STORIES OF BARNABY

You know I'm glad you brought up Barnaby. His story needs to be told.

Funny thing about that lighthouse operation, itwas actually the last time anyone saw him before what became known, at least in certain Scottish legal circles, as the Great Virtual Drag Racing Incident.

A few years later, Barnaby resurfaced in Glasgow after somehow becoming acquainted with a Scottish millionaire who had accumulated an absolutely obscene fortune through virtual drag racing. I never completely understood the economics of it (and neither did he), but apparently the man had spent nearly fifteen years selling heavily modified digital Honda Civics to strangers on the internet and had somehow turned this into an empire worth somewhere north of £3 million through the use of Facebook marketplace.

Barnaby immediately recognized two things: the man was extraordinarily wealthy, and he possessed absolutely no understanding of how money worked outside of purchasing imaginary turbochargers.

Within three weeks, Barnaby had convinced him that virtual drag racing was on the verge of becoming Scotland's national sport and that the only thing standing between him and generational wealth was physical infrastructure. His proposal was ambitious: construct the world's first real-world racetrack specifically designed for cars that did not actually exist.

The Scotsman invested his £2 million immediately.

Construction began outside Dundee on what Barnaby described as "Europe's premier digital motorsports complex." There were grandstands, concession stands, a twelve-story timing tower, and nearly two miles of freshly paved drag strip. There was only one minor design problem: because the cars were virtual, Barnaby determined the track itself didn't technically need to lead anywhere.

It ended abruptly in a sheep pasture.

This apparently did not concern the Scotsman. In fact, if anything, he liked it as it exponentially increased his possibility of romance, but that's neither here nor there.

The real money came several months later when Barnaby introduced him to a revolutionary investment vehicle called Non-Physical Automotive Securities. Barnaby explained that instead of merely owning virtual cars, he could purchase the future theoretical performance of cars that hadn't been digitally built yet. The Scotsman immediatley called his accountant.

Barnaby had anticipated this and answered the phone from the other room using a convincing Welsh accent.

By Christmas, another £1 million had disappeared.

Things finally unraveled when the Scotsman attempted to visit the headquarters of Barnaby's holding company, McLaren, Barnaby & Sons International Virtual Motorsport Holdings Ltd., only to discover the registered corporate address was a vending machine inside an Edinburgh bus terminal.

Barnaby was already gone.

Authorities eventually traced portions of the money through Luxembourg, the Cayman Islands, and, somehow, a medieval-themed miniature golf course in Nebraska. The Scotsman lost everything. He currently lives in government housing outside Aberdeen, where neighbors say he still spends most evenings hunched over an aging gaming computer, furiously racing a 1,400-horsepower virtual Nissan Skyline.

Barnaby, meanwhile, hasn't been seen in Scotland since.

Although, about six months ago, I received a postcard from Monaco containing no return address. On the front was a photograph of a yacht and on the back, written in Barnaby's handwriting, were only six words:

"Turns out the cars weren't imaginary."

I miss that bastard...
 
Someone who hasn't been here for the past couple of weeks is gonna see this thread and be very confused.
 
Man I don't even know wtf is going on with this. I'm kinda curios but kinda not. Part of me wants to dig, the other part of me wants to backfill. So it's like I'm looking to do something. So I'm gonna leave. But probably come back and stay. Briefly. Both ways.
 
ABB said:
Man I don't even know wtf is going on with this. I'm kinda curios but kinda not. Part of me wants to dig, the other part of me wants to backfill. So it's like I'm looking to do something. So I'm gonna leave. But probably come back and stay. Briefly. Both ways.
Click to expand...
I would expect nothing less. And also expect nothing more.
 
bconcrete said:
You know I'm glad you brought up Barnaby. His story needs to be told.

Funny thing about that lighthouse operation, itwas actually the last time anyone saw him before what became known, at least in certain Scottish legal circles, as the Great Virtual Drag Racing Incident.

A few years later, Barnaby resurfaced in Glasgow after somehow becoming acquainted with a Scottish millionaire who had accumulated an absolutely obscene fortune through virtual drag racing. I never completely understood the economics of it (and neither did he), but apparently the man had spent nearly fifteen years selling heavily modified digital Honda Civics to strangers on the internet and had somehow turned this into an empire worth somewhere north of £3 million through the use of Facebook marketplace.

Barnaby immediately recognized two things: the man was extraordinarily wealthy, and he possessed absolutely no understanding of how money worked outside of purchasing imaginary turbochargers.

Within three weeks, Barnaby had convinced him that virtual drag racing was on the verge of becoming Scotland's national sport and that the only thing standing between him and generational wealth was physical infrastructure. His proposal was ambitious: construct the world's first real-world racetrack specifically designed for cars that did not actually exist.

The Scotsman invested his £2 million immediately.

Construction began outside Dundee on what Barnaby described as "Europe's premier digital motorsports complex." There were grandstands, concession stands, a twelve-story timing tower, and nearly two miles of freshly paved drag strip. There was only one minor design problem: because the cars were virtual, Barnaby determined the track itself didn't technically need to lead anywhere.

It ended abruptly in a sheep pasture.

This apparently did not concern the Scotsman. In fact, if anything, he liked it as it exponentially increased his possibility of romance, but that's neither here nor there.

The real money came several months later when Barnaby introduced him to a revolutionary investment vehicle called Non-Physical Automotive Securities. Barnaby explained that instead of merely owning virtual cars, he could purchase the future theoretical performance of cars that hadn't been digitally built yet. The Scotsman immediatley called his accountant.

Barnaby had anticipated this and answered the phone from the other room using a convincing Welsh accent.

By Christmas, another £1 million had disappeared.

Things finally unraveled when the Scotsman attempted to visit the headquarters of Barnaby's holding company, McLaren, Barnaby & Sons International Virtual Motorsport Holdings Ltd., only to discover the registered corporate address was a vending machine inside an Edinburgh bus terminal.

Barnaby was already gone.

Authorities eventually traced portions of the money through Luxembourg, the Cayman Islands, and, somehow, a medieval-themed miniature golf course in Nebraska. The Scotsman lost everything. He currently lives in government housing outside Aberdeen, where neighbors say he still spends most evenings hunched over an aging gaming computer, furiously racing a 1,400-horsepower virtual Nissan Skyline.

Barnaby, meanwhile, hasn't been seen in Scotland since.

Although, about six months ago, I received a postcard from Monaco containing no return address. On the front was a photograph of a yacht and on the back, written in Barnaby's handwriting, were only six words:

"Turns out the cars weren't imaginary."

I miss that bastard...
Click to expand...
It is wild how small this circle gets. I actually ran into Dori—yes, Dori, not Cory, though he has spent forty-seven consecutive years screaming "IT’S WITH A D!" at confused customers—during the fallout of the Dundee track collapse.


At the time, Dori was running Dori’s Discount Bedding & Mattress Reclamation out of a rusted corrugated shed adjacent to the track’s sheep pasture. Barnaby, ever the opportunist, had convinced Dori that the track's virtual drag racers would require "high-performance aerodynamic slumber surfaces" to optimize their digital reaction times. Dori bought sixty-eight water-damaged twin mattresses from an abandoned maritime museum and lined the perimeter of the pasture with them, fully convinced he was on the verge of a retail empire.


When the entire operation collapsed into legal anarchy, Dori was left broke, stranded in Dundee with seventy tons of soggy foam, and harboring a deep, burning bitterness toward humanity.


To cope with his total commercial ruin and the endless torment of local townspeople calling him "Cory," Dori retreated to the only venue where a man with a floor-model memory foam mattress can exercise absolute, uncontested dominance: Reddit.


He managed to install himself as the head moderator of r/PowerSlapGlobal, a subforum dedicated entirely to the sport of standing motionless and getting hit in the face.


From his stained recliner inside the mattress shed, Dori ruled the subreddit with an iron, turnip-scented fist. He created an intricate 400-page rulebook for comment formatting, banning users permanently if they failed to capitalize the "S" in "PowerSlap" or if they questioned his sovereign authority on open-palm physics. He frequently issued stickied announcements declaring himself the "Supreme Arbiter of the Slap," using a profile picture that was just a extreme close-up of a heavily stained Sealy Posturepedic tag.


Whenever anyone in the forum inevitably addressed him as "Mod Cory," he would issue a lifetime ban, freeze the user's account, and post a furious, 3,000-word manifesto titled The Phonetic Superiority of the Consonant D.


The absurdity peaked when Barnaby—having just liquidated the virtual Honda Civic fund—briefly resurfaced on r/PowerSlapGlobal under the username SlapMaster_Barnaby. Barnaby convinced Dori that he could host the world's first Virtual PowerSlap Championship directly on Dori’s remaining inventory of used mattresses. Barnaby claimed the soft memory foam would safely absorb the kinetic shockwaves transmitted through the internet.


Dori was so blinded by the prospect of digital clout that he pinned the event to the top of the subreddit and declared a global holiday for the sub's 400 members.


Barnaby collected £50,000 in virtual entry fees, live-streamed a static image of a sleeping Bartholomew for six hours, and vanished into the night once again. Dori was left sitting in his shed, banning every single member who asked for a refund, while shouting "MY NAME IS DORI!" into an unplugged headset.


Last I heard, Dori is still in that shed, manually approving every single comment on r/PowerSlapGlobal and trying to trade a pre-owned pillow-top for a digital Nissan Skyline.
 
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