T.L.S.I.T.W.O.T.W
TLSITWOTW (The Longest Stories In The Whole Of The World) were two classic threads on the BarrysWorld forums.
The concept worked as follows: One member would start the story with a simple opening paragraph, introducing a principal character and then trailing off at a point of plot development (phrases ending in ‘where he…’, ‘but…’, ‘then…’ and so on). The humour tended to arise from thinking up the best way to confound peoples' expectations about what the next post would be. Often posting tennis-matches would occur between users who wanted the story to go in different directions along the lines of:
User 1: "now Davemech knew that what he had to do was..."
User 2: "...wake up from this silly dream that made him think the story was about eggplants when in fact it was about confifers so he woke up in a forest of conifers and..."
User 1: "...died immediately because this was just a shit parallel universe. Meanwhile, back in the REAL universe Davemech knew his destiny involved eggplants so he..."
User 2: "...was killed by the conifer-loving Davemech2 who hated eggplants. The people gathered round to thank Davemech2 for bringing conifers back to the forefront of everyone's attention. "No problem", he said, "just call me Davemech", so Davemech went on to bring the light of conifers to all when..."
...and so forth.
These threads proved extremely popular, amassing many hundreds of posts each.
- The longest Story (volumes 1 & 2 as posted with markup removed)
- List of people who contributed to the Story (volumes 1 and 2)
- Story repost on FreddysHouse with comments
- A current Story effort (idea by MYstIC G with support from TdC)
