Novel Entertainments.

A new form of entertainment emerges.

It's a sort of movie, but it happens in a different sort of building.

People lounge there for hours and hours at a time--no one ever asks you to leave--and you can eat as much food as you like during the process.

The movies are normal enough: there are characters, and they have problems and fall in love, and all that stuff.

But the characters are kind of odd. They act strangely. They say "hello" at the end of conversations. They say "I love you" before eating dinner. Some of the little rituals are wrong. The logic of feelings and actions seems upside-down.

People are very taken with this.

The new moviehouses with their infinite quantities of food start out with just a cult following. But slowly they spring up everywhere. More and more people are taken with the delectable food, the charming laziness of long hours spent watching rather inconsequential and odd events unfolding slowly.

People spend hours and hours inside specially-constructed movie theaters watching these strange moving images.

Which is very convenient, because when the aliens who made these movies arrive, it's that much easier to eat the now-fattened audiences.

--E. R. O'Neill