Mastodawn

The Mad Frank's Dreams: Part 5 The Room

#FanFic #TheApothecaryDiaries
#Wss366 Feature

Dizziness overtook Chue, and she sank back down onto the straw mat. She began breathing the way she had been taught: in and out, focusing on a point in the center of her belly.

The pain in her head ebbed until it was a dull ache she could ignore. “Things are never as hopeless as they seem,” she reminded herself. True, The Mad Frank’s friends had kidnapped both Maomao and her, but Mao was still alive, and their captors had placed them in the same cell. Surely those were omens of good fortune. The gods must have been smiling on her.

She climbed to her feet and checked on Mao. Lifting one eyelid, she saw that the pupil was dilated. She hoped it was due to drugs, but the gash on Mao's temple made that seem unlikely.

Next, she examined the door. It was solid, and even if she forced it open, she would only escape into hostile, unknown territory. Next came the window. Three meters in front of her was a #featureless wall. Peering up, she could see the sky deepening into darkness. Below, she could see the edge of a rubbish-strewn alley.

Examining the boards followed. They groaned and gave slightly when tested. If she used her full weight, she should be able to remove one and then use it as a lever. That would be noisy. She wondered how long it would take the guards to arrive. Probably not as long as she’d need to make her escape.

She looked back at Mao and abandoned the idea of escaping through the window. The chances of success were slim to begin with, but they vanished if she had to carry an unconscious person.

That left her with only two options: out-talking or overpowering her captors. It was in the hands of the gods, she thought.

#MicroFiction #TootFic #ApothecaryDiaries #NMFic

Ian K Tindale Dec 4

Featureless

I propose 2026 to be the ‘Featureless’ year.

We all know the concept of Gear Acquisition Syndrome, whereby we end up with far too many instances of equipment that can do a job, so we collect multiples of the thing we’re interested in – guitars, synthesisers, computers, bicycles, radios, you name it.

If a person is interested in a thing which enables them to do a thing, there’ll be people who aren’t satisfied with just the one, they’ll keep buying more things which do the thing.

This isn’t really just a mindless process of collecting, most of us are chasing some smidgen of a percentage difference between the multiple things which we already own and the thing out there we don’t own – because of some advantage or feature or affordance which might make a real difference in the way we get the thing to do the thing.

What I’m proposing is that we just operate without those features – we go ‘featureless’ (at least for a while, several years). In truth, almost any given instance of a thing we already own can do the thing that the thing is supposed to thing – or we wouldn’t have bought it.

Cameras – any camera I own (which still works) can take a photo. I wanted to take photos. I’ve got cameras, I can take photos. If I keep getting more cameras, they take photos too, I can already do that.

Synths – any synth I have can make the sounds I want to make, or I wouldn’t have bought them. Any further synths are probably going to afford very similar sounds but perhaps with slightly different ways of getting there (and I do have enough ways of getting any sound I could imagine, in any way I could imagine, there’s literally no requirement to obtain further, for me).

The reason for going ‘Featureless’ is basically to convert the time (if not money) browsing the shopping places for secondhand or new alternatives to what we’ve already got, into time spent actually doing the thing which our existing thing things.

I propose we stick with what we’ve already got, for a while, but view what we’re doing (sticking with what we’ve already got for a while) through the perspective of taming our chase for features. I say, don’t chase the features, shun them, eschew them, diminish the importance of features. If you’ve got a thing which does the thing, stick with that in 2026 and do more of the thing with the thing we have.

Given the amount of time we have, we can either use the time for doing the thing with the thing which does things, or we can use it for endlessly shopping for another mostly similar thing which also does the thing our existing thing does.

Also, it’s possible to discover ‘new’ features within the thing we already have! #Featureless