Fandom Snowflake 2021: Challenge #12

[scrubjayspeaks]

Challenge #12: resurrect an old meme. Have fun with it! Which is the goofiest meme you can think of? Put on your party hat and be silly!!

Ha! Ah, I have a few askbox memes still saved in my tumblr drafts folder from several years ago. Some of the writing related ones sound fun, but they seem to favor people with a large body of work from which to be drawing answers. Others are more along the lines of icebreaker questions, which I have...mixed feelings about in brickspace. Online's okay though.

I pulled a few from the list of suggestions, though. Under the cut due to length:

I have, in fact, very strong memories of taking the Historical Lunatics quiz back in the day. I saved my results in a little .txt file that was otherwise used for tracking passwords (seriously, back in the day) and my favorite basic crepe recipe. (God, I was a text file gremlin for so long. I still resort to them pretty often now, for that matter.) For some reason, my result really tickled my fancy. Perhaps because it doesn't carry nearly as much of a taint of misery as some of the other results. Also, floor-less ballroom. Behold!

You are William John Cavendish-Bentinck-Scott, the Fifth Duke of Portland!

Sometime Marquis of Tichfield, Earl of Portland, Viscount Woodstock, Baron of Cirencester, co-heir to the Barony of Ogle and renowned as the finest judge of horseflesh in England, you took the tradition of aristocratic eccentricity to unprecedented heights. Having inherited the stately home of Welbeck Abbey, you proceeded to construct miles of underground tunnels and a ballroom, in pink, beneath it. The ballroom was complete except for one small detail. It had no floor. Despite this vast home, you lived exclusively in a suite of five rooms, each one also pink.

Having been turned down by your opera singer objet d'amour, Adelaide Kemble, in your youth, you suffered a broken heart and never married. This did not stop you from caring deeply about the wellbeing of your servants. Occasionally you would even help them muck out the stables. However, you did not neglect discipline, forcing disobedient underlings to skate themselves to exhaustion on your subterranean skating rink. Servants were given strict instructions regarding conduct: if they met you in a corridor, they were to ignore your existence while you froze to the spot until they were out of sight; and a chicken was to be kept roasting at all times in case you felt like sneaking into the kitchen for a snack.

You became ever more eccentric with age. You built another tunnel, this time to the railway station, through which you would ride your carriage. When you reached the station your carriage, with you inside, would be hoisted up onto the train in its entirety.

Upon your death, your multitude of titles passed to your cousin, who was obliged to delve into your curious domain to find your body once the servants had reported your absence. Entering your private rooms, he found that, aside from a commode in the centre of your bedroom, the only objects in the whole suite were hundreds of hatboxes, each containing a single brown wig.

I took the I Write Like... quiz using the long bonus story I wrote for Lake Lewisia last year.

I write like
Agatha Christie

About Agatha Christie | Analyze your text

Huh. I'm not entirely sure I've ever read an entire Christie novel, come to think of it, so I can't say how accurate an assessment this may or may not be.

And finally, I'll do the Nearest Book meme: 1. Grab the nearest book; 2. Open the book to page 123; 3. Find the fifth sentence; 4. Post the text of the next 3 sentences on your LJ along with these instructions; 5. Don’t you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.

From Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes by Maria Konnikova:

Maybe I could trick it? I tried to get the string and circles to somehow detach. The ring to slide over the circles that it hadn't slid over in the past.

She's talking about one of those three dimensional brain teaser objects, where you have to remove one bit from the rest of the structure or some such. The passage continues on to explain how the obvious solutions were useless, and even focusing directly on the challenge at hand--remove the ring--was doomed to lead you down deadends. You must look elsewhere, approaching the problem obliquely. Think about something else for a while, deliberately, purposefully redirecting your attention.