byzantienne.

Feb. 21, 2012 at 1:32pm with 64 notes

Reblogged from paratactician

Gunga Dirk

sonnetstuck:

You may stick to comrades human
When youre picking fellow crewmen
For adventures that will offer no surprises.
But in the wasteland mapless
When youre helpless and youre hapless
Buster you learn quick that mates come in all guises.
Now in the blue pacific
Where i roamed an isle horrific
A-hunting of the capricorn berserk
Of all my cronies fickle
My best chum in a pickle
Was a saucy piece of software known as dirk.

It was “Dirk! Dirk! Dirk!
Wheres your frigging maker robot dirk?
Hi! Fetch him on the double
Or by jove ill give you trouble!
Damn your dastardly malarkey robot dirk!”

Now Dirk Strider was a master
Of puppets and disaster
As sharp a tack as nature could contrive.
But no matter how prestigious
No hacker can be jegus
And bits and bytes will never be alive.
I didnt fancy Dirk’s AR
Ever could be any more
Than a soulless code-compiler with all
The emotional sensation
Of a Bayesian equation
And the aptitude for feeling of a doll.

So it’s “Dirk! Dirk! Dirk!
You snarl of data with a human smirk!
Your sham of friendship sickens
Like the devilfucking dickens!
You dadburned bloated virus robot dirk!”

Dirk and the AR built a bot
Most elegantly wrought
To school me in the methods of rambunction.
As a cyborg it was spiffy
But i found out in a jiffy
I couldnt get the frigging thing to function.
Oh there was rare and fiery fettle
In those sinews made of metal
That brobot knew a thing or two of war.
But it had this way of *petting*
So that on the novice setting
I often plumb forgot what we were fighting for.

And it was “Dirk! Dirk! Dirk!
Get this sodding wrestlebot of yours to work
Or ill rewrite your syntax with him
You cheeky algorithm!
By gum ill flay your neural networks robot dirk!”

I shant forget the fateful day
I had my hands full in a fray
And brobot came to aid me fighting like a turk
With the blood of monstrous fauna
Dripping from his swift katana
And i just KNEW the mind inside of him was dirks.
“Shucks my friend” i said all penitent
“Didnt realize you were sentient”
But in a trice he tore his chest apart
And his solenoids unraveled
As he pounded into gravel
The green-hot chunk of ore that was his heart.

It was dirk! Dirk! Dirk!
All along that blasted brobot had been dirk.
Id ignored him and id used him
Id mocked him and abused him
And did i ever feel a ruddy jerk.

Its hard to be believing
And its funny to be grieving
For a copy of a copy of a chum
And i know that over yonder
Lives a rogue autoresponder
With a stout heart and a talent for the scrum.
I know i shouldnt be distraught
For all things made of code have got
A certain form of immortality
But i saw that robot suffer
As he perished poor old duffer
And i KNOW he bled and died that day for me.

And now its “Dirk! Dirk! Dirk!
You goldarned android bugger robot dirk!
Though you flummox and harass us
And youre only bloody glasses
YOURE A BETTER MAN THAN I AM ROBOT DIRK.”

-submitted by tweedymcgee

This is incredible, on each of its several levels. (And was written before the most recent updates, in fact.)

Seconding pT. This is brilliantly done.

(Also someone really should push more on the Kipling conceit, with Jake. There’s all kind of interesting things there, about jungle exploration and Victorianism. And colonialist/imperialist theory, and Jake ENGLISH (both lexigraphical meanings of that word, the in-text one and the our-world one) vs. Jane Crocker (in-text imperial intertext, explicit). Huh. I should do something with this.)