The Non Sequitor Thread

[L. Marcus]

Ooo, Heidi Klum!

[Cancer]

... female Townsend's warbler!

[Cancer]

Quote

Objectives

• Participants will understand the role of chaos in organizations.

• Participants will analyze prioritizing multiple goals in an organization.

 

[Cancer]

Quote

The principal industry of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania is updating the Wikipedia page about Luzerne County, Pennsylvania.

 

[tkdguy]

If Marx had been dyslexic, the workers of the world would still be trying to figure out what the heck they're supposed to untie.

[Cancer]

As I'm channel-flipping the muted TV waiting for some futbol to come on, the shrivelled old white televangelist guy on channel 11 is grimacing and gesticulating and it looks like he is describing his last painful, burning bowel movement.

[Cygnia]

Tomorrow, mujadara.

[tkdguy]

Light... we can't see without it.

[tkdguy]

"Oh, the humanity!"

 

"How dare you call me a manatee?"

[Cancer]

The car alarm across the street is making me feel better about staying up too late, reading inane old posts.

[Cancer]

Quote

It's two A.M. (It's two A.M.)
The beer is gone (beer is gone)
I'm sitting here waiting
The gun's still warm (the gun's still warm)
Maybe my connection is tired of taking chances

 

[Cygnia]

Melancholic nostalgia -- finding a wine that smells like your grandma.

[Cancer]

OT: is the grandma in question alive or dead?

 

EDIT: Don't answer; I really don't want to know.  The emotional loading is different, though, in the two cases.

 

EDIT2: This sort of thing.

[tkdguy]

Y U no like katana?

[Cygnia]

Sometimes, you just need tacos.

[Cancer]

The law school has the right idea, taking spring break the week after daylight time starts.

[Cancer]

Atomic power noogies!!

[Cygnia]

All right, "Ugly Delicious", you've hooked me...

[Pariah]

That feeling when your phone autocorrects 'Nice' to 'Nude'.

[tkdguy]

Thanks for the pet rock. 

[Cancer]

Quadraginta duo!

 

Though Quadraginta sex! sounds more intriguing ... hmmm ...

[Cancer]

I am a tea bigot.

[tkdguy]

Insufferable in victory, ungracious in defeat. No wonder nobody wants to play with him anymore!

[Cancer]

Two homeworks graded this weekend.  And I didn't kill anybody!

 

But when I have final exams to grade Wednesday evening, look out.

[Cancer]

The cold wind whistled in his ears, bending the sparse stalks of grasses which had forced their way through the cracks in the brown-black basalt.  The thin morning sun slanted over a few boulders and the broken palisade scarps they had fallen from, casting wan light and twisted shadows across the desolation.

 

It was a good place for a final examination.

 

He drew his circle around him, putting enough power into it so lesser harassments would not reach him through it.  It would not, of course, stand up against the assaults of his intended foe.  That was not its purpose.

 

He issued the ritual challenge: blew the horn, rang the bells, called out the enemy's name, cast the reagents to mark the spot of challenge.

 

As it had to, the air in front him warped, space itself shimmered, and a disfiguring blot of Void opened upon the dark rock a few fathoms away.  Out of it stepped something vaguely manlike in overall form, though every subsequent detail refuted that initial suggestion of humanity.  The sunlight did not illuminate it, and the wind seemed to blow through it.  

 

It turned to face him.

 

"Who dares?" came a mental growl of demand.

 

"I," he responded.  "A human, native to this world."

 

"You will be consumed."

 

"... If I am defeated.  There is a challenge whose resolution is a prerequisite for that."

 

"Challenge it is," came the mental whisper.  The human felt alternating waves of heat and cold coming off the thing he had summoned.  "What mode of contest do you invoke?"

 

"Formal logic," he responded.  "I will refute your existence."

 

The other entity emitted actual physical sounds, booming and warbling over the stark barren plain.  It seemed to be laughing.

 

"I accept, dweller of this plane," came the mental whisper.  "I will claim the victory with the first error in your proof."  There was a pregnant pause.  "That I stand here suggests there will be such an error."

 

"Let us begin with that observation," he replied, relieved that the other had taken this implicit bait and placed them on his most analyzed path.

 

The discourse lasted hours; the sun ascended, culminated, and began its descent.  The cold wind remained constant.  At times the other challenged one of the human's steps, to be met by a closed digression, construction of a lemma, demonstrating that the challenged proposition was valid.  Mostly, though, the other loomed silently, its form growing in appearance, the limning by transient colors becoming more variable and more persistent as the day wore on.

 

The sunset had not yet begun when he began his final syllogism, gathering the propositions proven over the course of the day, assembling them, parsing out the disjunctions and the exclusions, assembling the closing logical structure.  The summoned entity's physical appearance towered over him now, and vivid colors washed over its writhing form, casting eerie shadows on the basalt.

 

But at the limits of those shadows, a ring of light began to form.

 

"And taking Proposition fifty-seven with the thirty-second lemma, we now see, with the Counter-proposition Twelve demonstrated to be True, since exactly one of Counter-proposition Twelve and Proposition One can be true, we have achieved the result which we set out to demonstrate: that as an independent, formal entity  you cannot exist, cannot ever have existed, and cannot ever exist in the future in this universe, and therefore, all manifestations of you are banished to Nothingness, eternally."

 

The ring of light blazed up, and contracted upon its center steadily, and the great looming form roared and shrieked, shrinking as the perimeter around it grew tighter.  Nothing of the entity's form extended past that ring, but the stone bubbled and hissed as the light passed through and over it.

 

Half a minute went by as the ring contracted, remelting the old basalt, growing brighter as it shrank to a central singularity.  In a blinding terminal flash, accompanied by a blast of nonphysical force, the logical construction reached its final conclusion.  Perhaps there was a final scream, drowned out by the final explosion, but it was plausible that was only a wishful notion of the human’s.

 

Nothing remained of the summoned entity but the glazed circle where it had stood.

 

The human sagged with fatigue and the release from tension.  He drank from a bottle, ate a morsel from a pouch, and stepped out to relieve himself while standing in the lee of a basalt outcrop.

 

While he still remembered, he spat on the glazed spot from which his enemy had been banished, and wrote a few sentences in a notebook drawn temporarily from his pack.  The spittle boiled on the as yet steaming rock. 

 

Notes taken, he collected his kit and shouldered his load, and set out on the walk back home.  He would not, of course, remember this foe who now was not, had never been, and never would be, once he got back home.  But his notebook would, and he would transcribe these notes into greater, more permanent volumes, in which the names of terrible demon-lords of old were listed with tales of the woes they had made, and of volumes in which it was recorded the names of entities forever expelled from the human world.