Adventures in Cyberland (eBook)
208 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
979-8-3509-0267-9 (ISBN)
Eight Seattle roommates - - brought together by fate, go on an unexpected and riotous virtual journey together. A journey that soon finds them making YouTube videos about dumpster diving around town...whacked-out life advice designed for high school kids before they go off to college...bizarre yet clear steps of how to go homeless successfully on the streets of Seattle....a daring formula challenging the world of sports and the ridiculous pay scales of its athletes....and even a virtual visit to the world of online trading and penny stocks. And in the midst of all this digital mayhem, creativity and laughter, the roommates lay down a future foundation to bring their creative energies to a new VR and internet experience, that is currently taking the virtual world by storm: a PG-rated and massively interactive website called: 'Planets of Humanity'. And just how far they make it in their newly found cyberspace adventures is anybody's guess, but one thing they realize is for sure: trying to change to virtual and real world one slightly revolutionary idea at a time is never boring...and a lot of fun...want to join them?
Live
“So, who’s the lucky guy moving into Eric’s room? I heard his name was like Jackson or something?” said Jen amid all the chatter. Probably just another creepy dude, she thought.
“Wait, Eric really is moving out?” said Toya with a slight smile on her face. She already was in a great and giddy mood as Dan’s weird presentation was about to start, and she just found out via email that her “Real Change” article won an award. But now this: Eric, the bane of her peaceful existence, was gone. Things were going almost too good to be true, she mused to herself.
“About freakin’ time! That weirdo has been giving me a headache since the day I moved in. He made so much dang noise above me. That, and he’s just, ummm”—she sighed a bit, scrunching her pretty little nose—“well, we all know he’s anti-social and a borderline psycho. I’m soooo happy! Yesss!”
“Yeah, I hear you, Toys,” said Jules now rather coolly back to her. “And Jen, his name ain’t Jackson, it’s Jasper. That’s all I have heard from Tim so far. Oh wait, I guess he’s lived here before, too. Anyways, he moves into the Cloud Room in like three weeks, but dang it! I should have got the room, but no one told me when I was on vaca, or I would have,” he said while taking another drink from his kombucha tea.
“Yep, ‘shoulda, woulda, and coulda,’ the three bums that haunt all our damn lives,” Toya replied with a laugh. “And hey, speaking of new roommates, is that Raj’ guy ever gonna show up for anything? Since moving in, no one has talked to him much. I thought you said he was cool?”
Jules grinned. “Hey now, he’s cool, but he’s shy, I guess. He told me earlier in the kitchen that he wanted to make it, but he had to go back to the U and work on some big project in the computer lab. But I hear ya’; we gotta drag him out of his room sometime. This would have been the perfect time too, but oh well, next time,” he responded in his usual casual way, as they gazed around at all the people milling about the large basement room, with more coming in through the sunken stairwell from the outside. It was raining, and the new guests were making quite the splash.
In the next ten minutes, the cavernous room filled with a dozen more people, including some stray high schoolers who were friends of Devin, sneaking about because they thought they could score some beers; that and just hang out with so many older, yet still cool people, they figured.
Soon the din of the room was overflowing with laughter, loud drinking, and various side conversations until there was a call for the show to begin and for Dan to start his joke/serious presentation. His fellow roommates wondered if he would be his usual jovial-clown self or try to play it straight, as he was trying to help Devin, who had to retake two classes that summer after skipping so much school and failing his senior year.
Toya grinned as she watched all the high schoolers trying to look inconspicuous in the crowd. Then she looked up at Dan on the small stage with a smile.
“Wait,” she now whispered back to Jen and Jules, “didn’t Dan try stand-up back in the day? This might actually be good.”
Jules shook his head slightly with a laugh and responded in similar hushed tones, “Yeah, Toys, I think it’s gonna be good. The guy’s hilarious.”
Jules had lived with Dan for the past several years and they got to be pretty good roommate friends. Toya and Jen moved in together the year before but still mostly knew Dan in a “run into each other / quick kitchen talk” kind of roommate way.
“Or horrible,” said Jen with almost a mocking grin and not whispering. “He got booted off stage years ago at some stand-up gig in the U-District, didn’t you know? Though comedy was never his thing—not like his music career. Anyways, you know Dan, he did something crazy.”
“What did he do?” asked Toya with a grin, wanting to be filled in on yet another “Crazy Dan story.”
“I will tell you later; it’s too long of a story, and a weird one.”
“Ha! Excellent! I can’t wait!”
Everyone soon found a seat somewhere on one of the old raggedy couches and chairs, or even on the ratty floor; a random assortment of Seattleites from the ages of seventeen to even around Dan’s age and fifty-five. The high school kids stuck together on one large couch along the far wall almost 15 feet from the little stage, where Devin was having a quick muffled conversation with his friend nicknamed Wig before Dan began.
“This is gonna be epic, brah,” sneered Devin coolly, hitting his friend on the arm.
“Wait, Heavy D, you’re telling me Missus Kline is going to let you actually film this dude drinking beers and talking about life, or something? For your project? You kidding me?”
Devin, who had red-buzzed and spiked hair and a rather rebellious look to him with his sleepy, half-squinting eyes, shook his head slightly. “Yeah, well, we were asked to film in some dumb creative way on what we have learned in life so far. Ya know, how it will help us out in life after school and all that junk. So I decided—for like a joke—to record this roommate of mine who said he has been through all this stuff in his life, and then I thought I would comment on my own video box attached to it as to what advice I think I will use or not. You know, like one of those fast-edited YouTube vids.”
His friend looked at him questioningly.
“I know, dude, I just thought of this out of the blue and didn’t want to think forever about the dumb perfect thing to do. Anyways, anything I turn in will give me a pass so might as well have fun, right? I mean this is freakin’ Humanities for summer school. And Billy Grey is in it. Yeah, Billy. And half don’t even show up. But anyways, Dan is the man—he has been here like, I don’t know, Jules said like more than ten years or something insane like that and has all this real-world advice he said he wants to impart to ‘us kids’ before we graduate. That, and he’s even gonna tell us how to go homeless too. You know if everything doesn’t work out in our lives, I guess.”
Wig slapped him on the back. “Homeless? You’re right, this is going to be epic!” he said laughing hard and then giving Devin a fist bump, loving this rather random yet perfect Seattle weirdness, of which he now found himself excitingly a part of.
. . .
Up on the little elevated platform—a convenient storage spot in years past to keep above any flooding—Dan scratched his big frizzy brown beard streaked with a bit of grey and tapped on his earpiece mic audibly testing it. Everyone stopped whispering and now tuned into him; some had smiles on their faces knowing they were in for something special if “Crazy Dan” was on stage. The roommates also knew that he was a former Seattle grunge-singer for the very minor hit band Ice Lice, a few decades before. So they figured this could end up being good or really, really bad, but fun and a reason to have a house event, nonetheless.
Right before Dan began, Jen was signaled by Jules to begin filming. She fumbled around trying to find the “on” button again to her dad’s old cumbersome VCR camcorder. When Devin saw the camcorder in Jen’s room one day, he thought it would be retro-cool to use it. But he also had Jules use his iPhone to record it, not wanting to entirely rely on such an ancient piece of technology. What if it broke or something while recording? But if it did work, his retro-coolness would rock everyone, especially his teacher, who was fifty-something and grew up with such devices. All this was much more work and an unnecessary touch of creativity for such a class and occasion, but once Devin mentioned the idea to his roommates earlier in the week, they thought it would be hilarious.
Dan now began walking his hefty frame back and forth, getting into the character of some pseudo–Steve Jobs guru while still testing his wireless mic. He was wearing thick and fake black glasses fitting snugly to his caveman-like brow, all with his curling shoulder-length brown hair touching the sides of his beard. He wore slacker blue jeans and a white T-shirt that had a retro-print from the first Zelda game on it—Link in a cave, asking a question to an old man about a sword—and over this he wore a black corduroy jacket, completing his look as some kind of crazed entrepreneur-hipster of sorts.
“Well, well, well, all’s well that end’s well, ain’t dat swell? Aaaaaaaaand welcome to ‘Dr. Dan’s Life Tips, Scary Shit – I mean Health Scares – Great Mysteries slash Going Home Free’”—he put his fingers up in quotes while saying this and looking around the room—“oh my double-dunces and downright fools for listening to me! This goes out to Heavy D and his young friends, who are about to go through this thing called ‘da modern life,’ and I’m gonna share with dem things that took me decades to learn, and things that took me decades to unlearn, so they don’t have to go through it all too, and gitz scared shitless at times and even kill themselves, dig?”
Toya giggled to herself while Jen quickly corrected Dan by mouthing to him, “Hey, no swearing!” The audience also laughed a bit and were now ready for the ride, focusing in on Dan as he committed all the way to his character. More than a few, though, were surprised that this crazy-fun guy could so deftly, quickly, and confidently transform himself; he did...
| Erscheint lt. Verlag | 23.5.2023 |
|---|---|
| Sprache | englisch |
| Themenwelt | Literatur ► Krimi / Thriller / Horror |
| ISBN-13 | 979-8-3509-0267-9 / 9798350902679 |
| Informationen gemäß Produktsicherheitsverordnung (GPSR) | |
| Haben Sie eine Frage zum Produkt? |
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