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So what's the deal with the "rirrom" level?

Spoiler

Yeah, I get that it's "Mirror" backwards, but how do I solve it and get my Beer?!

[close]

There's no way of telling if I, Miguel, am telling the truth or a decoy lie to fool internet custom agents. Ha!

Lies within lies....  Your James Bond lifestyle will one day lead you to be tied to a stainless steel table with a laser beam slowly inching closer to severing your testicles.    But so long as you live in the Now, things are good: illegal vacuum anal devices galore!

Here's another high-tech marvel.  I understand that it will keep public urinals much more sanitary in future, probably because people will just hold it instead of risking a HAL moment while it's their turn....



I can't let you do that, Dave!

[Best Character:]

Voting is fun.  More people should try it!   

Best Character: Sinitrena!  I thought John was a puzzlingly complex character.  He had many bad qualities: selfishness, impulsiveness, false heartedness (becoming a monk despite not being a believer, marrying a wife he did not really love), and of course he was a wife-beater and a bit of a racist bigot too.  But he is pitiable, too, since he seems not to understand that he is the author of his own misery (at least until the end), nor that he seems to be more useless (relationships, scouting, being a monk...) than the people around him that he writes off as useless (his wife, the monks, the natives....).  It's hard to get into the head of someone so incompetent, but I thought Sinitrena did a good job.
Best Plot: Sinitrena! I liked the format of switching back and forth from Brother John's narrative to the group's perspective, and the build-up to the revelations at the end was clever.
Best Atmosphere: Sinitrena!  I thought this was the strongest quality of your story.  The creepy, surreal vibe was very compelling.  At times I wanted to look away, but could not!
Best Setting: Sinitrena!  For someone who often creates whole worlds for her short stories, I was impressed in this one how the world was drawn in to the immediate locality: a couple trees, a stream, a cliff, a path, all shrouded in a stifling fog that shut out the world beyond.  In the case of this story, less was actually more. 
Best Word Choice/Style: Sinitrena!  I thought the dialog was realistic, and the descriptions of the locations, especially the canyon, were well done.
Best Holiday Destination: Sinitrena!  But I wouldn't really want to go there.... it's too scary!  Maybe if my friends Ray and Egon come along to watch my back.... 

One Week Left!

...you've captured the cheesiness of 70s sitcoms perfectly.

I felt it had more of an 80s feel to it.  Like a Married with Children kinda vibe.

I just want to say that vacuum anal devices are forbidden in my country.

And I was just thinking to myself this morning: "Self, what do you think the chances are that Miguel will get into trouble with the customs agents at the border of his country when he tries to cross with his impressively diverse collection of vacuum anal devices?"

We all know this community has a plethora of gifted writers, but most of them are much too lazy to enter the regular fortnightly writing

....well, they could always just read what we few diligent toilers have written and vote. 

It was Gatlinburg in mid-July, and I just hit town and my throat was dry....
                                  -Johnny Cash, A Boy Named Sue

GATLINBURG

   Basin County, Nevada.  A broad swath of scrubby nothing 200 miles from anywhere.  When it rained the land turned to mud and the air turned to flies, and when it didn't -which was most of the time- everything turned to dust.  Along the barren mountain slopes that bounded the county the dust drove like a sculptor's chisel to carve improbable channels through the rock.  In the expanses of the sagebrush it would be whipped up by swirling winds to wreak devilish mischief.  On the bumpy trail it would linger, billowing but still, at about the height of a man's face on horseback.  And in town it would rise like a filthy plume, besmearing even the heavens while pointing out to weary travellers for miles around the way to the centre of the ass-end of nowhere: Gatlinburg.

     K.W. leaned over in his saddle and spat.  The dust sizzled briefly where it hit the ground, and then a noxious fly emerged from the very spot to circle his head.  K.W. scowled.  In his estimation, this place was the geographic equivalent of the bottom of the world's deepest cesspit.  It was about as far in life as a man could slide without leaving the world entirely, and though it might not be quite low enough to qualify as hell officially, it was mighty close.  Kind of like purgatory, except without the upside.

   â€œFly botherin' you?” Scab asked.  Scab was as dumb as the spit K.W. had just sown on the trail side, and a damn bit uglier than the back end of the mule he was riding.  An easy measure of his reckoning capacity was the fact that he insisted on being called Scab, a nickname he'd earned in the hardscrabble guano mines back home.  He was kin of some sort, as K.W.'s momma had once recollected in one of her bouts of sobriety, but no one could ever figure exactly how.  All K.W. knew was that they were as good as brothers, for they'd been watching each other's backs for as long as he could remember.  Dumb, ugly, smelly, and reckless: Scab was all of those things rolled into one, but it didn't really matter.  A fraternal bond was not something to be taken lightly, and in this rough and tumble world of lean times and tough breaks, the sad fact of the matter was that the bond was pretty much all either of them had left in the world.

   â€œI'll get that sunuva bitch,” Scab drawled, drawing his pistol and levelling it, as best he could from his bumpy perch on the back of a burro, just to the side of K.W.'s head.  “Now don't move now,” he said confidently, closing an eye and cocking the trigger.

   â€œDon't you dare-!” K.W. shouted, but the shot cut him off.  Fortunately for K.W. (as for the fly) Scab was just about the worst shot west of the Pecos.  K.W. had seen a trained prairie dog at the Silver County Fair shoot straighter, even though he had no stereo vision with which to aim nor any opposable  digits with which to pull the trigger.  Shit, the kickback from that pistol had flung the little critter six yards back into the roaring crowd, but he'd still hit his mark.  But by far the safest place to be if Scab was gunning for you was right where he was aiming.

   â€œGot 'im!” Scab crowed, breaking into a gap-toothed smile before realizing that the fly was now buzzing around his own head. 

   â€œNeed some help?” K.W. asked, unholstering his own pistol.

   â€œNo, no, Kay-dubya.  I got this figured,” he said, as he turned the gun towards his own head. 

   â€œNow wait just a second-” K.W. started, but again the gun shot interrupted him.  He stared in disbelief through the billowing dust at the now empty saddle of the mule, and in a matter of seconds he was down on the ground, grabbing at his cousin's limp body.  “Scab!” he called, racking his brain for the man's christian name.  Was it Adelbert, or something like that?  Fat lot of good the name “Scab” would do on a tombstone, not that he could afford one anyway.  K.W. lifted his cousin's head and contemplated the good of praying for such a no good low-life as he, wondering if there was any point in trying to stem the flow of blood from his head wound.  At least it might keep the flies down....

   â€œDamn, Cus!” Scab moaned, pushing the astonished K.W. away.  “I pass out for just a sec, and you're all over me like a five-cent-piece ho on payday!”  Scab sat up, scratching his head as if he were trying to make some sense of what had just befallen him.  K.W. never did get a good enough look to say definitively, but if he had to draw a conclusion he would have said the bullet passed clean through the man's skull without ever hitting a thing.

   Of course, life with Scab had always been like that.  As they rode the long dusty trail into town they turned to swapping tales of the good ol' days, like the time when Scab had put a cork on a scorpion's tale and lowered it down his throat with a bit of fishing line to catch the beetle he'd sworn had flown up his nose (when he pulled the line back out, all that came up was the cork).  And that time they couldn't afford the dentistry bill when one of his molars came in all abscessed, so they figured on pulling it out with a bit of piano wire stretched across the railroad.  Yeah, they'd shared some good times back in the day.

   But of course all that dwelling and nostalgifying got to dredging up rawer memories of their true purpose on this journey, and that got them clammed up good and tight once again, so they covered those last few miles in silence, alone with their thoughts (or what passed for them, in Scab's case).  And even a man with half Scab's intellect could have made some money wagering that they were both thinking about Delianna.

   Dela, as she'd been called in the camp outside the guano pit where they'd all grown up, had never been a pretty girl in the conventional sense.  She had big teeth, and a small jaw, with wild curly hair that you'd need a bridle to tame.  And her personality was not exactly convivial, owing to the fact that her family life most resembled a trainwreck colliding with a coal mine explosion.  Basically she was just ugly and messed-up enough to give young K.W. and Scab the time of day, which as good as counted as female companionship as far as they were concerned back then.  Over the years they'd both come to think Dela was pretty swell.  The fact that she'd cast off the shackles of conventional social mores and had become an inexpensive prostitute didn't hurt either.

   But the strange thing about desperate men and desperate women is that they mix about as well as nitro and glicerine.  Hearts were lost and heads were busted, and before anyone much knew the facts of who had paid whom to do what in farmer Rankin's ol' pig trough there'd been a jealous shootout and and a string of murder charges.  What followed was a drunken blur of bank heists, railroad banditry, opium dennery and a briefly yet implausibly successful itinerant kite vending business.  Through it all you'd have needed a score card to tell the match ups, which would have been trying on the cohesiveness of the group if any of them had had their heads screwed on straight at the time.  Whether out of sheer exhaustion or lusting after a better life (with a new Stetson hat and a bag full of empty promises), Dela had finally skipped the gang with the last sack of loot and a longshot dream.

   What followed was a story of catharsis and woe, as the two cousins had stumbled from town to town, trying to figure where their girl had run off to while living on the lam one step ahead of the law.  They sobered up more from poverty than by design, and heard enough evidence in two show trials and a botched lynching to piece together enough of the relevant facts.  Among the sordid details and frayed nooses they'd come to two important realizations.  Firstly, it turned out that they both did truly love Dela, despite all her shortcomings and backstabbings.  And secondly, that all clues pointed to her winding up in the only squalid little shanty town that'd have her: Gatlinburg.

   So here they were now, with the sun sinking low on the dusty horizon, staring at a faded wooden sign announcing the town's name.  The broad, rutted street ahead of them led between rough-hewn saloons and brothels, populated with the occasional indigent forty-niner bedding down for the night on a soft mattress of his own vomit, and the odd bullet ridden corpse of a draw-speed silver medallist.  Gatlinberg: where the men were tough or dead, and the women drunk or just plain crazy.  Gatllinberg.  God's backed-up toilet after an asparagus and corn roast.  Gatlinberg.

   K.W. and Scab rode slowly down the middle of the street, eyes scanning from left to right.  Once in a while a bar-fight would spill through a window onto the street, but they continued resolutely onward, their shadows stretching out like their necks would if the marshal ever caught up with them.

   â€œTell me again about the plan,” Scab said, hand slipping down to his gun handle as one street fight got particularly close.

   â€œWhat, finding her, or afterwards?”

   â€œAfter.  How's it gonna play out?”

   K.W. stopped his horse, and turned to face his cousin.  “We find her, and we ask her to choose.”

   Scab stared back, a little less blankly than usual.  “Between us and them?” Scab asked, nodding towards the mine-hardened men beating each other into fleshy pulp in the street.  “Or between you and me?”

   K.W. tipped his hat, but said nothing.

   â€œWhat if she chooses wrong?” Scab asked.

   â€œFor at least one of us, I reckon that's a pretty certain outcome.”  There it was, out on the table like a deuce from the bottom of the deck.  K.W. had known from the moment that he'd hatched this scheme that it wouldn't turn out pretty.  But somewhere in his lovelorn heart he felt that cutting the deck was worth the shot, even if it more than likely would result in losing big.  Scab was just now working through the odds, and the expression on his face told K.W. that he didn't like how the deck was stacked.

   â€œI reckon at least one of us is bound to be pretty put out,” he said at length, still stroking the handle of his pistol.

   â€œYeah,” K.W. replied.  “But I always figured we'd be gentlemanly about it.  Owing to our long history and kinship.  You know, 100 paces in the street, instead of a cheap shot in the back.  If it comes to that.”

   Scab scratched his chin, trying to churn through the possibilities.  He had to know how bad of a shot he was, and that the chances of beating his cousin in a fair fight were next to zero.  On the other hand, he also had to reckon on the fact that he was essentially an unkillable human cockroach, who might just prevail through sheer brute bullet-absorbing force.  Whatever passed through his mind, or whatever was left of it since that afternoon, he nodded back towards his cousin.  “If it comes to that.”

   K.W. turned and nodded towards the last brothel in town, a dilapidated grand-dame of a place that seemed to drip vomit from its peeling paint.  At least, K.W. hoped it was vomit.  “I reckon that's the type of place she'd be holed up,” he sighed.

   â€œWell, let's settle this.”

   They both dismounted and walked side by side up the creaky steps and through the swinging doors.  In the dank reception room, decorated with peeling wall-paper and dead flowers, they were met by a fat old madam.  Her nose was turned up, and her ears stuck out of her head such that it looked like someone had put way too much makeup on a pig in a dress.  She glared at them through eyelashes so heavy with mascara that her eyelids twitched at the effort of holding them aloft.

   â€œWhat'ya after?” she grunted, looking them over.  “Penny Tuesdays don't run in the summer months.”

   â€œWe're not here to see Penny,” Scab started, but K.W. waved him quiet.

   â€œLet me handle this,” he said.  “We've come a long way to find an old flame.  We're here to see Dela Horstang.  She might be going by the name of One Helluva Dela, or maybe Starlene Brightcakes, or even the Half-Crown Down.”

   â€œOr sometimes Post Hole Dell,” Scab kicked in.

   â€œYeah, maybe that too,” K.W. conceded, trying to gauge the madam's reaction.  If she recognized any of the aliases, however, she showed nothing through the mask of makeup.  Or maybe the makeup was too thick to reveal any expression at all?  This might get expensive if they had to go through the rank and file of the resident prostitutes to find their lady.  They'd have to sell the horse....

   â€œThin little minx,” Scab spoke up.  “Got more teeth than a herd of sheep, and just about as organized.  And she got a lip like a can of whoop-ass.”

   â€œOh!” the madam exclaimed.  “You want to see Sharkbite Sherry!  That'll be fifty-cents each, cash on the barrel.”  K.W. and Scab exchanged the briefest of glances, before fishing in their pockets.  Amidst the horseshoe nails and broken buttons they were able to put together their bottom dollar.

   â€œRight this way,” the madam entreated them.

   They slowly climbed the stairs, still side by side, each with his hand on his gun now.  They might come to shooting each other by the time the evening was through, but at this moment they both knew that the greater threat lay in an itchy bed above them, wearing garter socks and nothing else and more than likely packing two shotguns for protection.  The madam stopped at the first door on the landing.

   â€œHere we are, boys,” she announced with all the flair of a pig's fart, and opened the door.

   K.W. and Scab almost climbed over each other to be the first through the door, only to nearly fall backwards at the stench within the room.

   â€œHoly shit,” Scab exclaimed, covering his face with his sleeve.  “She's dead!”

   K.W. scrunched his face, but peered long enough to confirm that it was in fact Dela, legs splayed wide and locked there with rigor mortis.  He turned to the madam for some explanation.  “Why didn't you bury her?” he demanded.

   â€œI ain't payin' extra for no Y shaped coffin,” the madam spat.  “Besides, she still pays her rent.”

   An old gentleman stopped behind them on the landing.  “Hey, how long's the line up tonight?”

   K.W. shook his head in disgust and stalked off down the stairs and into the street.

   â€œHey!” his cousin called after him.  “Are we going to do this or not?”

   â€œWhat?!?”

   â€œShe ain't choosing nobody in her condition,” Scab stated flatly.  “So, the way I sees it, the winner gets the prize.  You wanted 100 paces, right?”

   K.W. shook his head at the futility of it all.  Scab was not what you'd call a discerning man, but now he was plumbing a new low.  And yet, as K.W. turned it over in his mind, his reasoning did have an ironic logic to it.  Hell, without her two-timing, throat-slitting, tongue-lashing personality, Dela'd be all the more attractive....   Two minutes later, through the squeaking of the rusty bed springs, the old gentleman heard two more shots go off in the night.  Somewhere in the distance a dog barked and a line of drunken red-necks sung arm-in-arm.  Gatlinburg.


   

The logic of your inflated font size is compelling....  I feel as if I must purchase the bungle again!

Seat warming seems like a nice feature, although I'd need more details about this "bum squirting" before I sign on for that...   The rustic charm of Miguel's home-made toilet seems quaint, but I'm secretly disappointed that he didn't get adventure-game creative with some sort of needlessly complex but hilariously ingenious plumbing arrangement.  Similarly, I would find it more sporting if there was some sort of fraying or burning rope that could be used to swing over the communal cesspool, but to each his own. 

To the opposite end of the technology spectrum, can somebody please explain me this:

Spartacus!

....or Cheese Man?

"what do you call a man without a shovel in his head?"

....an ambulance?

A horse?

This ain't no "Alice the Camel" song!

Actual bona fide answer:

Spoiler

....Humphrey

[close]

I am most appreciative of Atelier for starting this long-overdue topic.  I actually learned a lot at the beginning of the OP about squat toilets!  But surely there are more than just the three varieties of toilets listed above....  For a species of remarkably similar anatomy across ethnic lines and national borders, I was always led to believe that humanity was infinitely inventive when it came to disposing of the waste that anatomy must regularly expel. 

This is my personal favourite:



When I was a kid we had to freeze our bums off sitting on the bumper!  This looks 1000% more comfortable.  Of course this kind of toilet works best on isolated back roads and up in the bush, not something you'd want to try, say, on a driveway or a parking lot. 

Here we go Baron!
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=50484.0

Excellent!

I know the joke, but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guanaco or even llamas are in the same family.

Riddle.  It's a riddle.  Just because it's funny doesn't mean you don't have to think literally laterally to solve it. 

[THAT DAMN DOG]

BUMP!

We're halfway through the Bake Sale now, and the clock is ticking down.  How's everybody enjoying the games?  Here are my thoughts so far:

THAT DAMN DOG: I played this one first and really enjoyed it.  The canned laughter, the silly comedic situations in the... sit-com, the character development of Stephan: I thought the game was hilarious!

BEER!: High score so far 77,000, and the soundtrack is echoing through my mind even as I type this.    I like that this game doesn't ask me to make any serious time commitment, so that I can play it when I only have 5 minutes.  I also thought the concept was brilliant: seemingly mindless speed-click game that actually really makes you think about how to solve each puzzle.

BLUE LOBE INC:  I haven't played it recently , but folks have been writing many encouraging words over in the CG thread

2034 A.C.II: I'm currently playing through this one (after a six month hiatus: I was an early beta-tester).  As a Canadian, I can vouch for the fact that Paige's goofy and well-meaning nattering is in fact authentic Canadian girl-speak, but the wicked and at times even dirty humour is pure Ponch.   I'm enjoying it the second time through!

So who's played any of these games?  Let's get some reviews up here in order to motivate the fence-sitters to do some downloading -there are only 12 days left!

because he's a fun guy!

Blast!  Pipped by that sexy BCT duo once again....  Try this one:

What do you call a camel with no humps?

Why'd the supermodel date the mushroom?

please analyze, when cheeses please the greases, do the seas ease the cheese when they terrorize precise trees? Or do fleas rather cheese the peas? or is peace just the demise before the cheese of john cleese will arise?

Is this the Philosophy Thread or the Insult Sword Fighting Thread?  Whichever it is, can somebody please direct me to the Weird Foreign Toilet Thread?  Thanks.