Writer's Notebook

[johnhern]

Looking through my Penzu account I find I have quite a few ideas sitting around.

So for the fun of it, good or bad, I will post them here in this thread for some feedback.

It doesnt matter if the feedback is food or bad.

For my first post....an idea I had if the Joker was in today's society and had a blog.

Jackie's Blog

The world has gone batty, insane in the head. They live their lives sporadically, no end to their constant desires for more and more and more. Will they take it all when they die? And die they will, glorious death that we run from. Which is funny because many people die the most boring deaths.

Imagine if everyone decided that they should die in the most fashionable way, or a never ending death contest, where only those who live can see who is the winner. In any case, those who fear death only live their lives in agony.

But no one asks my opinion anyway. If they had, they would only think I was the crazy one, actually believing that death means something for both those who die and those who live. If you ask me, I would rather die jumping off the empire state building with a bit of C4 ready to blow when I reached a certain speed. That would be much more exciting than being hit by a car or simply falling asleep and not waking up the next morning. I just referenced a movie there, no thought is original anyway, someone once said.

I would think that those on death row would feel the same, maybe toss them out of a plane with no parachute or toss them into a tank of starving sharks. Whoever lasts the longest or neglect to wet themselves will win a prize that goes to their living loved ones. Maybe add a check to the deal with a plaque saying, "The winner with the best bladder" or something. Whatever works.

People these days... I will never get why they do what they do. Me, for example, I always have an end game, a reason for what I am doing. This track leads somewhere and it's the reason why the wealthy become wealthy. Everyone else seem to be on random trains, never knowing where they are going, worried about how the train feels. Forget how the train feels if you know where you end up.
A gun in hand is better than an empty thought, especially if it's loaded I always say.

I look out my window now and see a normal person so focused on their facebook or whatever is on their phone. I think about how she would feel if someone ran off with her baby just now. Of course, at first she would be like "oh my baby" and then see how long until it ended up being a post with a thousand likes online. Other people relish in gossip and the tired angst of others is probably the most popular in the world.

There are sick people in the world and in my opinion ordinary people are the worst. At least serial killers help reduce the population of normal idiots.

They do something to benefit society bringing down the amount of resources necessary to feed the world. While normal people just think of want, want, want, and take, take, take. Self centered theatrics all the while acting like they are better than their neighbor. It reeks into religion as well. All these people supposedly helping the world and so on. Bullplop it's all about the mighty dollar in the end.

I mean religion is internally focused no matter how you look at it. It's all about me me me. I want to go to heaven or whatever passes as that in the religion. I want to be seen as all great to my God.

I personally choose to have faith in God. So don't get me wrong. But hey... No one can say I am sane anyway.

It pops my balloons everytime I think of all the people out there who don't deserve to be breathing the same air and that guy who keeps messing up my programs.

Look let's not cross the T's and dot the I's just yet. I mean I just need a little cash to fun my Operations (yes, fun them idiot) . Everybody needs some cash at some point. I just need a lot of it to cash in some checks for people and put them a few feet under the ground.

It's not my fault they are at the end of their due. They're the ones that are stupid and phony baloney. I just can't stand them walking around. Picking 'em off one by one sucks and it's really time consuming so blowing a bunch of them up at once is just easier you know?

But this guy won't leave me alone. Strutting around in a black suit all the time making it hard to see him. Really knocks my jokes down everytime.

If it weren't for him we would have a nice clean city full of people that deserve to be walking around. I bet his problem is humanitarianism. Stupid. The whole lot of them.


The above was written way back in... November of 2014...I hadnt written further after that. Its a common theme in my writing hehehe.

I will copy paste some more a bit later. At work atm.

 

[KentCave]

Brother John. Thank You.
Am glad that @juneberrychan and me finally sparked your flintstones ready for a bonfire..so to speak.
lol
Fire away! Know that, at least there will be "someone" waiting for "more" and MORE!
(gonna savour this..now)

Dicey Nicey. Feedback for Food or Bread.

 

[johnhern]

Yeah, feedback is good or bad. But in the end you eat it and digest the reality of whether something is cliche, garbage, or good.

 

[johnhern]

No title - idea for both story and PvP/campaign android game.



I woke up one morning a few years ago and wrote this down from a dream I had.

---------------------

Family starts out at grocery store and during the time in there a tattooed group is also there.

Car doesn't start and the tattoos family asks to take them home.

Family about to go but young boy gets activated by an almost invisible hand and can see invisible door leading to a cave that exists in another realm.

During the argument the boy hands the driver a leaf out of thin air and then the family walks away. The driver is scared because while they were talking the boy zoomed in the cave and defeated the monster (or whatever was in there cant remember).

The boy goes to school and finds other kids like them and teachers that have doors to other realms to take kids.

Boy learns of the history of kids that come from a lineage of a mysterious group from the time of the Crusades.

The tattoo kids are enemies at first but then later become allies in the story.

The online part is to gain more powers and battle against other kids.

Each kid has his own powers. They are randomly chosen at the beginning of the game.

Each kid has two friends at first NPC. These kids do not work in PvP. And they battle through teachers at school and bad groups of kids.

Powers are basically colored and allow high fighting skills which can be enhanced.


As you can see from the copy/paste I was still half asleep when trying to get the idea down asap. Using mobile at work so not worrying about grammar in my actual typing atm.

 

[johnhern]

This next idea I am kind of partial to.

I actually planned on writing this series but someone took my title and it actually upset me enough to put the idea down.

In October of 2011, I had this idea and I wanted to call it Social Suicide. This was a couple years before the movie came out with the same title...but totally different.

I was thinking of both the actual meaning of someone doing something dumb on facebook and committing social suicide and the other meaning where people commit suicide on social media.

However someone took the title as a book 2 of a series published on amazon. It pissed me off because it was about someone murdering someone else but only while tweeting. And then called it twittercide.

Even when they did make a movie with this title, it wasnt like that book. It was inspired by Romeo and Juliet.

Whatever. So I actually only outlined a bit in penzu in the end, though I had written a lot more and deleted it after finding that Twitter-murderer book that took the title.

Social Suicide-social destruction-social hypnosis

Idea: explore mass psychology and individual psychological triggers that push humans to act in a certain way. In this case suicide or murder. Use two ends, one from a group in the shadows who have created an experiment and created a high for themselves. The other end from an intelligent detective, most likely female, that identifies similarities and the like of deaths on social media.

Notes:

A detective starts to see a pattern in suicides across social media platforms.
Throughout the story we see two sides of a coin...
On the detective side, we build around locating similar friends, similar patterns that led to the suicides, develop an idea of social media hypnosis so to speak.
On the other side we see a group who started out with an attempt to make a single person commit suicide.
Successful as it was, an experiment arose from this. The group decide to challenge themselves to see if it was a fluke. They develop different methods of nudging and molding a victim and finding ways to ruin parts of their lives and reputations.
Then when they become more successful, an internal challenge to see which members can create the most suicides is set.

At the end of the first book in this short series, the detective is successful in tracking down and arresting one of the members, but the detective is not aware that this is a member, the detective simply thinks the person could know a member, however, intimately.

The second book covers the interrogation, then the survelience, the addition of suicide for hire, making the victims more important, harder to manipulate, and more challenging overall.

The detective does not know that the group knows about the detective due to the earlier interrogation. The group focuses on a significant other and pushes them into suicide, while almost successfully pushing the detective to suicide.

The end of the book puts a cap on all the intimate drama with the detective and ends with the same member from before captured by the detective, outside of the law, and the cliff hanger leaves off where the fun begins.

Books one and two should release next to each other, where book three can wait for at least 1 full month of gaining fans.



As you can see this is all that is left of that idea. I kind of took that whole...I cant use the title personally because I couldn't figure out another one. Lol. Looking back that was retarded.

 

[johnhern]

Working title-- Time Sliding.

This was a short draft of an idea I had based on people talking about the mandella effect years ago.





Chapter 1 - The semi-technical please plow through.

Let me start by saying that if you are reading this then something happened and I cannot publish online any longer. I am trying to write down everything, a journal of sorts, so that if you were not able to find the clues I have hidden in many web sites, then you would still have something to go by, the whole story in one place.

If you want to know how I do it, you will have to realize that I do not completely know how its done. I only know that a few people can do it, and a few people cannot based on my experience so far. I have been trying to teach it online, let people know that it is possible, before I am caught or worse.
Twice I took a path that led to capture, however, I was already experienced enough to know which choices I could slide to avert that reality.

Some of you do not know the beginning of the story, and I have heard it embellished to the point of myth and legend. Let me summarize, as much as I can, how this happened, and how it can be used for both bad and good. Always slide responsibly, though that sounds like a prevention commercial, it is the most important thing to understand first. Slide responsibly for your sake, the sake of those around you, and for a better chance at anonymity.

What is time sliding? To put it in the simplest form of thought, it is sliding sideways from one timeline to another. Someone smarter than myself had said it is like jumping to the next closest dimension that runs almost concurrent to ours, except with a few slight changes.

To illustrate this, and also show how I came upon sliding, I will have to go back to when I first had even a minor thought of what all of this stuff is.

Its important to note here that time sliding has rules, though they are still being written with experience, that keep people alive. But I will get to those somewhere farther on.

The Mandela Effect was a conspiracy theory that had caught my eye online one day. Specifically, it was the Forrest Gump saying "Life was like a box of chocolates", where the box of the video tape stated "life is like a box of chocolates" and I remembered that phrase as "is" from the movie.

As I looked at more and more of these "memories" that many people did not share, and the theory that someone destroyed the universe/timeline/dimension, and we fell into another, I started to wonder about the science behind it. I am not, have not been, or ever will strive to be, an Einstein. My expertise is in information systems. I look at the world logically, and as such, have a curiosity for the "how" of things.

When I was young, I wanted to know how the phone worked, and I studied, broke apart my home phone and put it back together again. I did the same with a Tandy 2000 computer, software, and learned networking and telecommunications along the same lines of thought.

With the Mandela Effect, I wanted to know if it was theoretically possible.

I found a lot of information online back then. So much that I was about to write it all off as just another crazy conspiracy like big foot and the Loch Ness monster. The one and only real theory that stuck with me, and made me search online for similar thoughts, was the theory of dimensions and timelines.

According to this theory, there are infinite timelines or dimensions that run along side of ours. If you were to fall into the next one over (by mistake somehow), it wouldn't matter because it is concurrent with ours by the millisecond. Sometimes, people can tell this happened while driving or walking and a second later they appear a half mile from where they started in the blink of an eye. You wouldn't even know the difference really though it would be a bit shaking at first. However, if you fall far enough, eventually you start to notice things entirely different.

Technically speaking, its a working theory for the Mandela Effect. We (as in our species) did something to mess up our time line not once, but a multitude of times to end up in a dimension (or timeline) far away from our original one. So far, in fact, that those who slid can remember things those who were originally in that timeline cannot.

Publicly, the Mandela Effect is identified by anything famous that was different in the past. Privately, however, it effects the minds of close families that do not remember the same things happening in the past.

What happened to the people who did not slide? The ones who cannot remember the past the same way. Did they die with the old timeline? Did they not replace themselves in the new dimension or timeline?

What I found at the time was that if this theory were correct, then the people who cannot remember the same past were not taken over by their sliding selves. Thus a quarter of the population remembers differently. While the remaining population of the world are not sliders but the original people of that timeline.

In other words, some people lived and everyone else died. Of course this could only occur if something drastic happened and destroyed our timeline over and over and over.

Of course I did not know of the actual method of time sliding until I ran into an experiment online around the same time I made my conclusions regarding the "how" of the Mandela effect.

A large group of people would try to change their lives by jumping into a dimension where a decision they made would fork instead of stay on the same path. For example, John Doe made the decision to start smoking again after two years of being smoke free. Using this experiment he could jump into the timeline or dimension where he did not start smoking once more.

To prove this theory people would think of many decisions they had made and try to magically fall into the dimension where this did not occur or the other side of the coin was chosen.

For some reason I was making a connection between the two theories and wanted to try the experiment. The first ten times or so nothing seemed to work. I was attempting to invest in Google when it first launched or Facebook or anything I could think of. The problem was, what I did not know at the time, not only were these things too far in the past, but I also had never been interested to either invest, or not, at any time in the past. That is where the rules start to slither into the tale.

Chapter 2 - Firsts in Sliding

My first successful time slide was by accident. During a regular shopping trip a kid stole a box of cereal. I had the opportunity to stop him and pay for it, the thought had actually crossed my mind, and I chose to let him attempt to steal the cereal.

The grocery store was like any other. Rows of food stacked specifically for buyer habits, a nice freezing temperature compared to the heat outside, and ten plain clothed security people keeping a diligent eye on the shoppers.

The boy knew about these types of security and looked as though he was keeping an eye on them as well. When he grabbed the cereal he glanced at the mirror in the corner, thought it was the perfect time, and sprinted toward the exit.

Without warning an arm stuck out at the end of the aisle. The security guard made an attempt to grab the boys shirt. Instead he mistakenly placed his bulky forearm right in the path of the boys face. Normally, this may have simply knocked the boy down, at most caused a concussion he could have also gained playing baseball or tag football.

On this day, this boy had nothing but a bunch of bad luck. Not only was he caught, but this basic cross to the face smashed his nose right into his forehead. When his head smacked the tile floor I saw his face full of blood and I knew the kind of pain he must have been in.

Within an instant I was now holding the same box of cereal with the boy by my side complaining. According to him he didn't need my help. I am sure the look on my face as I sat in the aisle was one of shock because he immediately shut up. I played it off the best I could and bought the cereal saying next to nothing to anyone at the time. I sent him away and thought only of the old Final Destination movies.

There was a period of three months without incident. The second time I time slid it was slower, I had a better understanding of what happened.

I was in my apartment kitchen at the time. My apartment was pretty nice considering the low cost. The front door opened into a small two foot by three foot tiled entryway. Directly opposite the front door was a closet, I assume was supposed to hold umbrellas or jackets for those leaving. Immediately to the right was my small living room with a kitchen separated by a bar on its left side. To the right of the living room was the sliding glass door that opened to the balcony where two children could barely fit with a standard barbecue pit.

On the bar side was the short hallway to the bathroom on the left, the second room to the right, and the master bedroom at the end. I describe it as short because it was only a bit over six feet in total length. I could have lain down with my head at the door of the master bedroom and the entry to the hallway would almost meet my feet. I could compare the length to a queen sized bed if I knew the actual length of one.

My living room had a single couch, tv stand with tv, and my video game console on a side table.
The kitchen was small enough that only one person could walk around in it. On the right was the bar with a counter on the kitchen side. Under the counter were cupboards I never used, the same with the cupboards above it.

Now that I think back, I hardly ever used anything in the kitchen except the small pantry and the fridge. Most of my meals had come from fast food places or were microwavable. I can remember around a whole year when I ate only nachos and microwave dollar burritos from the liquor store just down the block from my apartment. It is hard to believe that half of the population of the USA is still alive from all of the junk people eat three times a day.

This particular day, I was going to cook something, however, we had a party a few days before and there was a heavy helium tank in the kitchen where we stored it up against the back wall. You would think, if I was really lacking in common sense, I would fire up the stove and blow myself up. Lucky for me, I was born and brought up in a standard environment surrounded by smart people who taught me that putting my hands in fire would end up in quite a bit of pain.

I had two choices in that situation. I could have pulled the tank out a bit, then used the dolly to move it away from the wall and out onto the balcony, slash, back yard. The second option was to try and lower it down to lay on the dolly and then move it out to the same location. I decided to move the large, and full, tank out from the wall, and push it on the dolly instead of lay it down. Unfortunately, the dolly was broken next to the bottom of the wheel. Without, realizing, the cuff of my pants caught in the broken metal, knocked me off of my balance, and down I went backwards. Somehow, I fell on my hand wrong and broke my wrist, as well as the entire tank falling on my leg. For an instant I was in agonizing pain, until I wasn't.

I noticed when it happened this time. I consciously thought of myself making the decision to lay the tank down and standing on the side of it to do so. In that moment, though I did not know it, I slid to that decision, to the timeline where I made that decision. It couldn't have been the nearest, or even the first ten timelines, they are too close to each other. I couldn't see how it was done, or even how I felt it happen slower that time. Only that it happened.

Again, I thought of movies where a person can see the future, before it happens. After they see the visions they are given a second chance to do something different. Yet, I felt everything and also "woke up" after the second decision was already made. Not just after the second decision was made, but at the exact same moment in time after it happened. My mind immediately recognized it as if I moved over to the other choice, but did not travel back in time to make a new choice or even actually do the action that comes with making another choice. I had already complete the action. I couldn't write it off as some X-Man power to see into the future. I also had the fleeting idea that time travel as science fiction portrays it was a complete and total impossibility.

Questions felt as though they slammed in the front of my forehead. I was so involved with wondering and thinking, I hadn't realized that time had passed and it was about an hour later when I noticed that I was sitting at the table and staring at the helium tank still in the middle of the kitchen on its dolly and I hadn't eaten. I took note of those questions on an empty page of an address book.

We had those back in those days, when the internet was still widely available on dial up, less available on DSL, and even less still was broadband cable. My phone actually sat on the kitchen table, though I can remember answering more calls than I had ever made. My cell phone was a small, black, flip phone with a dial pad and green digital numbers to tell me who I was calling and who was calling me. I made almost fifteen calls on that phone each month, and paid around eighty dollars a month to have it available. It wasn't that great of a deal, but I did it to myself.

Chapter 3 - Research

Just like you are doing now, I was reading everything I could on dimensional shifts. Most theories are complete garbage. I wasn't able to understand at the time, but like alien theories, most of the world's population have lost all comprehension of common sense. I fully understand the need to believe in something besides what we see in front of our faces, but blindly writing junk down because a thought is there is just plain ridiculous.
However, just as those who believe in Christ, which I admit I do out of my own choice, are able to read the same thing as others and see something different, I began to see similarities and base ideas that just fit together.
The difference was that I had slid across timelines and noticed it. Now I wanted to figure out the "how".



That's it on that idea. If you came straight to this post there are other things I wrote above in this same thread.

@juneberrychan @CordeliaCross

 

[CordeliaCross]

I really like the dark, angst, dysopian feeling of your writing @johnhern . I don't know if you've ever heard of a tabletop RPG called Rifts, but it has the same sort of dark futuristic feeling. I really hope you are able to make this into a game like you wanted to. I'd definitely play.

 

[KentCave]

Aaaah Rifts!!!
Love the Splugorth. They reign in Atlantis. Two books.
The World of Vampires, Wyrmwood, New Camelot, Old Gods / Alien Intelligences, Phase Worlds (2 books too) etc
Still have the physical copies of the delicious Sourcebooks and PDFs too, of course. 30+ of it, up till the South American expansion of later Lone Star's Lore.

Great Shadowrun and also Wonderful White Wolf : Vampire clans (Kindreds), Werewolves tribes (Garou, Lupus, Metis), Mages, Feys, etc.

Love Uplift too, the novels n the RPGs books. From author of the Ender's Saga. (Have the Steve Jackson's Sourcebook n the Illustrated Guide on How to Deal with Uplift Alien Clans)

I better Stop. Being Nostalgic. lol

 

[CordeliaCross]

@KentCave No need to squash the nostalgia! I still play Dungeons and Dragons every week with the same group I started playing with back in 8th grade. Rpg's are amazing. We have a million handbooks for different ones too. We even have a D20 based Zelda one xD

 

[KentCave]

KoDP. Glorantha. Tarsh. Thralls. Crag-spider!
I better..Stop.
err Six Ages coming up.
Had known David Dunham for ages.
KoDP FAQs still available all over.

 

[johnhern]

I really like the dark, angst, dysopian feeling of your writing @johnhern . I don't know if you've ever heard of a tabletop RPG called Rifts, but it has the same sort of dark futuristic feeling. I really hope you are able to make this into a game like you wanted to. I'd definitely play.

Of course I have heard of Rifts. Lol. D&D before it was AD&D, and then after.
Such a great life before the era of handheld devices that take up all of our time. Back when playing outside (with a 20/80% chance of being kidnapped) was a thing.

Its been quite a while, as I am now working on touching the second half of a lifespan. But I miss many days around the table "thinking" and using a brain rather than simply "tap, tap, tap".

I will go ahead and post up some more stuff I had written, though almost everything I will find will be in parts, as I finished almost nothing lol.. maybe an idea would become boring. lol.

 

[KentCave]

I forgot to mention :
"Knights of Pen and Paper I & II"
Great Games, emulating the old D&D (Dungeons & Dragons) game system.

You are playing as Dungeon Master creating entertaining contents for the Four Players (Party members), like the Storytellers of old.
In gameplay like Eye of The Beholder but with cartoony graphics, instead of the 3rd-person views of Vampire the Redemption / Masquerade.

Available first for PC and then mobiles. Actually, just start directly from the sequel, wont lose much as no continuation of a story.
Got modules (expansion packs) and such, trying to give us a feeling as if it was like how ppl do it on older era.

It is quite a loooong game too, I think I only got till around 30% of the contents after weeks of continuous playing. It just felt too standard as a fantasy-fare, comparing to current games that combine genres and quite unpredictable on story part.

Stopping myself, before I keep going on and on and on..

 

[johnhern]

I forgot to mention :
"Knights of Pen and Paper I & II"
Great Games, emulating the old D&D (Dungeons & Dragons) game system.

You are playing as Dungeon Master creating entertaining contents for the Four Players (Party members), like the Storytellers of old.
In gameplay like Eye of The Beholder but with cartoony graphics, instead of the 3rd-person views of Vampire the Redemption / Masquerade.

Available first for PC and then mobiles. Actually, just start directly from the sequel, wont lose much as no continuation of a story.
Got modules (expansion packs) and such, trying to give us a feeling as if it was like how ppl do it on older era.

It is quite a loooong game too, I think I only got till around 30% of the contents after weeks of continuous playing. It just felt too standard as a fantasy-fare, comparing to current games that combine genres and quite unpredictable on story part.

Stopping myself, before I keep going on and on and on..

I had just come back to this.. you know.. I modded KPP2. I probably have to update that at some point.

 

[CordeliaCross]

I also just started replaying the D20 Based Legend of Zelda game. It's so much fun XD

 

[johnhern]

If anyone is still watching this thread, since I have been modding choice of games and studying the apk structure I found that they use a specific script. But its available publicly here.

That said I will probably study it more and it looks superbly easy to use and I may just start writing my own and publishing them. I don't have a job (it was liquidated since we were outsourced from the usa). So I have quite a bit of time while I apply to new jobs via upwork each day.

 

[johnhern]

Adding to this I am going to open a google play developer account this weekend. My country is supported for merchant account and so on. So I will do that.

 

[CordeliaCross]

Thats's awesome, @johnhern ! I'm so excited for you.

 

[johnhern]

Thats's awesome, @johnhern ! I'm so excited for you.

Paid for it this morning.. thankfully, its only $25 not like IOS which is 99 a year. Now I just have to figure out what I am going to do with it.

I named the studio Eat L8t Studios. Why eat late? No clue, just popped in my head.

 

[CordeliaCross]

I like that name!

 

[johnhern]

I like that name!

Thanks, apparently, it also had to come with a domain, so I had to buy one of those too... then it has to have a logo, yada yada, so I am working on all that.. and privacy policies and tons of stuff I didn't think I had to do upfront. But hey, guess that comes with having an "android game studio" even if its not actually any kind of studio yet. lol.