{"id":1974,"date":"2007-01-26T23:55:59","date_gmt":"2007-01-27T05:55:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nerdflood.com\/2007\/01\/26\/machine-of-doom-i-mean-death\/"},"modified":"2007-01-26T23:55:59","modified_gmt":"2007-01-27T05:55:59","slug":"machine-of-doom-i-mean-death","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nathanielpayne.com\/blog\/machine-of-doom-i-mean-death\/","title":{"rendered":"Machine of DOOM! I mean DEATH!"},"content":{"rendered":"

It looks like our good man Ryan North<\/a> has taken a great idea<\/a> and gathered a few friends<\/a> and decided to put together a short story anthology<\/a>. The concept sounds<\/em> wonderfully simple:<\/p>\n

The machine had been invented a few years ago: a machine that could tell, from just a sample of your blood, how you were going to die. It didn’t give you the date and it didn’t give you specifics. It just spat out a sliver of paper upon which were printed, in careful block letters, the words “DROWNED” or “CANCER” or “OLD AGE” or “CHOKED ON A HANDFUL OF POPCORN”. It let people know how they were going to die.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The concept is deceptively complex, because North makes it very clear that they are looking for a particular type of fiction (potentially a dark comedy of errors of some sort, more than likely containing an hilarious and\/or thought-provoking ironic twist).<\/em><\/p>\n

So, I’m taking up the gauntlet. Since this project has a deadline of March 31st, I’ll be temporarily shelving the historical zombie fiction<\/a> (which has a May 25th deadline)<\/em> and working with this writing project for the next couple of months. I brainstormed with my wife, and we came up with a couple of great ideas, and I’m going to see where I can take them. You’re welcome to try it out, too! I’m interested to see what kind of entries something like this might receive.<\/p>\n

Good luck!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It looks like our good man Ryan North has taken a great idea and gathered a few friends and decided to put together a short story anthology. The concept sounds wonderfully simple: The machine had been invented a few years ago: a machine that could tell, from just a sample of your blood, how you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[244],"tags":[413],"class_list":["post-1974","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing","tag-anthology","last-post"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanielpayne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1974","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanielpayne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanielpayne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanielpayne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanielpayne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1974"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nathanielpayne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1974\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanielpayne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanielpayne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanielpayne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}