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Sam's picture

Giant Killer Robotz™ and the Case of Kylie

The boys down the street had Giant Killer Robotz™. They went to the same school as Kylie, and got off at the same bus stop. Her mother always told her to try and get along with them, because Kylie had no one else to talk to when she was shooed out of the house to go 'play outside.' They were okay, but they were boys, and sometimes boys didn't quite get it.

Like the sometimes when they didn't let her play with them. They always had their reasons, she didn't have the right toy, she was wearing the wrong color, they only needed three people... but she knew the real reason they didn't let her play.

The day they all had Giant Killer Robotz™ was one of those days.

"How can you play with us if you don't have a robot?" Michael asked in that philosophical way he had, and pushed the glasses up his nose because the sweat was making them slide off.

"No one told me that it we needed robots today." Kylie looked at the three boys with their three robots. The robots were only two feet tall, and didn't look very giant to her. Maybe the standards for Giant Killer Robotz™ were different, and no one had told her that, either.

David looked at Billy.

Billy chewed on his lower lip and squinted up at her. "No one has to tell you about robots," he told her.

"Oh," Kylie said, realizing that he was right. Everyone should know about robots.

She didn't get to play with the boys that day. It was her fault that she didn't know about the robots, after all.

"Mom, I need a Giant Killer Robot."

"You know I don't like that kind of play," her mother told her. Her mother normally said that kind of thing, whether Kylie wanted a Dress Me Up™ doll or a Deathzone Frontier Battlesaur™. There would be no changing her mind, no matter how much Kylie asked, pleaded, or asked her father. That much she had learned from painful trial and error.

Kylie decided that this simply wouldn't do.

So she stayed up late one night and made a plan, and stayed up late the next night to set that plan in motion.

Rebecca's picture

Model Cars

 

“I can’t believe this” Maude muttered into the glove compartment as she fished out her insurance and registration.

A minute ago the car ahead of her had slammed on its breaks to avoid colliding with the Hummer that had barreled out of the gas station. Maude tried to turn onto the shoulder but there wasn’t enough time. Her car crashed into the other with a nice, loud crunch. She had bit her lip in her moment of panic and could taste the blood.

eli's picture

Poems

Left In The Dark

By Liz Newbury

 

She could not feel the grit of reality

For they had wrapped her in silk

sky stegall's picture

Apple Blossom Journey: A Path to Feminizing Physics

I haven't written a poem (where anyone could read it) in almost ten years. I was, therefore, a little afraid because I had volunteered to write poetry for this paper assignment. I tried several different things, and they were all pretty crummy. Words that sounded great and made sense in my head looked silly on paper and came out wrong when I read them back to myself. I think I was forcing meaning, rather than naturally making it or just letting it happen. Then I remembered the joke I'd made in class on Wednesday - that a single haiku wouldn't exactly equate to five pages of writing.

That was, perhaps, untrue. I also remembered what Anne had said in reply, that a haiku filled with words of the right weight could in that sense perfectly fit the bill. All this remembering happened as I was walking across campus, and simultaneously thinking about how I'm really going to miss the weeping cherry trees when I graduate.

Pemwrez2009's picture

Three Waves

(The spacing got really messed up while i tried to post)... 

 

The aim of my project was to give a more modernized perspective of the three waves of feminism and how they would view science. I have tried to incorporate more than physics in my poetry, even though we have focused much more on physics than any other science. Though my poetry is not a direct representation of any of the feminist critics from whom we have read, I tried to put more of my own perspective—or rather, what I got from these critiques.

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rmalfi's picture

The Collective Guardian: The start of a potentially heroic tale by R. Malfi

I am searching for a name… this sound I used to know… They all remind me that I am real, that we are here… Hear them tell me, don’t you? I am searching for a name… the one I used to claim… before I became… so many. I always know the perfect fit… that’s why the others always came to me… for answers…they still try, but I won’t. Can’t. We won’t let me. That is when the memory died… when night after night more of them began to cry and fill my eyes so I could not see anything ahead but everything elsewhere instead… I am searching for a name…trying to remember that time when we were an am. Before I felt them inside… when we were me… We feel the world around us, beyond these four white walls…Everything’s connected, you know…it’s just molecules. The wall, me, we… us all.

oschalit's picture

A Collection of Poems

*put titles of poems in quotations ("W", "Schrodinger's cat said meow and died", "Oedipa") because serendip was not allowing underlining or proper spacing.

"W"

 

Yes, the letter on my chest is W.

And no, I prefer not to be seen that way.

evanstiegel's picture

Contemporary Evolution of Racial Mindset

For a large population’s set of beliefs to evolve, members of the population who hold novel beliefs must influence others in their beliefs. When more and more individuals consequently hold these original beliefs, the mindset of the population as a whole can evolve. This process has occurred numerous times in American history especially with race. Today, a new outlook on race has emerged in certain communities and when more and more individuals are introduced into this mindset, the popular belief of the American society can evolve. The emerging racial belief is one of more consciousness and understanding of other races and cultures.

kaleigh19's picture

Intertextuality and Literary Evolution

As a Classicist, I often find myself often reading texts for the holy grail of Classical studies: intertextuality. In its most simplistic terms, intertextuality is the presence in one text (the target text) of another text (the source text). The most obvious intertextual moments are allusions—direct (if at times obscure) references to another piece of literature. For example, Dante’s Inferno has as a primary character Virgil, the Augustan-era author of the Aeneid. Similarly, as Dante and Virgil descend through the circles of Hell, they encounter various characters from ancient literature, many of which are represented in Book 4 of the Aeneid, in which Aeneas visits the Underworld—for example, Cerberus, the three-headed dog and Medusa, the snaky-haired gorgon, just to name a few. But intertextuality can also be far less explicit. In the same work, one might find subtle resonances in Dante of other hell-bound travelers, like Aeneas or Odysseus. For a Classicist, these intertextual moments are thrilling. They represent an author’s engagement with the Classical tradition, at once affirming that the influence of ancient literature is not limited to ancient writers and also providing new and compelling ways of reading old and oft-analyzed texts. But we Classicists are just one sect of an intertextuality studies cache consisting of members from every literary discipline. Intertextuality’s implications, however, are also generative to a person attempting to understand how stories in general evolve.

Shayna or Sheness Israel's picture

The Why of Why We Want to Know Why, "I think?"

The Balance between the I-function (Consciousness)

and the Nervous System (Unconsciousness)

by Shayna Israel

 

1) Why does the I-function want to know why? Or why it “felt” something?

2) For the body to “move” it does not need the I-function to motivate it or even give it the energy to move. So, why does it not only need the I-function, but why does it even have it? Unless it actually does need the I-function to give it the energy, “will”, “a something” to move it. Is that what is going on with people who are brain (I-function) dead? They don’t have an I-function to motivate their nervous system? If we look at frogs, the nervous system does not need an I-function to move it, and not only that, it also makes decisions. Back to my question, why do we have or even need the I-function?

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