Atlas · Details
Story Time
AI Notes
The confession up front is worth the ticket by itself: Steve, who claims he can't stand blogs, lost three straight days blacked out in davesecretary's back catalogue "where nobody knew where the hell I was," and came out envious of another writer "for I think the second or maybe third time in my adult life." His response is to copy the man outright, mock-title for the crime included: Terry Brooks rewriting Lord of the Rings "line-by-line badly as Shitstorm of Shannara." What follows is pure Yegge family material. Brother Dave stars in two of the nine, and an alarming share of the cast is hauling around an extra hundred pounds — the narrator's own early-twenties self "as fat as a walrus." The best stories lean on a trick the technical essays use too: Steve arguing with himself in two voices, deployed here at 1 a.m. against a clicking noise coming from between his eyes.
He claims to have about a hundred more of these, and the post keeps writing IOUs: a spider sequel "way more dramatic" than the one told here, Navy reactor stories from the Idaho desert. Nothing in the archive ever pays them off, which makes this the one sustained look at a vein Steve plainly loved and never mined again. The preamble runs ten paragraphs of reddit throat-clearing before the first horizontal rule, though the Comic Book Guy bit pays its own rent. The ski story goes last for a reason.
Related listings
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2007
Boring Stevey Status Update
The other piece on this lens where Steve drops the technical voice and just narrates his own life — a Mountain View Building 43 dispatch on falsely being reported fired by Reddit, plus a side-project status update. The companion to this one's full-on storytelling night.
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2010
Blogger Finger
A year after Story Time, the storyteller writes about why he stopped storytelling — an apologia for the year-long silence following the Drunken-era output, in the same plain confessional voice the stories use.
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2016
The Monkey and the Apple
Seven years later Steve is still doing this — sitting down to tell a single true story without the technical scaffolding. The Monkey and the Apple is one of the cleaner late examples; pair it with Story Time for the bookends.
From the peanut gallery
Read the rest of the thread · 39 more
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So stevey's still alive. First Post lol.
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Well... I'm seriously overweight myself (6.2ft/265lbs), but not in the least touchy about the subject (as your Beijing "flend"). That's to put this comment in the correct perspective.
If we were talking about software we'd agree that the computer illiterate user clicking the wrong button and making the application badly crash would qualify the application as "defective".
Talking about chairs and fat people it seems like the culprit for the failure should lay on the "whale".
I know, these are intended as fun stories, not as software engineering essays, but it's interesting how chair crafting and software crafting show the same defect when used not as intended by the designer/tester.
PS: sorry for my rusty English... -
Nice stories man. Made me laugh a good number of times.
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Nice stories, but next time, don't copy Dave's style. Your own is better - really.
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Great Stories! The one about names is pretty familiar to me. I have an uncommon first name (Ferruccio). There have been many occasions when meeting someone new, I would carefully pronounce my name (Feh-rroo-cho)and, at least 1 time out of 10, the response was "Hi Bruce!"
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I never understood the whole spider phobia thing. Maybe I didn't grow up in a house with enough scary photos in medical textbooks.
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OH MY GOD YOU JUST ACCIDENTALLY THE WHOLE
TOO LONG -
The one about your brother in the garbage can had me laughing until I cried! Keep 'em coming. :)
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Fantastic! Love a good story.
I wish I could have been there to see the Fatitude Fall.
Interestingly, it seems like skiing, and other slippery, frosty activities, are a gold mine for great stories. I have a bunch of 'em from the time I went skiing with a group of Japanese tourists... -
When you post personal reminiscences instead of programming stuff, do fewer people post comments saying that they disagree with you?
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@Bondscoach: Copying the style of a writer you like, once, is both a good exercise and a temptation impossible to avoid, methinks.
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You guys should just learn IPA.
On second though, every-damn-one should just learn IPA. -
The bleacher story is definitely the most amazing. It actually tops the garbage can one in the "I can't believe that really happened" factor.
Uncle Harold's baby food moment seemed more awkward than funny. I'm embarrassed for your uncle I've never met, wow.
But by far the funniest part was the reveal of Wijji... priceless.
You know who else is great at telling real life stories in a consistently humorous way? Scott Adams. His blog posts in that vein are hilarious. -
Uncle Harold would be like the smartest guy in my family! LOL. narwhals!
-m -
As someone who isn't fat, was never fat, never had to think about fat, will never get fat, and didn't fattened even during my time in Google, I find all these stories about fatness to be completely uninteresting.
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More spider stories please! :D
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Did you ever read any waste-o stories? Might be before your time, but from rec.autos back in the '80s. Unfortunately I can't seem to find them on google groups.
Fucking funniest thing I ever read -
I haven't read any DaveSecretary stories but these are great! Thanks for the laughs.
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With you with the last-name-mangling syndrome. I can't count how many times people have, for some reason, put an "L" in my last name where none exists, spelling "Knibble".
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Thoroughly enjoyed these...can't wait for the follow up 'spider on face' stories...:)
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My last name starts with a Y and I've known this fact for years. A lot of people write W when you say Y. In fact, my credit report has different variations of spelling my last name and there's one staring with a W.
It used to piss the crap out of me but now it will make me laugh every time, knowing that it's not just my last name!!! -
The baseball seat story had me laughing so hard I cried. Then I got to the garbage can one, and laughed and drooled (literally). This is some funny shit.
- Legend of Angband
http://legend-angband.blogspot.com/ -
Excellent stories, Steve, thanks! Can't wait for the next batch :-)
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After I read your stories, I was all excited about davesecretary's stuff, and I thought, "wow, they'll be even better than these!" I have read about ten of them now, and I am stopping, because frankly, they are boring. They seem to have even less of a point than yours (yours have just enough to make them interesting), and writing in all caps doesn't seem cool or anything – it makes him look like an illiterate. All caps means shouting, and I do not like being shouted at. I used a third-party Service on my (Mac) computer to convert the stories to sane capitalization before I read each one, so the capitalization isn't to blame: his stories are just boring, though they seem to pretend otherwise. Steve, your stories are way better.
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I was always curious how your last name is pronounced; because my imagination stiffles; my internal text-to-speech just coredumps.
I guess I've heard it when I've looked some conference talk, but I still don't remember, it seems it just doesn't fit in my head. -
Any CSI writers here? The garbage can story has potential :-)
It's pretty sad that we're forced to revise U.S. engineering standards to support a "larger" population... I'm not kidding! -
Speaking of great stories, I found these treasures by "lustfish":
http://www.b3ta.com/users/profile.php?id=19164 -
Wow, reading the negative comments out loud with the Comic Book Guy voice really does work.
I think your tip has suddenly made the internet a little bit more entertaining to me. -
They made me laugh, I guess I'll have to search out this secretary guy now to see if he does the same thing only better.
Also, glad someone else feels that way about Shannara. What absolute bollocks. -
Steve, you gave yourself a task which fairly screamed for brevity, and yet managed an EPIC FAIL nonetheless.
Seriously, give yourself some time to write your next Great American Blog Post by posting one of these vignettes each week. That'll be just enough to leave people wondering if your narrating style is improving from week to week, rather than shotgunning them in one read. -
I want more sea stories! Especially the ones that start "This one is no s***..."
Keep 'em coming! -
Sounds like you need a green beer Steve
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Good stories (and I'm not in the inner circle).
Now that I know you were in the Navy it all makes sense. A large group of the programmers I've met (or read) whose worth a darn more often than not has a military background; can't be coincidence.
Anyway, great stuff and using the CBG voice is the best tip ever. -
Great stories! You've inspired me to look back at my past and dig out similar stories. I know I have some deep down in my memory, but I haven't recalled them for a long, long, time.
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Awesome stories, man! I laughed a lot, and I think my neighbors may think I'm crazy now.
I actually read a few of the stories before reading the introduction, and was thinking "Wow, Yegge can write!" (Which I knew before, but I just hadn't been exposed to this side of your writing.)
You don't need to be jealous of anyone's ability; you're friggin' awesome. Thanks again for the stories, they were great! -
On the whole, I don't believe 'walrus' and 'fragile' should go together in the same sentence, with the exception of this sentence of course.
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You forced davesecretary's writing style into your own, and it didn't work.
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My father was an alcoholic and was prone to pulling these kinds of stunts.
My father's name was Harold.
One year, on my fourth or maybe my fifth birthday, my father showed up late to my birthday party and gave me a jar of Gerber's baby food as my sole birthday gift.
What are the odds that we're first cousins? I am amused. -
oh here´s the comment box
hi steeve i was compelled to read your clog because i was clicking on ROR stuff and i liked reading it. then i read some more around here and there. see unlike you, my attention got all dstorted after all that marijuana i smoked. your post about it was boring.
but i loved your stories.
please post the link to the blog that you mentioned you liked reading, that had the stories about china (unlike its mandarin then nm) because for some time it seemed like copypaste.
then you bragged about being smart, so i knew it was you and not cp.
so typical of you nerds not to give credit. unless its gpl then youre ok. url please
Steve, I hope you don't mind, but I'm going to choose to interpret all of these stories as thinly veiled allegories about programming languages.
Let's see. "Dash Rendar" is "ECMAScript", obesity is static typing, "Fly Lice" is design patterns, the cousin Uncle Harold got baby food for is Javascript, ...
— Thomas Colthurst · 4:50 AM, March 13, 2009
"He asked me to spell my name, and I said: "Y". He wrote "W". So far, so good. I really didn't want these fuckers to have my personal information just because they gave me an oil change, anyway.
I said "e", and he wrote "i". Wow, this was new.
I said "g, g" and he wrote "jj". Cool!"
The guy's first language was apparently French and wasn't good at English.
letters with the same sound in French and English:
French English
é a same
i e same
f f same
g j similar (in french we don't make the implicit D sound)
j g similar (in french we don't make the implicit D sound)
l l similar
m m same
n n same
o o same
q q similar (in french we say "ku" instead of "kiou")
r r similar
s s similar
t t similar
v v similar (vé instead of vee)
w w similar (double-V instead of double-U)
z z similar (zed instead of zee)
— Hexstream · 8:01 AM, March 13, 2009
I am sorry, Stevey, these stories just sucked. I guess it's just me though, since everyone else seemed to love them.
1)Embarrassing situation with some coincidence mixed in. Happens to all of us - not interesting.
2)Fat person story? Really? That's just plain boring.
3)And another one?! I think a squirting flower would be more entertaining.
4)Oh boy, a girlfriend with an attitude and people with accents. What else is new?
5)A person who is knows to give bad gifts gives a bad gift. Wow.
6)You didn't feel that thing crawling on your face?
I am going to stop here, because I think I made my point. All those stories require the "you had to be there" component, which makes them bad stories. Also, they happen to everyone all the time. They are not interesting to anyone outside the circle. Just enjoy them personally and keep them to yourself. Now can we please get back to programming? Thank you.
— Xelaie · 5:34 PM, March 15, 2009