52 Short Stories

They came in super technologically-advanced spaceships. They had traveled a bagillion space miles, or light-years or whatever. They came to do all the typical alien things that humans (at least the ones in the USA) are afraid of extraterrestrials doing. They wanted to introduce a huge multi-functional monarchy that ran on a communistic economic system that didn't benefit the rich or men...just the aliens. The space kind, not the foreign kind. It was a nightmare. And the demons of Earth were of no help. They didn't want to get involved in the affairs of humanity. Or at least, they were waiting for Ms. Kills-A-Lot to give them the go ahead. But she couldn't because she herself was mostly dying shortly after the invasion took place because the aliens were also quite good at wholesale slaughter. The aliens blasted up the entire planet. Indiscriminately, really. They were killing humans in a very evens-Stevens sort of way. At least, that's what all the other countries claime...

Here are some Books I wish I had been assigned in Middle School and High School I used to hate rating. So much so in fact that for most of high school, I got by reading SparkNotes alone. When I went to grad school, I lived on campus my first year, but that proved to be financially impossible to maintain so I decided to commute...3 and a half hours round trip, 4 days a week. Music and thinking about life worked for a while, but sitting in traffic day after day left me feeling like I was wasting my life -- or at the very least, doing something wrong. Enter, audio books. Which eventually led me to actually finish reading my first novel in about a decade, and I was so proud of my accomplishment that I decided to start keeping track of every single book I read or listened to. The list has grown long now because I discovered that there are actually in existence quite a lot of books and authors I enjoy reading -- I just had not been introduced to them or at least not introduced properly. So i...

To begin with, you must know that Virtual Reality didn't work out as planned. In fact, it went horribly wrong. Everyone started out very excited about their over-sized virtual reality goggles strapped to their heads. Eventually, someone was able to port the technology into more normal sized glasses. Then, came contact lens. And then came the day of the great fusing. No one is really sure quite what happened, but something went horribly wrong. By this point, basically everyone was using virtual reality contact lenses. So when they fused onto the corneas of the human population, on that day virtual reality became reality. It didn't take long for folks to forget what life was like not being an animated avatar running through a pixelated world that became increasingly more lifelike after every update. In fact, people began to worry that if they had children who didn't have "reality" lenses fused onto their corneas, the parents would not be able to relate ...