As the fire began to die down in the long arctic1 night, a ring of glowing eyes appeared in the darkness. We had no more wood, we had few bullets. All we could do was ready our guns and wait, shivering, huddled in our blankets. After an hour, the fire was almost gone, and one of the creatures rushed us. Grargngnm fired: A good shot. The creature fell and lay still. The ring of eyes receded.

Wood fell in the fire; it blazed up briefly and then burned on, lower than before. The encircling pack of lousy writeups began to draw in closer again, slowly and patiently. We were outnumbered, but all we could do was fight.

  • Yet Another Droid by redhog: "See YAD." See the bit bucket, Sparky.

  • William Steig by ansomatica: This was a 3300 word biography of William Steig (a New Yorker cartoonist, among other things) which the user had copied and pasted from somewhere. He credited the source. There was a note at the top explaining that he couldn't find any material on Steig, so he had to paste these 3300 words as-was. Well, you know, he had three thousand three hundred words of material right there in front of him, did he not? For comparison, a solid three paragraph writeup here is usually about four hundred words, maybe five. So I asked the user to precis it down to a reasonable size, in his own words. He responded by removing the writeup and replacing it with some resentful nonsense about how he would put something there as soon as he found some information. It's been like that for a week now. Well, I'm not a psychiatrist. I'm a computer programmer. The writeup is gone.

    I repeat this whole story because it amazes me.

  • wazzup by de-frag: "WAAAAAAAAAAAAASSSSSSSSSSS SSSSSSSSSUUUUUUUUUUUUU UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU UUUUUUUUPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP PPPPPPP!!!!!!!!!!!! (inhale)". This was all one word, originally; in addition to being cretinous, uninformative, and redundant, it broke the page formatting. The other writeup in that node is almost as repulsive, but there's "content" in it, if you're willing to be generous enough to call it that.

  • Harlan Ellison by pulp (last seen 9/13): The accurate half is covered better elsewhere in the node; the other half, about Ellison's significant contribution to the original Star Trek series, is nonsense. I killed it so Jet-Poop wouldn't have to feel squitchy. I hate it when people feel squitchy. I feel squitchy myself now and then, so I know what it's like.

  • What's going on? by Yablo: "how you do dat?" No comment.

  • surfers by mps1024: "assholes who think their ability to get thrown out of the ocean make them attractive." Informed the user that it wasn't a satisfactory effort.

  • gundam by strict9: "hoorj". Oh, for God's sake...


roaving herds of dangerous cars [sic] is in baaad need of a title edit.




1 Two 'c's in "arctic"! Two!