another bad witch

A bad witch named Baya lived on the edges of the Web, near its darker fringes. In her yard were cute things, puppies and goslings that, seeming innocent, attracted youngsters.

She quickly infected the minds of children who strayed inside her home, however. On her outspread apron were embroidered images that young people weren’t supposed see, moving pictures of people doing naughty things to each other. The pictures got stuck in the kids’ minds, making them callous and adult at an early age - too early, many argued. Baya changed her address frequently, for she lived in a moving house. On taloned feet it picked its way carefully through the tangled mazes of web domains, always one step ahead of the angry parents following it.

One child, a precocious and prepared young lady, saw what was going on and, as she fled from the bothersome images, dropped behind her a few bits of rotten code. The discarded virus soon took over Baya’s home and brought it crashing to its knobby knees. But much damage had been done to others, many young minds ruined.

And, soon enough, another bad witch took Baya’s place.

americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan

student uprising in Grigovia

From the capitol city of Grig to even the smallest of hamlets, students enrolled in the Grigovian public schooling systems – some of them merely children – took part over the weekend in often violent protests to draw attention to a number of different issues. While some rose up out of solidarity with Syrian rebels fighting the regime of Bashar al-Assad, others took to the streets to voice their dissatisfaction with capitalism and such poverty and income-inequality as is associated with this unjust and outdated economic system. The youngest protesters, however – they who are most prone to sudden, brutal violence – actively fought various police and even military forces to bring attention to the rising cost of candy and sweets, whose prices have skyrocketed following a local outbreak of the virus nonspecificus willibrandtis, which has destroyed much of the country's reserves of sugar-beets, ruining most of its sugar-beet-derived sweeteners, sweet-makers, starches, and similar smack-a-licious substances.

In a statement posted to youtube and disseminated by hand-printed fliers, the students of Grigovia's vocational-technical colleges declared their allegiance to all other vo-tech student movements around the world, especially to those in Thailand. “We – and our brothers and sisters around the world, especially in Thailand – are dedicated to the free speech, free assembly, and to the propagation and free expression of the various trades, among them woodworking, electrical wiring, and gun-smithing; any government organization that opposes our right to unionize shall not stand long.” Long columns of vo-tech students – recognizable by their red and gold shoulder-patches – marched through the empty streets, or drilled in abandoned lots.

Said Noviembr Chu-Yendt, age 7, from the northern village of Vonya Yellenda, who had traveled to Grig by train, alone, in order to take part in these historic uprisings, “Last night, I ran into some school-mates who were going to join a street-march to highlight the degradation of our national park-lands by foreign companies mining there for rare-earth-metals, but, afterward, we became separated, and so I had to spend the night in a park, which was no so bad, because I brought my father's Soviet-Afghani-War-era Makarov pistol, and all these knives.” The boy opened his knapsack, allowing us a glimpse at what appeared to be a collection of trench-knives dating back to the First World War.

Later that day, we spoke to unemployed former factory forewoman Hana Blastisyennd, a 67-year-old grandmother whom we found manning a street-barricade in front of a Home for Orphans of the Israeli Occupation of Palestine (HOIOP). “When I heard rumors that some teenagers were looting the orphanage of its silver, I erected this barricade to keep the police away while my grandsons went inside to re-capture the stolen goods and to give those damn teenagers a good spanking,” Mrs. Blastisyennd said before stooping to pick up a hissing tear-gas canister, which she promptly threw back into the midst of an approaching phalanx of riot-gear-clad policemen. Pulling an AK-74 assault rifle with a telescoping stock from a floral-print carpetbag resting by her feet, the otherwise-unassuming old woman fired it into the upper windows of a building a few blocks away. Her well-placed shots caused two men who had been hiding there to flee, carrying what appeared to be scope-equipped rifle and a pair of binoculars away with them. Furthermore, the phalanx of cops – which had approached to within a few scant meters of her position – drew back in haste, reforming behind the thick stone walls of a nearby auxiliary citizen's armory. “On any other day, if these policemen had asked nicely to make sure everything was OK within the HOIOP, I would have let them pass in peace, but these pig-dogs are not acting like gentlemen, so fuck them – fuck the police.”

Analysts except the protests to spread before they peter out, hopefully sometime around the harvest festival, in late November.

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virus attacks Grigovia

May, 2012; Grig – In what appeared to be a concerted attack launched by an as-of-yet unnamed foreign body, critical network nodes and sensitive hardware sites around this small, mountainous nation went suddenly off line in the early hours of Friday morning. Contrary to initial fears, the attacks – which appear to stem from a single finely crafted, specifically tailored virus – have had little affect on this rugged nation's civilian or military infrastructure. The average Grigovian is accustomed to rolling blackouts, heating material shortages, state neglect, and having to rely on his wits 99% of the time, so losing something as insignificant as the telephone network, and not being able to log onto the web, are everyday occurrences; such services as were lost during this week's virus strike prompted few, if any, lifestyle changes.

“We teach our grandchildren to be hardy, and to sit patiently in the dark not making a sound,” said Hennrig Yuyulong, 82, owner of an already dismal and smoke filled publick-house in the pulsing heart of this nation's capital. “We are not like soft-skinned American who cry when they skin their knees and who whine like children until they get their way. In Grigovia, we do things for ourselves, by ourselves, using our own resources, or we do not do them at all.” Analyses of the virus indicate that it was fabricated by highly advanced military algorithms similar to those used by U.S., British, Russian, and Chinese armed forces. According to Pitr Mohammad Yilyilanov, MIIG's senior press agent, the most recent attack is not the first such assault on this small, isolated nation's electrical and communications grids. “Most of our systems still run on old Soviet technology,” Mr. Yliyilanov declared at an early morning press conference. “This means that they are slow but reliable, cumbersome but also harder to hack, and backed up with backups for each backup. The systems affected during the breaches were responsible for all but the most peripheral systems such as our wi-fi and Internet servers, but, since most Grigovians do things by the old-fashioned methods, by the methods that have worked for generations, the only persons truly affected were sick or old, persons visiting our fine hospitals, and a loose smattering of bloggers who live in the band of industrial sites and abandoned warehouses known as Yidyidlenkov that encircles cosmopolitan Grig.”

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