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Literature / Assignment 2

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Stanley Brown: Damn straight I am, I'm Stanley- Sir Stanley Watson Brown motherfucker, and I. Am. AWESOME.

Assignment 2 is a series of short stories written by someone ostensibly called 'James Fresco', though this is most likely a pen name. It is also the name of a character who appeared once.

There are eleven stories currently written and available online, each ranging from around 4,000 to 5,000 words. The stories center around the everyday life of the narrator and main character, Stanley Brown. "This man does whatever he feels like at that moment. He is a teacher at a high school. He is awesome." The eleven stories are divided into three arcs, in which he is firstly a schoolteacher, then someone who randomly travels the world, then a university professor. And a knight.

The stories are big on randomness. Everything makes sort of sense, if you accept the genetically enhanced monkeys and the robots. And insanely improbable coincidences. Sort of. Kinda. You may "find the stories a cavalcade of insane hilarity, or you may just wonder what the hell the author was smoking when he wrote them. Maybe both". The story grows from 'Stanley Brown making random things happen' to 'random things, many of which are caused by Stanley Brown, happening'. Hilarity Ensues.

Assignment 2 is available in its as-yet-entirety for free here.


Provides Examples Of:

  • Black Comedy
  • Calvinball
    Stanley Brown: By the way, today’s lesson will be in the style of a game show. If you are selected, you must answer fourteen questions. One of these will be the Super Krung, and one will be the Silver Krung. If you choose one of these, it determines wether you lose the round or score a Krung bonus. The Super Krung is worth fifty points, the Silver worth forty-five.
    Each correct question is worth ten percent more than the previous question- the first is worth ten points and if you lose a question, and you continue because you have a Red Flag you obtain by answering the Silver Jung, which you can only obtain by asking for it after you beat the Super Krung, or the Fuchsia Flag, , which you can similarly get after answering the Super Jung after the Silver Krung, which is worth three continues, anyway if you screw up and are able to continue, the next correct question is worth eight points.
    If you answer all fourteen correctly, you challenge the ‘Feared Five’, a series of difficult questions in which you have six seconds to answer each. From there you forfeit all your powerups for four point five points each. Then you have to answer the ‘Evil Eight’, which are harder again, and with only five seconds to answer each, and from there the ‘Nonconformist Three’, harder again questions where you have a time limit of three seconds to answer and finally, the ‘Omnivorous One’ and I mean omnivorous not omnipotent or whatever other shit you would say you freaking smartass Caitlyn.
    You must answer that question before it is asked.
    There are exceptions. During the ‘Evil Eight’ and ‘Nonconformist Three’, if you answer wrongly, someone may answer for you if the Tebuka rule is in play. To activate this rule you must accept the waterfall bonus special challenge by declaring yourself ‘Burruku’ but only if you have answered three of the Tuktuk pillar questions, which you can request at any time unless the Pillar Bomber question has been answered wrongly.
    Now, the waterfall challenge involves hopping on one leg and reciting the Canadian national anthem backwards or playing the rest of the game with the Collar of Judgement of your head, which means you have to complete song titles as I give them to you.
    Now, are we ready to play?
  • Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: This, quite deliberately, happens to Stanley Brown's mother, who features regularly... for the first two books, after which they are literally never mentioned again.
    • This is played straight as directly after this scene Stanley Brown thinks about all the people who've left him in some way, and doesn't mention her.
  • Gosh Dang It to Heck!: From Stanley Brown's rewriting of Macbeth, "Deity fornicating blast it!"
    • Averted heavily in the series as a general however, and subverted in the same story itself with the precision f-strike Macbeth gives at the climax of the story.
  • Hilarity Ensues: Step One: Stanley Brown says or does something. Step Two: Hilarity Ensues.
  • Mundane Made Awesome: Stanley Brown having a swordfight with a three foot tall genetically enhanced monkey. And winning by throwing a ninja issue kunai knife into its neck from a distance.
  • Put on a Bus: Stanley Brown's mother, introduced as though they were a main character, gets committed to a mental asylum in the second story.
  • Precision F-Strike: At the climax of Macbeth, a Novel:
    Macbeth: “Silence thou! I bear a charmèd life, which must not yield to one of woman born.”
    Macduff: “I was born via Caesarean.”
    Macbeth: ... ... Oooh fuck.
  • Shout-Out:
    • When flooring the accelerator of a car, Stanley Brown likes to shout 'gimme fuel, gimme fire, gimme that which I desire, ooh!', the opening line to Metallica's song 'Fuel'. More obviously, he's once speaking in solemn tones and lapses into the spoken word into from Iron Maiden's 'The Number of the Beast'. (And then starts singing the opening riff'. Unacccountably, a hypotherapist who randomly decides to put him under hypnosis quotes the entire spoken dialogue from the intro track to Dream Theater's epic concept album 'Metropolis Pt. 2: Scenes From a Memory'. There isn't even a prelude to this. He just does it. Can we say that James Fresco likes heavy metal?
    • To This Very Wiki at one point, where he reflects upon the phrase Department of Redundancy Department.
  • Unreliable Narrator: Occasionally. Mainly it's just flavoured by his personality, at other times he deliberately rewrites things in his own memory, though the story gives us hints to this. Or maybe it doesn't? Sometimes he simply forgets things, such as wondering why the 'love of his life', Rita, dumped him and then remembering only when told that he killed her uncle and then put his severed head in her letterbox'.

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