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*                                                            *
*                         CYBERSPACE                         *
*         A biweekly column on net culture appearing         *
*                in the Toronto Sunday Sun                   *
*                                                            *
* Copyright 1999 Karl Mamer                                  *
* Free for online distribution                               *
* All Rights Reserved                                        *
* Direct comments and questions to:                          *
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One of the oldest online pastimes has been the "Never 
Ending Story." The format hasn't changed much since 
the days when kids ran single line bulletin board 
systems (BBSes) on Commodore 64s, 300 baud modems, and 
pirated software: one person posts a few opening 
paragraphs and others follow up the narrative with 
their own prose.

No matter how a story starts, all quickly degenerate 
into improbable tales of Heavy Metal singers running 
around a Star Trek universe. Literature it ain't but 
Never Ending Stories can be mildly amusing, especially 
if you're taken with dreaming up exotic ways of 
disintegrating Sammy Hagar. The fun eventually stops 
when someone contributes a plot killer like beaming a 
nude Captain Kirk over to a Klingon ship. There are 
some limits.

The folks at Amazon Books (www.amazon.com) have 
recently attempted to update the Never Ending Story 
concept, even though the format has traditionally 
produced some of the worst writing imaginable. The 
mega-book seller has contracted John Updike to write 
the beginning and ending of a murder mystery. The 
bothersome middle section is left to budding online 
writers. Each day, netizens are invited to submit a 
few sentences. The winning submission for that day 
gets added to the collective tale and the daily winner 
is awarded $1,000. Not bad. Unfortunately, the contest 
is open only to citizens of the United States. Even 
with that restriction, I'm not sure how Amazon Books 
is going to handle the volume of submissions once the 
word gets out. There are 20 million net users in the 
United States. All but four of those believe they're 
better writers than Updike. Do the math. Best of luck, 
Amazon!

If you're willing to work for a bit less money and 
write a few more words, Troma Team Video is hosting a 
script writing contest. Troma Team Video has made such 
fine '80s era films as /The Toxic Avenger/, /Surf 
Nazis Must Die/, and /Class of Nuke 'Em High/. Troma 
Team is coming out with a new /Nuke 'Em High/ 
instalment, updated for the '90s, and they want the 
fans to write it. Each week, from user submissions, 
Troma Team adds another two pages to its script. The 
winner gets $50 and a sense of pride knowing he or she 
has managed to write dialog in keeping with Troma 
Team's cinematic sensibilities. In fact, the Troma 
Team requires you to write just like them. Winning 
entries have to work one or more provided lines of 
dialog into each submission. Think you can work "Plain 
and simple, robotics are the wave of the future." or 
"What if VALLEY OF GWANGI was the real world, and our 
world was a movie which the people in VALLEY OF GWANGI 
were watching, in-between lassoing dinosaurs?" into a 
semi-coherent scene about high school life? If so, 
head to www.troma.com/contest.html.

If you're one of those twisted types that actually 
likes writing for the fun, and you don't insist on 
cash for your time/ideas, you can find an interesting 
twist on the Never Ending Story format on a newsgroup 
called alt.dragons-inn. You assume a persona in one of 
many swords 'n' sorcery "worlds" hosted on the 
newsgroup and contribute to an ongoing plot. Just make 
sure you read the group FAQ at dragon.io.com/inn.html 
before you join.

    Source: geocities.com/lapetitelesson/cs/text

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