Post Your Funniest Old Shame

XD It wasn't as bad as some of this.

Anyone read any of mine?

"Jesus is always the answer." - People who drift off in Sunday School.

I might when I have more time. Just one thing though. It may be from having read too many Fan Fiction Fridays, but I read this

"Case #1:

The majic pens"

as "The magic penis". So Yeah

Belief or disbelief rests with you.

My funniest old shame is probably a terrible sprite comic featuring derivative, cliched writing, bad artwork, and stale humor. Thankfully it never left my computer, but I sometimes come back just to laugh at it.

My old shame is something that I never want to ever mention again. I can't imagine what I was on when I wrote it. It's like my past self has only one one-hundredth of the IQ I have right now. Actually, that number's probably incorrect. I mean, my past self didn't even start a new line after someone spoke. Disgraceful. It's like a giant insult to my intellect. Hard to believe that was only two/three years ago.

Gave them our reactions, our explosions, all that was ours For graphs of passion and charts of stars...

A four-page quasi-play I wrote when I was 9. There's virtually no plot in the first couple pages, and the last two are just the characters giving me stuff like Ponderosa Steakhouse coupons. I actually found a printed copy of it not too long ago and scanned it in for safe keeping. You can read it here: page 1◊, page 2◊, page 3◊, page 4◊. I think the thing's loaded with unintentional comedy, which is the only reason I keep it.

---

As I've said in other threads, I didn't read many novels growing up, so I had very little to draw inspiration from. Most of what I did just re-hashed Calvin and Hobbes, Garfield or FoxTrot (yes, I liked FoxTrot before it was cool) almost entirely verbatim, or was plotless meandering like the play. I think I once ripped an otter-octopus hybrid (I still think that's an awesome combination) from the children's horror series Michigan Chillers — and I remember what I wrote at the time being decent, but I never finished it and have likely lost it. I can't remember too much of it, but I'm pretty sure I just ripped off the actual book's plot with a personality-free character who shared the otter-octopus' name.

Even in high school, I was assigned virtually no literature, and did little voluntary reading besides Harry Potter (mostly junior year and into senior). But I gave up after Goblet of Fire because I realized it just wasn't grabbing me. The fact that the only HP fanfic I tried — hand written on notebook paper, no less! — involved me picking him up at a local airport my be testament to HP's inability to inspire me. I have the characters eating at Burger King. I divert entire sentences to complaining about a freeway exit and listing the fast food options in a local town. It's bad. I got about 3 pages in before I wrote myself into a corner.

(I also got into furry stuff around my senior year. The first furry character I ever made lived in a dungeon, so that might've been vaguely HP inspired. He was also part llama, likely swiped from my love of The Emperor's New Groove. I tried to build him an underground lair, but I randomly decided I hated the character's species name before I ever got around to giving him a personality, and eventually discarded every trace of him. Since then I've flirted on and off with furry art and story, but never really finished anything.)

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Finally — what little I did read never drove me to think, "man, it'd be cool to be in this world" or "hey, I'd like to make a character who does this". As I said, Harry Potter and an obscure kids' series were the only things that drove me to do fanfic; the former was set in the real world with no magic or wizardry, and the latter was a slavish derivation. Even when I got into Redwall around the time I was 18, I enjoyed the hell out of the books but never came within a million miles of thinking about Redwall fanfic. And (perhaps mercifully) I never once did a Sonic OC despite reading the comics often.

Seriously, what was wrong with me?! It can't be that I don't like writing, because I couldn't get enough of the creative writing class I took my senior year. When I can actually focus enough to write, I get a bajillion ideas all at once and have to list them.

I don't see what's wrong with having no interest in writing fanfiction. I certainly don't have any, and I can't say it's stunted my growth as a writer.

Then why did I do so little original work, either, if I seem to enjoy it so much? Could it just be the lack of inspiration thing?

I wrote Club Penguin fanfiction when I was ten. ._.

I have an awful lot of things that embarrass me now, yet I also have to recognise that some of the ideas were good. The worst thing is usually the terrible dialogue (still a problem, somewhat).

I know that early on (before I was 10? Difficult to put down chronologically) I had some partially coherent story ideas about some scientist/millionaire fighting some sort of evil organisation. It seems to have then changed to some crazy military fiction, one where I tried to square space opera with no FTL. The one thing I remember keeping from it was an intelligent, talking, genetically engineered viper that combined my love of snakes and Spiderman.

Some time after that, I started writing a short novel that I probably still have somewhere. I reused the snake as a cameo, because I had grown embarrassed by the rest. I was years writing that thing on/off, and before finishing it I was embarrassed by it (half of it was about a Martian invasion of Earth -by a human colony, it seemed original to me).

I started writing other stories that continued the same universe, and kept some of the novel's characters and places, but it was clear to me that the novel itself was disowned. Some of these stories I still think good, but the overall setting had big plausibility problems and was too much a collection of political allegories In Space. It is now something of an embarrassment.

So, I have 3 times been embarrassed by old shame. I get embarrassed easily. It may happen again, but I know have a policy about my writing: if it's going to have silly things (usually does), make them silly in the cleverest way possible.

A blog that gets updated on a geological timescale.

Another funny old shame I have is the earliest version of my first fanfic. Unlike the latter, this one was never posted online, and I'm glad it wasn't. It featured a lack of detail, almost no development for secondary characters, blatant and excessive Author Appeal, and a whole host of other flaws.

I once rewrote Half Life Full Life Consequences.

With myself as the main character.

For an English exam.

I was 13 fucking years old.

edited 23rd Jul '12 11:08:57 PM by Steventheman

FIMFiction Account MLPMST Page

Ouch...

A really minor one but I was going through my first draft and the wording of this. Just. Why?

"The seeds of an idea were already fermenting in his mind."

Yes that's technically the right use of the word fermenting but still self, what the fuck. Awkward metaphor is awkward.

Me and a friend made an old fanfiction centered around Sly Raccoon, wherein Carmellita finds Sly's pot stash, mistakes it for mulched lettuce and makes it into a salad, before jumping Sly's bones and getting pregnant with Romeo Cooper, the hero of the story. Other highlights Murray as Sly's hippo-skin carpet (brought back to life after Romeo and Bentley recover, and I quote, "MURRAY'S GUTS!!!!!!!!") and Octavio's poison cock, which he raped and (supposedly) killed Sly with.

...Except Sly has a "Cure cock", so he's okay. And raping Octavio somehow kills him, because the antidote nullifies the poison. I was maybe 10 at the time, writing this with a 15 year old.

I actually made most of the choices storywise. What the hell was I freebasing?

EDIT: This should go in Fan Fiction... But really, nothing except maybe the names are the same.

edited 25th Jul '12 3:26:44 AM by MrMallard

I wanna know how you even knew that much about sex at 10. I was a super early bloomer, but dang.

edited 25th Jul '12 10:33:47 AM by Twentington

I'm guessing from this thing called 'the internet'. I knew that much at that age.

Gave them our reactions, our explosions, all that was ours For graphs of passion and charts of stars...

Different times I guess. I'm probably a lot older than you, since the Internet was a lot less advanced when I was 10 (1997). I was also very sheltered.

edited 25th Jul '12 11:02:59 AM by Twentington

I found a few excerpts of my Old Shame, back when I was twelve.

More:

More x2:

More x3:

More x4:

More x5:

More x6:

More x7:

More x8:

The worst part was that that last quote wasn't setup for something later. It was never going to be brought up again.

Ugh. I hate past me so much.

edited 25th Jul '12 11:46:32 AM by Collen

Gave them our reactions, our explosions, all that was ours For graphs of passion and charts of stars...

What was the context for this?

There were super rats that were invulnerable to lasers. They attacked the protagonists, and then they made a deal that they would not kill the protagonists if they gave the rats the laser they were using.

Gave them our reactions, our explosions, all that was ours For graphs of passion and charts of stars...

There was the earliest in the first attempt at New Dawn, when I was in Middle School or so, it was simply hilarious. I could not decide what year it was supposed to be, and just settled for 20XX. The setting is in a city called Neocora made for "academics and magical lore". So, theoretically, its an unmasqued world. Theoretically. You'll see how this is a problem in a minute.

The actual students there are 80's, 90's and early 2000's cliques. Really. They all fit into one clique or another. Matthew, strangely, is a very athletic kid, but is viewed as an outsider because he's...er, um, I never got to describing why, exactly he was disliked by almost everyone. It might have been his magic at some point, but then one must ask why so many normals are in a "magical" city. And why none of them knew about magic.

Between Power Rangers style battles between the heroes, the monsters blowing up, and the villains? Well, ostensibly, they should be a Vile Villain in this rather saccharine show.

Ostensibly.

They are a power hungry dictatorship from outer space who have conquest on the brain. They've done the world take over plan hundreds upon hundreds of times before. They have been established as having numerous high level, powerful elites who are utterly no nonsense.

Who do they send to Earth?

Well, first of all, they decide we're Puny Earthlings despite having a previous hero utterly ruin all their ambitions for the place...because that hero is currently 45 years old. And he worked in a team. A team that is, you know, still around. Who might just mentor a young hero. And they do nothing about this, nor do they think older people can offer a fight against the DRA. Problem with this is...they totally did. Just, canonically, three years prior.

So, the oh so fearsome DRA sends a teenage operative named Malfien who had previously been beaten no less than six times...on Earth. Against the previous hero. How was he not fired already? The DRA fired other people for less. I actually picked up on this a little later and retconned it in that he had a politically strong relative. This presented another issue. He was canonically homeless before the older series involved him. He's got one of the most convoluted backstories in the Old New Dawn.

Malfien was not even sent out there with very many allies. After wasting his time on some gimmick monsters made to take advantage of Matthew's mental insecurities, including one made of his angst, Malfien called in some lasting allies. Except then he wastes them all in a massive attack wherein he stays at home. This doubly doesn't make sense when you consider he's actually very strong in a fight. Its administration he has issues with. At the end, he has the utterly useless Manglor, the cowardly Terrorcon, and the Stupid Evil Lathetara, whose name is spelled different on each page.

This only succeeded in getting him more enemies on Earth, and exposing him to Neocora. To the surprise of nobody but himself.

And then, rather than call in reinforcements, he...attacks Matthew's school. Personally. What he should have done on day 2.

Once there, the designated "bully" clique approach him. Does Malfien do the smart thing and manipulate them into bringing Matthew to him, since Matthew has sworn not to attack normals?

No. No he does not. He reveals he is actually an accomplished alchemist by throwing a liquid that turns into extremely hot fire on them. To the surprise of nobody but himself, he is thrust into a massive battle against the student body. After using his fists was not working, he takes out his sword and kicks the dog en masse.

He then taunts Matthew by holding up the decapitated head of one of his old almost-friends and playing ventriloquist with it. After a long, long fight, Malfien returns to his base - a meteor-space station-thing - and plots some more.

Oh, it gets really silly really fast after this. The DRA, seeing what a miserable fuck up Malfien is, send in their most merciless agent. He's called...Sharker. He is a villain whose whole gimmick is shark related things. Yes, he gets shit done, and actually beat up Matthew and friends once, but my mom could never get past the silliness of his name.

The next big scheme was to steal diamonds. I have no idea why the DRA would even want diamonds. Maybe it was some new Humongous Mecha or something, I cannot really remember. But it gave birth to this silly line. "Malfien...those diamonds were not meant for your dirty hands! Sully them no more!"

Malfien's response? "Matthew, your soul bondaged down by the deadly chains of gravity and the fake promise of a life outside of the various dysfunctions of school, you lack any sophistication nor force behind your ambitions!" Even today, I cannot fathom the faux-philosophical warble garble Malfien puked out.

Thankfully, the next scheme involving crashing a space bound city into Neocora marked the end of the book. The next was worse. Way worse.

edited 2nd Aug '12 10:11:27 PM by NickTheSwing

In either fourth or fifth grade, I wrote a story for school about a kid whose family is forced to move into a neighborhood of crazy people because of his dad's job. One day the family finds a dog on the street and takes him in only for him to later reveal that he can talk. The talking dog warns the family of a coming threat, which they blow off and instead they introduce themselves to their new neighbors. That night, a bunch of madmen believing themselves to be pirates raid the family's house and kidnap their senile grandma. The kid rides the talking dog to the pound where he releases all the stray dogs, who then attack the pirates' fortress and fight a massive battle. The kid finds his grandma and releases her only to learn that she was actually staging an uprising of the city's mentally ill to take over and install a new government. As she is about to dispose of the kid, the talking dog jumps in and saves him. The dog fights the grandmother and they both sustain mortal wounds in battle. As the dog is dying, the kid asks if they had defeated the threat, only for the dog to respond in the negative and pass away. Then aliens blow up the neighborhood.

Fin.

If you find the text above offensive, don't look at it.

This may be bumping this topic, but I have another one:

In second grade, I got my mom to help me type up a book called "The Priness Hole." It was about a knight who went to save two princesses, because the princes were too sick to at the time (the knight was based on me; and I did NOT want the world knowing I wanted girls; so he had no romance at that point). They were captured by a witch; who turned a horse-rider into a dragon and his horse into a beetle named "strong-arms". The knight broke the four captives out and the "dragon" breathed on a hole in the ground.

I wrote in songs and poems that they sang about the hole; including, "strong-arms couldn't sing; so they sang his part for him" and "they went under London, they went under france; they even went under your underpants!!"

The hole; as it turns out; led to other worlds. The first was a world of giants; and both a giant and a human-sized mouse joined them. Next was a land of tiny people, where they meet a Totally Radical guy with hair over his eyes and carries around a boom-box. The third world was a, "world where animals act like people". (Like Arthur, Franklin, etc.) There they met Timothy from Timothy Goes To School.

Eventually, they go out into a field and the witch finds them. She uses her magic to put the princesses in a cage, destroys the tinydude"s boom-box, turned the dragon and beetle to stone, and and did something to the other two. The knight beat her, she was arrested, the dragon was a horse-rider again, and they sang about how much they adored the hole again.

"Jesus is always the answer." - People who drift off in Sunday School.

A Nintendo Wars fan fiction from when I was in grade 8 (I think I was 12 at the time). I'm pretty fuzzy on the details, but I think it was supposed to be a slapstick sitcom-esc story about the characters written with mostly inside jokes and humour only I'd get. Story? There was no story. Character development? What character development? Jokes? Well, it had the directional accuracy of a sketch TV show. It was modeled after another since removed fan fiction (Dr Bross' "Advance Wars show" if memory serves).

I do remember (even then) numerous spelling errors, jokes about friends, and an obsession with sock stealing . Also included was explaining jokes, the words "anime faint", and laser tag fights with laser pointers.

...I bet Fanfiction still has it.

edited 10th Sep '12 7:45:34 AM by kirant

As I mentioned, the next book was even worse than the Old New Dawn I.

Ten Parts Terror. That's its name. I don't know what I was snorting to think Ten Parts Terror was ever an okay name for a book.

Well, Matthew has gone a little nuts. I do not know if it was that Malfien's warble garble speech I mentioned before somehow got to him, but he put himself through very unhealthy Training from Hell.

Almost immediately afterward, Malfien gets demoted to second in command as the next guy up gets involved. Zeltha V, subject of a number of embarrassing incidents between me and another writer, was quite simply a suit of armor at the time blatantly ripped from Xiaolin Showdown, specifically Hannibal Bean's Armor.

He came up with a plan that you'd think Malfien would've thought of, namely, instead of the snail's pace "one monster a day" format used before (blatantly ripped from Power Rangers), V came up with a plan involving ten horribly named monsters who, in spite of this, were quite capable enemies. But as far as names being horrible, one of them is called Evilo. Another is called Dumbat. That's all you need to know.

And Zeltha's plan...actually works. At first, the lack of backup seems to really kill the heroes ability to fight back.

And then, amazingly, they stop using this plan, apparently, in favor of letting someone who failed even more than Malfien have a go at Matthew. Its Terrorcon, who pulls a Starscream in a funny way. He uses some sort of spell to fuse with dead monsters, and he becomes...sigh...Super Awesome Mega Ultimate Terrorcon. He spontaneously goes insane, and the heroes put him down...though not for good. The final loss for Terrorcon would've come in a book I never got around to writing, Goodbye Terrorcon.

Then the DRA loses some spotlight to a guy called The Reaper, who mind rapes Matthew and is never heard from again. And nobody ever makes reference to him again.

The most head bangingly stupid, most hilarious, most unfortunately named thing to come out of the DRA was next. It involved soft drinks.

Specifically, they acted like they had decided to make peace, and sold soft drinks to kids, which, going by what the stuff does, should have really been illegal from the start. And they put Zeltha V, previously a dangerous, really serious enemy...as the vender. If you thought the DRA poisoned it or something, or that they made it so that it would make monsters or something, you have more brains than most people in Neocora. Was it really even that surprising that a drink called Zelth, sold by a ruthless group of space fascists and named after The Dragon would be bad news? Everybody that actually drank that stuff and turned into a monster army commandeered by Malfien and Zeltha really had it coming for the insurmountable idiocy of drinking something that space fascists give out virtually for free.

Matthew wangsts about this, and then gets his sentai armor, which lets him godmode right through one of the previously pretty tough monsters.

Thinking that a plan that had failed once should be replaced by a plan that failed twice, they decide to throw their meteor base at Neocora, and sacrifice their otherwise competent monster guys to do so.

The end result? The local (somewhat limited) Physical God manages to teleport the damn thing away and the DRA are forced into the indignity of somehow leading their campaign from the moon, thus becoming a punch line to any Power Rangers jokes.

Thankfully, the book ends with Zeltha calling for reinforcements.