AsteroidPuncher's New Writeups

It's the first day of summer and already I feel yesterday's fingers clenched tight around my throat (event)

2012-09-28T22:12:11Z

The slimy tentacles of the country's K-12 system have gone limp and slipped from my body. I'm free of public education. And as I drive to the school to pick up my cap and gown for graduation, chilly memories from the past ripple down my spine on the hottest day of 2011. I normally deal with angst by turning up the stereo - the solo from Led Zeppelin's Heartbreaker is enough to destroy almost any grief, or at least cram it away into the shadows of my mind - but the volume's up as high as it goes and it isn't helping at all. These are heavy-duty 240-volt chills, memories of thoughts I haven't had or even thought about having in years, pushing my back into the seat and almost knocking the sunglasses off my face. They're strong and they're unwelcome, and I had thought them dead after doing my damndest to destroy them back in the spring. I pull over in a paraoxysm of some sort and look upon my childhood home in reluctant awe.

It's seventy degrees Fahrenheit and seventy days…

That man has writer's block but I don't know if I'm him right now (idea)

2012-09-15T22:11:24Z

When the wellspring in my mind runs dry, and I've said all I think I need to say, I'm going to go back through this and move the words and sentences and paragraphs around until I think it makes sense to people besides myself, and I'm going to format everything, and press that little "submit" button with a sort of panicked apprehension so potent it's prevented me dozens of times from even embarking on the first part of this sentence.

There are a few gripping questions that give rise to this apprehension - Is it formatted right? Is this the best time to submit it? Is anyone going to bother clicking it in the sidebar? Should they? Is it anything worth giving the people here to read? Have I really said anything? And who said it?

All the first of those are neurotically driven, of course. Simple…

Death to illegal anime uploads (idea)

2012-06-11T19:51:48Z

I am not a man of many eccentricities. Aside from smoking weed and cross-dressing, few of my interests have the potential to raise eyebrows. Except, probably, my status as a Wapanese-American. Yes, it's true, I enjoy anime, and I sometimes read manga, although honestly the ratio is skewed towards the former because I like to enjoy all of my eccentricities at the same time and it's a lot easier to watch a video than read a book when you're tripping balls in a floofy skirt. And I don't like paying for it.

Sure, I've done it before. I've paid for anime. I've steeled myself as I approached the checkout counter with Strawberry Panic buried between a couple normal-person books, hoping unrealistically that the cashier wouldn't notice it as she rung them all up. Not that I'd be run out of town for buying an innocent schoolgirl romance, but it's just not the kind of thing I like people to see me enjoying. Much like weed and floofy skirts, in fact. It's really unpleasant to…

Metal Inert Ass Welding, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the F-Bomb (idea)

2011-08-02T01:37:33Z

As an important family of metalworking processes, the many forms of welding are practiced by plenty of folks on a daily basis. Some of them are responsible for metal joining operations in construction or repair or fabrication or assembly; they're listed as welders on the payroll, and they generally know what's up with molten steel. Some folks use a buzzbox in their line of work from time to time, and can lay a bead on a broken frame or a cracked machine base, but don't weld full-time. And others strike arcs on their own time, and they work on their boats and trailers and sculptures and whatever else is around. But whatever the setting, there are two deep-seated urges common to almost all welders (including myself). The first is to swear a whole lot (I mean like serious goddamn Pulp Fiction-level shit, not like the bitch-ass cussing you hear from those limp-dick wannabe riveter bastards but manly fucking heartfelt profanity). And the second is to offer unsolicited…

we can give up, but the world never will (idea)

2011-07-29T16:54:56Z

It's an empty street, occupied primarily by vacant lots and abandoned houses. And it's an embarrassingly cliched street, with every embarrassingly cliched element of urban decay present. A haphazard stack of tires from a garage too cheap to pay for special hauling, a sectional suede couch with its moldy cushions slashed, a ten-foot boat with half its hull ripped out. Its identification number and license plates are intact - damning evidence of the owner/dumper's identity, but still not an issue because nobody will ever care enough to track them down.

The vacant lots are littered with empty wrappers and cigarette butts and plenty of other things that hide in the three-foot weeds. The vacant houses that once stood there have been destroyed - the lots look like ass, but at least they've been wiped. And that's more than can be said for the occasionally boarded-up death traps dotting the block - so badly mauled by all four…

They protect us from danger by harming us before we can harm ourselves (thing)

2011-06-01T20:11:18Z

Some time ago, in Texas:

A dusty old man with sandblasted skin looks proudly at a job well done. Twisted lengths of spiky wire between rough-hewn posts of osage orange make ease of what split-rail fences and hedgerows could never do. The cows and bulls and steers groan uselessly against a fence they can't knock over or walk through. No more will their owner have to deal with break-outs and break-ins and fence repairs and hedge trimmers - they're penned in for good.

A while later, in Germany:

Beneath the hazy yellow ghost of mustard gas, trenches stretch across the muddy countryside like huge snaking graves. From time to time, machine-gun fire and mortar blasts break a silence almost as deadly as lewisite. And above the foxholes and the trenches and the grizzled young veterans lay a wasteland of dead…