Find yourself sitting home alone on Friday night? Looking for something a little silly to make you giggle – or maybe share with some friends? If that”s the case, I”ve stumbled across the perfect place to while away an hour.. or five. Poppyfields.net hosts a collection of well over 100 computer/techie filks. A filk, for those not familiar with the term, is a parody of a song. The definition, according to MassFilc.org, is subset of folk music that is practiced in, by and for the Science Fiction and Fantasy community. The term “filk” was originally a typographic error in the program for a science fiction convention and the term stuck. People who write or sing filk are “filkers”. In its earliest form, filk was the setting of new, usually humorous, words to old tunes. Filkers still write new words to existing tunes, but they also write songs that are original both in music and lyrics. These songs can be funny or heart wrenching, silly or deadly serious, or someplace in the middle.

At Poppyfields, you”ll find songs like:

We All Live in a Yellow Subroutine
In the town where I was born
Lived a man who played with “C”
And he coded his whole life
On a stack of Function Keys

Berkelian Rhapsody
Is this in real time? Is this in memory?
Caught in a for(;;) loop, no escape from this subroutine…
open() your files, branch through the do{}while()s and see
I”m just the kernel, I need no libraries
Because you boot me up, load and go
Branch from high, store to low
Any way the thread flows
Doesn”t really matter to me
To me.

The Sounds of Science
Hello lab work my old foe
I”ve come to feel my anger grow
I have to find your composition
Using your spectograph emission
But I can”t, and I”m on my seventh try
I start to cry
These are the sounds of science

Is it poetry? You be the judge. You”ll find dozens more at www.poppyfields.net/filk.