CROW: Wow! That has to be the longest Marrissa story we've ever had to
sit through!

You got that right! I've read plenty of Misted Marrissa stories, but it was usually all in one (slightly long) sitting. But this...look at the dates on my previous posts. Other than that, Ratliff fics are the same now as they were ten years ago, complete with all the pointless introductions, conversations, detailed descriptions of where people are sitting, and of course adolescent sex references. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

And yet...Ratliff seems to make no effort to improve. He's quite aware of the MiSTings, in fact, he offers every new fic to the MiSTing community as soon as he's finished with it. Could someone somehow fund his way through a comphrehensive creative writing class? :-)

This past weekend I downloaded and have been reading in installments R&PD. Oh, Ratliff, how I've missed you! You are the one fixed point in a changing age.

One of my favorite lines so far comes from the scene where Lord Henry is torturing Ensign Calgray. After stating that Calgary has not been trained to withstand torture, Ratliff writes:

"Still, the torturer had to be asking the right questions to get out the information. Otherwise, Calgary would have been telling how to build a starship."

All together now . . . HUH?

From Athena Prospects, the finest TNG/Clintons crossover ever:

"His daughter Chelsea is currently an intern at the Kennedy Space Center."

Further proving that the harsh light of truth fails to penetrate far in Ratliff's little world.

Snick, I've just been rereading a few of these during dead spots on the job and I'm just as baffled as you are.

Especially since in the intro to Walls of Jellico he credits the MiSTings with 'making my stories much better'. (Although even they can't do much with this dud.) Soooo...Stevie...you're admitting you're a no-talent hack, then?
This is either a symptom of a marvelously subtle sense of humour or a pathetic attempt to sound hip, and from what I've seen he doesn't do subtle all that well.

Well...last weekend I did what I couldn't do four years ago. I read M&M, all of it. And...really, what's there to say that we don't already know?

The worst thing about it was actually these lame double entendres. For instance, the Romulans do surveillance by taking a cloaked ship across the neutral zone into Federation space, and this is called "Deep Penetration Under Cloak."

I have to admit with great embarrassment that I discovered last weekend that Stephen Ratliff has actually taught me something.

In the UK version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire on Saturday, a man reached the one million pound question for the first time in ages. The question was:

Which of these is NOT one of the races forming the Triple Crown:

a. Arlington Million----------------b. Preakness
c. Belmont Stakes----------------d. Kentucky Derby

If I’d been in the chair I’m not sure I’d have risked an answer but I remembered Ratliff writing about the latter three as a sequence of races and so I was fairly confident as a viewer that the answer had to be (a). I almost wished that it wouldn’t be, cos I really didn’t want to have to acknowledge in any way that Ratliff had increased my general knowledge, but sadly the answer was (a)!

Callie...a long time back, you said you managed to save a load of stories from WSN9 before it went down...do you still have them? I really miss them, and I need to reread 'Revenge of the Romulans'...

Is your email addy still the one on the front page of the "UFO" section? If not, bung me an email and I can send it to you in Word format.

Kingy, a LOT of the old MiSTings are in Google's newsgroup archive...just do a search for [MiSTing] or [MiSTed] in the subject header. Anyway, here's RotR:

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/rec.arts.tv.mst3k/msg/fbf632e271ddc037

There's also handy archives like:

Mystery Blockbuster Theater 3000
and
Shuuichi's Vault of Anime MiSTings (has nearly all Ratliff)

Quite a few MiSTings from WS#9 are here also:

The MiSTing Mine

Those links fill me with both relief & terror.

On the one hand I'll be able to read the stories I missed. On the other hand it means Ratliff's work lives.

Glad to hear it, Keith.

BTW, the MiSTing of "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" on the MBT3k link above is a personal favorite of mine. Great riffs.

From "A Royal Mess, Part II"

> "Just to the junior members of the crew, the senior staff knows
>better than to underestimate a bunch of kids," Marrissa replied.

Mike: After all, that's the major point of this particular series.
Tom: This and Scooby Doo.

> "Didn't you once burn that into a Cardassian warships starboard
>blade?" Victoria asked.

Mike: Ooh, he checked his Nitpicker's Guide To Stephen Ratliff before
writing this.
Crow: I can't imagine that book sold more than maybe 93 copies.
Tom: I thought what we do was the Nitpicker's Guide to Ratliff.

That "Misting Mine" site should put the name of the original author next to the Mistings. Since they don't have that up there, I can only rely on memory to figure out which ones are Ratliffs.

Well, I'm reading "All the King's Horses" right now. I could be reading more of The Bourne Identity right now but who needs Ludlum when you've got a literary genius like Ratliff?

Here's the comprehensive Ratliff MiSTing site, unfortunately, most are hosted by SVAM, which is down at the moment. When they come up, it's the best place for all things Ratliff, bar none.

Ratliff MiSTings

At the very least, you get a list of Ratliff's there.

Oh yeah...I forgot about that site. It even includes the "Stephen Ratliff Drinking Game" by NitCentral's own Todd Pence.

Now this is just hilarious:

After Marie left, Marrissa did what she had always wanted to do
>with a bed like the one in this room.

MIKE [while bouncing]: JUMPa! JUMPa! JUMPa! JUMPa! JUMPa! JUMPa!

> She plopped right on it.

ALL: EEEEEWWW!!

The "Stephen Ratliff Drinking Game" . . . ah, that takes me back!

Sadly, a lot of the classic Ratliff MISTings seem to no longer exist anywhere on the web. The all-time classic "Time Speeder" seems to be among these. There are many dead links on the Ratliff archive. Fortunately, I have a copies of the early ones saved somewhere on hard drive.

They're all in the Google Groups archive, I bet.

Yay! Revenge of the Romulans! Thank you so much!

There are some others I'm looking for...I think they were more recent.

One was called, I think, 'Hostage' - I seem to remember a guy making some kind of virus which made his hamster explode or something, and then at the end I think the police talked him down by bringing up some painful secret from his childhood, or something. Oh, and there was a lovely sequence describing a birdy getting splattered on the side of a plane.

There were a few good meta-mistings...Mike and the bots riffing on badly written versions of themselves...

And the one I would LOVE to get hold of...my all time fav...'Tom Swift and his War Tank'.

Here's "Hostage", presented in four parts. Just use the navigation links at the bottom to proceed.

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/alt.tv.mst3k/browse_thread/thread/81d81e14a176ff2c/93ec34c43e6dce0c?q=group:*mst3k*+insubject:Hostage#93ec34c43e6dce0c

As for Tom Swift...that's a pretty tall order. Intensive Googling of the Net and USENET have failed to turn up anything, but I'll keep my eyes out.

King, I can email you Tom Swift if you'll confirm your email addy (it'll have to be in several sections as it's so long!).

Some good news...

SVAM's MiSTings section is back up, under a different name.

Behold Everything What is Cr@p!

From "Revenge of the Romulans", perhaps the most inexplicable fanfic dialogue ever, uttered by Major Kira:

>Please dock at gate 3, that's the wing with the big "three" on it. Ha! >Ha! Ha! See you later.

*bounces up and down in delight*

Callie Callie Callie! Thanky thanky thanky!!!!!

kinggodzillak@bibfortuna.freeserve.co.uk

I really want to see the DS9 cast perform Revenge of the Romulans and I don't know if I should be worried or not...

Now this has nothing to do with Ratliff, but everything to do with MST3k, and I trust my Ratliff-wounded pals here are fans enough to enjoy it.

What if we were to take some of the more outstandingly entertaining movies featured on MST3k and make one-act plays out of them? Well, we don't have to, it's been done!

The MST3k One-Act Play Project!

“Tom Swift and his War Tank” is online on my own website here but probably not for long – I have no idea whether I’ve exceeded the amount of space I’m allowed, so grab it while you can!

w00t!

The MSTing Mine's old server has shut down, however, it already has a new home.

The MSTing Mine

Thursday's installment of Strange Candy features a young woman captain named Marissa. Hmmm...

The writer of Strange Candy admits that his Marissa was inspired by Ratliff's & there will be other Ratliff references as the story goes along.

His website is gone again! w00t!

Great news! The Ratliff Misting Archive is back - with broken links apparently fixed and recently updated!

http://home.netcom.com/~mblackwl/

Todd, you need help. This is good news?!!!! You poor boy! ;-)

Marrissa's powers have destroyed him, despite the best efforts of Mike and the bots

I find the Mistings make them not only bearable, but often actually entertaining.

I was referring to the Mistings, not the original stories.

Yes, the mistings are often funny enough to make laugh out loud - but what the stories reveal about Ratliff's warped mind - the last one, about the medieval planet, where the "King" knows his daughter has lost her virginty by how she walks... or that a captain becomes King because the nobles don't want the job, it's too much work... or his strange world-view in "Time Speeder" - that's what makes Marrissa's stories disturbing. At least for me.

Oh, they're disturbing for nearly everyone.

Hellooooooooo. Anyone here?

Just read one of this guy's stories. Wow. You know, I wrote stuff like that about 10-12 years ago. I'm 19 now. Want to take a guess as to what my opinion of his writing is?

Oh dear. You didn't read the story unMSTed, did you?! That's very bad for your health, and you should seek psychiatric counselling immediately! ;-)

Don't worry. I'm staying away from drugs, alcohol, and his NC-17 story to avoid permanent brain damage. I wonder if he has a bunch of macros programmed into MS Word that automatically add lists, Kobayashi Maru times, and dramatically mispelled names to his stories (Laxwana Troi?!?!). Is he still writing these?

Well, what do you know! Ratliff's earned himself a mention on Erika Flores' IMDB profile!

good 1215402120841

Wonder what old Steve is up to these days? Could it be possible that he's found a career involving the activities programming director for Norwegian Cruise Lines??

That would certainly explain this . . .

http://cruises.about.com/cs/cruisingwithkids/a/nclkidscrew.htm

And just in case the entire adult crew of the cruise ship is somehow incapacitated, don't worry, there's a backup in place!!

Wonder what old Steve is up to these days?

Paying for his sins, hopefully! ;-)

Cue new fanfic about a Norwegian cruise ship being attacked by pirates ...

An action figure from the Ratliffverse??

http://www.flickr.com/photos/joshb/2057635015/

Okay-you've got me--what's wrong with the figure???

It looks to be a correct figure of a one-shot character from the series finale-All Good Things...

In the future timeline you did have Captein Beverly Picard in command of the medical ship Pasteur.

So I guess what I'm saying is--what's the problem??

Beverly Crusher marries Jean-Luc Picard in the Ratliff universe.

Excuse me Todd--my point is that she also was shown to have married(and divorced) him in the future time-line in All Good Things.

This figure is as canon as any other figure based on Trek.

Unless you're making a joke which I'm missing.

If so:

Sorry about that, Chief.