right off that bat

Altered Bart

THE LORD OF THE RINGS (1978)

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There’s six guys who live in this flat and all they do all day is play WoW and watch movies. Waking up at 2pm every day and there’s always just someone asleep on the bed near all the multimonitor computer setups. There’s always music playing and it feels like a recovery day every day, padding around blearily in pyjamas or underwear. Old hoodies from defunct school teams. They’ve got this system where they’re selling their excess computing power to companies and hosting all this warez, and they’re stealing the internet from the business next door anyway and getting welfare on top of all that. They’re self sufficient and never go outdoors except to buy more fast food, and even then only in the dark. But then one of them wakes up dead some heavy afternoon. He’s just dead and they don’t know why but maybe the floor covered in fast food wrappings is a clue. They don’t want to tell the cops because of the purgatory den they live in and the illegality that supports it, and as far as they know he never had any actual parents. So it’s trouble. It’s taking a long trip out to the forest and thinking about how stars are so far away for the first time in a long time. It’s sweating in the cold air and digging a hole all night with your brand new shovels to leave him alone in. And it’s a long few days cracking all his passwords to keep his identity and associated payments persisting. Until the rhythm of waking up every day at 2pm to play WoW for nine hours and half watch a movie on your other monitor takes over again. It’s the same as it ever was except now there’s a room no one ever goes in.

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