The Drabblecast Forums

How about a Norm read? I can hear the song of the Koto, and the wise voice of Ling Ling, (which should have been Norm's Japanese accent, but sounded exactly like Walter Brennan: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqpROXVW_yc&feature=related" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false). I bet it would...

My take is that even if one wants to argue about robot sentience, the story can still be taken as metaphor. Natch! That's basically a given for me, though. Preferably I can get it to work on more than one level, though; I find metaphor is strongest when it's also part of a sensical story and not a ...

I wasn't really intending them to all be read in a lump sum, really; I just put them all in one 'cause multithreads are more obnoxious than singular long posts, to my mind. I fully expect people to pick out one or two to read at a time; I only post one story a day on Mirrorshards anyway. Based on th...

I don't really make a case for sentimentality being programmed in. I just figure that weird connections and obsessions probably come, to a certain extent, along with sentience. I recall an entertaining story in a recent F&SF issue about robot superstitions regarding a mythical monster; that sort of ...

Yeah, but thirteen separate threads would've been halla spammy, ne? I dunno. I s'pose I can take half of 'em down or something...

He does a lot of "sentimental robot" fiction that ends up on EP (among other places), which so far has included a devoted robot butler who loves a little girl and a robot janitor who wants to join a church.

Over at Mirrorshards, I've had a sort-of mascot sort-of tradition going for over a year now. Back when I started, one of the first stories I did was called "The Wisest Stone." The Wisest Stone's truculent pseudo-philosophy appealed to me and I wanted to do more stories about him, but I had promised ...

Man, don't ever read any Mike Resnick, strawman. ;-) Personally, I was assuming that artificial intelligence was widespread for this, and AI being self-learning and likely involving pseudorandom connections a la the human neural net, allowing for personality. On the other hand, I also routinely writ...

Rattle-clank. Rattle-clank. I watched the old robot make its slow way up the path. Every morning and every evening it was the same thing. The poor little spud wasn’t made right, and one leg dragged. After months of this, I caught his attention as he passed by. “Look,” I said, “I’m mostly a hobbyist...

I kept expecting the story to end, and it kept on keeping on. It wasn't bad, but I just kept feeling like it was over and didn't have much more to offer. No real sense of urgency to keep reading, if that makes sense; if I'd been able to control the flow (i.e. reading it in a book) I might well have ...

I actually didn't realize the old person was a ghost until the comments. When I read about him "throwing things," I pictured some old guy, forced to move to an efficiency apartment by the recession, walking down the sidewalk and hurling a rock at his old house, where some young punk now lives. I mea...

Cute!

“A rough situation for Richard III. He’s called a time-out.” “That’s right, Ron. With Emperor Tenmu’s squad as strong as it is, there’s not a lot of options. He’s tried passing twenty times this quarter, but every time Napoleon has swatted it out of the air.” “He’s got more reach than you’d expect, ...

The hairy creature squirmed in his hands. "Wait! Wait, please! Don't you recognize me?" Ekee peered at the baboon, nostrils flaring. The scent was familiar... "You knew me when we were young. We played together under the fig trees in the fruiting season." "Ah!" said Ekee. His dark fur settled, shrin...

I like the last line; it redeems the piece almost entirely, all by itself. Up until then I was very "meh," but the turnaround was successful, I think.

((That comma after "banging on the door" should be a semicolon, though. A useful tool for scraping off a handful of words, I've found.))

ROU Killing Time wrote:Welcome to the Drabbles forum.

Thanks!

I'm here explicitly because Norm entertained me mightily in his brief stint hosting Escape Pod and now that I'm all caught up over there, I need something to listen to while I exercise.

Here's one from a few days ago. My 'readers' at Mirrorshards seemed to like it. What do y'all think? --- When the first rebar poked up through the turf, only old Pickles noticed. Nobody paid the dog any mind to start with. When everyone had gathered around the site, the first webbing of new-grown c...

In the interests of full disclosure, it's technically my 458th drabble. I'm glad you liked it.

The guy at the meat counter was hassling some ghoul ahead of me. I tried not to look. “Pleez… just hambone… for soup…” “Yeah? You run out of corpses in the cemetery? My mom is buried there, you creep.” I don’t get involved. I’m three, four generations back. Just a little pale, pronounced canines. I ...