End of the World as We Know, I Feel Fine

  Maurice sat down at his desk very slowly, knees sore from age, or experience as his wife used to called it. Selecting his favorite fountain pen and a fresh sheet of paper, he began to write. Nothing profound, but he had had a slow day and felt that writing might liven things up. Besides, his grandson, Henry, always enjoyed the stories he sent home with him after an afternoon visit.

Just as he was about to start writing, the doorbell rang.

  “I’ll get it!” Margo, the housekeeper, called. Outside his office, Maurice could hear a frantic discussion and a thlunk as the umbrella stand was knocked over. The guest was obviously in too much of a hurry to see him. But who would be rushing around this time of night? The old house did not see that much excitement except for when Henry was here, and it was far past his bedtime by now.

  “Maurice! Thank God you’re here!” the figure exclaimed, stepping quickly into the room.

“Where else would I be Laurence?” Maurice looked quizzically at his friend of many years.

“Have you not heard the news? It’s on every radio and television station in the world!”
“Oh, no. To be honest, I haven’t tuned in for quite some time now, I don’t enjoy most of the new music, and the oldies are a reminder of days long gone.”
“But-Maurice! They’ve finally disproved free will! The people are rioting! Every storefront downtown has been smashed and looted! I don’t even want to think about what it’s like in the bigger cities!”
“Oh, probably much, much worse.”

“How can you be calm at a moment like this? This is life changing! The very fabric of society has been torn asunder by this announcement! Nothing matters anymore; consequences are meaningless! I could kill you where you sit right now and no court would even think to hold me responsible!”
“Then why haven’t you?” Maurice looked up at Laurence through his thick-framed glasses. He needed new lenses, his eyes had gotten worse in the past year. Maurice hoped that no one was trying to loot the office; he had an appointment on Tuesday.

“I…I don’t know. I suppose I’m not meant to kill you."
"Mm. That is probably true."

"I-buh-uh...What are you doing anyway?"
"Oh, just writing a story for Henry. It's not late enough to go to bed, but not early enough to do much of anything else."
"And you have no desire to go out and do anything you want?"

"Well technically it wouldn't be what I wanted, would it? It would be this manipulating force that they've just discovered. Did they say what it was? Some sort of god or something?"

"Erm... I suppose not. But you feel no push to run out and join the riot or anything like that? And no, I don't recall what they said it was..."
"Well, considering that this 'force' has not pushed me to do anything like that before, even when I was physically capable of doing such things, no. No, Laurence, I think I'm going to sit here and finish my story, get a cup of hot cocoa, start a book, and fall asleep with the light on, like I do almost every night."
"What about all those people running around? Aren't you afraid?"

Maurice looked out the window above his desk. He could see people running around with flashlights and improvised clubs, and even heard the occasional gunshot. He pursed his lips and furrowed his brow, considering the implications of fear.

"Margo just let you in without question?"

"Yes... She knows who I am," Laurence said slowly.

"Irrelevant," Maurice said, waving the idea away with his hand. "And you say you are not here to kill me?"
"Of course not! Are we not friends?"
"Again, irrelevant," Maurice said, standing up. "No, Laurence, I don't think I shall be afraid tonight. If this 'manipulator of fate' wanted me dead, you would have done it long before, and if not then, now, before even alerting me of your presence," Maurice mused, clapping Laurence on the shoulder. "But if you feel afraid, you are perfectly welcome to wait the riots out here, Margo will make up the guest room."
"Um... No, thank you old friend. I suppose I shall be going..." Laurence fixed his coat and hat and turned to leave. Maurice walked Laurence to the door, who glanced around furtively before running to his car. 

"What a dull discovery." Maurice walked back to his office, sat down, and finished his story.

You just keep on trying till you run out of cake

  This post has nothing to do with what you think it does, i guarantee it. A few months ago when I was starting the Comicstory (you can yell at me for my inconsistency later...), I lost everything. Blogspot has this terrible glitch that if you past something and then do control/command Z, the whole page wipes, and you can't get it back. I tried everything, it was all gone. What's amazing is how overlooked this problem is. I googled it, and humorously enough (because blogspot is owned/created by google), there were tons and tons of results. I went to the forums and there are literally pages and pages of people complaining about their lost work. But that's not what this is about; I'm not here to complain about a free service, because as Mint Condition always says, if it's free, don't complain, just deal with it.
  I don't know about how caching works. I know that the computer tracks most of what you do and it sits there as a weird little file that can't be opened except in Text Edit/Notepad and is actually longer than the amount of complaints about blogspot. Again, just pages and pages of code.

What I assume Google does with hatemail to make the place even cooler.

  So in an venture that is only taken by the ill-informed (there was no swamp hag to point me in the right direction unfortunately), I plunged into the files, opening things that looked interesting.

Doesn't she just scream "swamp hag"?

 To explain to those of you who knows how caching works (see, I don't even know how to use those terms or if the computer even does that), I was hoping to find my blogspot entry written out in a file from the interwebs. I know it does this because I found some of the URLs I visited, as well as some of the text from pages of those sites themselves. Well, to no avail, I gave up, but kept looking at the coding because it was really interesting to see. So at one point I'm looking through the folders and there was one that was weirdly named. It was through the Paintbrush program (the ghetto Paint...), but unfortunately I cannot find the folder again to reference. I did, however, copy this because I was so weirded out. Those of you who I was talking to about the misfortune might remember this:

That is unedited except for the obvious fact that it's short.

I did try to transcribe it all for you. Yes, you.

  There's nothing truly profound here, but isn't that weird? Really consider that in all of the pages I could have found and all of the coding, I'd find that one little spec. I even ran a search on the entire file, and it never occurs again. Just one of those things I suppose. Again, nothing profound, but I thought you might be interested in the things I find.