Menu

Subscribe

Realm of the InterNutter

Thoughts, stories and ideas.

Challenge #01607-D146: Hermit Permit Pending

"To be honest, I hadn’t planned on the whole Dark Lord thing. It just sort of happened." -- RecklessPrudence

It's not easy being a hermit. Especially not when random adventurers get lost and mistake your cave for a dragons' lair or the entrance to the goblin caverns or something of the ilk. I had to learn a few spells just to protect what little I have from their greedy hands. It takes days to make a decent bowl. And the rogues kept stealing my cauldrons! Do you have any idea how hard it is for a hermit to get a halfway decent cauldron? It's harder than you think.

So, yes. I admit to slaying a few under-prepared adventurers just to get the coin for what folks like them stole in the first place. And a sign for the entrance to my cave so that, I hoped, the adventurers would no longer barge into my home and disturb my meditations.

What I got instead was a bunch of adventurers thinking I was some kind of super mystic who could either heal them or grant some form of divine booster to their extant skills, and thereby defeat whatever it was they were fighting this week. And when I could only offer them soup? They trounced me and stole everything. Again. So I started brewing up some poisons to lace the soup with, and antidotes for myself and anyone who actually turned out to be bona-fide good. It saved a great deal of time, to be honest.

Continue Reading

Prompts remaining: 13 Submit a Prompt! Ask a question! Buy my stories!

Tropes That Annoy Me: Hypergendered Fat

Think about all the overweight people represented in our media. Now think about all the overweight main characters. What do they have in common?

Well, if they're not Jack Black, who can actually get away with the Overweight Antihero, then they are excruciatingly well-dressed. Neat as the proverbial pin.

The ladies (far rarer than the men) are aggressively cute. The stand-out example is Penelope Garcia from Criminal Minds. She is the girliest of girly girls, despite being in a STEM discipline. Every

Read more »

Challenge #01606-D145: Miss Handling

"You place too much trust in me, I think."

"Until you can place more trust in yourself you may rely on mine in you." -- RecklessPrudence

Rael got the shock of his life just being invited to someone else's home. Five seconds inside the door, he got one big enough to turn his entire body silver.

Officer Lyr Marken, Subchief of Security for the JOAT sector of the Elemeno, had just handed him her infant daughter. With nothing more than a negligent,

Read more »

Smol Dramas

Once again, I have to rant about a few things because life is hellishly inconvenient and everything costs too much and I slightly want to scream.

First up - ISBNs.

So I was thinking that once you got an ISBN for one book, you could use the same ISBN for the SAME CONTENT. I couldn't find anything about this on Lulu, but Smashwords insisted on one, so I thought I'd better check with Lulu just to be sure.

And dummins me went

Read more »

Challenge #01605-D144: Articles of Beauty

Us humans have skin lotions and hair straighteners/curlers - what do other species do to improve the Outer Alien? -- Anon Guest

There are things you can sell anywhere. Popcorn, for example, is the only known deathworlder food that is so inoffensive that it can be sold to Havenworlders. Many more things change uses between species.

"What is this liquid?"

"We call it 'varnish'. It's a clear polymer coat that adds shine to static surfaces."

Continue Reading

Prompts remaining: 15 Submit

Read more »

Tropes That Annoy Me: I Have Brothers

It's usually a feature of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but sometimes your Action Gal explains her usually manly feats with "I have brothers". The brothers are almost always older, and numerous, and our female lead has learned to hold her own against them as some form of survival skill.

Sometimes, there are no brothers, the mother is usually out of the picture1, and the father "didn't know how to raise a girl" so did all the boy stuff with her.

Read more »

Challenge #01604-D143: They Grow So Fast

How about one where Aliens are stunned at the absurd growth rate/ regenerative properties that humans seem to have. Either for something as small as fingernails or hair needing constant maintenance, to 'how did that child grow a full METER in the ten years I was absent?!' -- Anon Guest

Human Steff had reproduced. Live birthing was trauma enough for most of the crew, but the idea that humans could be small and fragile was overwhelming. These mammals had to be

Read more »

Tropes That Annoy Me: The Fighting Fucktoy

If you want to know all about the Fighting Fuctoy, you won't find much about it on tvtropes.org at all. Nope. For that, you have to go to sites written by, and run by exclusively female authors.

Or you could absorb this picture:

[Artistry care of Kate Beaton of Hark, A Vagrant! fame. Link leads to her Strong Female Characters series collation]

Any attempt to put this sort of thing up on tvtropes results in, I presume, a phenomenally unbelievable amount

Read more »

Challenge #01603-D142: Eat Snax

"Fat grubs in butter sauce." this was from a Lizard culture's idea of Snack Food. Humans have popcorn, crisps, peanuts etc. So how about one of those Snack Food van equivalents that caters to various species, and make a good living thereby. -- Knitnan

Eat Snax the sign blared in potentially noxious colours. Underneath, a more staid sign discreetly told the observant that this was a suggestion and not an order. Inside the ludicrously small booth, a popcorn popper was doing its

Read more »

GDI

I was really hoping for the crises to be done with by today. I wanted to talk about the Fighting Fucktoy trope with y'all.

But no. Life has intervened and I need to bitch about stuff for a bit.

Before you fret, Chaos is fine. Her tooth is still nice and shiny and she's eating okay. Today's threat to the return of normalcy is... Mayhem.

Yes, folks. Disasters come once per little darling in this house, and it's Mayhem's turn to fuck

Read more »

Challenge #01602-D141: Farewell Letter

[TITLE: Constant vigilance or endless confusion.] One of those sayings that are only too true, put your own spin on this one. -- Knitnan

They say, It's not paranoia if they really are out to get you. They say, pesimists are rarely disappointed. They are frequently right about this sort of thing. They really are out to get me. And I am very rarely disappointed in my expectations. Any day, they will find me. They will do horrible things. It's what they

Read more »

Signs of a rotten week

The fear/exhaustion feeling is not going away. It's starting to suck major league balls.

I will do just about anything to make it go away. Except break Keto. That crap is not going to happen.

Fortunately, I have a fuckoff-huge coffee hoard and little tricks like sugarless mints to help maintain awareness.

The worst part is trying to go to sleep at night. I can succumb to the exhaustion, but the fear manages to keep me awake for way longer than

Read more »

Challenge #01601-D140: Unseen Creatures

You washed two, now there's only one sock. Black Hole? Alternate dimension? Sir P'Terry's sock Eater? -- Anon Guest.

Even in the modern day, there are things unknown to magic or science. The hidden creatures that have so far evaded notice by the common and uncommon worlds. They eke out an existence in the forgotten corners. And live where you'd never notice them. One such creature is the line-dangling shoe lark, which exclusively nests in the shoes random people throw over the

Read more »

Blurghledy

Something is in the air. Something got to me in the dead of the night and reminded me that asthma is a son of a bitch.

Sneezin' and Wheezin' Season got me, last night, and I woke to the all-too-familiar sensation of not having enough air. So I've used Max for maybe the third time since I started on Keto.

I'm okay. I found my Seratide and dosed myself up on that and some nebuliser Atrovent. I can breathe again.

What I

Read more »

Challenge #01600-D139: Best in the Business

[TITLE: Acme Showroom.] You know Acme - All those cartoons. Especially the 'Roadrunner" -- Anon Guest

It was pristine. It was flashy. This company, the architecture screamed, has made a lot of money. You should invest in this company, it said. It's a wise choice.

The objects of pride were on revolving plinths. They had never been used, and they were polished regularly. Everything looked like the pinnacle of engineering.

It was a wonder how this company got sued in the first

Read more »