The Red Gauntlet Saga

It's getting late; Gon knows this by some innate internal mechanism of his body, something vaguely aware of the passage of time even when nothing in his environment seems to be affected by it. The light doesn't wane, the weather doesn't change. But a human body must sleep, and the tiredness behind his eyes has increased incrementally until he knows he must seek the dark niche of his bed and close his eyes until consciousness leaves him.

I didn't write 100 words yesterday because I forgot. Also I don't want to do this anymore. But I will do it anymore anyway.

My phone is broken in a stupid way. It keeps rebooting over and over, sometimes it stays on and I can use it for a while then it will arbitrarily crash and start the the cycle again. I switched my SIM to a flip phone which is a nice change, and also it completely sucks donkey ass.

I want a smartphone alternative I can use to do everything I want to do, yet somehow without the level of distraction that comes part of the smartphone experience. I don't think that's possible though. I want my non-smartphone smartphone to have internet and data so I can use it as a GPS to navigate the city. And to stream music. And to have a nice camera. And to have a web browser when I need to look something up. And to have access to apps so I can use spotify. And when I tally up all the things I want my phone to do I've somehow created a regular ass smartphone. I want all the things it can do yet somehow is not addictive and distracting. Maybe the problem isn't the phone, maybe it's just me.

I watched I Saw the TV Glow last night and I can already tell that movie is gonna fuck me up for the next couple of weeks. Holy shit, it captures such a unique intersection of the perils of nostalgia, feeling like an outsider, feeling alien in your own skin, and the crushing weight of reality when you KNOW that something is completely wrong but you have to just suck it up and act like everything is normal. You know, like we're all doing every day of our lives.

I won't spoil anything but this movie is much more of an existential dread type of horror movie, rather than anything traditionally scary. It honestly reminds me much more of the Don't Hug Me I'm Scared tv/web series than any movie I've ever seen. Give it a watch if you feel like randomly crying three days from now when you remember Justice Smith's performance in the last 10 minutes of the movie.

My internet has eenn out for like 4 hours and it's almost midnight so here's 1o0o one hundred ffucking words. It doesn't matter what I say here I'm writing 100 words lalala lalala lalala

I ran into someone from my past and it was a positive interaction. I hope I will see them again soon.

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuyckf uckf uckf cufk fuck fuckf ufck fuck fuckf ufk cfuk cfuk c

I have been toying with that board game idea but, for now, back to the story.

Gon is laying in the grassy field behind the ridge that shelters his community, staring up at the Roof and almost overcome by the idea that it is somehow staring back at him. It is late and his parents will be expecting him back soon. With great effort he manages to tear his gaze away from the vast ocean of concrete and steel behind the haze of clouds ovehead.

I've written well over 100 words today already which is a very nice win but I'm not sharing them on Tumblr because they're related to a new idea I want to work on. I can talk about it vaguely but I don't want to go into too much detail yet.

I've been working on the idea of an open-world role-playing board game for 1-4 players that combines elements of single-player and cooperative gameply. The general idea is that players start off as peasant labourers in a fantasy world who dream of being adventurers. Players split their time between accomplishing solitary tasks to earn money during the day at their job, spending that money in town on supplies and adventure gear, then working together to go on quests in the evening.

My fiancee likes the idea so I'm going to explore it and try to come up with a functional prototype.

OK. What next? It starts off with Gon. A young boy in an isolated community living in this sparse grassland.

Sidebar (for my eyes only, spoiler): the ancient aliens that build this structure also constructed others. The reason there are both aliens and humans in the structure are because those ancient alies grouped creatures who could share an atmosphere and living conditions. Because of this, some aliens have reacted for better or for worse to the atmosphere, because of some subtle change in the makeup that they've had to augment themselves in order to make up for it. So you can have cool aliens with integrated breathing tubes and stuff.

It's almost midnight but I didn't forget. Talking about that super structure story idea. Unfortunately Maze Runner coded. Whatever. Gon is a scholar, or something like one. He's been living in this place called The Spire for about 5 years trying to learn theories about what is beyond the Roof but he feels the ideas there are static and uninspiring. He never fit into the strict structure of this place in regards to education. He's smart and well liked but struggled to impress academically. So he leaves to go somewhere he's never been before. To discover what other people know and theorize.

That's super basic and cliche but I'm sleep deprived and don't have it in me to pretend it's a brilliant premise but I swear it is a cool idea.

I am writing 100 words right now even though I don't want to and I have nothing to say. I am writing 100 words because even though I don't want to and have nothing to say, writing 100 words is more words than 0 words.

All zero-hundred people who read this are slacking; nobody suggested anything so I'll have to do that brainstorming now.

So it's a guy in this massive super structure. It's his world, it's all he and anyone else have every known. People have explored for thousands of years, travelling across this structure, climbing higher and higher levels, finding passages that lead to new areas, and some wonder what—if anything—is beyond the Roof? The usual answer is simply: more Roof.

There's also alien-type people, strange creatures, sci-fi gadgets, and cool stuff like that. The main idea was that it was supposed to follow this guy named Gon as he travels from society to society, meeting new people and trying to learn what others know about the world they inhabit, slowly unravelling mysteries about the ancient past and the creators of this place.

I got like 5 minutes before I have to leave to meet my fiancee for dinner so we're gonna bang these 100 words out right now.

I'm gonna brainstorm a new story idea. I've been toying with this idea for a novel about the people living inside a massive, seemingly infinite structure of monolithic brutalistic architecture, lots of steel and concrete. Problem is I only have a vague idea of what the story should be, and no idea how to achieve it. So I'm putting it on pause until I at least have some ideas.

Trying to write 100 words while sitting in on a 7 hour resume writing workshop in the hopes that it'll make me not feel like blowing my brains out for the next five minutes.

Why are we talking about creativity while writing something that is the antithesis of creative? This is not a creative endeavour, and it feels a little patronizing to pretend that it is. Writing something with the express purpose of tricking automated scanning software into thinking you're a good candidate does not equal creativity.

This workshop is being run by 3 very HR-coded white ladies who probably read Linkedin thinkpieces in the bathtub.

100 words. Words about words are better than no words. Meaningless words are better than no words. Trying to write while my fiancee talks aloud to herself is difficult, although to be fair her job is really frustrating and if I was in her position I'd be loudly cursing every time one of my annoying coworkers invited me to a pointless meeting too.

As the designated un(der)-employed person in this relationship it is my duty to keep her company while she's doing her boring work. This has the undesirable effect of me being too distracted to do any of my own work, like: writing these 100 words per day, updating my CV, writing a cover letter, or applying to jerbs. But, after much distraction and side-questing and with only 16% battery life remaining on my laptop, I can safely say that these 100 words are written and I can move on with my life now.

That's it, that's literally it. New challenge where I have to write 100 words a day and post them on Tumblr. Edited or not, coherent or not, doesn't matter. It doesn't even have to have be connected to a larger narrative, or any narrative at all for that matter.

This is 50 words already. If nothing else then this challenge will be a good example of what 100 words actually looks like. 100 words isn't much; it shouldn't take a day's effort to do. By the time I finish this sentence I'll be over 100 and it took me less than 5 minutes.

There, those two paragraphs were 103 words. This one is superfluous; I could have posted already and it would have met my criteria. But since this is the first post of this challenge I thought I'd lay out my intentions, on the off chance anyone else finds it interesting but mostly for my own clarity of mind:

100 words according to the Ellipsus word count. 100 on the dot is fine but 99 is not.

Quality does not matter. Spelling mistakes, run on sentences, grammatical errors, even complete gibberish is acceptable. I could write the word "cucumber" 100 times in a row and it would count.

AI does not count. This one is obvious for myself, but might not be to someone out there using AI to write for them. It doesn't count, in fact it counts towards the negative. Anything you ask AI to do is something you get worse at as a result, because you're passing up an opportunity to improve.

Why am I doing this? To recapture my passion for writing? To slow the progress of brain rot on my frontal lobe? To give some structure and consistency to my life? A eaag ne annaoork to worrrkur fa ruuchi? Maybe.

What will I be writing? Possibly complete nonsense and stream of consciousness until I manage to break through the temper tantrum inside my toddleresque brain stamping its feet and screaming "I don't want to do this!" Eventually I'm sure I'll use this as a platform for posting snippets of longer form content and maybe outlines and general story ideas.