The Scriptlings

Love can be just like hot peppers, exciting on the way in and agonizing on the way out.

Simon did not solve problems, he just shamed them into going away.

At the last moment, she remembered that her Master might be watching her and, knowing that good girls bend at the knees while bad girls bend at the waist, she picked up the cigar butt, as it were, in style.

The coding was anachronistic, kind of like bokeh in a renaissance painting.

You learned a lot by playing RPGs, although not all of it was useful, or real for that matter – unless you really believed that wolves normally carry seven gold pieces, a flawed garnet, a scroll of ice storm, and a lock pick somewhere about their person.

It had been an embarrassing moment, like the one you get when you realize for the first time that you have what it takes to become an accountant.

It was all kind of fuzzy, as if his mind was doing its thinking in limericks.

He was a good storyteller, but he told the kind of stories that made children run away from the village and adults look for a length of rope and some soap.

The conversation had been so lacking in quality that it actually made Toddlers and Tiaras look like good entertainment by comparison.

Let’s see, you will need a project plan, resource allocation, a timeline, test cycles, a budget, a contingency budget, lots of diagrams, flowcharts, a media release, a strategic vision, a charter, technical specifications, business rules, travel expenses, a development environment, deployment instructions, a user acceptance test, stationary, overtime schedule, a mock-up, prototypes…” “Tell me,” she said, “did the people who built the pyramids have any of those?” “Mostly, they had beer. Come to think of it, if there had been such a thing as a Business Analyst in ancient Egypt, then the hieroglyph for it would have been very graphical, if you know what I mean.

It probably wasn’t entirely her fault that she was such a bitter person. Having a name like Grace can be a serious stigma, especially when nature has endowed you with about as much charm as that of a disillusioned walrus.

Behind the cool mask of bravado, past the one-way mirror of his mind, underneath the rock-solid layers of self-control, in the Zen garden that was Master Sewer’s soul, a high-pitched anxiety fart rustled through the still leaves. If farts could talk, this one would have said, “Damn coppers!

Master Dung’s study was silent. So silent, in fact, that one might have been able to hear a gnat passing air, if only an obligingly flatulent gnat had happened nearby.

Tradition, thought Merkin, was not the most reliable thing in the world. Tradition had this nasty habit of asserting itself overnight. A new species of funny-shaped, bioluminescent invertebrate found sixteen thousand feet under the ocean might instantly become part of the Chinese traditional medicine, for instance. You never knew.

He knew for a fact that he was so hopelessly bad at seeing through camouflage that, if left alone in the forest, he might even attempt to make fire by rubbing two snakes together.

There was a rare quality about Nurse Grace’s smile. It was the knowledge that sooner or later her smile would inspire some witty observer to say something around the lines of, “Every time you do this, an angel farts”.

Wonderful craftsmanship, Simon decided with the expert eye of one who had played enough computer games to know art when he saw it.

What makes the Arctic VarChar so unusual and popular is that each bite has a different taste. As you carve your way into the ersatz fillet, you might find yourself chewing on smoked salmon, tender tuna, marinated mackerel, seared snapper, raw roe, baked barracuda, grilled goldfish, or even pickled perch, to alliterate just a few.

Many things have been compared to a brick, mainly as a tribute to their intellect or to their aerodynamic characteristics.

He spoke in a trembling voice that didn’t seem to be entirely in sync with the movement of his lips. That’s because sound travels slower in halitosis.

Dishwasher safe, debit only,” Deborah produced from the arsenal of useful English words for immigrants, with barely a pause for thought.

Merkin had used only one drop of the “just soap.” Two drops would have made her Master walk slightly awkwardly. Three drops would have made a Victorian gentleman utter something really lustful, such as “you transfix me quite.

Her assignment had been to write a simple Sumerian code for preserving a jar of pickled eggs. (To the programming-inclined reader, this is the magical equivalent of “HELLO WORLD.”)

He acts like he’s in one of those Hollywood movies where after spending a couple of weeks with the natives in a remote Amazonian village, the white explorer is already debating the nature of the universe with the Chief in passable lingo. Except that in the movie, he ends up shagging the prize virgin whose body looks as if the jungle is really just a spa. What he doesn’t know is that ten years down the road, she will wind up looking like all the other women in the village: saggy tits, rotten teeth, and about as supple as a mother of eight can be.

FEBRIZIUM();” said Buggeroff, and the foul smell immediately disappeared as if by, well − Magic.

Are you single?” inquired − rather bluntly − the email titled “Career Opportunity.

Let’s just say that once the party was over, the Tribe had the decency to put most of the things back into place with the possible, and otherwise notable, exception of the platypus and a moronic drinking game that later evolved into the imperial measurement system.

On a scale ranging from very little to too much, Merkin could just about categorize the amount of personal data stored in Master Loo’s computer as a shitload.