Tautology Club

Another week, another prompt. I'm trying to get back in the habit of doing them all.

The prompt this week was "key" - lots of potential. More importantly, I learned a new word today! "Tautology" - it means either a logical statement that is always true (e.g. "No bachelors are married") or saying the same thing twice with different words (e.g. "it's a free gift"). I learned it on xkcd.com in a strip that included the "Tautology Club" - so I'm writing the initiation one might face when joining the Tautology Club. In theory, anyway.

It's not my best piece, it's not really even that good, and my viewpoint character ended up as a smug superior jerk. Oh well.

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I was trying to get in this club. It was notoriously hard to join, but I'd been recommended by a current member. Still, I was surprised and excited to receive this card:

If you received this invitation,
you are invited to test for initiation.

There were six of us in the waiting room when it started. A member of the club entered.

"The first applicant will go first," he said.

We all just looked at each other. We weren't sure who was meant. Nobody moved for a few moments, but then someone stood up. Either he was ambitious, or full of initiative, or he'd been the first to arrive; I didn't know, since there was a sign that said "No talking before the test. If you have not begun the test, do not talk."

Mr. Initiative went into the room with the tester. The five of us left in the waiting room continued to wait.

Five minutes passed; we heard nothing from the other side of the door. We waited in silence. I waved at a girl; she smiled and rolled her eyes as I made what I hoped were flirtatious and not obscene gestures. Then she started gesturing back; I quickly realized that I did not know sign language at all. She smirked at my confusion and wrote on some paper. It had her number and name and the note "call me after" - I smiled, nodded, and pocketed the slip.

More time passed. After about fifteen minutes, the first applicant finally left the testing room. He looked disappointed, and left without speaking.

The tester said, "The next applicant will go next."

No one moved. Moments passed and everyone continued to not move at all. I felt a little confident after my successful flirtation (I later decided that not speaking had worked to my advantage), so I stood up and volunteered myself.

When the door closed behind me, I felt the weird pressure sensation you get in an air-tight chamber; it was completely silent. The club, it seemed, had borrowed the room and the lobby from the music club.

There was a table with ten keys on it. They all looked the same.

"The door is locked," the tester said. "You can't get through. The only key to the door is on the table, and only one of the keys on the table will unlock the door. If you want to get through the door, you must have the correct key. Which key will unlock the door?"

I looked at the far door. I looked at the keys. There was no way to guess correctly. I could agonize over the question for hours looking for hidden clues, or I could pick a key at random and take my chances. But it felt like a trick question.

I thought for a minute. What sort of trick question would the Tautology Club use?

Finally, I said, "The key that unlocks the door."

Visit me Gorica!

So I haven't been writing lately, and I so recently changed my blog's title from Unexcused Absence in the premature hope that I would update it regularly. Well, luckily, my wife is pretty great and she's talked me into writing tonight.

I do apologize for sitting out on the Flicker prompts lately; normally I try to comment even when I don't write, but that hasn't happened either. My bad.

This week's prompt is based on the photo to the left there; let's see what it does.

Once, but Friend no Longer?

For numerous reasons this evening, I dropped in on an old friend, GreenCine. Incognito, mind you; I haven't been on there in years, and boy howdy, it's not what it was.

You must understand; this was, at one time, not merely the non-netflix rental site. It was sort of a home. Back then, and largely still now, Netflix didn't do a good job of handling anime. GreenCine did, and through it I grew in geekiness and became worldly in a very narrow sense.

More importantly, I very slowly started interacting with people. At that time, there was an active community on the discussion board. There was a nearly-constant "Name that Movie" game; whenever someone guessed the movie, they started the game over. That was how I started. Shy? Yeah, shy awkward and a teenager. Constantly awkward. But I grew up a bit, made some friends. The nostalgia there still kind of hurts. Good people, these were, for the most part. I regret losing touch.

Anyway, it was a great group. And - this is key! - it was through this group that I made the connection to Cult of the Romance Junkies, a forum I joined and later owned where I eventually met the woman I later married. GreenCine was a key, central, and necessary link in this chain of causality. It is highly unlikely that I would have made contact with the Romance Junkies if not for my involvement in Greencine; it is compoundly unlikely that I would have had the chance to encounter Kathryn if not for being part of the Cult. And I only found GreenCine by trial-and-error looking for decent anime rentals online. It was not a direct path here, but it was quite possibly the only path. So I naturally have some nostalgia for the place.

Thus my return browse. The boards are not so active as they were once. It was depressing to click on the profiles of old friends and see that so many of them are, for all real purposes, quite gone.

Partly it's a problem with the fact that GreenCine is first a business, second a community. It's DVD rentals, and Netflix... well, it was pretty bad-ass, and even now it's still a few orders of magnitude more powerful than Greencine. The business grew and shifted; some people broke away, got left behind, or, as in my case, moved across the country and essentially out of good service range.

Also, there was trolling. Once, we were like the Australian outback - isolated by our weirdness, completely free of predators. But that had to change eventually, and eventually it did. A contentious atmosphere grew, and I took myself out of it. By then, the Romance Junkies were around for me, so I wasn't isolated (mind you, in physical reality I was and remain without any close personal friends, though I know quite a few more people through work and family-in-laws than I did then). I don't know if anyone meant to be a troll, but the effect was pretty much the same.

I friended several of the people from GC on Facebook - but we don't have meaningful discussions about food or fun games about movies (or, on a couple occasions, weird text-based RPGs or talk-show-style interviews with fellow board members that ended when I set them on fire). I basically get the same things from them on there that they get from me: occasional status updates, pictures of people I don't recognize, etc. It's Facebook. Alas.

A few click-throughs eventually brought me to someone who had formally "friended" me and I got linked to my old profile page. "No longer active" - no joke. Similar messages greet me on other pages, and those few that show "most recent postings" tend to link to posts two years old or older. At least two of them are topics like "Boy, sure is quiet around here. Woosh, woosh. That's the wind. Because nothing else is making noise."

I guess that happens. It's always sad when it happens to somewhere you loved though. Maybe GreenCine's forum will swing back around one day soon. But at least they can continue to serve the area within a few days shipping time of Irvine, CA with anime, foreign movies, and porn through the mail. They're still not Netflix, and that's still a good thing.