Tuesday, January 10, 2006

Tagged

From the depths of the lake, a capsule rose towards the surface. It breached the perfectly still water surface, like a Soviet Typhoon submarine piercing the silent artic ice floes, with an abrupt whoosh and splash, and then silence as the waves quickly calmed, the only noises audible being little rivulets of water still dripping and running down the external cladding to the water surface and stirring little ripples that propagated outward in circular arcs.

The capsule’s hull parted, and a figure slipped into the water. Having been underwater but separated from the cool liquid for several days, he savoured the refreshing sensation.


Far away in the distance, an engine started up before abruptly revving angrily. Emerging from the far shore, a tiny boat slowly came into view. It was a long, slender craft, powered by a pair of supercharged Mercury 275 hp marine engines. The dart-like craft headed towards the swimmer, its bow raised in the air as it skipped through the calm lake surface, its twin impellers churning the water behind into a menacing foam.

The engines paused momentarily as the pilot switched into reverse thrust, before going full throttle again. The boat’s hull slapped onto the water surface, and a plume of foam began jetting towards the front of the boat instead of behind.

The slender aluminium boat drew to a stop next to the stunned swimmer, and the pilot revealed herself over the hull. Recovering his composure, the swimmer asked acidly, “what was that for?”

plink the pilot ignored his question, “I’ve got you a graduation present!”
She opened her palm, and a wisp of light fluttered out.
“What’s that?”
You’ve been tagged,” she explained, “It’s an idea, by the way.”
“It’s beautiful. I follow The Blog(u): A Blogger's Tale series, but never expected an idea to look so… remarkable.”
plink grinned. “Well, I’ve got to take my leave now. Going to see someone else,” with that, she disappeared behind the hull.

The engines barked to life, and idled quietly as plink manoeuvred the boat around. The craft was pointed back to the shore where she came from, heading away from the swimmer. As she engaged into gear, the propellers began to windmill lazily in the water.

A flash of realisation hit the swimmer, and he tried to get out of the way of the impellers’ thrust. He was too late. Plink pushed the throttle to wide open, and a column of water gushed at him.

As plink sped away, the swimmer thought he heard a mischievous cackle of laughter from the boat.


***


Jot down as many things as you can think of beginning with, 'I have come to realize…'

I have come to realise that:
I am getting tardy with this self propagating meme
A meme is a behavioural trait that propagates without the use of genes
However, I believe that if one is intent on building a mathematical model of the spread of a meme, it would still look very much like the model of a bacterial colony, with mutation rates, competition for resources (attention), propagation rates…
But memes would have high mutation rates compared to bacteria due to people executing the meme as they perceive it to be, not as the originator intends it to be.
I have no idea why I suddenly thought of creating a mathematical model of a meme.

I am actually contributing to the mutation rate by deviating slightly from the earlier method of explicitly starting every sentence with “I have come to realise that”.
Some of the preceding points do not actually go very well with the “I have come to realise that” bit because mentally, they were composed away from that phrase.
I can’t be bothered to undo the damage; let the mutation continue

I spent more time writing the introduction than actually doing the meme.
Meme reminds me of Mini Me, a very disturbing image.


I'm not sure if it's fantastic or daft, but the second sentence in this post is a massive 62 words long. Blame it on the submarines...


Labels: ,