I have seen a vision of the future, and this is what I saw:
Why would Beefy be targeting the panda with a laser gun? Why is the panda glowing green? How did this situation come about? What happens next?
Your mission!
It’s a contest. 🙂 Come up with the best story to go with this picture, and:
- You’ll get to name the panda.
- Your story will be illustrated and used in a Fedora webapp’s error message pages (more on that tomorrow at FUDcon. 🙂 )
- You will receive a LIMITED EDITION, ONE-OF-A-KIND, direct-to-garment printed Beefy Miracle and radioactive panda T-shirt, using the design of your choice from your story (or the design above.)
Want to give it a shot? Submit your ideas in the comments below!
The Beefy Miracle, a recognized achievement in modern edibility the world around, is in trouble. This community-created wonder has angered too many evil and powerful people who wanted to see the simple so-called “hot dog” remain in relative obscurity. The Beefy Miracle’s eventual rise to success was pre-told in many ancient texts, and now that The Beefy Miracle has taken its rightful place as the mightiest of foods, those evil and powerful people decided to spring into dangerous action.
Knowing that the lovable community of Beefy Miracle well-wishers has a strong correlation with the love for adorable pandas (by virtue of a simple Venn diagram), these evil and powerful people schemed to abuse the cute power of pandas to lure The Beefy Miracle to untold of horrors.
Their plan was set into motion in three steps:
1) Acquire cute pandas.
2) Expose them to dangerously un-cute radioactive materials.
3) Lure The Beefy Miracle with panda-sized cuteness in order to taint his supreme edibility with harmfully green radiation emanating from the cute panda.
Their plan almost worked.
Predictably, less miraculous beef became infected quickly. Other communities consuming the lower quality beef entirely died out. Due to the hue their bodies emitted upon infection — which necessitated many large camps devoted to quarantine — this period became known as the “Green Plague.”
The final showdown: inevitable.
The outcome: initially uncertain.
As The Beefy Miracle rounded the final corner, and approached the final Radioactive Panda, a silence filled the air. All of humanity held its collective breath.
The other Radioactive Pandas had been easily disarmed. Holding the laser in hand, a precision tool common to all “Beefy Miracles” (such as high quality Spins), is powerful and adaptable as the job requires.
The Beefy Miracle took aim at the final Radioactive Panda and, using the precision tools only for good, removed every trace of the evil radiation until the Panda was again whole.
The Panda cried out, “Thank you!”
The Beefy Miracle nodded.
“Can we be friends? My name is Duffly! We should be friends!”
The Beefy Miracle nodded slowly, as if to say, “Sure, kid. Sure.”
Duffly skipped quickly to The Beefy Miracle’s side as they headed towards the sunset.
I think the answer is pretty obvious!
The panda, mistaking them for bamboo shoots, ate several radioactive carbon rods. The panda has only several minutes to live. The gun that the beefy miracle is holding is in fact a time gun, calibrated to shoot the panda back to the past so he can prevent his own self-destruction.
Chrisopher Allan Webber = Awesome!
[…] can only enter on Duffy’s blog in the comments of her announcement. There’s already a novelette and a plot summary submitted. I don’t see an time limit […]
The class were shown round the nuclear facility today. We were exited, scared, worried? They did a good job but the eerie ticking got to us all. In the canteen afterwards we relaxed a little and I had a hot dog and fries. I was enjoying it until smarty pants Jo asked if I could see the green radiation coming from the dog! He put me off. I ate too much already.
I’d been asleep for a while when mom came in and asked why I was moaning. I told her; my dog was glowing and about to shoot me with pellets of iridium or something. She laughed, but it wasn’t funny. I’ve gone off Jo.
Panda was trying to stop the polluting factory of software patents, but unfortunately,
Panda forgot her useful towel at home (after all towel is the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have), so she couldn’t stop herself from falling into a huge, bubbling vat of glowing green sticky goo (patent pending).
Then Beefy, the hotdog super hero of Open Source and Free Software rescued her using his Fedora Tractor Beam Gun (beta version, only available in Rawhide).
Beefy then gave a (free) towel to Panda, which she used to clean all the goo from her, and they all lived happily ever after, fighting together for freedom, friends and features.
Yeah, I know it looks bad. What can I say? The panda had it coming. Three months I tailed her through the slums of Mars, building up the evidence I needed to nail her for illicit transportation of fissile material, treason, and impersonation of an environmental control officer. Three months in disguise as a Twinkie, my bun in hiding, the mustard that’s my signature on the mean streets masked.
But finally, she slipped. Meeting her control in a low-down oxygen bar on the Upper Lower West Side, she let her disguise and her lead-lined trench coat slip at the same time, and I knew I had her. I had her! Still, it wasn’t over yet. As I made my way quietly to the door, snapshots and geiger reading in hand, she looked up. Twinkie coat or no twinkie coat, in that moment she’d have known me anywhere.
She made for the back door, adjuster in hand, and disappeared into the night. From that moment, the town wasn’t a safe place to be. That panda’s bad news any time; in desperate times, you wouldn’t want to be on the same planet with her.
I found her three days later, running for the Phobos spaceport with a couple of hostages, the goods still on her. Maybe she had some crazy plan to sell them out on Uranus, who knows. All I know is I got those hostages out alive, and I got that panda good, my bun against the night, my mustard standing proud.
And I won’t lie to you. It felt good.
mo: I will give you One American Dollar if you draw me a picture of PI Beefy Miracle in his Twinkie disguise.
The radioactive pandas had made their mission to destroy the world and nature with their destructive radioactivity. They were like show-stopping bugs that malign the experience of our dear Fedora and its users. So Beefy Miracle was appointed by his ailing master Fedora to hunt down such pandas.
Our brave Beefy entered into the Dimension of Code inside of Fedora. It was a beautiful world of code that took the form of the worldly nature. It exuded elegance from every bit of code and each representation of nature. But as Beefy traveled more, he began to see the havoc the pandas were wreaking.
He came across such a notorious panda in the Valley of Code-River. It was a violent panda with a radioactive sign glowing red on its belly. When the panda caught sight of Beefy, it directed an energy blast at him from its belly. Beefy dodged it swiftly and cleanly and then aimed his laser gun at the belly and shot a green laser. The laser deleted the radioactivity from the panda’s system and the sign began to glow a healthy green.
Coming out of shock, the panda thanked Beefy and said, “Thank you for rejuvenating me! There are others out there who are still under the influence of dark radioactivity. Hurry up and save them. I will go and recompile the things I destroyed. Best of luck!”
And so our brave Beefy Miracle set out to hunt and heal other pandas and make the forthcoming incarnation of his master a great success for he was the chosen one.
The ailing master Fedora meanwhile recorded Beefy Miracle’s bravery and sent a snapshot of it to one of his caretakers Máirín Duffy to beautifully present it to the world outside, promising of a greater success this May.
The panda’s name? It’s Lunchmeat.
“Beef from a radioactive panda? It’s a miracle! And it’s what’s for dinner.”
Now you know how hot dogs are made.
Wow. What a great logo for the upcoming Fedora 17 Angry Radioactive Pandas edition.
[…] that weird hot-dog-seemingly-with-a-grudge-with-a-panda post? Well, check this out (it will get even cooler soon with Fotios’ parallax animation… […]