind where we started. so that means if we just sat still, i mean absolute stillness, in this one spot out in space while the planet continued to move along it's trajectory, there would be a literal infinite stream of stars, planets to greet us from the center of the universe just as we are moving past this point in space at this very moment.

Good read dtewi. thanks for posting!