Weekly Challenge #433 – Media

Welcome to the 100 Word Stories podcast at oneadayuntilthedayidie.com.

This is Weekly Challenge, where I post a topic and then challenge you to come up with a 100 word story based on that topic: MEDIA

We’ve got stories by:

• Tom
• Lizzie
• John
• Jeffrey
• Richard
• Serendipity
• Tura Brezoianu
• Munsi
• Zackmann
• Chelsea
• Dionysis Clowes
• Norval Joe
• Planet Z

The next 100 word stories weekly challenge is on the topic of MEDIA…

TOM

A Well Define Relationship Part 62

Sparky arranged the bandits and assembled the ladies of the gear guild behind them. The video feed went meg-virile in an hour. Major media plastered the image on the transverse. Cid’s Q factor temperately bumped Tarzan and Santa Claus. When Smith called in the Senate Guard the full impact of his sorry state settled in on Caesar like lormire petafrost on capulating Brolox. He called to Smith. It was time to deal. “I have something that the honorable doctor has been looking for.” “Sorry scum no deal.” As a trooper push El Cid into the wagon he yelled out, “Tamerlane.”

LIZZIE

“What do a gondola, a widow and a gun have in common?” asked Prof. Mullins while being interviewed on TV.

The anchor didn’t know.

“Mullins, of course!”

The studio crew snickered.

“So, who’s Mullins?” continued the behavioral researcher.

“The wife shot him,” replied the anchor. “No, he’s the killer; he killed a man, a husband… in a gondola!”

“Interesting,” replied the researcher. “But Mullins didn’t kill anyone, well, not directly anyway.”

“Oh?”

“Mullins is an experimental program named after its founder.”

That’s when everyone walked out of the studio.

Within the next few hours, dozens were killed all over town.

JOHN

Media
by John Musico

The book Robinson Crusoe opens with his father advising the best way for a man to lead his life;
‘Seek the middle ground son, poor men have special problems but rich men do too.”
Here’s how I make that hard to believe point:
When you’re poor and have little; you want to obtain.
But, when you’re wealthy and have it all; the same dilemma returns; you can’t get because you already have it.
The Buddhists have the same advice. So do the Chinese as depicted in the yin yang symbol.
Sadly, our commercialistic culture makes us blind to this wisdom.

JEFFREY

Media Day
by Jeffrey Fischer

Coach was starting to sound defensive. “I keep telling y’all, I don’t put much stock in those tests. On my team, we play quick and strong. Ain’t nothing any IQ test gonna tell me about that.”

The Media Day frenzy was particularly bad this year, after the team’s top draft pick, Cletus Brickyard, received a record-low score on the Wonderlic test and the results had been leaked to the press.

“Fo’ the last time, I’m telling y’all, Cletus is a guard. He’s a locomotive of aggression wrapped in 350 pounds of muscle. Don’t need no IQ test to chew up quarterbacks.” And that settled that.

After the season was over, when Cletus was fooled so many times that his white pants bore a permanent grass stain on the butt, Coach’s successor decided to take the Wonderlic test more seriously.

The Breakthrough
by Jeffrey Fischer

They say you can’t rush genius, and that was certainly true in Alan’s case. As a young man in the early 1970s, he had spent countless hours working out the complex mathematics of a new type of plastic, one that would revolutionize automobile design. He nearly had it, but could never get the properties just right. He consigned all his work to storage media and did other things with his life.

Then, one day in 2014, as retirement-age Alan daydreamed through a personnel meeting, he had a flash of insight into his problem from 40 years earlier. He could hardly contain his excitement during the meeting. Afterward, he raced to incorporate his new insight into his old equations. He opened a dusty file, grabbed the disk… and found himself holding an 8” single-sided floppy, capable of holding a whopping 250 kilobytes. He could only laugh.

RICHARD

#1 – George’s Story – Part 65: Newsflash

George turned the key in the ignition and the engine burst into life. Bizarrely, so did the radio on the dashboard – tuned in to a news bulletin.

Excitedly, he turned up the volume and listened incredulously to the newscaster… not a single word out of the ordinary: no mention of widespread death and destruction; nothing about fighting in the streets and not a word about the world’s impending doom.

George was baffled – if the media were oblivious to what was happening, then this whole thing was even more peculiar than he’d imagined.

He eased off the handbrake and pulled away.

#2 – The best show in town

Those clowns in foreign affairs are up to their usual tricks, falling over their feet in their haste to get a story, whilst the gossip column hacks are walking a tightrope between the truth and sensationalised facts. We’ve got TV crews tumbling and leaping through hoops for an exclusive scoop; troupes of reporters performing an intricate dance between facts and fiction, and a team of editors taming the roaring lions of legality and integrity… and all without any safety net!

Political correspondents – experts at spin, illusion and trickery – are conveniently ignoring the elephant in the room.

It’s a media circus!

#3 – 30 Megabytes

Am I the only one who regrets the demise of good old fashioned removable media?

It’s true you could hardly call a Winchester drive particularly portable, or high-capacity – but still, I miss them. What about eight-inch floppies? Now that’s a real disk – superior in every way to those five inch tiddlers that followed, and their progeny.

Now we’re saddled with memory sticks and flash micro cards – wonderful in their own way, and miracles of technology and miniaturisation, but I can’t stand them.

Those old, clunky, massively oversized media may have been awkward… but you’d never lose the buggers!

#4 Press corps

Borin Cokenshield peered nervously through the letterbox at the imposing figure at his door.

“You’re not from the press are you?”, he hissed.

The wizard, bending low, peered back through the narrow slot at the dwarf: “No, I’m a wizard”

“You sure?”, came the response, “Because if you’re one of those media guys, I’ve got nothing to say!”

“No, I want you to join my quest… rings, treasure, dragons – it’s an offer you can’t refuse!”

“I knew it!”, snarled the dwarf: “You are one of the press gang!, before poking the wizard in the eye from behind the locked door.

SERENDIPITY

The media love me – if I’m not front-page news, I’ll make the centre-spread, editorial, or a spirited debate on the letter’s pages. There will be pictures of where I was last seen, with eyewitness interviews of the people who were there. Thousands of words of newsprint, countless pieces to camera and endless newsreels on every channel.

The media love me – and i love the media.

You see, if it wasn’t for the media hype, I’d have no incentive to keep going, but as long as they keep me in the limelight…

I’m just going to keep on killing.

TURA
Media
——–
“What social media studies misses,” said the earnest young woman, “is a problematization of the marked/nonmarkedness intrinsic– actually intrinsically extrinsic– in the hegemonic thrust of unfolding immanence.”

“Does that mean,” I said, reading my scribbled notes, “Google and Facebook don’t talk about how they want all your data to sell to advertisers, and everyone knows but they don’t think about it?”

She nodded. “The superincumbence of materialisms deconstructs the mesoteric assumptions of subcultural neodiscourse!”

I took that as a yes.

Reporting for the media on a social media conference is an unpleasant job, but someone has to do it.
——–

MUNSI

Something New

By Christopher Munroe

In lieu of a story, I’ve written a speech.

Then hired a band to set the speech to music.

A technician will light the speech and set off lasers, strobes, flash pots and fog machines whilst I deliver it.

A filmmaker friend of mine will be shooting a short, surrealist piece that’ll be projected overtop me as I deliver the speech, and it will be broadcast live via webcam as I give it.

In short, it’s an over-elaborate, multimedia spectacular, and rest assured, I cannot afford the production.

Like, at all.

So a 100-word story it will have to remain…

ZACKMANN

Come here you little brats your grandpa is going to rant like a Jay Langejans Dog Days of Podcasting character. Long ago radio stations played a bigger variety of songs that often included the likes of Weird Al and Ray Stevens. They rebroadcasted Old Time Radio especially around Christmas. There was a Star Wars radio drama. Radio stations could play the best rock old and new. Since the laws changed fewer owners meant fewer songs played over and over. Talk radio was mainly at night talking to bands or about sex. Apparently talk is cheap when syndicated. Now radio sucks.”

CHELSEA

Media

She resides in there, behind that screen, behind every screen, just waiting for some one to bring them to life.

Waiting to fill our lives with images and words from as close as the next room to as far way as another planet.

Her domain is vast, touching each of us in one way or another.

So there she remains, trapped inside her domaine, inside that screen until you bring it to life, letting her into your world.

She is the soul of Media and she is waiting for each and every one of us to just let her in.

DIONYSIUS

Bubble Man

It used to mean more, being a bubble man — THE bubble man.

The presence of anyone repulsed me. Human contact. The horror. You others didn’t mind.

I put a bubble around myself to keep it out, all of it. The irony is, the media made it possible. I went years without any face-to-face. Before media you killed whoever fucked with you. I’m not a killer.

Now it’s too easy with the ueblita and you’re-not-too-smart phones, the cloud. Media are everywhere, and you’re all bubble men. Everyone is a bubble man now.

I can’t get away from you!

The Medium Is the Mensonge

My first attempt was a simple “I love you.”

Tears began to roll down her cheeks. Everybody uses those words, she sobbed. It’s not how you feel! Cliches make me so sad!

I tried poetry, flowers, romantic dinners, trips to exotic destinations, and spending all my time with her. Basketball games. Hikes into the woods. Jewelry. Taking her shopping. Romantic comedies.

She was always pleased at first. We laughed, shared,

adventured, whispered, cheered, photographed, shopped, and cried and laughed together.

But there was always the moment when she’d grow quiet, tears would well up, and she’d say, You’re such a liar!

We understand each other.

You and Me Dia

What made me decide to go was the name of the meetup: You and Me Dia.

Isn’t media taking over our lives? What can we do about it?

Dia, he said, you mean internet, television, newspaper? Have you checked in?

Exactly! I don’t use —

I mean you’re crazy, dia.

I stared at him.

It’s all media, dia. The earth itself is media. You and me, we are media, dia. That dog sleeping over there.

What are you talking about? I asked.

Media are supposed to take over our lives. Dia, those things you fear are not very good at it.

NORVAL JOE

Spheno Palatine strode into the office and saluted.
“Palatine. What did you find at the orbital cavity?” Commander Styloid asked.
“Yes. Well. Um,” Palatine hedged.
“Mucus and bile,” Ulnar Styloid cursed, recognizing her perfume before she appeared at the door.
“Media Lateral,” Styloid said, rubbing his brow ridge. “What were you doing in the orbital cavity?”
Media slunk into the room, sideways, and oozed forward to slip onto his lap. She smoothed her hand across his hairless head and winked. “If you expected me to stay in the duodenum nebula, you shouldn’t have sent Cardiac Sphincter to pilot the spaceship.”

Z

Our water has methane in it. We have to filter it.
Sometimes, you can light the gas coming out of your kitchen tap.
The thing is, the water has always had methane in it, but the anti-Fracking people ignore that part of the story.
They fly their celebrity protestors into town, and spin their bullshit stories.
When the circus leaves town, the legislators roll out the laws and bans.
I depended on that drilling lease. I have to sell my farm now.
I heard that gas is six bucks a gallon in Hollywood.
Good. I hope it keeps going up.