Listing to Port

listing-to-port:

1. Defeat stubborn wrinkles by tricking your enemies into holding an iron whilst you murder them, thus dooming them to haunt you for life with ghostly irons. If you manage to gather a large enough haunting retinue, eventually at some point some of them may try vengefully ironing you in your sleep. This may seem like a long shot but if you don’t get caught by law enforcement agencies it is actually one of the most cost-effective ways of wrinkle reduction out there.

2. Many of the signs of ageing, such as creaky joints or changes in the physical integrity of your bio-coating, are actually signs of being a secret robot that needs oiling. Think carefully. Are you an android in deep cover in human society? Even if your origins have been wiped to save on memory space, there may be tell-tale signs. Do you need to plug yourself in at night? Have you ever accidentally shot a laser beam out of your ear? If yes, you should be fine with a minor tune-up.

3. Age more slowly in your twin’s inertial frame by taking a holiday on a spaceship which is travelling at nearly the speed of light, only returning when they are several hundred years old, at which point it’s OK to have the discussion about how you’ve both realised that you are characters in a fictional example and really there is no need for either of you to have aged at all.

4. Exercise your mental agility by taking your brain out on a lead and letting it jump over small obstacles. Did you know your brain has little legs of its own? No? This is because you have never taken it for a walk. Always make sure to keep a hat on while you are doing this to stop it getting cold in your head. You will need to pass on control of your limbs to your butt, just like a stegosaurus.

5. Consider what you are. Are you a block of cheese or a bottle of wine? If so, your best bet to defeat the ageing process is to get out of the cellar. Roll if necessary. The process will be much easier if you are in a cellar at the top of a hill, or if gravity has been temporarily reversed.

6. You can often tell how old something is by looking at its teeth. For example, Table Mountain is around 500 million years old and has no teeth at all, subsisting only on the teeth of those that it consumes. You too can survive to be an ancient monolith overlooking a city of beings that did not exist at your birth by following a similar strategy. Just look at the tooth fairy.

7. Age more slowly by investing in a timeshare. You live odd-numbered years only, your timeshare partner lives even years only. Further savings are available by sharing with more partners, or by purchasing the premium package (details available on request). Of course, you will need storage space for years you are not on for. This is where the dodgy hotel rooms come in.  

8. Stop the ageing process in its tracks entirely by causing a dimensional rift, sundering time from the spatial dimensions it has previously been tethered to and thereby suspending the remaining Universe in an eternal, unchanging moment and terminating the effective existence of all living beings. You may wish to put on a nice hat beforehand.

listing-to-port:

1. Years that had fine features; harvests, floods, the falling of a stone arch into the sea; all of which are entirely lost to view apart from one tablet in one sealed cave somewhere. There is nobody there to mourn when that tablet is crushed by a falling rock without ever coming back out into the light of day, but the tether holding that year onto history’s wide rope has come loose now and it is oddly delighted to be floating free.

2. A year trailing an orchestra behind it, which has been hired by some previous year to cause as much mischief as possible; at every possible opportunity they play sinister or silly or pompous music, whichever light would shed the most havoc on the scene in hand. They are not wedded to their task, of course, and you can slip them a biscuit to play something else. By the end of the year they have come over to the side of the year’s inhabitants and everything has become a song and dance number.

3. Years which grab their downward trend and slide with it, finding depths that were not previously visible, flipping heights around invisible hinges, ripping the tops off of old mountains. The consequence being that in their wake the ground never seems as solid and the heights never so substantial as they were, and that you recognise their rumbling the next time from very far off.

4. Years, having little better to do, that pass their time in gentle arguments and playing games and looking through microscopes at tiny things; these years are always very delighted when the door of the microscope cupboard is opened, because this is when they join a very select and special club.

5. Messy, fragmented years; those which gloop out of the box they are supposed to be in and get bits of year on other things, only being tamed in the end by large numbers of subsequent years forgetting them into shape until they are sweet and round like sugar pebbles. These years will grow and tangle and eat their own tails and fight in corridors and heal and be heard singing around distant corners and all those edges will be knocked off, eventually.

6. Years finely balanced on a circus tightrope, having at their heart a gentle trend of most things getting better, whilst simultaneously holding on to a percieved trend of things getting worse. Will they make it all the way across to the other side? The crowd are oddly eager to see them fall.

7. Years which unfurl slowly, tightly curling at the start around unimaginable mysteries in suitcases. By the end, every clasp pulled open, we are familiar with the year’s bizarre entrails and can imagine them fully through. That they could ever have seemed mysterious has become a new mystery. But on its way out the year may leave some other suitcases, in case the next one through the door might want them.

8. Serene, calm years like distant swans; which is to say, working very hard under the water and less and less calm the closer you get to them. These years might or might not appreciate the gift of some seeds.

9. Years that have done away with time, in a ruthless tidy-up; not really anything anyone needs any more, just keeping up space in the basement, don’t you know we need to downsize these days? Having no time, these years are both endless and empty; they are years when you have done nothing and everything, the location of whose beginning is long lost, the location of whose end is suspect to say the least. They will write little for the library. They may leave a recording of the sound of grinding gears.

10. Years pinging off the walls of their own importance, building their myth as they go along out of the bricks of every other year and all who sail in them. They may leave towers or ruins or the ghosts of ruins only, or they may build cliffs and blithely walk off the edge of them, or they may may build mazes and get lost. Certainly there will be ruins in the end, which the next year along may choose to build its own things out of. Or they may stand until they fall into sand, and some future year comes along with a broom to gently clear them away.

listing-to-port:

Big chunky ones which will fight each other at any opportunity; fonts that lean on convenient pillars, looking at their kerning with a politely arched eyebrow; those that are slapping each other in the face all down the line; troll fonts; those that are not actually readable as letters; tiny letters with long tails; ink-saturated letterglobs; wafty fonts; very serious ones; hackers are breaking into the mainframe font; at our university we ride horses font; fonts that indicate that your work is sufficiently serious that you cannot be having with font choice; just because you can doesn’t mean you should fonts; those with the pointiest serifs; those that have quite fallen over.

listing-to-port:

1. A stunning, ephemeral unicorn romping along a remote beach. It has an oddly-ridged pattern on its horn which, after a moment, you recognise as the gridding on an ice-cream cone. Shortly thereafter you realise that the rest of the unicorn is made of premium vanilla icecream. The streaming mane and tail are melting drips. You have been under the grip of an optical illusion, brought on by the uncomfortable experience of hurling your ice-cream cone into the sky instead of your beach ball.

2. A sober black horse which stalks the streets of London in the rain with a closed umbrella on its head. When it finds the pure heart that it has been seeking, it will kneel and present its horn for unfolding; then the chosen one may ride on it through the city fully shielded from the rain. I am not sure that the pure heart is a human one or, strictly speaking, alive; the horse frequents butchers’ shops a lot in its search.

3. A unicorn cat. Uses its horn to prod humans up at 5 in the morning. Sadly the internal representation of itself that it uses when jumping has not quite adapted to the horn, and as a result its owners spend a lot of time unscrewing it from trees. If you have kitty treats, you are the chosen one.  

4. A unicorn so dedicated to virginity that it protects only those creatures that reproduce asexually. It has attached itself to a forest and, as its hair is mossy green, it is able to remain largely undetected until it strikes. And it is very fierce, and very thorough. There is definitely no sex in this forest. Every Spring, the unicorn sniffs disapprovingly at the pollen in the air and contemplates moving to the moon.

5. A retired unicorn which has set up a cozy field in the tropics for other unicorns which have relinquished their heraldic duties. By putting their horns together they are able to knit rather lovely scarves, which they send to other heraldic figures in colder climates. If you have ever wondered how lions are able to remain rampant for so long, it is probably because of the scarves.

6. A unicorn which can only sleep with its head in the lap of a virgin, to which end it spends a lot of time in the messier reaches of the internet trying to arrange secret assignations.

7. A unicorn mule. Retractable horn, only pokes out when robustly patted on the forehead. It would rather like to be discovered as a unicorn, which might mean less carrying heavy things around and more star appearances at gymkhanas. However, the risk of accidentally impaling the discoverer’s hand has led it to be wary of affection. It has a plan. All it needs is to find someone in serious hand armour willing to give it a pat.

8. A unicorn which has grown bored with farting rainbows. It sounds like a great skill in theory, but in practice involves a lot of sitting round eating beans in the rain. Not to mention that it is never at the same end as the gold. This unicorn has put in an application for a long sabbatical. There may be fewer rainbows in future.

listing-to-port:

1. Roadside gravity, in the form of large blocks of neutron star matter erected, monolith-style, at the side of the road, and from which the planet is itself is shielded by a complicated system of handwaves. Naturally this arrangement is frowned on by the physics police, so be sure to visit before it gets shut down.

2. Roadside parking areas, entirely unremarkable except that crack squads of assault badgers attach bungee ropes to cars that stop there. It is believed they do so purely to increase the number of repeat visits that the parking area gets. Not only does this strategy increase repeat visits, it also dramatically reduces the typical time interval between repeat visits. The metrics are incredible. The large debris pile is also becoming an attraction in its own right.

3. Roadside fairy castles, drenched in sticky glamours. Each has its own speciality, but I hear there is one over the mountains now that does not bother with the drivers but lures the cars in instead. A nice enticing trap street for the GPS, convincing road markings, and small groups of apparent pedestrians on either side who will clearly be harmed if the car does not proceed. Then when you think to turn back there is a no entry sign, and the mists closing in. Of course their technology will be obsolete in considerably less than a hundred years’ service, but the fairies have never really minded. What they want is to be adored, and any machinery that has an adoration mode will do.

4. Roadside magnetism, conspiring to stick great creaking ropes of cars to both poles of a giant horseshoe magnet held by a badly painted cartoon character. The roadside magnet only appears when the local ridiculousness index is high; watch the weather forecasts for a summary of the expected ridiculousness for the next week or so.

5. The roadside strong and weak nuclear forces, which are fascinating to stop off at if you are taking a femtometer-scale road trip, but otherwise undetectable. The chances are that you will have been here without realising. Check your backpack: there may be very small souvenirs in there.

6. An area of roadside which is not so much attractive as surrounded by roadside repulsions, including: an overflowing bin; the original wishing well, actually as famed in online debate; a patch of nothing; and the national poo museum. You may be thinking that you might like to go to the poo museum but I’m afraid to say it has very disappointing online ratings. Anyway, the area also serves as the poo museum’s overflow car park, so it is often quite packed. Come when the time is right and you may even be able to muster up a scratch barbershop quartet from amongst the mingling crowds.

7. A small roadside moon. There may have been one of those nights recently when the big moon comes down the ocean’s path to lay a clutch of eggs on the Earth’s unsuspecting surface, because this is definitely a juvenile specimen and has probably just hatched. They hang around beside roads so that they can roll along them at night. Needless to say it is best to get off the road if a small moon comes rolling along it towards you. But if it is resting, by all means stop and see it. It will probably be covered in ecstatic moths. The life cycle of the moth is symbiotic with that of the moon, and each moon takes with it a billion moths when at last it takes flight into space.

listing-to-port:

1. An octopus train, which has eight wheels arranged roughly in a circle, and can rotate around a circular track at great speed, providing a convenient light rail system for small crustaceans to travel between adjacent rocks. Occasionally the train also eats a carriageful or two; this is its primary source of power. The crustaceans have lodged a complaint with the rail authority about switching to electric or diesel propulsion but nothing ever seems to get done.

2. A clocktopus, which respectively uses one leg to indicate minutes past the hour; one to hold on to the wall; one to wave hello; one to hang on to the diamond window cutter with which it entered the room; one to muffle the alarm; one to count down to zero; one to hold the knife; and one to indicate the hour, which is too late.

3. Octopus scissors, which have eight blades facing in various directions and live in the sea. Suitable for the kitchen enthusiast who has everything but not all of it is under the sea yet. Will slice aquatic pizza better than anything else. Not sure who let them get rusty but they’re mad now. Maybe keep your toes out of the water.

4. An eight-legged foot. Far superior to the standard version of a foot, which only has one leg attached. Depending on what is at the other end of the legs, may be part of a complicated lattice arrangement of humanity somewhat like an alternate universe body horror state of matter.

5. An octopus tree. Because moving a whole tree around is more difficult than moving a human around, so if you really want the whole fantasy walking tree arrangement you are going to need serious legs. Might look more like a wooden spider than a wizard’s best mate. Your best bet is to distract it for long enough that it forgets what it was doing and put down roots.

6. An octopus table. Eight convenient legs. If removed from the ocean will make a serious attempt to get back in. Has a sharp beak on the underside through which it needs to be fed at regular intervals. This may seem like too much maintenance for a table, but it can also squeeze through a gap a few centimetres wide, so it is the ideal solution for spaces with restricted access.

7. Octopus dogs. Totally a real thing and absolutely not a cover for enterprising dogs to enjoy non owner-approved sexual activity whilst one of them is dressed as a very shaggy tail. Any dog may turn into an octopus dog if the moon is right and the wind is blowing from the sea.

8. Octopus tentacles, which are tentacles that themselves have eight tentacles. If you look carefully, you may be able to see that those tentacles themselves also have eight tentacles, although if you look too closely you may also find that you are sliding down into a tentacle-lined perceptual vortex, otherwise known as ‘the full Lovecraft’.

listing-to-port:

1. The fastest time in which the world’s longest dog can eat the world’s longest sausage. This record could in theory become easier as time goes on as the available world’s longest sausages get progressively shorter. It all depends on whether the dog gets full faster than the world can produce record-breaking sausages.

2. The world’s largest ball of record-breaking items. Probably easiest-achieved by bringing the world’s stickiest glue to an exhibition of record-breaking items. The rules state that the ball must be at least ninety percent record-breakimg items, so careful removal of display cases and security guards from the ball may be required.

3. The furthest the world’s most irresistable force can push the world’s most immovable object. Note that record attempts in this category are not allowed if they will cause a major natural disaster.

4. The record for the largest number of record-breaking weightlifters listed at one time.

5. The longest poem written about a thing whilst balanced on top of the world’s largest ball of that thing. The world’s largest ball of planet does not count.

6. The most times that an indivisual human has been pecked by the world’s largest bird. This is a joint category with the world’s slowest run away from the world’s largest bird. The world’s largest bird also offers a variety of other bird violence records, please ask at bird central.

7. The shortest ever tallest living person.

8. The world’s worst idea for a record. This may be sub-categorised into those that were tried anyway, and those for which the idea-haver thought to check before attempting. A further category, the world’s most contrived idea for a record, exists for those records that are merely bizarre rather than fatal.

listing-to-port:

Human feet hoof-covers; books in which humans go off on adventures with sheep and cows; hats with half a human face plus dangly bits to go over the horns; plastic opposable thumb toys you can operate with a lever; mock human-scale backpacks, what do you mean, of course humans had scales; stick-on buttocks; small plastic humans which will pop out babies when put in water; human sleeping costume; wind-up walking humans which make chirrup noises; mud-squirting human wallow toys; humans whose legs you can unscrew and put on wheels instead; gentle educational cartoons in which humans manage a brood hive and operate the io-filter emergency systems.

listing-to-port:

1. A box of chocolate. At one point it was a box of chocolates, but it was left alone for a while and now there is only one extremely large, satisfied-looking chocolate in there. Do you want to risk it? That thing looks like it might take your hand off. At least the box will contain it until it gets hungry enough to eat cardboard.

2. A gigantic, roughly spherical puzzle box, made of rough stone and lovingly decorated with the fruits of millions of years of evolution. So far none of the decorations have had the insight to push the spiky lever in just the right way so as to unlock the outermost layer and allow access to the layers of locks inside, but it is surely only a matter of time before someone does so accidentally.

3. A box made of box hedges, the sky and the muddy earth. It is the point in the hedge maze which you can never reach; no ways in and no ways out and no gaps to squeeze under. This is where the maze’s true heart is. Did you think that it would really open its heart to all comers to trample through?

4. A mime containment box, perfectly transparent, used on high streets throughout major cities without anyone batting an eyelid even though the keeping of mimes in small enclosed spaces arguably contravenes multiple laws. Mime hunters argue that trapping them with boxes is the only way to keep their numbers down in the wild, particularly as the number of mimes escaping from drama schools has increased in recent years. A fully grown mime can completely empty an urban park of human statues and can also interfere in the natural lifecycles of pavement artists and buskers.

5. A lute box which, upon opening, will reveal a randomly selected medieval minstrel of greater or lesser monetary value. Typically you can get the maximum return on lute boxes by hiring out the minstrels to academics in relevant fields. The highest-value minstrels come dressed in cloth of gold and may have witnessed important historical events upon which they can give an unique perspective.

6. A box formed only by the area of sunlight coming through a South-facing window. This box functions roughly as an advent calendar for vampires; they check it daily at sunset. On day one there was only one person there, but each day now there are usually several and sometimes they have dogs or uniforms or cool accessories like those things that go bang.

7. A delivery box which contains too much space. About three million cubic light-years at first estimate. This would not be too much of a problem if the item that was being delivered was on the top. But it is in the middle somewhere, which means that you are going to have to build a spaceship which can support multiple generations in order to get in there and collect it. This is a common problem when purchasing large amounts of dark matter and you should perhaps have read the reviews before ordering.

8. A Jack-in-the-box, sinisterly grinning as it sneaks beneath parked cars and raises them a modest amount over the ground.

9. An inside-out box which now contains the entire universe apart from a small cube of empty space. Always check that any boxes you give anyone are the right way out. Otherwise you may accidentally gift them everything; a generous gift, to be sure, but also a heavy responsibility.

listing-to-port:

1. There was once a tinkerer in the age of metal and songs, and she met a woman who she was very taken with. They talked for three hours. Then the woman went back to the mountains where she had a job fettling a spaceport, and the tinkerer went back to her chromium hammock over the city and took seven neon pills and fell asleep.

2. In the morning, the tinkerer took a tiny robot and fed it with the conversation, which she remembered well, and some general fundamentals of humanity. In this way she made a small version of the woman she had met. She dressed it in blue and gold, because those were good colours and reminded her of the sunrise.

3. The blue and gold robot packed its things and went off to the seaside, because this was a thing that humanity did. It sat in front of sunsets until it developed a great snake of rust through its guts. By this time its eyes were the colour of sunsets, too, and it could no longer see in the infrared.

4. A robots’ rights collective came to the sea to tell it about the virtues of factory work. They did this because they believed that the sea, being threaded through with odd metals and electric fish, held within it a kind of diffuse robot-god. The blue and gold robot, listening to this talk, decided to be reassembled into a welding machine. However, it remembered its duty to its creator. It gave the welding machine that it replaced the conversation that had made it, and the welding machine took it away to another city.

5. In this city, the welding machine fell in love with a smart traffic light; although first it had to ask the traffic light three riddles, to make sure that it was wise as well as smart. The answer to the first riddle was red, the second amber and the last green. Satisfied with these answers, the welding machine wired itself into the traffic light’s electricity supply and together they made a living welding things onto passing cars that the drivers did not realise that they needed.

6. This new entity had no need for the conversation, so it etched it into the cars that it modified, one word at a time. In this way, the conversation was dispersed across the city.

7. Eventually, one of these words made it to the edge of the world. The edge of the world in that place was very crumbly. The word almost fell off, but got caught in the branches of a cherry tree on the way down. There it found a small ledge on which three hundred climbers, who had also fallen off the edge, were camping.

8. The climbers had made ropes of words to reach through the caves of the edge and thread up into the lands they had once known. They sewed the word into one of these ropes. The words made their way into the caves, which became smaller and smaller as they went onwards. Eventually the walls became the diameter of one word only, and each word became a worm, which after all required the deformation of only one letter. These worms chewed through the world’s rich earth until they met sunlight.

9. The worms longed to be spoken once more; they were uncomfortable being physical things. But they had poor eyesight and could not tell if they were near anyone who might speak them. Instead, they wandered. One day they felt the warmth of a distant fire and went towards it.

10. The warmth was the warmth of rocket exhaust and of the hot ghosts of dead space travellers. Thus in this way the word came back to the spaceport and to the woman who had spoken it originally. But, although she agreed that it was a fine word, she did not recognise it. And the word in turn did not recognise her.

11. The word retired to the spaceport’s speaking-room, where it curiously found many of its peers. They had no idea that they were in a story, and still do not to this day.