Prompts!

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  Can you please...?
  • InterNutter

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  I understand that some people are new to this and don't know how it all works. It goes a little something like this:

  You write a post I read the post I use the post as fuel for a flash fiction.

  Not much to fret about, right?

  Except...

  I really prefer it when the prompt is in the content of the prompt thread, and not the title.

  So can you all please make sure the prompt is not the title? It makes all things way easier for me.

  Likewise, it's preferable to have one post per prompt. Do not reply to a post with another prompt, please.

  Also... you don't need to tell me to have fun with a prompt. I always have fun. Telling me is just superfluous.

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  The Sun never rises in the British Empire...
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  Little known fact: Queen Elizabeth II is a descendant of Vlad the Impaler, meaning she, and the rest of the lineage to the throne under her, are direct heirs to the bloodline of Dracula...

  Kinda makes her remarkably long life seem a bit questionable now, doesn't it?

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  Time travel
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  "My apologies for the security breach. I was experimenting with temporal rifts and found myself here."

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  Pet name revenge
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  A havenworlder calls their human companion annoying and embarrassing pet names in front of other humans.

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  Sweet Rage
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  It's the nice, sweet, quiet ones that never argue that you should be afraid of.

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  Any idiot with the right runes and a few candles can do it...
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  Welcome to wizardry, where people with awful ideas and no social skills invoke supernatural forces to gain power and respect. Almost makes you want to tap out and start a little shop selling healing potions, huh?

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  Plunka! plunka, plunka.
  • Guest

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  The ship's human brought a ukulele on board, now they've infected the gravity drive.

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  It's just a jump to the left . . . .
  • Guest

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  [The Galactic Council learn about ANZAC day]

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  Violent Interrogation
  • Guest

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  What if someone was trying to get information out of someone else by threatening them, but the second person was just too positive. For example:

  "I'll cut off your leg."
  "Yes! I can get a peg leg!"

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  " . . . And far off battles of long ago . . . "
  • Guest

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  "Fear me, for I am descended from tigers!"

  "That would be much more impressive if you weren't only as tall as my boots and as heavy as this bag."

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  Airhorn
  • TheDragonsFlame

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  "Why is that rooster using an airhorn?"
  "It's outsourcing its morning cawing."

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  Not a Queen prompt. A Muppets prompt.
  • RecklessPrudence

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  The sheer existence of the various characters Jim Henson and his protégés created, both Muppets and Creatures. From highly stylised characters in a children's television show that still stand up today and whose show is still at the forefront of teaching children decency and tolerance, as it has been since its first season, but were never meant to pass as flesh-and-blood beings (no matter what so many children know in their hearts to be true, that despite not being flesh and blood, they are no less alive) to The Muppet Show, aimed at a decidedly older audience but with a surprising number of the same characters as Sesame Street and more in the same style, with that same lack of expectation to be seen as flesh and blood, to big-budget movies with characters that are meant to be seen as something you could see living on other worlds or in other realms like the latter two Star Wars of the Original Trilogy (Yoda was not a Jim Henson project, but many of the people he trained were instrumental in the wise (and slightly crazy) old being's creation), Labyrinth, the first two Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles films (not technically beings from other planets or realms, but still), and more, to realistic aliens shown in close-ups for long periods of time on a TV budget, as in Farscape, to puppets of actual animals that hold up to scrutiny even by people that know those animals like the Creatures they built for the first Babe movie that stood in for many of the animals when shots required things that were easier to get a puppet to do than an animal (such as move their mouths in time to speech) that in some cases hold up to scrutiny better than any pure-CGI character done with cutting-edge equipment that has to interact with the real world, rather than a stylised world done to match the character models, unless there was a truly ridiculous budget to throw at the problem - with hybrid CGI/actual actor characters only relatively recently reaching Yoda, Hoggle/Ludo/Sir Didymus, or especially Pilot/Rygel levels of believable in both their looks and how they interact with the world around them.

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  One more Queen prompt
  • RecklessPrudence

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  One more Queen prompt, not BoRhap-related this time. The story of the recording of "The Show Must Go On", the last song Freddie recorded for the band, barely a year before his death. He was so ill when the band recorded the song in 1990 that Brian May, who wrote the melody and much of the lyrics, after he and Freddie had sat down and determined some of the crucial lyrics Freddie wanted in there, had concerns as to whether he was physically capable of singing it. Brian May has said: "I said, 'Fred, I don't know if this is going to be possible to sing.' And he went, 'I'll fucking do it, darling' — vodka down — and went in and killed it, completely lacerated that vocal."

  The song was the story of Freddie's long slow death to HIV/AIDS, in a time when that was still a certain death sentence, and his fight against it and determination to still live his life. This video has the isolated vocals track, with Freddie as lead vocals and May as most of the backing vocals. And even separated from the rest of the song, it still raises goosebumps.

  (Wikipedia link for the song)

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  Bohemian Rhapsody-Related Prompt 1 of 3
  • Guest

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  Oh, and I forgot to put this at the end of the prompt. I would usually delete it and resubmit, but I obviously can't in this case:

  Considering how much the whole band liked audience participation, and Freddie in particular loved it when the audience was with him, just imagine his reaction to this, if he could be on stage as the whole crowd sang this to him?

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  Bohemian Rhapsody-Related Prompt, 3 of 3
  • RecklessPrudence

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  Third Bohemian Rhapsody prompt.

  This video. The Muppets are always an outstanding technical achievement when they do anything more complex than stand there and open and close their mouths, and it is a tribute to Jim Henson that his techniques have been used for such a wide range of media, from Sesame Street all the way to big-budget films like Star Wars and Labyrinth, to a TV series like Farscape that wanted a higher level of verisimilitude for their non-humanoid characters than CG can provide on a TV budget even now.

  But the Muppets, admittedly in their aimed-at-older-audiences-than-Sesame-Street The Muppet Show doing a cover of Bohemian Rhapsody (altered for added silliness that fits the characters so well, and does not take away from the song)? That dozens or hundreds of people spent weeks or more of their life to recreate the song that was rejected by the band's manager at first for being nothing that anyone would want to listen to and then initially panned by critics, with Muppets filling all the vocal roles, and it currently has almost "sixty-nine and a half MILLION* views, almost thirty million views higher than the next most popular Muppet music video, when the Muppet Youtube channel does not even have two-thirds of one million subscribers, says something about the lasting impact this song has had.

  (of course, the sheer fact that the official Muppets channel has almost two-thirds of a million subscribers in the first place, as well as multiple videos above the twenty million view mark and even more above the ten million view mark, says something about the lasting impact the Muppets themselves have had - don't want to give any impression otherwise!)

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  Bohemian Rhapsody-Related Prompt, 2 of 3
  • RecklessPrudence

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  Second Bohemian Rhapsody Prompt.

  This video. The person who built this machine has (at time of prompting) 97 other classic songs 'sung' and 'played' by the amalgamation of repurposed obsolete computer parts, but for their celebration of their 100th video, they chose Bohemian Rhapsody (it is two videos 'early' because the final necessary component for Bohemian Rhapsody to be successfully done by the machine was obtained recently, and it dates from the Windows 98 days. The fact that this machine, which has done all the other songs on this playlist, needed an extra component specifically to be capable of Bohemian Rhapsody speaks volumes in and of itself, but that Paweł Zadrożniak of Poland, which at the time this song came out and for many years afterwards was behind the Iron Curtain, assuming Paweł was even BORN yet, chose it as the 100-song celebration certainly says something about how well it has propagated in the collective human unconsciousness, and how much that collection of seeming nonsense lyrics that was panned by critics on release and yet has gone on to become one of the most well-known and well-regarded songs of the last century moved us all.

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  Archivaas and DNA data storage.
  • RecklessPrudence

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  Been a while since I submitted a prompt, but I thought of some Archivaas running across references to DNA data storage - look here for my ramblings on the subject (it became too long for a normal prompt, as I am forever incapable of being concise).

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  Pens
  • Guest

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  Aliens find out about "ink poisoning" and get concerned about crew members who write on their hands.

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  Locals
  • TheDragonsFlame

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  "I think we may have pissed off the locals."
  Loud explosions
  "We definitely pissed off the locals."

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  language
  • Guest

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  "Do you beeep realize that they beeep wired my voicebox with a digital censor ! Under the beeep pretext that it might shocked some Havenworlder. So now I can't say beeep like beeep, beeep, beeep beeep, beeep or even beeep ! That's half my beeep vocabulary ! It's goddam beeep."