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Omega Ladder #4: Wizard Week Wredux Something Like Necromancy 1015 words Wizbiz: Your wizardry allows you give anima/life to any work of art: A sculpture, a painting, a photo, and so on. "Before you make any decisions," the Witch of the Camera said, "I need you to understand something. I can give you the child from this photograph, but he won't have the mind of the original. He won't be your brother." The man sitting across from her, toying with a hangnail as if considering skinning himself alive, looked up and nodded too fervently. "I understand. I -- we -- we're not looking to get Brandon back as he was. We just thought it might be a nice gesture, I guess? He was only three when he died. I guess we thought it'd be a second chance, but of course, not the same person." "Mm." The Witch looked over the photo in her hand again: a young boy who could be any tow-headed toddler, although there was a distinct resemblance to her potential client. Most clients looking for resurrections of relatives from old photos were dissuaded when she explained the truth, but small children made it much more complicated. This wouldn't be Brandon, but how much would anyone be able to tell? "Have you talked to your family about this? Forgive me for prying, but it seems as if they should know." "We don't really talk. I mean, we're not estranged or anything, but -- you know how it gets, right? But yeah, I mean... I guess it'd be weird if we tell my mom we adopted a kid, and then she shows up and it's him. And... you'd have to destroy the photo, right? It's the only one I have." Half of the job, sometimes, was letting a nervous client find rational reasons to dismiss you, instead of having to make the choice to send them away. It had been a lean season for fresh commissions, but the Witch had long ago ensured her personal comfort, in large part to avoid summoning mirages of the dead for the desperate. "Yes, I believe so." She put on her most sympathetic-but-disappointed smile. "I would be more than happy to help you, Mr. Rabin, but I do not think Brandon is the child for you. Perhaps a child who is unrelated? A child from an illustration, perhaps? Despite my moniker, I am not limited to the photographic form." "Maybe? I don't know. I should talk to Jeremy about this, maybe bring him next time. I... thank you. I'll call again." Mr. Rabin rose, took his photograph back, and showed himself to the door. Once he was gone, the Witch began to tidy up the tea and sandwiches she always put out for consultations, letting the image of the long-dead Brandon drift from her mind. Honestly, children these days! For two married men to want a child together was all well and good, and for them to decide against homunculi or traditional life magic was certainly their right, but to resurrect a dead brother to raise? Next time, she hoped, Rabin would bring along a pencil sketch or a clay model, something that had never had a name or an identity. You had to be sensible about these things. *** Upon their next meeting, Mr. Rabin brought his husband, and they brought another photograph: older, this time, in antique sepia, of an infant in a christening gown. "My great-aunt," Jeremy explained. "She died at three months old. Her name was Mary, but all the dead babies' names were Mary in those days, I think." "I see," said the Witch, who could not quite remember if that was true. "Are any living who remember Mary?" "My grandfather, I guess? He was six?" Jeremy glanced at his husband, who shrugged. "We all knew about her, but nobody knew her." "And does your grandfather know what you plan to do?" "God, no. He'd lose it. Hates any whiff of necromancy, and he won't hear of an explanation of what you really do. I always figured that we'd give her a new name, not tell him, and hope he doesn't notice. Every baby looks the same, right?" "Gentlemen," said the Witch, with a frown on her face that was unfeigned. "I respect your intentions. You seek a child of your own legacy, and it is admirable, although I cannot guarantee it. That said -- the art I practice is not necromancy, but it can be very close. However long ago young Mary lived, and however briefly, there is a history there which would burden a child I conjure in her image. Will you not consider another way?" Jeremy scowled, but his husband nodded, just as fervently as before. "Jer, hon, I think she's probably right. I... can we figure something out that isn't anyone's relatives? Your grandpa's really observant. It could get weird." "Fine," said Jeremy. "We're not being charged for the consultations, right? We'll be back." *** The third consultation was a phone call. The Witch took it on her office phone, a push-button black Bell that was a hesitant gesture towards modernity, and she was unsurprised to find Mr. Rabin on the line. "Ma'am? This is Mike -- Michael Rabin? Jer and I think we have another candidate." "And that candidate would be?" "An old photo we found at a tag sale. We... we think it's one of those old Victorian mourning photos? Definitely a dead baby, though. No name or anything. I don't even know if it's a boy or a girl. Can, uh, can the magic make a decision?" "It will know well enough. Tell me, though: will you accept whatever the magic gives you? I can influence it, you understand -- ensure the child is healthy -- but with a photograph, I'll conjure what's there. If you want to design a child precisely, you should create the art yourself." "Oh, no," said Mr. Rabin, "I think we want the surprise. We've been talking about names, because... we'd get to pick the name ourselves and not feel weird about it. Not like I'm constantly calling Brandon the wrong name. It sounds nice." Sometimes, the Witch thought, children learned. "Very good. Bring Jeremy and the photograph, Mr. Rabin. This time, I believe, I can give you your child."
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Aug 8, 2022 09:34
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Omega #2: Wonder Lurking in the Depths Word count 186 There’s only one thing on my bucket list I’ll have to cross off posthumously: visiting the bottom of the ocean. Not the shallow, sandy bottom where crabs lie waiting to inspire guilt for stepping on them, not the reefs tour guides will take you to in a little glass-bottomed boat, no, the bottom, where male angler fish spend their brief lives in search of a mate to parasitically attach themselves to, where the blobfish roam, and where we have yet to see 95% of it. Most of what lives down there doesn’t even have bones, ironically weak against high pressures. Light can’t reach the depths, so animals create their own bioluminescence. Every resource has something that’s found a way to use it, like giant worms living on geothermal vents. Giant squid were supposed to be made-up monsters from a bygone age, but they aren’t. Mostly, I wonder when the ocean will figure out how to eat plastic. Hermit crabs already live in it. Urchins wear it against the sun, or as camouflage, maybe both. It’s life’s cradle, and if we’re lucky, could be its salvation, too.
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Aug 8, 2022 09:35
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Throwing out a terrible omega prompt 2 (biography) entry so we can hit 100. The weirdest thing is that this wasn't even the first time something like this happened around me 634 words This is a story about my ex Alex (not his real name), who was perfectly nice but was a near-perfect stereotype of a Guy in a Band in Portland. This being the case, of course, he was living in an ancient, dilapidated former farmhouse on a highway next to a dive bar, usually with 4-6 roommates at any given time. Given that all five-to-seven of them were also People in Bands in Portland, house maintenance was not always at the forefront of anyone’s priorities, which combined with the “ancient and dilapidated” part of their living accommodations, sometimes meant that things broke and then didn’t get fixed for a long time. One of these things that broke and then didn’t get fixed was an upstairs window that was loose in its casing, and one day decided to slam shut of its own accord, shattering two of the glass panes therein. Since it was summer and the house didn’t have air conditioning anyway, everyone was content to leave the window broken until the weather necessitated they fix it. This brings us to the night of The Incident. Alex and his housemates had thrown a house party (with requisite basement show/jam session), which was uneventful enough as these things went, and had mostly wound down for the night. Sometime around 2 or 3 AM, I remember Alex getting up, presumably to go to the bathroom, and then a short time later waking up to an incredibly loud noise from upstairs. I stumbled out of bed (which was behind a curtain in the room the staircase happened to go through; there were not actually 5-7 bedrooms in the house, so they had to improvise a lot) to see Alex walking down the stairs, a trail of blood smeared along the wall where he was holding himself up. “It’s okay,” he said, staring at me wildly. “The blood is from my hand, it’s not from my penis.” The next 30 minutes were mostly chaos, with roommates flooding out from all their assorted rooms (or room-like spaces) to clean up and make sure that Alex was okay. No one was really clear on what had happened, which was not helped in the least by Alex himself, who was still clearly drunk and also wouldn’t shut up about his penis. “You guys don’t understand! In 9 universes out of 10 right now, I don’t have a dick!” Everyone eventually went back to sleep and woke up the next day, where all was revealed: instead of going downstairs to the bathroom, Alex had drunkenly decided to go upstairs and pee out a window – specifically the window already loose in its casing. When the inevitable fall happened, Alex managed to get his hand into the gap in time, which saved him from the worst possible outcome, but didn’t prevent his hand from being lacerated by the rest of the glass as it shattered, thus the trail of blood. Now, that isn’t to say his member was spared entirely; we took a trip to an urgent care the next day after he passed some blood, and he got checked out. There was some spectacular bruising, but no long term damage. He was told “not to agitate the area” for a few weeks, and — more importantly — was okayed to play his gig later that evening (the conversation with the doctor, I was informed went roughly: “So, I’m in a band-“ “Of course you are.”). Anyway, Alex and I broke up some months after that for totally unrelated reasons. There’s no real moral to the story, but I guess it could be “fix poo poo if it’s broken,” or maybe “don’t piss out a third story window facing a highway unless you’re really sure it’s not going to slam shut on your genitals.” Yeah, actually, let’s go with that.
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Aug 8, 2022 09:35
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 WARNING THUNDERDOME HAS REACHED MAXIMUM 
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Aug 8, 2022 09:49
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Fly Ball 542 words When I was a teenager I was on a softball team. Now, I don’t mean to imply that I was part of the team; far from it. I came to the same field as them, did the same drills, played catch, but that was where our relationship ended. I didn’t talk to them and they didn’t talk to me. Why? I don’t know. Part of it was probably that I was an unathletic nerd, with average to below-average skills at softball. Therefore, I was stuck in left field, a position that required no interaction with other members of the team and generally demanded very little skill. If I saw any action, it was chasing down a ground ball or home run that had gone over my head. My throwing arm wasn’t even that good, but it didn’t matter. Left field was mostly a place to daydream about being anywhere but a cold, muddy sports field on a Saturday morning. So imagine my surprise when I hear the crack of a bat and the shouting of my teammates. I look up and there’s a ball! Fly high above me, but on a trajectory that is within my capability to catch. Endless fly-ball drills take over and I move underneath it, hold up my glove, and it falls right in. The impact is harder than in the drills but I squeeze it tight. You’re out. I hold the ball for a second, then throw it back to the infield. I feel great: for the first time in ages, I feel like I’ve materially contributed to the game. I’m still riding that high when, a few batters later, it happens again. A lower ball this time, a high line drive over the third baseman’s head. Now I know I can do this. I move in and scoop the ball out of the air. Out two. I can sense the team noticing me for the first time. I’m a player, not just a scarecrow standing in a field. So when the third ball comes my way, I want it. I can tell that it’s a foul ball, but if I catch it it’s an out nonetheless. It’s a stretch though, a short fly ball over third base, but I run as fast as I can, my mitt outstretched. But the ground is muddy and I slip. The ball lands on the grass, the umpire calls it foul, and I throw it back to the pitcher. My pants streaked with mud, I feel deflated. The feeling continues as the inning, and the game, end with no other balls coming my way. I had my time in the sun, now back to counting blades of grass in left field. My actions didn’t go totally unappreciated. At each practice, the coach assigned someone to lead the warm-ups, usually someone who’d played well the game before. Needless to say, this had never been me. But at the following practice, the coach chose me, “not for the balls that you did catch, but for the one you tried so hard to get.” And sure, it didn’t change the dynamic between me and my teammates one bit, but now I felt like I belonged, just that little bit more, on the team.
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Aug 8, 2022 09:56
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Now you hear me, now you don't 734 words There was a wizard and his power was words. Not magic words like you would find in a grimoire, all rich and polysyllabic like a tasty summer casserole, no. His power was the the little ones, the tiny ones, the conjunctions and pronouns and exclamations and prenominative decliners; the swarming insects of the word kingdom. It was honestly an utter pain in the arse. He’d be halfway through ordering his scone and latte at the local greasy spoon when he’d drop in the wrong parts of speech, and WAMMO the counter guy was a frog, or a buffalo, or once (confusingly) himself but with a slightly different name. The wizard, whose name is unimportant, would bitch about it to his friends. “It sucks a gently caress,” he would say. “A ripe one.” His friends would nod and commiserate briefly, then remember a magical errand they had to run or something, no-one wanted to be around a haplessly improvised conjunction explosive. One day he’d had enough, and decided to stop talking. He purchased a very expensive notebook (since he was still a wizard and therefore had standards to uphold) and undertook to write down everything he wanted to say. No more, he averred to himself and to anyone who would read his careful penmanship that he learnt in wizard prep school, no more! Of course the following week he was in a bank when who should walk in the door but a bank robber. It was easy to tell because he had a striped vest, a tommy gun, and a bronze plaque around his neck that read ‘BANK’, which he clearly had not paid for. “This is a stick up,” declared the bank robber, emitting a puff of purple smoke from his mouth at the same time. With a series of gestures, gun movements and interrogative eyebrow motions he indicated that all the people in the bank should place their valuables into his sack which was also striped. The wizard was thunderstruck. What were the odds, he wondered. Not only was he being robbed, he was being robbed at a time when he was completely unable to wizard away his problems with a few well-chosen participles, and he was being robbed, at a time, etc, by another wizard who was also clearly unable to completely control the magic of his words! For a moment he was tempted to break his solemn vow to cast some kind of spell, but as everyone knows wizards must never do that, so he discarded the thought as unworthy. Instead he took out his notebook and dropped it into the open mouth of the sack. Then he pulled off his ornate wizarding jacket, and dropped it in the sack likewise. Next, his expensive wizarding pants. His deliriously complex wizard gruts followed, as did his spectacular wizard shirt. The wizard was naked now, apart from his relatively plain (for a wizard) wizard hat, which he doffed, in a great bow, before flinging it high into the vaulted air of the bank. All eyes were naturally upon him at this point, as was the quizzical gun of the larcenous purple smoke wizard, and therefore all eyes widened as the wizard performed a great leap, and then another. His hands were expressive counterweights, which he spun round in a twirl, before dropping to his knees! These were merely the first tentative raindrops of the utter storm of naked dance that the wizard unleashed on the open-mouthed hoi polloi of the bank’s customers, it was a sight to behold and all felt obliged to do nothing but behold it. This was, therefore, the scene that greeted the wizard cops when they burst through the door five minutes later, a crowd of onlookers and a single on-looked dancer, naked as a jaybird and flamboyant as the jaybird’s more extroverted best friend. Naturally they arrested the bank robber, for bank robbing, and the wizard, for naked bank dancing, and by a curious quirk of magical law they ended up in adjacent cells. With nothing to do but wait out their sentences they took to communicating by way of beautifully hand-written notes, and soon became fast friends. When they were released, they agreed to move in together and a few years after that were married in a brief, tasteful, and very quiet ceremony.
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Aug 8, 2022 10:01
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A few 10th Birthday Crits  The Cut of Your Jib – Apocrypha: The Book of Revelations This is amusing and I appreciate how you worked both your agony rule and that hell rule. I chuckled a couple of times with the juxtaposition of language gravitas. But after that reveal, the story needs to make use of it, instead it’s a one note joke. And the story isn’t entirely consistent with the language choices for characters either. There could have been a bit more to this story too, because even though the revelation is a bit lost in time, it still kinda works as an analogy to human-caused climate change/environmental damage that would still be relevant to Chris 2000 AD. And with just a few extra details/responses from Chris, that could have landed easily enough. But instead he just wants a sweet truck. I guess another reading is that like many in biblical times, he does not heed the warning. Without this extra meaning, the reveal at the end is expected, if not the modern day context, then at least mistaken identity. Another option would have been for this to actually have been John and for him to try to puzzle it out and hear whatever his interpretation is. The words are all readable and the archaic language doesn’t feel odd or stilted. There are places where it could have been cut back since there are whole sentences I had to go back and read a couple times because I couldn’t figure out what they added. A story that could have used some more marinating time. But this is TD and there is no time! Chernobyl Princess - Just Like Tesco! (what the gently caress is wrong with me) A cute little slice of life, at least as cute as anything can be with someone confronting their past racism. It all works out neatly for them. They make progress, really make it sound like they’re trying. And none of it feels like it’s cheating or short-cutted. The guy’s in therapy and he’s learning to like new food. And he’s confronting little bits of his preconceptions as he goes through the store. And maybe he’ll come to even more realizations with the cardamom in his bedroom. And I almost wish we’d gotten to see that part too. I think if we had, this would have felt like a complete story rather than the slice of life. Especially since there’s a hinted at, but not yet explored bit of coming to terms about his outmoded way of thinking of his purpose as the bread winner that could be explored more if we got to see more of the home life or the lives of his kids and their partners. No complaints, just wanted to tell you that this has more possibility. Kuiperdolin – The least dangerous most dangerous game Welcome to the dome! You picked a heluva week to start. And a typo in the first sentence, you’re officially part of the blood cult now. And what is Kevin raising above the stump? His head, the sweat? The antecedent to “it” is unclear. Also the stump of what? That doesn’t become clear within the paragraph either. Good getting to the point though. Database administrator being hunted by the Russians. Cool. For what? It says for sport… but why him? Hmm, maybe we’ll find out. And then the world gets very foggy. Because as a reader I am thrown into Kevin’s thoughts about what’s around him. But is the forest around him? Is the trap around him? By the end it sounds as if the trap is around him because he’s in the middle as bait. But he doesn’t seem to be trying to get out. And then he’s stabbed and maybe the hunter is also trapped. It’s all a little muddled. This might be one of those instances where something makes sense in the writer’s head but in keeping back certain details it loses that sense to the reader. There’s also not much story here. Sure, a database administrator is agonizing over what we infer to be a trap though never really conclude, but I don’t even know what Kevin wants in this situation. So I don’t know if any progress is made. It’s a short story, but it’s not clear. And clarity is especially important in short pieces. Simply Simon – Dinosaur’s Fangs Thoughts while reading: Sonic’s gotta go fast. The hyphenates are long and distracting. “He’s even worse at reading rooms than what he will end up being…” Awkward and I’m not sure what it actually means. Usually we’re worse at stuff when we’re younger? That’s not brutal honestly. gently caress hip hop is brutal. Time dilutes? What an interesting way to phrase that. I think I usually see dilate, but you know, I think dilute works too. Who’s Youth? Okay, despite the confusion early on, this story does a good job of building suspense. I can tell it’s going somewhere and with every small section it ratchets things up a bit. Then Dino is introduced and Simon manages to avoid his friends until he can’t and then… it just ends! Simon! Did you die? Did they initiate you into the techno cult? Are you writing this from prison? As it’s written now we’ve got a guy who doesn’t want to make a bad impression in front of the wrong people but who also does not want to go to the techno concert. He has to go to the techno concert and is still being bullied by the hulking dudes. And without more, I’m left with no answers, no satisfying conclusion, and no interesting thoughts to chew on. Part 2 when??? Kaom – Lurking in the Depths I like many pieces of this story. I like the juxtaposition of the shallow ocean vs the deep ocean. I like the wondering what’s in the deepest part of the ocean. I like the musing on plastic and comparing it to the use of every resource in times/places of hardship. I like the beginning that starts with a posthumous bucket list mention which brings up the idea of death and that it ends with a line about life’s salvation. All of these have great possibility. But the problem is that they’re such small pieces in a small piece. They’re not well explored and they can’t be in a story that’s limited to 250 words and that uses only 189. I’d like to see this dig a little deeper into one or two of these thoughts and really paint an interesting picture of the wonders of the undersea. Even if they’re mostly fantastical. The difference or enmeshing of life and death. Or how we think something is dead (the deep ocean) but it too has life and life in ways that we wouldn’t imagine. Or we think are imagined and are actually real. Yeah, there’s some real possibility here. Thranguy – Swords and Time Soooo, where can I buy your novels? There are so many details implied here that don’t get their due because this is a flash fiction competition. But it’s interesting how well they do work considering the scope that’s been set up. But with the amount of worldbuilding that’s done, the characters and plot suffer. Caboth is blank. We get glimpses of his past and the choices he has possibly made based on his sword, his longevity and where he has chosen to be at this moment. But how much of that was choice? And how much was it the sword acting through him? Yress is also missing some important pieces since I don’t know why she’s battling this dragon to the ends of a world. I’m also confused as to what the dragon’s deal is. Did they resurrect it? Did they do that so it would lay waste to the world? Did they want that? I like that this ends with the idea that there is time despite all of these indications of endings is a good place. It helps the piece feel as if it has at least a thematic ending if not a character one.
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Aug 8, 2022 16:32
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LETS TALK ABOUT CRITS! Thunderdome. I'm so proud of you. We hit over 100 entries for our 10th birthday week, and had over 40 authors contribute their stories. We wrote over 79,000 words. NaNoWriMo can eat it, we NaNoWriWee'd. But as Uranium Phoenix said earlier, Thunderdome isn't just about writing stories. The real lifeblood (or plasma, or another runaway metaphor for a vital thing) of TD is CRITS!!!! They're how we all get better as writers--not just receiving them, but giving them too. I'm of the opinion that writing a whole bunch is only half the battle, you gotta get out there and figure out why a good story is good (or the other way around). This week has an absolute assload of entries, so it'll be a team effort to get crits for all of them. Some of our intrepid Domers have already stoked the crit-train's engine and it's rolling out of the station, so now's a great time to jump in and throw some crits in the thread! What's that you say? Overwhelmed by the wall of entries? Well, sit here next to me, dear friend, and I will help you. CRIT FAQs: Q: Who is allowed to crit stories? A: Anyone, everyone, you! It is one of the tenets of Thunderdome that anybody can crit anybody's stories. Doesn't matter if you're a first-timer or have 300 entries under your belt, you can crit a story. Doesn't matter if you even entered this week! You can still crit a story! Q: What story should I crit? A: Whatever you want! If something grabs you and you want to say something about it, great! Or you could follow UP's lead and crit the story posted before or after yours. Or you could follow Simon's lead and offer up crits in the thread on a first-come-first-serve basis. Or you could pull numbers out of a hat. I'm not your dad, I can't stop you. Q: What if I can't decide what story to crit because I'm indecisive? A: I put together a crit tracker spreadsheet for just this occasion: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11jRr3Rw8aC4Wq4AdgIwF4TM5HcoMf6WSH8bLOR_XYj0/edit?usp=sharing I'll highlight story titles in green once they've gotten a crit, so you can easily see what stories haven't gotten crits already, if you want to spread the love. When in doubt, I'd encourage you to pick stories from authors who haven't received any crits yet. (Note, I'm not keeping track of who's offered to crit what stories because you people never stop loving talking in like six different places, stories only get marked when the crits are posted in the thread. But there's no harm in stories getting multiple crits!) Q: I still can't decide what stories to crit. That's not even a question. What are you trying to pull here? Okay, fine. If you really want to crit a story but just can't be bothered to pick one, you can request a story to crit in the thread and I will randomly assign one to you. Q: I got a crit and I want to talk about it, where should I do that? NOT loving HERE. Take that kind of discussion to the discord, we don't need you making GBS threads up the thread with your whining. Q: Why is MockingQuantum so sexy and intelligent? gently caress you, go crit stories.
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Aug 8, 2022 17:33
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Sitting here has collapsed in a nervous fugue at the thought of judging your 80,000 words of absolute nonsense so I am going to call decade week to a close Judging, and the next prompt, will occur in a manner that is both close in temporal proximity, and horrifying in its brutal inexorability. Let the PORMPT horn sound, let the cries of FJGJ echo off the blood-slicked crags of the Domewastes, neither can avert the doom that rushes towards you
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Aug 8, 2022 18:37
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Thunderdome Week 523: It Takes a Village (to gaze at a navel) Well this is awkward. At the time of this prompt's posting, I'm about to read This week it's a shared setting prompt, except the setting was designed by me, for my novel. Feel free to embellish with your own ideas, characters, set pieces, and plot points. I'm going to provide some basic worldbuilding info. All I ask is that you integrate some of those details interestingly into a story. Since this is intended to be a truly accessible prompt, I've omitted pretty much everything related to the central conflicts of my book, other than some of the major settings and groups. So go hogwild. When you sign up, you may ask to be assigned a faction. I will assign you one of the three groups listed in the 'factions' section. This is optional. I won't assign you one unless you ask. If you do ask for a faction, I'll expect you to write from the POV of someone from that faction. GENRE NOTES  Stories should be science fiction, science fantasy, post-apocalyptic scifi, and/or dystopian scifi. When I say post-apocalyptic, I am envisioning people living in the wake of a slow collapse, not an irradiated hellscape. GENERAL WORLD NOTES All stories should take place on an Earth-like planet called Etrenu. Etrenu is populated by humans and has a history that is superficially similar to Earth, though it's an entirely different universe. Since these are meant to be post-apocalyptic stories, you can imagine an Earth-like world roughly 400 years in our future. The planet has effectively undergone an apocalypse—the technologically-advanced society has all but collapsed, except for a few dystopian megacities and a handful of free city-states. Outside of those oases of life and culture, the land is harsh and difficult to inhabit. As if a planetary apocalypse wasn't bad enough: the universe is slowly, subtly dying. Something is eating away at its edges—chaos, decay, entropy, rot, cancer. Whatever you choose to call it, it's unraveling the stuff that holds the cosmos together. Your characters may or may not be aware of this.Gods walked with mortals in ancient history, but they've long since mysteriously vanished. Most people don't believe in gods, or they follow the remnants of mainstream religions that did not venerate the old gods. However, echoes of the ancient deities still remain in the world. The gods live on in city names, archaic turns of phrase, and even video game worldbuilding! Among other things. Most (though certainly not all) surviving people live on the continent called Humet. Oh, and the internet and videogames still exist. Gaming is one of the few unifying pastimes on the planet Etrenu! How does the internet still work? It just does. Or you can make up a reason. FACTIONS Khosalu: Located on the westernmost coast of Humet, Khosalu was once a bustling seaside city, one of the technological jewels of the world. Now its abundant megatowers are populated by communities of squatters who have made the dead city their own. Khosaluans are cheerful, gregarious people who understand the value of community in times of hardship. They value their freedom, even if it means living a harsh life. Khosaluans also enjoy banter and wordplay, and take great glee in confounding outsiders with cheerfully weird turns of phrase. Visually, the city looks like an abandoned sci-fi paradise that folks have done their best to restore to something livable. Khosalu has two seasons: the hot hot dry season, and the sodden wet season. The Abodes: The 'Abodes' are a network of megacities scattered across the continent of Humet. Abode residents are known as Bodians, though the other factions often refer to them pejoratively as 'bodi'. Because the megacities require endless resources and materials, they often annex and strip free cities for resources and salvage. All of the Abodes are overseen by a sapient artificial intelligence that uses citizens' brains as a kind of distributed computing network. Because of this, the Abodes are generally reviled by outsiders—to become a citizen, one has to allow the enigmatic AI into their mind. The cities themselves are stunning to behold; the buildings are lush with biotech and the people are comfortable, cosmopolitan, and generally well-cared for. But at what cost? There are six Abodes in total:
The Scalvs: Scalvs live a harsh, nomadic life out in the apocalyptic wastes. They shun all cities, preferring to live in small, temporary settlements. 'Scalv' is a perjorative term assigned to the various nomadic peoples by the cityfolk—most scalv communities have their own names and identities, though outsiders rarely are trusted with this information. Scalvs occasionally do business with free cities like Khosalu, trading drugs and salvage for tech and creature comforts. The Abodes want to exterminate them as a nuisance, or indoctrinate them as citizens. Aesthetically: think Tank Girl meets Mad Max: Fury Road and you'll have an idea of what I'm going for. SUB-FACTIONS The militias: Once, militias (also referred to as 'chia', or 'chiafolk') were a lot like the contemporary militias of Earth: reactionary paramilitary groups motivated by bigotry, fear, or a desire to overthrow the status quo. Then the world fell apart and militias had to start supporting themselves. After generations, they're still dickhead neighbors, but they've begrudgingly formed the beginnings of a functional society. Militias tend to make their homes on the fringes of free cities, since they require the trade but want to retain their sovereignty. They rarely, if ever, cooperate with the Abodes willingly. They begrudgingly cooperate with the free cities, but only when necessary. The sympos: 'Sympo' is a slang term, short for "sympathetic doctor". Sympos are doctors who were trained in advanced medicine in the Abode megacities, then took their skills and fled to the free cities (like Khosalu). Sympos are considered to be criminals by the Abodes, since it's illegal to practice Bodian medicine outside of the megacities. As a result, Sympos must integrate with whatever faction they end up with. Without sympos, residents of the free cities would have significantly reduced access to medical care.Sunken Hope: Sunken Hope is an underwater techno-paradise somewhere off the coast of Humet. Mainlanders affectionately call residents of Sunken Hope fishbellies, because they tend to be sickly pale. No mainlander has ever been to Sunken Hope; the aquatic city would almost seem mythical, except that the fishbellies tend to be prolific programmers and internet junkies who make very real contributions to the virtual world. Little is known about them other than that, and the fact that they seem keen on sending entertainment and technology to the mainland. The gods: Once, there were hundreds of them. Now they're long gone, nearly forgotten. Or are they...? Gods were the programmer-poets of the universe, speaking all of creation into being in the form of a grand, intricate poem. They gave humanity two gifts: 1) free will and 2) The ability, upon death, to go to the place where gods cannot see. Human souls can depart the divine poem when they die, forever putting them out of reach of godly semantics. Few humans remember the time of the gods, and even fewer wonder at their whereabouts. There were so many gods that it's possible even I, the creator of this world, don't know them all! So feel free to make some up if that's the direction you want to take your story.STANDARD PROMPT STUFF Feel free to collaborate or work alone. I'm not fussed about whether or not you write about my world as I envision it. Just tell me an interesting story using some of the details above. No external links (including google docs), no erotica, no fanfic, no transparently ideological screeds, and I probably won't enjoy reading poetry unless it's truly godly. Signup deadline: Friday, August 12 by 11:59PM PST Submission deadline: Sunday, August 14 by 11:59PM PST Word count maximum: 2000 words Judges: me Phantommuzzles ??? Mortals YOU?? Sitting Here fucked around with this message at 19:55 on Aug 8, 2022 |
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Aug 8, 2022 19:14
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In, faction me
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Aug 8, 2022 19:18
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First round of birthday week crits Yoruichi - Big Day Out This is a neat little thing, just a slice of an experience. Good for Xanthe to go out and grab her fun by both buttcheeks. There’s some things holding it back, however. First of all, the intro needs some work. It’s a bit hard to tell at the start what’s going on - Xanthe is collapsed already (presumably into a seat), but then Sarah points down at said seats, indicating a “let’s sit here” thing? You’re talking about “girlfriends” which always confuses me because it could well be a romantic relationship, and then it confused me again because Sarah is the only one you talk about. Then, Xanthe’s journey from “collapsed” – which is a very strong word, it reads like she’s already quite done, physically, from what happened during the early stages of the concert - to “okay I really need to be in there” is too sudden for me. Yeah, the music can infuse you with the NEED for dancefloor action, I get it, but usually - for me at least - that comes with a certain swelling of emotion, with a “no actually my fatigue is GONE I can DO it” surge through your body, and you could have written that and I’d have been happy. Rest is fine with the one caveat that I don’t know how cool and moshy Metallica still is. It is maybe not the best example for a band to get someone of Xanthe’s probable young age going (she’s still flatmates with somebody, open for relationships, no judgment if you’re older and in that situation, but it’s rarer). Admittedly, I wouldn’t know which current band would fit the bill. Anyway, getting on stage and (if contrived) meeting James and vibing is all good. SurreptitiousMuffin - Matey Potatey lol this ruled. You really are excellent at writing just unpleasantly visceral poo poo. I especially enjoyed the hosed up speech of the potat man, like a deepfried meme gone horribly wrong. There’s a somewhat intriguing glimpse into a wider world where everything has turned to gently caress, I don’t know if I like it - the black-eyed cunts, excuse my direct quote, are just kind of there and don’t really reinforce what needs setting up or more fortifying: that Bev is not just a greedy fucker, he’s also trying to survive in a world that’s rapidly turning to dogshit. Yeah, he’s also a fucker, but hosed worlds breed hosed people. There’s something to that paragraph, but it needs to focus on that aspect imo The paragraph that starts with “alright then mate” needs a serious tune-up in the middle, I’m sure that’s an artifact of you rewriting a sentence and forgetting to connect the new pieces. Finally, the title is stupid, it doesn’t fit the tone. But I get it, titles are hard. Why not call it “The Spudbears” or sth idk spitballin anyway cool story Uranium Phoenix - Thesis Retrospective: Results Analysis for Sub-Universe Generation Method for Obtaining Large Quantities of Iron (Final_Final_ActualFinal_2_Edited) Dear author, I have taken the liberty to further comment on your document, I trust you won’t find the nested style confusing: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1a5WOO8V7EDxWFhTMWB6ysrqK9F9sSLHSDEf2aeTSn5o/edit To not further clutter up the document itself, some general comments in this mail: 1) You [UP] mostly hit the voice of a scientific report quite well, but it derailed a bit in the end. That is probably intentional, as the author gets carried away, but the commenter should catch this and rein them in more 2) I think even within the restraints of the format, a bit more “unexpectedly: life” could shine through. A good (i.e. actually readable) scientific publication (counting Theses there, they are public after all) manages to convey the “Eureka moment” of the project, why the whole thing was worth reporting on, to the reader so they can nod along and go “yeah. Great research here. These guys know what they’re doing.” I think this is missing here a little, especially considering the author is full of obvious wonder at what they managed to achieve 3) That they established dialogue with the cultures in the pocket universe doesn’t really have a pay-off, they are after all mostly just observing the art the inhabitants created. I think it would be more interesting to suggest establishing contact as a follow-up study 4) Generally, like in every paper, the methods and experimental part is the most boring and I usually skip it. The meat lies in the results and conclusions, and the outlook can add a lot, this is where your story’s focus should also be I hope this was helpful, and your next version can be called ready for publication. Best, Dr. Simon a friendly penguin - Art Ha, that’s a great twist at the end. I like that. Overall, the story did a great job in setting up an atmosphere, giving an idea of a character who honestly enjoys nature for what it is, introducing some “off” elements, and ending in the “oh they’re just letting everything go to poo poo” reveal. However, it’s 250 words max, so every one needs to be tight, so I’m gonna be nitpicky about your words. Some choices are awkward. Symphonizing, circulate, grass AND crabgrass, perpendicularity, these make the flow of reading grind to a halt. Also, some minor questions the text raises. Like, does grass make symmetrical flowers? Aren’t all flowers symmetrical? Windows are slammed with a tight shunk - is that a deliberate choice, or should it not be slammed tight with a shunk? What does a golden ratio of gravity mean exactly? Why do rats weave in and out of feet, that sounds terrible (should be in between, no?). These tiny annoyances add up to a slightly clunky reading experience that does the general buildup a disservice. The devil is really in the details here (which are neglected…oh drat it’s all intentional isn’t it) MockingQuantum - The Brass Key This is a very nicely written account of someone experiencing time travel in a singular location. Technically, I have nothing to criticize - the word choices are on point (only “divaricated” gave me pause, I think it’s always a bit of a risk to put rare words into text because the reader might be tempted to stop reading and google instead of just going “kind of branch growth pattern, whatever”), the sentences have great lengths, it’s clear what happens, good stuff. As for the content, I have the issue that I am a very plot-focused person, and nothing really happens here, so I don’t feel qualified to say “oh you made just a wonderful moodscape” or whatever. What I can glean from the story is that someone with no clear motivation to do so decided upon finding a time travel device to first go back, then forward until the apparent end and rebirth of the universe. The point of the story seems to be that the only constant throughout time is change, and in the end, the universe is cyclical. There’s nothing new here, and that’s my critique: I don’t get what you are trying to say, and what the protagonist learned, if anything.
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Aug 8, 2022 19:24
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Aug 8, 2022 19:36
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sebmojo posted:In, faction me The Abodes
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Aug 8, 2022 19:55
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Aug 8, 2022 20:04
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Aug 8, 2022 20:05
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Aug 8, 2022 20:23
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Crits for Week 521: Sports Day Good evening, sportsfans! This is Chuck ‘Winchester’ Derbin here, coming to you live from the Thunder Dome! Last week, eighteen of our finest flash writers met right here in the Dome to show off their love of sports, and my fellow judges and I had a Hell of a time picking the winners out of the pile. Now, anyone who knows me knows I’m not a ‘writing’ guy, since reading is for kids and I’m a grown American sports-man, but the wife kept nagging me until I sat down to read your stories. And boy howdy, am I glad I did! I liked your stories so much I even scratched down some thoughts about each one in my Mike Ditka diary, and I’d like to share them with you now—but first, a word from our sponsors, IHOP. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbbLnX_YOqk Wasn’t that great folks? Now let’s get into the crits: The Uranium Phoenixes, Ecowright: Look, I don’t know much about climates and changes (except when my stepson keeps messing with the thermostat!) but this story really made me believe you could shove a couple of people in an arena and have them make their own planets. I sure wish you’d told us what had Jola so fired up to win before the story was winding down, since I love to watch a player fight for something meaningful, but I’ll give you credit for getting the motivation in there at all. Not everybody in the Thunder Dome remembers to do that, I tell you what! The Screaming Idiots, Spectacle: Different languages? Whew, no thanks for this American. Yours wasn’t too hard to read, since I’m pretty sure it was some kinda crazy future-English, but I did have to slow down and reread a few sentences multiple times, and that’s hard when you’re judging fast (and illiterate!) Your game wasn’t the easiest thing to follow, either, but you brought home Chaluc’s emotion, and that’s what I love in a sports story. And boy howdy, what an ending! “From sleep Chaluc had come, and to sleep Charles Lucas would return.” Pretty stuff, real biblical. At least I think it’s like the Bible. Honestly, I’ve never read the drat thing! The Friendly Penguins, A Simple Magic: I had fun with this one, kid, but I gotta ask ya: Did that girl’s fingernails turn into Pecan Sandies at the end? I’m a simple man with simple reading skills (again, I cannot stress this enough, I am illiterate!) but I did not understand what I was supposed to get from that sentence. Aside from that, your story was a hoot and I liked the little demon a bunch. I also liked some of those insults! ‘First among babies’ is exactly what I shout at my stepson whenever I see him skulking off to his room at night without giving me a hug, so I’ve gotta admire your taste in trash talk. You’ve done your research! The Mocking Quantums, Fumikomi-ashi: ‘The Master’ and the ‘Student’: what, you couldn’t think of any names? Honestly, hot stuff, I didn’t love this one like my fellow judges did, but that’s because I thought your plays were out of order. You hold back the relationship between the master and the student at the end, and you do the same thing with the stakes. The student wants to open his own dojo, but he’s got to prove to his grandfather that he’s good enough? That’s great stuff! Why not put it up top to set up the story from the start? Putting your goals and your stakes at the end of the story is like having the Cowboys cheerleaders come out at the end of the game. They still look good, but they’re not setting the mood for the game! If you want to develop your technique, try running this piece back with your relationship-play up front, then see what happens. I’ll bet it changes things a bunch! The Phantom Muzzles, Good Dog Waffles: I fought for this one to win the whole thing, but I guess some judges just don’t appreciate man’s best friend. You do, though, and you clearly know them like the back of your hand. Your love for these fluffballs comes through in every line, and it’s honestly a joy to read. I know my co-judges will have more to say about how you can improve, but for me, I just want to use this space to let you know I’m a fan. Can’t wait to see what you write down the line! The Bad Seafoods, Cloudburst: You ever see a football game that doesn’t pick up until after the halftime show? That’s what we’re dealing with here. The opening half isn’t bad, but it doesn’t have the excitement and the spice of the back half. What’s the history between Marduk and Seven like? This could be a classic sports rivalry, and that’s how to bring it home in the back-half, but you’re missing some of that emotional connection in the front. A great story should start strong and keep getting better—unlike my marriage! The Kaom Kaoms, Taking the Plunge: I like dialogue. It’s easy to read and I don’t have to think too hard, which is great because I don’t want my brain to overheat and turn me bald. Now, your story walked a pretty fine line of having too much dialogue, especially in the final stretch, but it worked for me because you used it to tell us more about the characters. A lot of stories this week spent their word-budget on setting up their original sports, but you focused on the athletes, and I think that was a smart call. Just don’t let your dialogue overwhelm the rest of the story, otherwise it’s going to feel like the characters are talking heads in an empty room—like sports commentators! The Chernobyl Princesses, Heartbreak on the Miami Trench: My stepson’s been going on and on about how he wants to be a twitchy stream when he grows up, whatever that is, but he taught me enough to know that the guy in your story felt like a realistic twitchy streamguy. You almost lost me when the story took a sharp dive into fantasy-land, but making the mermaid destroy the camera was a smart call. You figured out the most precious thing your protagonist has and took it away from him as punishment for his hubris. Do I know what hubris means? Of course not, I just learned that word from a newspaper I was shredding up to burn some parking tickets. I’m pretty sure you know what it means, though, and you used it to write a great little story. Good game! The Sonny Sonnies, Joyce and Sanchez: Being a rookie isn’t easy, Son. You have to learn everything from zero, and part of the learning process means getting things wrong. Your big mistake in this story was breezing past important events and scenes with exposition, so the reader doesn’t have time to really feel them. Let’s take one paragraph, for example: “One day, Joyce decided to take his obsession one step further. He broke into Sanchez's house and stole one of his hockey sticks. Joyce slept with the stick under his pillow, dreaming of the day when he would finally become Sanchez.” These three sentences could be a whole story! You could let us see through Joyce’s eyes as he skulks around Sanchez’s house, jittery with excitement and fear and envy, but instead you blew past the scene just to take us onto the next chunk of exposition. My advice? Slow down, Son. Stop and smell the roses, then write about the roses so your fans can smell them, too. Bring them into the story with you! The Sailor Viys, To Kiss a Girl: Let’s get this out of the way: I’m a progressive guy. The only reason I vote republican is because I don’t want the government taxing me once I win the lottery, but everybody who knows me swears I’m the open-minded type. Now, having said that, naming your story ‘To Kiss a Girl’ and then pretending there’s tension about whether the girls want to kiss is like naming a team The Washington Football Team and then trying to tease the fans with hints about what sport the team’s gonna play. You know it’s football, I know it’s football: where’s the excitement if the outcome’s already been decided at the start? Still, you show off some good technical skills in this piece, and your fundamentals are rock solid. Just don’t spoil your own story next time! The Something Elses, Bjorqvist Diaries: I love a good father-son story. Now, my old man managed to take himself doing donuts in a grocery store parking lot at 3pm on a Tuesday when I was eight, so I don’t have any good father-son stories of my own, but I know a good one when I see it. And that Hot-dog guy? Whew, I really felt for him. Seeing something you love stolen by people who don’t care about it is awful, especially when it’s my Dodge Charger and those god drat kids down the street won’t give it back. What was I saying? Oh yeah: Hotdog guy and Deonte made a great team. They had interests beyond their sports, and their conflicting motivations were nicely done. The ending with the dad felt a little rushed, sure, but you made a smart move by growing their bond by a little, instead of a lot. That’s how it goes in real life, even without the trampoline ball! The Anti Vechiculars, Meaningless: You’ve got a hell of a game here, and your player’s competitive spirit was really something special. This sport seems like it’d be more fun to play than read about, though, because you spent a big chunk of words describing a flying disk that would take half a second to fly in real life. There’s a reason you don’t read more stories about frisbee, even when the players have magic powers. It’s hard to get excited about a flying disk, unless it’s a plate spinning for your head, courtesy of a line cook at a 3am bar. Kitchen’s closed, my rear end! The Sitting Heres, But So The Cactus: Is this one of those Multiversus stories my stepson won’t shut up about? But seriously, it took me longer than I’d comfortable admitting to get a grip on what you were trying to do with time in this story, but once I got it, I had a blast. I don’t know that you need to fix your intro for a lowest common denominator type like me, but it might be work another look to see if you can idiot-proof it. My fellow idiots will thank you! The Thran Guys, Planet Cornhole: Finally, a story for the working man! I’ve never been abducted by aliens, but I’ve played a lot of cornhole, and this story truly captured the spirit of this inconsequential game. It isn’t about the playing; it’s about the pride and the posturing, and if your shirt says you’re the Galaxy’s Best Cornholder, by god, that’s something that outta be respect. Sure, the story was about as emotionally deep as a cornhole board, but it was entertaining as Hell and made me laugh out loud at multiple points. This Dome needs more comedy; keep fighting the good fight! The Hard Counters, Three Winters Cold: I’m the squeamish type, and I’ve had some real rear end in a top hat troubles in my life (just ask my stepson!), so I don’t know about going that hard on the anal prolapse in your opening lines. It ultimately fit the story, but it’s a rough tone to set from the start. Thankfully, the rest of the story had a good flow and the emotions are there, like any good sports story. You touched on a side of sports most people miss between the commercials: the hard poo poo some players endure before and after the game. Powerful stuff. Just go easy on my anus! The Cutting Jibs, m v n v m v love: Maybe I’m just an illiterate sports announcer, but I found this story tough to follow. It felt like you had five good plays and tried to run them all on the same down. What were you trying to accomplish with this one, and how could you have dumbed it down for me? The Lilly Catts, Striking Out Regrets: A good story with a lot of heart, even if the execution wasn’t always on point. You were too obvious with the exposition in your dialogue (“Don't you remember your pitcher, Kitami?” “You're still a worrywart, even after all those years, eh?”), and the piece wasn’t exactly subtle, but it left me feeling good and I’m glad I read it. Nice work, sportsfan. The Ro Hans, Team Effort: Hey, this is that Assassination Classroom show my stepson watches! Nah, I’m just kidding, but it did remind me of that. I struggled to follow the action at times, and I think that’s because your story might’ve been too big for the word count (which you went over, if we can trust the archive’s call on the field). When you’ve got a big idea, it’s not always possible to carve it down into something that fits in a small space. It’s like shoving a big head in a little helmet: it just doesn’t work!
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Aug 8, 2022 23:57
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In. Give me something weird you want me to ruin.
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Aug 9, 2022 04:08
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In. What Faction Flag Shall I bear?
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Aug 9, 2022 04:15
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I'm IN, and since I am both indecisive and absolutely turgid for the idea of being made to conform, I am pleading to BE ASSIGNED A FACTION.
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Aug 9, 2022 05:38
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Noah posted:In. Give me something weird you want me to ruin. Khosalu The man called M posted:In. the scalvs Screaming Idiot posted:I'm IN, and since I am both indecisive and absolutely turgid for the idea of being made to conform, I am pleading to BE ASSIGNED A FACTION. khosalu
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Aug 9, 2022 06:06
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BIRTHDAY WEEK CRITS FOR NEW BABBIES Thinking ahead by sb hermit What’s a “Silent Cal”? This is a confusing opening paragraph. I thought I was reading about a literal talking hat. There was no reason to bury the fact that your protagonist is playing an online game in the last sentence. It’s flash fiction; just tell the reader what they need to know right off the bat. Jumping back to your first line - “digress” doesn’t mean to disagree, it means to wander off topic. I’m not really sure what this story is about. As I’m reading it I’m thinking, am I supposed to be paying attention to whatever game this is that they’re playing, or is this a story about the protagonist trying to sell lizard based protein shakes?? Ok and then she loses the game, but, shrug. This would have been more interesting if it was more focussed on the relationship between these two people. 5/10 Untitled? by lightrook This is almost good. The scientist’s self-loathing, if a bit clichéd, is clearly described, and the mirror’s pain at observing this without being able to help is relatable. But the decision not to have the mirror affect the scientist in any way backed the story into a boring corner. It’s generally very unsatisfying if the POV character does absolutely nothing. If the scientist had imagined that he saw something different, some glimmer, which made him think differently, even if the mirror didn’t actually do anything, that still would have been more interesting. 5.5/10 The least dangerous most dangerous game by Kuiperdolin This started off ok but the ending felt rushed. I think it would have been better for Kevin to see his hunter get caught in the trap before he died, so he could have gone out with a tiny note of satisfaction, and the reader could get more insight into what’s going on. 5.5/10 The Thief of Opportunity by DigitalRaven This is a pretty good effort. Nice heart metaphor, and the protagonist wresting with a terrible decision was well done. I don’t think you needed the stuff about Daniel Ryde being a real estate developer - being a capitalist isn’t enough to motivate someone to commit murder. You should have used these words instead to focus on the driver’s relationship with his brother, and why his murder at Ryde’s behest had had such an awful impact on his life. 6/10
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Aug 9, 2022 09:25
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And three more, randomly chosen. Ski Jump by Chernobyl Princess I really enjoyed the contrast between the protagonist’s painkiller-fueled mania and her very real fear. As a fellow doer of dangerous sports the thought of breaking your back is… that is certainly a thing that lurks in the back of one’s brain. The ending landed with a real gut punch. My only criticism of this is I think it meandered a bit in the middle, got a fraction repetitious. I’m not sure what I’d cut or change though. I also wanted some hint at the of what happens next. Not necessarily whether the protagonist is going to be ok, but like, are they facing more tests, or surgery, or transfer to a specialist spinal unit… Just some indication of how uncertain, hosed or hopeful their situation is, so I know what they’re bracing themselves for. 7.5/10 Everyone Loves Dogs by Noah This is intriguing, but I think there’s too much going on for how short it is, and I’m left guessing as to what it’s really about. Still, I went back and read it a couple of times because I wanted to try and work out what you meant, and I think even if I don’t get it the fact I was interested means you did something right. 6/10 Noctilucent Cloud by PhantomMuzzles This is very pretty but it felt a bit pointless. I thought Talziel was going looking for the last drops of rain or something to water the doomed dandelion in one final act of defiance, but, nope, she’s just going to die somewhere slightly nicer than sitting next to her poor flower friend. Something didn’t quite work for me with the references to humanity being selfish and awful and destroying the world with nuclear weapons or whatever. Talziel seems sad but fatalistic, as if the end of the earth was an awful, but inevitable, occurrence. If humans did this through dumb actions I would have expected her to be more angry. 6/10
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Aug 9, 2022 10:30
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Tiny Crits from Week 520 If you'd like more information please ask in the discord or PM me! The worlds most gigantic diamond Something Else A man steals a big diamond, is tormented by inability to keep a secret. Fun, lighthearted, definitely stays sympathetic despite owning the thing he's done. Doesn't do much but it's good at what it does. Medium. Elm Street South of Houston Copernic Lots of secrets! The CIA being creepy! I like it. Medium high. Lake Mead Weltlich Fun. Good. We know the secret immediately, we know the stakes immediately, and we remain sympathetic to the women when it's implied that he was an abusive bastard. Good job resisting the urge to name him “Earl” after the Dixie Chix song. High. Postmortem MockingQuantum I don't super know what the secret is, but this is the kind of piece I really dig, where the world is just slightly off kilter despite seeming to function as normal. Medium because I don't know that it satisfied the prompt, but high because I liked the prose and the concept. Official Secrets PhantomMuzzles Another CIA story! I'm going to get a bunch more of their targeted employment advertising again. I appreciated that she had two secrets: working for the Agency and also not actually wanting to date. Medium high Beatrix's Cottage For Weary Travellers rohan I love a fantasy story, but this probably would have been better if you weren't trying to introduce so many concepts at once, or if you settled on a single POV. I wasn't sure if I was following Tulip or Beatrix's secret here, it was kind of both but the murder was definitely Beatrix. I'm not sure how the flash worked into this. I'm going with medium low. Tyrannosaurus Danno I hate these people. I love these people. You do a lot with stereotype here, but that's probably okay. I like the secret. I like the story of dudes trying to combat toxic masculinity and not winning easily, it would be too perfect and pat if the marine in the bathroom just was like “yeah therapy is good bro.” Best Man The Man Called M This is the best story you've written. It has an easy setup, read quickly without any distracting errors, and although you know how it's going to end, you feel satisfied with the way it ends. It's a grilled cheese sandwich story, simple, satisfying, and no frills. Well done. Medium. Too Late Rhymes with Clue I don't know that this satisfies the prompt, because the Big Secret is Marina's secret, what she was up to was the bigger secret, and Barb's secret is just that she was a witness. She has nothing to really own here. So although this is a neat story, it would be neater from Marina's PoV, or if Barb had a bigger hand in it than just driving a car and mixing drinks. Low. Gourdian Not The Cut of Your Jib So many new words were introduced that I found this a little hard to follow. It would have been much more interesting, I think, to see some of what Kentik saw in dreams, what was worth stealing the tin-baku. Or to even have it be super NOT worth it. I'm interested in why the Priestess seems less bothered by the gourd being gone than Timbu. All in all, this one didn't catch me. Low. Alien Thranguy I loved this. You get the sense of alienation and frustration from the not-total inability to communicate that doesn't actually free him from the requirement to communicate. I'm not sure if it's meant to be read literally, that this is an alien piloting a human suit, or figuratively, that this is a person who severely lacks social capacity. But regardless, I really liked it. High. Go Fund Yourself TarsTarkas Hah, this was great. It took a turn, though, when the CEO went and killed the other guy, that pushed it over the top for me. Also, none of them were particularly sympathetic, those things combined take it from medium high to probably medium low. Messy Bitch My Shark Waifuu I love werewolves, I love werewolves at prom. I was rooting for Lupe the whole time, even when she decided “gently caress it” and went tooth & claw at some guys. Good for her. High.
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Aug 9, 2022 15:48
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Crits for Week 522 Alpha submissions Applewhite - The Final Blasphemy https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10859&title=The+Final+Blasphemy This was a very cool interpretation of the prompt words! I liked the whole idea of the story a lot. The references to Old World things, familiar to the reader but strange and good/bad in the lens of the Seneschal was very cool. I wish we got a little better sense of the flavor of the world of the story though. I didn’t get a good sense of what life is like now, and I found myself wanting just a little bit more context. You do a good job of describing clearly how people follow the rules set by the Seneschal/Legion and that they would not question those rules in public. But I didn’t get a good sense of whether that was out of fear or respect, which would affect how I the reader view the Seneschal when we get to meet him. The framing of the story made me feel like it was going to be about (or from the perspective of) a citizen, but then it’s really about the Seneschal and his decisions. It also felt like there was a bit of inconsistency in how much the current world understands the Old World things. Like, they can use electric light bulbs, but CDs are absolutely inexplicable. They don’t know what cars are, but they know about petroleum and that it’s a nonrenewable resource. I would be tempted to move the first three sentences in the fifth paragraph to after the first sentence of the fourth paragraph (and then maybe shift other things around to make it flow nicely). Only because there are a lot of details about the cars, but then these arbitrary rule things are more interesting. They might lead into contextualizing why people might be upset they can’t use cars. Anyway, just a weird food for thought. The transition of “It wasn’t until the Seneschal found the sacred text that he realized the true purpose…” didn’t work as smoothly as I wanted it to. When they first found the time capsule, they thought it was dangerous. Then they opened it and found it was junk. But then with all the junk was this sacred text. So the transition to recognizing the comic book as a sacred text meant to be preserved is more immediately following the junk, not the dangerous. Armack - Kindness Bandits https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10834&title=Kindness+Bandits Overall the concept was interesting: couple does weird acts of kindness together to distract from how much they want to bone. But also that’s sort of established as the concept of the story and then kind of abandoned? If you’re going to make it about sexually frustrated religious people, make that more of an implied throughline. Use sexual language when describing their kindness capers or something. But the intro was awkward and uncomfortable and then ultimately not really relevant after the fact. I really wish a lot of the religious ideas felt a little more authentic, even at the risk of being stereotypical. The protagonist and Aleesha didn’t feel like religious people, they felt like someone’s idea of religious people by just making lots of references. I thought at first Aleesha would be the more religious one because she was anti-soaking, but then the rest of the story made the protagonist more pearl clutchey at things Aleesha did. Then the gun imagery with the kindness blammers also felt out of place. You could find a more religious analogy instead if you were married to the kill-them-with-kindness idea. But also some sort of kindness bandit or kindness ninja type stuff might be a little less off-putting. Notes I took while reading the first time: I had to look up what soaking was but I’m glad I did it in an incognito window. It sounds horrible. I get it as a religious loophole thing because they’re good at loopholes, but the “What about after we’re married? Can we soak then?” line weirded me out because NO why would you not just have SEX then. “But if we get found out we gotta stop forever.” This felt weird. Like I understand only feeling like the random acts of kindness “count” if people don’t know it’s you. But why would you have to stop forever? Just like never be kind again? Why wouldn’t you just be like “oh no you caught us, guess we don’t get God points for that one” and then move onto someone else. Whoa whoa why did they strap a kitten to a drone?! I know you established kindness-blammers, but the idea of people putting on ski masks and breaking into a movie theater and yelling “Bang, bang!” seems real problematic. Oh no then I kept reading and they made a joke about it. That’s not very cool. Oh you brought the soaking thing back again. I know it’s a joke, but I would never wonder if someone soaked after marriage because WHY WOULD YOU? The whole point is that you can’t have sex yet so you do stupid workarounds. But it’s pretty well documented that once religious people are allowed to have sex they do it a lot. Beezus - Sstrizzr, King Lizzr https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10841&title=Sstrizzr%2C+King+Lizzr Okay I don’t feel super qualified to crit this story because I’ve never played games online because I’m scared of people being mean to me. But I’ve seen The Guild, so that will be my point of reference. That being said though, even as a person without this kind of experience, I still definitely got a lot of the it’s-funny-because-it’s-true vibes. Like, it made me feel like I knew what was happening and like I was in on the jokes even though I sort of wasn’t. I liked the epic and dramatic start, and then the quick “it’s a game!” reveal. Beyond that I’m not really sure what to say. It worked! The story was simple and straightforward and told in an entertaining way. There wasn’t much of an arc, but that’s fine. It was a cool interpretation of the very fantastical prompt words in a very accessible setting. Copernic - Kudoszu https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10824&title=Kudoszu Oh nooo this is another one that I just don’t have context for. I’ve never read or written any fanfiction and I don’t know anything about it. I also don’t know what Homestuck is? I’m so sorry. I live a simple life and mostly stay off the internet. So please keep that in mind as you read what will probably be a pretty useless crit. Oh great that first line is helpful to me though. Chef kiss. Gives me lots of context  Overall I thought the story arc was clear and it fit the prompt well. Though I suppose one could argue that the fanfic writer isn’t really agonizing over the sentient weed as much as over fanfic. But that didn’t bother me. I will say though, a lot of the time I wasn’t really clear what was happening? Like moment-to-moment, in Jacob’s apartment. For example at the beginning where the description of the apartment was, I would have expected to be some sort of idea that he’s sort of anxiously waiting to see how well-received his awesome fanfic will be. Then he just broke stuff in the room, by which I would infer that he got real mad and had a tantrum, but we don’t really see that. So then when it talks about broken stuff I was like “wait why is stuff broken” because I immediately forgot. Nooo don’t cum on everything all your furniture matches. Is he like quietly raging while smoking pot after the first break? Because he just feels vaguely high and contemplative. But then it says “An idea, except he wasn’t sure he thought it. If he had, where was the fury?” I don’t really know what that means. Maybe his brain is all full of mad so a random non-mad idea was out of place? That’s a neat idea and if it’s out of place I’d like to have seen more about that. Oh my gosh I’m so out of it. When you said he put Ponies on the tv I thought it meant like horse races. But now I get it that it’s My Little Pony, right? I’m sorry I’m like 90 years old. I think I was a little confused by some stylistic choices. It felt like it was jumping around and made abrupt shifts and transitions, but not quite enough for me to relax into it and sort of accept it as the style. As-is I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to be understanding what was happening in the action or not. derp - Untitled https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10775&title=Untitled A lot of my questions stem from the fact that I want to know more about the parents. I felt like I instantly understood goth Xillia/Jill. Then when the mom is introduced I’m like “Okay so the mom made dinner and stuff so this feels very straightforward suburban mom? That might be an interesting conflict?” and then it sort of feels like that’s the direction it’s going when Xillia yells at the dinner table. But then when Dad gives her his monologue, I wasn’t sure if that was him sort of building a bridge to relate to her? Or if he was also a bit goth and this family is a little Addams Family-y? I think I was looking for some reaction from Xillia to contextualize Dad’s speech but she just sort of shugs and moves on. I thought it was strange that Dad called her Jill but Mom called her Xillia. Especially if Dad is doing the heavy lifting (in the story) when it comes to relating to the daughter. I would have expected Mom to call her Jill but Dad call her Xillia. Side note: when I read over this the first time I was reading too quickly and when I saw they were eating dead burnt flesh and decaying plant matter I was like “Oh wow are they like monster people?” but then I just realized that was describing normal food in a goth way, right? Sorry I’m pretty dumb and also I either overthink things or completely miss them. I know this isn’t a very good crit and it’s mostly just asking questions. But that’s good! I read your story and I wanted to know more about everything about it. Digital Raven - The Thief of Opportunity https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10798&title=The+Thief+of+Opportunity I liked this story a lot! Super well done implementation of both the prompt words and the flash rule. You didn’t just nod to the prompt/flash, the whole story really felt constructed around them and tailored to them. And this is your first story in Thunderdome? Big congratulations! I thought you introduced the exposition well. The story itself happens in a very brief amount of time, so the bulk of the story is the background that led up to this point. But it didn’t feel like an overwhelming amount of exposition, or thrown at the reader all at once. The focus felt like it stayed on Jomo, in the driver’s seat, glancing at the cooler, which just brief bits of context trickled throughout. It felt very natural, given that in his situation I’m sure Jomo would be thinking over the choices and events that led up to this very big choice. Speaking of, if I’m understanding correctly, Jomo put in years and years of planning to be put in this position where he was transporting Dr. Reyes heart, correct? And now he’s not sure what to do about it? That doesn’t bother me at all and seems to happen a lot in revengey stories, but I wish there was some small hint at the fact that he’s put all this complicated work and bribes to get in this position and now he’s second-guessing. Nitpick: End of 4th paragraph and beginning of 5th repeat “by existing” and I wasn’t clear if it was intentional. I liked the ending too! I don’t have more to say about this story because I just liked it and it worked well. Fumblemouse - Rite of Passage https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10848&title=Rite+of+Passage Okay before I read this I have to tell you that I’m still obsessed with your redemption arc. Is it a puzzle? Is it multiple puzzles? I must know. The poem at the end initially felt like it was going to be cryptic clues but I didn’t see any of the common indicators. Okay anyway onto this story… I read the story (and had to google what a bodhisattva was). I think I was waiting for lard to show up more than I should have, but that’s in part because I’ve read quite a few of these [blank] agonizes over [blank] stories now. Okay wait I’m going to write down what I think happened in the story because I’m not sure. Okay so there are elders, which I think include the bodhisattva. And they were ditched by the Arhats who peaced out into enlightenment. And the elders used to go crazy but now they don’t. And they’re not physical beings, but they can take whatever form they want, in order to learn more about those forms. And then they sort of hold species hostage and put them through tests to see if those species are worthy of joining the Arhats in enlightenment. Except none of the species ever are, so the elders just poof them out of existence. Is any of that correct? I wonder if part of why I’m not sure is because the POV is more from the weasel man, and he doesn’t really know what’s going on either. I have to say, and I don’t know if this is helpful: even though I have no real idea what is happening in this story or why, I still enjoyed reading it. The language felt clear and flowy and a lot of character came through both Jarn and the bodhisattva. Hawklad - Old Bones https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10844&title=Old+Bones Wow. I liked this a lot! It’s so good and so vivid and so clear what is happening and when and why and how. Awesome implementation of the prompt and the flash rule. I liked that even though Artemis knew what was going on above ground, I never lost sense of the fact that he was, in fact, a skeleton and still underground. I liked that most of his reference points for the march of progress were based on how they affected the ground in his cemetery. I liked the paragraph where you talk about the generational wealth/power stuff. I mean I didn’t like it, it made me BIG MAD. But I liked how you said it all. I liked the whole story setting up the flash rule ending, though I sort of wish he killed William Morse with a hatchet instead of a shovel. I feel bad that I don’t have more specific feedback, but I’m still new to this so I’m a lot better a pinpointing why I don’t like things than why I do. And this was so great so I don’t really know what else to say. Idle Amalgam - Dream Job https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10854&title=Dream+Job Story makes sense and fits the prompt well! I did find myself wishing I had a bit better sense of Jamie’s character. She feels very go-with-the-flow-y at first. Then it sort of only feels like she’s obsessing over the volcano because the prompt told her to, not because of any kind of personal or professional curiosity. I loved the intro bit. If I got a mysterious package with a button and a VHS tape, I’d definitely push the button first. Yes. The second sentence in the paragraph that begins with “Shall we?” is a bit rambly. Hmm. The last sentence is a bit surprising in its simplicity. It feels important because it’s the last sentence of the story. But it doesn’t seem to imply anything? Maybe your intention was to leave it ambiguous? But I don’t know why The Director would be approaching her if not to kill her or something. Also “approached” feels more like someone coming closer from farther away, not someone closing in on someone else in an elevator. It’s fine to end it with The Director like moving toward her and cutting away before he does anything. Just the phrasing seems odd. Overall I liked it, and the scenes in the story felt very clear and I knew what was happening. You establish immediately this is an evil organization, but then maybe it was supposed to be a twist that the Director was a lizard person? I mean, I supposed I was thinking more just like a basic supervillain because of the volcano lair thing, so I guess in that sense it was a twist. But it didn’t necessarily feel like a oomph-y payoff. Kuiperdolin - The Least Dangerous Most Dangerous game https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10807&title=The+least+dangerous+most+dangerous+game Welcome to Thunderdome! What an exciting week to join! Good for you Good intro, establishes what’s happening right away. Though the second sentence is a lot more interesting than the first. Might behoove you to punch up that first sentence in a way that immediately grabs the reader’s attention. It didn’t really matter to the story that Kevin was a database administrator. That’s not a terrible thing; we are not all defined by our jobs, and I know you probably wanted to make sure you worked it in to satisfy the prompt. It just felt very important the way it was thrown in the second sentence, like it was going to be Chekhov’s professional skillset. You could probably cut it from the intro if you wanted, and just make sure it’s clear enough later in the “They should have taken a soldier…” section. Or if you’re feeling ambitious, make it matter that he’s a DBA, like somehow those skills do help him out there. I’m not sure I’m clear how Kevin is bait at the end, and how Kevin realized that. Are there two groups of people hunting? And one group used Kevin as bait to draw out the other group? That’s a neat idea, it just might need to be made more clear. As-is it’s sort of a story about a guy standing still and then dying. Super good start, and I hope you keep entering! If you felt like doing another draft on this one, I might focus a little bit more on the urgency of the situation and the overall story arc. What Kevin is thinking, how scared he is, what’s going on. Lightrook - Untitled https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10823&title=Untitled%3F Welcome to Thunderdome! This is very solid, especially for a first entry. No sentences stood out as particularly clunky or weird and the language was well-used. Overall I think this story just suffered from a lack of anything happening or changing. It mostly kept reiterating the same cycle of “Scientist hates themselves which makes mirror sad, but mirror can’t do anything.” Which can get a little repetitive, so I kept expecting a change to happen at some point in the cycle. The reveal at the end that the mirror was sentient felt like it was supposed to be a kind of ironic Twilight Zone twist. But it didn’t hold a lot of weight for me as a reader because I already knew the mirror was sentient because the story was from their point of view. Or it’s sort of just confirming that this story is actually happening. Which again, would be a bit more interesting if something changed or occurred in the story, which the reveal would kind of reframe. That’s the thing about great twists, right? They reframe and recontextualize everything that happened before it. I hope you keep entering because this was a real solid start! Lippincott - Untitled https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10851&title=Untitled Hahaha excellent. YouTuber and rear end in a top hat Wasp square off in the Thunderdome. The differentiation in language and style between the YouTuber and the wasp is very clear, and I liked that change in style. It really felt like two different worlds colliding in this bizarre way. The first three wasp paragraphs didn’t do a ton for me personally. It definitely showed that you researched these rear end wasps and their bizarre habitat, but there were some details (like the very old and very young stuff) that didn’t feel to me like it necessarily enriched the story. It made the wasp feel a bit overly contemplative. Which is fine, and a legitimate choice to contrast with the YouTuber. I just noticed that I read the wasp paragraphs more quickly because they felt more verbose. Especially when there were details about spiders thrown in (particularly in the second-to-last wasp section). Poor wasp was being crushed to death and it felt like she took a quick break to tell me more about spiders. Overall this had a really nice arc and a nice pacing. I also liked the ending a lot and imagined the baby wasps stinging the stupid YouTuber like REVENGE FOR MOTHER. Great Nae - Handle With Care https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10828&title=Handle+With+Care Wow that one got me! It’s so sweet and kind and caring and sad. You mentioned before I read this that it was chock full of esoteric knowledge that only you care about. And while I see what you mean, it really didn’t feel that way at all reading it. The details just enriched the protagonist’s point of view and allowed me to view the situation as they did. I never felt bogged down with details, and I tend to be a reader who gets distracted easily by extraneous fun facts. Especially when it feels like the writer is like “sure a plot is happening but mostly I want to make sure you know that I know a lot about this subject”. This didn’t feel that way at all. The details lent the story credence, and established my trust in the protagonist as an expert on jewelry, which was important when it got to the ruby. Oh the poor sweet customer. I just want to give her a hug and I hope the ruby never ever breaks in the pendant. So good. I’m like genuinely tearing up. But also I’m a bit emotional atm because I just made a sandwich out of leftover garlic bread and it was so yummy it’s like broken down all my emotional walls. But mostly your story was *that* good. Noah - Everyone Loves Dogs https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10862&title=Everyone+Loves+Dogs Oh wow okay I was wondering if someone would try to do this. Okay reading it now. I really wish this was longer (which is probably a good thing). It’s so short and poetic and the imagery is colorful (pun intended I suppose). But I also just really don’t understand what’s going on. It felt a bit like a dream sequence where things changed and morphed and reframed and I was just sort of along for the ride. Which was fun, but once I started getting confused I sort of stopped paying attention and trying to figure out what was happening. It was ambitious to write a story that exists in the center of the Venn Diagram of prompts. But it feels a bit like you needed to compromise and smush together so many different ideas in such a small word count that it ends up being confusing and not really going anywhere. I think you probably did about as well as anyone could have done at it, but it might have been a challenge a bit too steep to work well? Absolute A for effort though. Very impressive. rohan - Iceberg Theory https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10866&title=Iceberg+Theory Oh my gosh what a weird little story. I saw you mention in the Discord that you think this is your worst TD story to date, which if that’s true, it’s still pretty good! But I’m sure that means you already have a lot of ideas about what you think is wrong with it. So I’m going to mostly talk about the things that I liked. I thought the tiny-writers-treated-like-puppies shtick was absolutely adorable. It was super duper charming. I may be biased because I’m obsessed with anything dog-related. But all the details about the newspaper-lined cages talking about having them fixed and taking them to classes were all so cute. And it was the best when you really mish-mashed them like “Ryan’s allergic to metaphors”, and getting their Hemingway acclimated by playing bullfighting clips from YouTube. It really was very charming and worked really well. It was also super funny to me to have all the male writers enrolled in a stop-writing-weird-things-about-boobs class. You worked in the ice sculpture/iceberg idea about as well as you maybe could have, given all the other stuff already going on in the story. It was trickiest at the end, when it was all of a sudden more from the Hemingway’s POV instead of the “owners”, so it would have been nice to keep that perspective of “dog owners who are cheering their puppy/writer on and trying to help them succeed but also inevitably they fail”. sb hermit - Thinking Ahead https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10830&title=Thinking+ahead Welcome to Thunderdome! I hope you keep doing it. If you do, I’ll bet you never forget this first, strange prompt. I can definitely see how the tiny top hat prompt made you think of Monopoly, and then how it might have been tricky to work lizard smoothies into that. That being said, it felt like there might have been a few too many things going on in this story. There were way more details about the game and the actions in it, then there were about the lizard smoothies or the relationships between players. It felt a bit like you had the idea for the story but then you got a little distracted thinking about things that could happen in a game called Gentrification (which has the same core idea as Monopoly, and the same game pieces, but different mechanics)(I shouldn’t have gotten hung up on that but I did). I also don’t know if it was intentional that her name was Eve and she kept putting EV chargers everywhere. But the fact that both things were mentioned and neither was really relevant made it feel important. The opening was a bit odd. I saw Yoruichi say in their prompt about the digress malapropism, and not knowing what a Silent Cal is. I don’t want to pile on, but I did want to mention that both things distracted me as well. There’s so much heavy lifting the first paragraph can do. I’ve learned in Thunderdome so far that it’s often way more effective to start with a punchy, straightforward way to lay the groundwork and set the scene, rather than playing anything coy. I think overall I wanted more stuff about the connection between Eve an the Top Hat, maybe more about the lizard smoothies, and less about the game itself. Screaming Idiot - The Man with the Pantry Keys https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10816&title=The+Man+with+the+Pantry+Keys Creepy creepy yes! Good fulfillment of the prompt words. I feel like you *mostly* did a great job at peppering exposition into the dialogue, though it was a teensy bit clunky at times. You also spread the world building throughout the story, which can be effective, but it made me feel like I was on defense, trying to catch up to what the world of the story was like. I think it might have made me a little more invested in the story if it was laid out a bit more simply at the beginning, so I feel like I know where this story is happening. I don’t need a ton of specifics about the Noise; I liked how sort of vague the references are to that. But maybe if you set the groundwork earlier, you wouldn’t have to rely on characters telling each other things they definitely already know. I felt like I had a good sense of Mr. Walter, like a ghoulish Col. Sanders. I’m not sure I had quite as good of a sense of who Bernice was. She seemed so timid in the intro, and moving sheepishly to make the door click quietly. But then she just balls out yelled at Mr. Walter, an incredibly powerful person. Also, since I’ve read a lot of these stories now and I read the prompt first, I thought Bernice was a wraith (since she’s the one who seems to be agonizing over the food empire). But when it was revealed that Mr. Walter was (which makes more sense anyway) it felt like it fit the prompt as a whole a little less. Overall I liked the story and I liked the ending a lot. I even liked the twist. I just wish you were more overt about all the other details. It made the twist feel a bit less punchy because I was always catching up to what was going on, it sort of felt inevitable that there was going to be some kind of big reveal. sebmojo - Now you hear me, now you don’t https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10876&title=Now+you+hear+me%2C+now+you+don%E2%80%99t I know you’re a judge and the archive says you were DQ’d but you wrote something and you’re in MQ’s spreadsheet so you get a crit too! Haha I like the first two paragraphs together. “It sucks a gently caress” that’s funny to me. Oh wow okay so that went places I wasn’t expecting. At first I was like “okay so he’s a wizard but life is ordinary and he’s trying to navigate it despite his magical powers”. But are these newfound powers that started in wizard school? Because I’m sure it would be hard to avoid saying conjunctions and pronouns and stuff. But also if your entire life bad things have happened when you say those words, I’d think you wouldn’t accidentally say them because it wouldn’t have been an established habit. I also wasn’t clear how wizardy or magicky the world was. There are wizard schools and the wizard has wizard friends and there is clearly a significant wizard clothing industry and there are wizard cops. But then the wizard is surprised that the robber is also a wizard? I felt like I was following everything up until the bank robbery. Then I spent the rest of the story not really having any idea why anything was happening. The imagery was very funny and entertaining, but it felt like wizard logic that I, a puny non-wizard, did not understand. I wasn’t sure why the robber wore a plaque that said “BANK” but I thought it was funny. But everything after that confused me. He couldn’t wizard away the robber so he took off his clothes? And then he danced naked? I mean good for him I guess. But it felt a little like the story got to the robbery and then you rolled a D100 to see what the wizard did next. Something Else - The Brown Round https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10825&title=The+Brown+Round Okay first of all, here are the notes I took during the first read: Alright it’s poop o’clock! Let’s go. Agglomerated- had to look that up (though it means what it sounds like but I still always check). “Me. It’s me. Hello.” HIIII POOOOOOP Oooh I’m the eggs Centuries? I am old eggs Oh no freighter ship mean to poop ship Hmm poop ship can poot over to pick up egg but can’t choose its trajectory? Poop saved the day! I liked it! Poop is funny, space poop is funny, sentient space poop is funny. I’m not sure what was going on and I don’t know what the eggs were or why or how but I don’t care that much because the poop doesn’t know those things. Omg I just re-read it and realized I totally missed the “Corn Imperium” line the first time (not wearing my glasses). The eggs are corn! That doesn’t necessarily make the story make more sense, but it certainly answers some questions. Why did the poopship name itself The Brown Round but it never named the corn eggs? They seem important to the poop. It felt a bit odd that the poop named itself actually. I’m not sure why, with everything going on in this story, that was the detail that felt odd to me. Anyway good work on your piece of poo poo story. Surreptitious Muffin - Matey Potatey https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10871&title=Matey+Potatey Spooky tater! Loved it. My favorite line was “it ullulated with a sound like somebody pouring out a bag of blood in the gutter”. I loved the hosed up imagery and the way the potato’s lines were written. I liked how Bev shrugged off spooky madness until it said nice things about him. I loved the spooky ending. Just very solid and strange. You made a potato scary! Well done. I’ve decided this is the origin story for Mr. Potato Head. The Man Called M - My Daddy https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10853&title=My+Daddy What a weird little story! You made some stylistic choices that I found very compelling. I sort of wish some of the first two bigger chunks were rearranged. Like maybe it started with hearing from friends about the wonders of touching grass, which prompted making the sweater. Then being proud of the sweater, then Dad being mean about the sweater. That sequence of events might make it feel a little less random and more like a progression, while also keeping the focus on how mean the Dad is. But I liked the repetition of “serves him right”. And I like that you really based the story around the prompt words and focused in on that. I think I saw you mention in the Discord that you didn’t have much time this week, but I think it’s awesome that you entered something for birthday week, even if it meant doing a shorter story.
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Aug 9, 2022 21:41
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Crit for Sebmojo's Now you hear me, now you don’t: This was a breezy little slice of weirdness that I enjoyed overall, but it did lose me a little bit as the story went on. I can get down with any kind of wizarding nonsense, but I really wasn't clear on the context of the world in a way that undercut the story. It took me a hot minute after the bank robber was introduced to realize that they, too, were a wizard. Initially I couldn't figure out why the hell breathing purple smoke would be commonly associated with bank robbers (though I could say the same of striped vests, that may be a cultural touchstone that I'm just unfamiliar with). That aside, this was light and fluffy and funny more or less throughout. I didn't feel like it followed a whole lot of logic, and the wizard stripping down, while funny and a vivid, memorable image, felt a little random. I would have liked a little more justification, through character or otherwise, that showed why this wizard was convinced that was the only avenue available to him to defuse the situation. Sure, he can't talk, but he could have done any number of things. Why was naked breakdancing the way he went? I don't dislike it, and I don't even need to necessarily follow a meticulous chain of reasoning to get there, it was just enough out of left-field that it pulled me out of the story. The ending was also cute, if also a little out of left field. I think this story teetered repeatedly on a sort of pseudo-fairytale kind of telling, and I almost wish it had a little bit more of that, I think it would have helped me just nod and go along with the occasional nonsensical (but entertaining) turn the story took, with a little less friction.
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Aug 10, 2022 02:59
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gently caress me, in
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Aug 10, 2022 03:07
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Aug 10, 2022 03:19
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Week 522 Crits, first in a series a friendly penguin - Two Spies Walk into a Bakery: A solid idea with a rushed execution. I love the thought of two spies slowly falling in love over the course of several heists in foreign countries, as they sample delicacies in the guise of blending in. The final quarter or so is a great comedic action scene with some solid blocking and the ending lands well; I think that’s because that’s where you’ve actually gotten into the groove of the story. The rest of it takes a bit too long to get started and there’s a lot at the beginning which confuses me; the Plato bit doesn’t work well enough to earn so much of the story’s early focus and I couldn’t tell you who or what Master Kelly is. Albatrossy_Rodent - The rear end of the NPC okay this was very stupid but I’d like to know where the other seven hundred or so words went? also the prompt is missing from the archive, although I guess in hindsight I didn’t really need it to know what the story was about. I enjoyed this for what it was, which wasn’t much. Nice twist at the end. Good job writing words about a butt randomizer agonising over robots, even if there weren’t really any robots. Antivehicular - The Archeopteryges and the Giant Freaky Dragonflies “hardly ever lethal” is a great line. I really liked this! Even if you did make me consider the logistics of a velociraptor giving a sperm sample. Ah, TD. But the characters are established well and I genuinely feel for poor dumb Theo and his unquestioning acceptance of being turned into goo for the next generation, while still ensuring he doesn’t lose his artistic integrity in the process. I don’t love that the story ends with three questions in fairly rapid succession and I would have maybe liked to see the question about the album art being resolved to take us full circle, but otherwise it’s a fun read. Bad Seafood - Lunar Libertines Nice title. Yeah, per your comments in the Discord, this relies pretty heavily on understanding some TD lore. I’m not wholly convinced you needed the Rural Rentboys reference, since the idea of some otherwordly creature attending an amateur fiction workshop and using some kind of psionic power to have everyone experience their story firsthand is compelling enough on its own. Everything after this just feels like checking off TD jokes until the impenetrable ending (I’m not familiar with the golden bean story myself so can’t say how well that worked). curlingiron - Survival of the Fittest I love the idea that several contestants on Survivor are actually corpses being manipulated by gophers. I think that explains a lot. The twist ending works well. I’d be curious to know how it fared without the foreshadowing from the flash rule; I could piece things together fairly easily, but it did feel like someone coming in blind might have a harder time working it out until the punchline. flerp - Dumb rear end Man, a lot of stories about butts this week. I don’t like “anus” in the first sentence. It sets up a completely different visual to the rest of the story where you just use “rear end”. Otherwise: yeah, solid comic set-up, good ending, top job for what it is. Could see this as an Oglaf comic, for whatever that’s worth. hard counter - The Amazing Technicolor Scream Coat: An Editorial written by Winston A.S. Parish for the TheDailyClickBait.com I feel like you could cut everything up until “It should’ve been an idyllic autumn morning” (or possibly even “After I put on my favourite coat”) without losing anything from the story. I’m also not sure where the whole dailyclickbait.com thing comes in; it doesn’t feel especially relevant to anything in the story? Some of the prose is a bit overwrought but I’m taking that to be intentional to create the voice for the character, and in that sense it works well.
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Aug 10, 2022 04:43
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Crits for Week 522 Partial Ladders Albatrossy_Rodent - The rear end of the NPC https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10779&title=The+rear end+of+the+NPC Okay so obviously it’s a very weird little story, and how could it not be with a prompt like that? I liked the idea of a butt randomizer getting in trouble because it makes butts too consistently juicy. Not sure if or where robots came in, or how the BRA agonized over them. The paragraph that started with “BRA looked around at his creations” was fantastic. It was super funny and butt-forward, but not in like a creepy sexual way. Did the ending get cut off? Ending after “stupidest looking sword you’ve ever seen” is probably a fine ending. Just the “I’m” was weird. The first sentence is funny, but I had to read it 3 times to figure out what was being said. I wonder if you didn’t need the bits about the BRA not believing in the RNG God and stuff. If you’re doing a short, strange story maybe keep the focus on the central conflict. The business about “did whatever algorithms do instead of quivering” and “nodded solemnly, maybe” and “fell to its ones-and-zeroes knees” was all pretty funny, but felt a bit inconsistent. Like later, “An enormous mace materialized in His hands.” I didn’t know if the BRA and the God were supposed to have actual forms or not. Albatrossy_Rodent - Gravity and the Grouse https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10795&title=Gravity+and+the+Grouse Hmm… what? I’m not sure I get this. The data made me tune out a bit so I tried re-reading it. Here’s what I *think* is happening: Point of view is gravity and also fate. Tyler (you?) threw a rock at a grouse and its babies because he was bored and high. There were people on a camping trip and some smoked weed and some didn’t so those who didn’t made those who did smoke it all right away but also everyone smoked weed? I also don’t care about the smoking weed details. The story jumps around in time between when Tyler throws the rock and also when the meteor killed the dinosaurs and also at some point in evolution when the grouse’s ancestor ate Tyler’s. So this one is tough. It was supposed to be a story about you and something that happened to you or because of you. But the flash and hell rules probably threw that off. But the biggest problem with this story is that a bunch of random things are happening and random details are being conveyed and none of it actually affects anything else. None of the action affects anything else happening or not happening. And none of the information really changes what happens or how I think about what happens. My Albatrossy Rodent Ranking The rear end of the NPC Gravity and the Grouse I thought your first story had more clear action and was more charming. curlingiron - Survival of the Fittest https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10860&title=Survival+of+the+Fittest Okay first impression from me is that I wanted one million percent more Jeff Probst. But that’s also my reaction to every story Okay here’s what I think is happening: three hundred gophers think humans have an ark and are going to peace out and leave non-humans behind. They think Survivor is a contest to prove one’s worth to be on the ark. But only humans can enter Survivor. They try the gophers-in-a-trenchcoat strategy and it doesn’t pan out. Then they try the Ratatouille approach but it doesn’t work unless the human body is recently deceased. So now they have a training program for corpse Ratatouille controllers and they’re going to stalk Jeff Probst. I’m not sure if that’s right. But there’s quite a lot of detail from these crafty and methodical gophers, especially compared to how much action is happening (not much). So it came across as a lecture (which I think it’s supposed to be?) which is just a bit more of a dense read. It was still very cute and entertaining, but I think I would have appreciated a little more of the bizarre cuteness earlier. I can’t tell you why, but “Season of the Blackcurrant” and “Season of the Strawberry” were my favorite parts of the story. It was such a weird cute detail. curlingiron - The weirdest thing is that this wasn’t even the first time something like this happened around me https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10874...pened+around+me Wow you can really tell a bloody penis story in such a funny and entertaining way! I like how you ended it. So many stories of real things that happened don’t have a great arc or button and you did a good job of sort of making one. It made me just feel like I was being told a story. Not in an unpolished or rambly way, but in a very personal and friendly way. All the details with the setting and characters (or people, I suppose) were very clear and I got a great sense of the vibe of the whole thing. My favorite parts were: -“It’s okay,” he said, staring at me wildly. “The blood is from my hand, it’s not from my penis.” Because I’m sure it’s a direct quote and is also just a clear example of a drunk, injured person thinking they’re being so rational and just saying such startling things. -“So, I’m in a band-“ “Of course you are.” That made me laugh really hard. My curlingirong Ranking The weirdest thing is that this wasn’t even the first time something like this happened around me Survival of the Fittest SotF didn’t hold my attention quite as consistently, but Twtittwetftsltham did. They were both charming and funny though and I enjoyed them both! flerp - Dumb rear end https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10784&title=Dumb+rear end I love this kind of humorous story: where there is something inherently funny at the core, but the POV character and the story itself takes it very seriously. It makes the humor and the absurdity so much funnier. This is an absolutely exemplary execution of the prompt. Crafted completely around it, and humorous but also some effort was put into it beyond the joke. Fantastic. The character of Jimmy was super funny to me because he like joined this cult, the leader was like “we have to kill a bunch of people and tear their hearts out” and everyone else was like “hmm too rich for my blood” and Jimmy was just like “yeah aight”. And also knows somebody who might want to buy an rear end? Very funny. I don’t really get him, but I like him, especially as a foil to Drear who takes it all very seriously. Very good handling of the humor, clear and vivid language, and straightforward action. flerp - I saw an eagle cry!!! https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10790&title=I+saw+an+eagle+cry%21%21%21 Wow this is very intense and honest. It’s definitely less of a story, like some of the other Prompt 2s, and more of an introspective essay. Which is fine, it just makes it feel a little odd to crit, if that makes sense. I do understand a lot of the complicated feelings about loss, especially when it happens in such a cruel way as dementia. A lot of the focus with loss tends to focus on quantifying things that are just not quantifiable. How close you were with them. How much you miss them. How different your life will be now. How much and how long to grieve. And a lot of the conversations around quantifying those things can cause a lot of unproductive guilt and unhealthy thinking. I really appreciate you taking the time to write this out, and to share it with all of us. I’m very new to Thunderdome so I don’t really know you or any of your previous stories about your grandfather. But I really hope this was cathartic for you to write and I valued reading it. flerp - Let us choke on ash https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10809&title=Let+us+choke+on+ash I have a huge affinity in life for those situations when you laugh when you “shouldn’t”. I honestly am not sure I’ve ever laughed as hard as I have when funny things happen at funerals. You’re so brimming with all these intense emotions and then you laugh and it explodes out of you. I wish I had *slightly* more of a sense of that in this story. Laughter is a rebellion here, with the repetition of “we’re supposed to…”. And I really like that idea of laughter being a rebellion, but not just for rebellion’s sake. It definitely gets the point across that’s established in the thesis statement: “The world is ending so let’s laugh… because we’re not supposed to.” It reiterates that very well, and the imagery is very vivid. I just wanted a little more sense of the why to laugh, beyond “because we’re not supposed to”. My flerp Ranking Dumb rear end I saw an eagle cry!!! Let us choke on ash This felt pretty weird to rank because you did a great job of writing three very different pieces, with unique styles and language. I ranked it the way I did because Dumb rear end was the most fun to read, and I saw an eagle cry!!! elicited a more emotional response from me than Let us choke on ash did. kaom - A Spiral, Not a Loop https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10857&title=A+Spiral%2C+Not+a+Loop This was great! Excellent service of the prompt, and for the most part clear what is happening. I was a little thrown off initially because it’s an interesting bait and switch to have the intro being thoughts of the non-POV character because your POV character is a telepath. So for just a minute I was like “wait which one is which and which one is telepathic?” but that was mostly my fault because I misread Estelle and Emichelle as the same name. I liked the setting, and the idea of mages for hire. I wasn’t super clear what Emichelle’s role/specialty and was a little bit like the “what would you say you *do* here”. It felt like you had a clear understanding of their roles/relationship and how their magics worked together, but maybe needed to make the Emichelle side of that a skosh clearer for dum dums like me. It was a fun reveal that the calendar was harmless, the ghost was just mad someone drew boobs and stuff on it. The last bit with Xenia wanting to go to Estelle’s wedding was cute but felt a little drawn out. Functionally you could end it after “On one condition - I’m your date to Estelle’s wedding.” Everything else after that doesn’t really make me feel any different about the characters. It would still be a nice little button to the story and a callback to the beginning, but it also it still does make it feel a little bit like the calendar stuff didn’t really matter because they just sort of moved on before they even left. kaom - That Time We Were All Wonder Woman https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10870&title=That+Time+We+Were+All+Wonder+Woman Overall this was a very entertaining story and is probably a super funny memory. I will say though, this telling of it lacked a lot of emotional context that would have made me enjoy reading it even more. Especially once you get to the obstacle course, it’s most just describing the course and obstacles. There are moments of describing your poor cousin and how y’all dragged your aunt along, but they’re brief and sparse enough. I wanted more about that, allowing me to really picture this very funny sight of all these hungover people dressed like Wonder Woman getting their asses kicked by an obstacle course. As is it felt a bit like “this sounds funny but also kind of like a you-had-to-be-there thing.” You also say at the beginning that everyone is hungover but you, but then your aunt is pumped and belting ABBA in the car, which sort of contradicted my picture of everyone dragging along sluggishly. Oh my gosh and the reveal that your cousin had mono, poor thing. I definitely just thought she was the only one that was real hungover. kaom - Lurking in the Depths https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10873&title=Lurking+in+the+Depths Okay I’m going to let you know that I am terrified of the ocean and almost everything in it. But with that terror comes a very compelling fascination, so this story did resonate with me, but for maybe slightly different reasons. I really like the first line, and establishing that this is a thing you want but is currently impossible to humans. Because that’s really what makes the very very deep sea fascinating: it’s so big and so unexplored. The first two paragraphs landed better for me, but even then I wish there was more of that sense of ~*wonder*~. It felt more like “hey the ocean bottom is pretty neat” and less like “it is MYSTERIOUS and WONDERFUL”. The last paragraph didn’t land quite as well for me. Partly because I think at some point “it” switches from referring to plastic to referring to the ocean. Unless you think plastic is life’s cradle and possible salvation. Maybe it would work a little bit cleaner if you didn’t have this part, and kept it more focused on the dark and weird ocean depths and less about the entire ocean itself? My kaom Ranking A Spiral, Not a Loop Lurking in the Depths That Time We Were All Wonder Woman A Spiral, Not a Loop had clear action and characters. Lurking in the Depths had more imagery and emotional language I could latch onto. That Time We Were All Wonder Woman was very fun but didn’t elicit as much of an emotional response for me. My Shark Waifuu - Total Eclipse of the Heart https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10861&title=Total+Eclipse+of+the+Heart I liked this one! I wouldn’t necessarily say the oak is agonizing over the radio as much as over the missing kids, but it’s definitely about a tree and a radio and that feels like enough for the prompt. It’s a very neat notion that the humans recognize and appreciate this radio tree, so it has a fondness for them in return. And it makes sense that the other trees wouldn’t care about (or would dislike) humans, especially those who hadn’t interacted with them much. Oh no a bear! That felt like a solid, more immediate threat and lent urgency to the oak’s actions. I’m not sure why, but I had to read the paragraph that starts with “In this collective pause” like four times. For some reason my brain had trouble parsing it. I don’t know what to do with that feedback, and it could just be that my brain is jelly from critting so many stories. I’m glad the oak didn’t die at the end and the radio is still going. It would have been touching if it sacrificed itself to save the kids, but it probably would have left me just mad at the kids for having wandered off. Anyway overall the story is very well told and I like the tree’s perspective! Very fun and cute. Side note: my mom trains search and rescue dogs, and I bet that would be a lot easier if the trees communicated with her too. My Shark Waifuu - Fly Ball https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10875&title=Fly+Ball Aww this is sweet. It definitely captures that feeling of being part of something without feeling like you’re really a part of it. I think we’ve always felt that, like we’re orbiting a group we’re ostensibly part of and you wonder if everyone feels that way, or if everyone else agrees that you are really an outsider. Beyond that not a ton happens, and that’s fine. It’s a straightforward story, recounting a softball game. There are rarely any particularly unique sports stories (at least that actually happened). But lending so much weight to how it felt and what it meant to you made it feel very personal and impactful. I’m glad your coach appreciated your effort and recognized you for it. I wish it changed things between you and your teammates but that’s teenagers and stupid real life for ya. My My Shark Waifuu Ranking Total Eclipse of the Heart Fly Ball I thought Total Eclipse of the Heart was more interesting and complex than Fly Ball (mostly just because magic trees are cooler than softball). Both stories had a lot of emotional honesty and were well-told and I liked them both a lot. Sailor Viy - Understand (Horse Version) https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10788&title=Understand+%28Horse+Version%29 Opening four words made me smile. Overall I like the story and what happens in it. It’s interesting and compelling. But a lot of the language itself didn’t quite land for me. It felt a bit casual and tongue-in-cheek, but in a very human way, not in a horse-who-only-recently gained sentience kind of way. With the nature of this [blank] agonizes over [blank] prompt, there were a lot of stories from the perspective of bizarre things, so comparatively a horse is not that weird. But I wanted a little bit more to make it feel like a very unique, somewhat alien thought process, which would translate to the language. Especially because you could have kept the language a little simple and stilted, and then ramped it into more epic and flowery after the horse drinks more goo. I like the ending, and the idea that a horse is much better equipped to use infinite knowledge in a positive/healthy way than a human. I like that the horse helped him. And then they die and ride off together. It’s very sweet and lovely and magical. I also imagine anyone who finds them and the chickens and the goo and is like whaaaaaaat Sailor Viy - Neil & I https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10792&title=Neil+%26+I The first sentence of the story was sort of lovely, but then nothing else in the story really was. It didn’t really bother me at all, but it might be nicer to have an opening that sets the overall tone a bit more. “If you eat it then nothing will happen, and then in 7-10 days’ time you will die in excruciating pain.” I’ve never been to Australia but this reinforces the only thing I know about it: that everything there wants to kill you. The very end with the feelings of guilt felt a little misplaced. I’m not saying you don’t genuinely feel guilt for giving up on a friendship, that’s a really common feeling. It’s more that the couple paragraphs leading up to it didn’t feel like you wrestled much with the decision to give up on him, that it happened naturally and you were sort of at peace with it. So then it felt like a bit of a swerve, right at the very end. This isn’t so much a story story, as it is a sort of illustration of a human you used to know. This isn’t inherently a bad thing, but it felt a little impersonal because it’s an autobiographical story that’s all about someone else. You do speak about how Neil affected you, but it’s still very much focused on Neil. A lot of this story felt very real and clear, and I found myself going “Oh yep, I’ve known a Neil”, and “Yep that’s how my Neil acted”, and “Yep I totally get what you’re saying about you don’t need to end a friendship as much as just stop maintaining it.” So it all felt very real and honest, but just not very personal or like you had much interaction or agency in it, even though it was ostensibly about you. My Sailor Viy Ranking Neil & I Understand (Horse Version) This was a tough ranking because I thought Understand (Horse Version) was a better and more interesting story. But I thought Neil & I was written better and even though not much happened, the language was constructed in more interesting ways. The Cut of Your Jib - Apocrypha: The Book of Revelations https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10864&title=Apocrypha%3A+The+Book+of+Revelations+%5Bs%5DFirst+Draft%5B%2Fs%5D Oh wow I don’t get it. It felt a bit like I fell asleep reading the Bible and watching Pimp My Ride and they just got shoved together in a dream. One problem was that at first I didn’t understand that the Jesus stuff was bookended by the John/Chris stuff. Both were a dude talking to an angel and it didn’t click for me when it switched. Especially when the transition happens immediately between “And the man’s eyes were suddenly open to the heavens” and “Jesus lifted up his eyes”. I didn’t understand until I read the whole story again that those were two separate things happening, a vision-within-the-story. It just felt like the same story continuing and that Jesus was the guy at the beginning. So then I was confused when Jesus talked so differently than John/Chris because I thought they were the same person. The juxtaposition of the Biblical sounding language and the way Jesus talked was pretty funny. But other than that there wasn’t a ton about this that I found particularly compelling. Part of that is very much a me thing: my eyes tend to glaze at Bibley language. And then jumping back and forth (plus a lack of quotation mark type punctuation) made it a little tiring to parse. The Cut of Your Jib - Yo Celly Pt. 1 https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10865&title=Yo+Celly+Pt.+1 Man I don’t really get this one either. I’m so sorry that I’m reading your stories at the tail end of a very long day of critting, though I honestly don’t know if I have enough Big Brain energy to follow them when I’m alert. I also don’t really understand, is this a Prompt #2? If so it didn’t really feel authentic. It felt like a fictional story, not an autobiographical account. Man that hellrule is a toughie. Especially because not only were there so many named characters, there was enough going on with all of them that I felt like I was really supposed to keep them all straight and understand how they all interacted with each other. I’m so sorry but my eyes completely glazed over. I didn’t know if this existed in a real world or a made up world and I felt like characters were getting chucked at me. That being said, I liked a lot of the language and imagery. I liked most of the paragraphs completely on their own and what they were doing. I just struggled to connect it all together and see the whole picture. Like a really good mosaic of characters but I was too up close to see what it looked like as a whole. My The Cut of Your Jib Ranking Apocrypha: The Book of Revelations Yo Celly Pt. 1 I had similar likes (use of language and composition of sentences) and dislikes (feeling very lost) in both stories. I mostly ranked Apocrypha higher because I felt like I had a slightly better handle on what it was trying to do.
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Aug 10, 2022 05:30
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Crits for the stories above and below mine: Simply Simon: Smaller Than 420 Microns This is an interesting title. I like it. Like a bored God’s fingernails, the acid wind cut rivets through the ashes of the Iridium Wasteland. It carried with it the ashes of an empire, still heavy with echoes of blood and screams. This is not good first line. It kind of resembles a good first line, it's clearly trying to be evocative, but it trips up over its own feet. If you've got 'a' god, then it's a small 'g'. Why does a wind need to be acid to cut rivets through ash, which is notoriously soft and goes everywhere if you breathe on it wrong. How does ash survive acid? Are the ashes of the iridium wasteland the same as the ashes of an empire? How do you tell them apart? Are empire ashes are heavier (though still light and feathery like ash) because they are weighed down by all the echoes of blood and screams? Does blood even echo? This whole sentence has gone dangerously overboard. But still, like I always say, stuff up early, and you have more time to recover. Let's proceeed. The ashes parted like a widow’s veil before Jerboa’s face, which might be the first one in decades to behold the devastation unfiltered by goggles. He folded his hands as if in prayer, then slowly opened them like the wings of a moth taking flight. The stream of necrotic dust parted before him, giving a clear view of a building.... Leaving aside whether widow's veils, in fact, part, in case they famously do in some contextI have never heard of, but the dust parts twice here (I assume ash and dust are synonomous... a tabletop that was now level with a ground entirely composed of sand, dust and ash, Oh, it's not, plus now there is sand also...) With an expulsion of force, all the fine particles the room had been filled with flew out of the window frames. Well, at least we won't have to worry about it any more. A sudden change in the dust’s flowing pattern made him freeze. But didn't the dust go out the window? ...sent him flying to the ground. Dizzied from the impact, vision wavering, he still attempted to get on all fours and crawl to the backpack. A tough spot A plume of flame erupted in front of him. He staggered backwards, landed on his rump, Can you stagger backwards from all fours? Wouldn't you need to stand up first? In front of him, still-smoking palm the size of his torso extended towards him, towered an Iridium Force Robotic Incineration Terminator That middle clause is clumsy as heck and stopped my read as I attempted to parse it. I am torn on the IFRIT acronym - it;s kind of cool but Terminator is such a specific universe it's probably better to just not go there, unless an incineration terminator puts out fires, which it clearly doesn't. With timing made perfect by desperation, he punched it to the side, generating a small vacuum behind it which diverted the fireball just enough to merely give him a bad sunburn on the side of his face. Credit where it's due, this is kind of neat story-physics, though I would have gone for singeing rather than radiation-based sunburn just barely not reaching its target. There has to be a better way to say this. An ashen tornado surrounded the IFRIT in less than a second. And then - the dust ignited. Ash is dust again, only the heat is so hot that ash, which by definition has already burned, burns again, even though the thing burning it is the same thing that burned it in the first place. It burns so badly that the thing whose entire job is to burn things, is burned. And also explodes. So, it's fair to say I had some story logic problems with this one. That said, the bones are there. There's a set up, an obstacle, a solution, a changed state at the end. The protagonist at least attempts to come up with a clever use of their powers to overcome the obstacle. You just need to pay a bit more attention to what you're writing. I have a sneaking suspicion you would have picked a lot of this up by reading it aloud to yourself before submitting. Chernobyl Princess: Pushing the Limits This was a much smoother read, by comparison. I got a bit of initial squick from the fact you seemed to be wizarding plants into sentience for the purposes of eating them... 'keeping the kingdom fed', as you put it, but it seemed in the end that the plants were down with it, so long as they got credit for it. I'm going to assume that the no plants were harmed and just their fruity bits got et, as it fits in better with my 'if it can choose the venue, it's off the menu" foodie philosophy. The story breezed along, and even had a couple of moments of charm. I wonder about the timeline - three years seems a trifle excessive to wait for a conversation to sort things things out. Plus the fact that it all got sorted out by a conversation seems a little easy - if there was a mention of a scientific publication system (in a story relevent context) prior to it being mentioned as a solution, that might have made it seem a little less making-stuff-up-as-you-go. The practical limit to how much magical information objects could store is mentioned once, then forgotten, which is a shame, as if this had also helped in the story resolution somehow, that might have made the beginning of the story and the end feel more connected. As it is, it's a pleasant but forgettable trifle.
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Aug 11, 2022 01:40
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JABC Crit-a-thon Noticed you didn’t have any crits yet, so here you go: The Lane Omega Prompt #1: A [mech pilot] agonizes over [their commute] Tight word count makes it hard to fully realize the setting in this one. We get some history of Antares’ being some sort of legendary ‘roid ‘rangler and you throw in a few other nuggets about a big competition coming up and then she can’t get there. Why not? Well someone random dumped a bunch of space debris in front of the jump gate. Now, this seems like a perfect opportunity for our protagonist to demonstrate some of those wranglin’ skills, but, no. She just sort of sits there and waits for someone else to clean it up and whines about it brattishly. So in the end you set up a semi-interesting scene and then it goes nowhere because nobody actually does anything. Pretty unsatisfying. Why wasn’t the cargo dumper a rival trying to slow her down? Why didn’t she move the debris herself? Who was her coach and why was he serving her dinner? So many questions. A Wonderful Day Omega Prompt #1... again? A [beloved member of the community] agonizes over [a bottle of oil] Flash Rule: Your protagonist seeks revenge on whoever murdered them in a past life This story kicks off after all the action. The sudden change in tone between the first paragraph and the murder reveal in the second is the most effective part of the story (and I see you picked up that original tone in the ‘epilogue’ section at the end, not bad). But the middle section is sodden with exposition, as we get a history lesson and then basically the guy gets murdered off screen (the explanantion is literally “one thing led to another”). How much better it might have been if our villain had some sort of motive that formed a thread through all the years? It seems like our hero finally got the jump on him, and that’s cool, but exactly how this time was different was just handwaved away. Expand on that, and the actual resolution of that conflict, and this would be a better story. Old mountain road Omega Prompt #2 So much setup! The conversational tone is all right, but I’m three paragraphs in and nothing has happened. This is flash fiction, get into the meat of the story and skip all but the most essential exposition and history lessons. About halfway through the story I started glazing over at the geography lessons and lost the thread of what the point of the operation even was. I guess building a road? Unfortunately I’m beyond caring at this point, too many words clogged up the first half of the story. Feels like a too-long story someone is rambling on about at a bar and all I can do is pretend to listen while desperately motioning for the bill. I guess the point is the Ukrainians get poo poo done and have the last laugh but to be honest it just seemed a bit too long-winded to be effective. Big Omega Prompt #3: Wonder Okay now this one is the exact opposite of the last story. Short, sweet, and evocative. The child’s relationship with the father is adorable, and the childlike wonder she expresses is well constructed. The line about ancient bones roaring again is cool and you did a good job with this little piece! Property Rights Omega Prompt #4: Bog wizard. Flash rule: must include a necromancer. This one is pretty decent, well written and enjoyable. I mean, more could have been done with it rather than it all being a big misunderstanding. I mean, you put too cool wizards in a story but they don’t really do anything other than bicker. I was hoping for some treachery or magic or something. The “You Like Me” line fell flat (not just because of the odd punctuation) as it jarred me right out of the story. It was very unsubtle and anachronistic to the tone of the rest of the piece. Overall this one was pretty fun to read, but again all the ‘action’ took place prior to the story so in the end it was just them talking about poo poo they already did.
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Aug 11, 2022 03:20
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Some Random Crits Not too much to these here crits, but I looked at your words and enjoyed them. Something Like Necromancy by Antivehicular: Omega Ladder #4: Wizard Week Wredux It had a clear premise that nailed the prompt. Great start with a fitting end. The ending felt abrupt when I reached the end, but with the transaction being what drove the story I don't know how else it could have gone. Regardless, I thought it was a fun execution of the prompt. Would read more about the Witch of the Camera. Proscenium Lights by PhantomMuzzle: Omega Ladder #3: Wonder: Flash Rule: Your story exists during some sort of countdown I'm 50/50 about the flash rule, but it doesn't matter because I really like this one(and I mean, technically, yes it is a countdown or a series of them, but I digress). You crammed in some cool bits for 250 words. I think it delivers on the third prompt decently. The Dancing Colonel's Wonder Show by Thranguy: Omega Ladder #3: Wonder: Hellrule:Your protagonist is named Rutherford and all their joints bend the wrong way  This is great and it put a smile on my face. Captures the prompt via the spectacle, but there's a melancholic eerieness to it that I really enjoy. It seems well put together. Agony and Empire by Tars Tarkas: A [Empire State Building] agonizes about [werewolf] “Nothing can stop the Party Werewolf. He’s going to bring down the whole block!” I love the bizarre monster/living building world that humans just exist in. Does it fit the prompt? Absolutely. Seemed fine as a story, and like a prompt that you had fun with.
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Aug 11, 2022 05:10
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Since I was asked about this elsewhere: I WILL give out flashrules if you want, and they will come in the form of additional worldbuilding details. Anything from food to religion to recreation.
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Aug 11, 2022 06:41
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Thank you very much for the crit, Fumblemouse, and again for the others crits I already thanked for in the Discord
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Aug 11, 2022 12:17
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Posting some birthday week crits! These were the stories before and after mine. Two Spies Walk into a Bakery by a friendly penguin Flash: A [spies] agonizes over [love] Very cute! You pair the rising action of the spy mission with the rising tension of the conversation very well. My one crit is the final line, this would have been better ending on "Do you think our relationship is ready to expand to sandwiches?" rather ending on Grace's answer. Her line makes the scene feel like it should be longer, like there's more the story wants to say, but I think Lee's line wraps it up really well! Also, hurr hurr cream horn I am twelve years old Dumb rear end by flerp A [cabalist] agonizes about a [butt] This is a very good fart joke. The kissing of the rear end was pretty good, Jimmy being a snickering weirdo trying to get his cult leader to do weird stuff is good. This gets a little flabby in the middle, the repetition of the fifteen hearts and the ritual being P E R F E C T is a little overwrought. It's understandable, because the narrator is overwrought right now, but I think tightening that up would make this an even better goofy fart joke. Some Might Say I Am A Fan Of Cinema by Tars Tarkas Omega prompt #2: autobiography I'm going to be honest, I don't super know how to crit this! It's less a story than a rushed admission of a wierd but fascinating hobby. Don't get me wrong, I absolutley loved reading about this whole world of cinema that I know nothing about, and you wrote it cleanly and with plenty of cheerful enthusiasm, it's just... not entirely a story in the usual sense. If you were going to rework this, it might be cool to write specifically about the first weird movie you found, what drew you into this more-acquisitive-than-experiential-but-not-not-experiential hobby. An interesting read, thank you for sharing it! The Thief of Opportunity by DigitalRaven A [driver] agonizes over an [anatomical heart] This was an excellent use of the prompt and the flash, and is one of the ones I read while the contest was active. I genuinely enjoyed it, the internal debate of 'am I really going to do this?' and 'I have to do this,' and the relief that he didn't have to choose. Even though it left him with serious injuries, his revence is complete. Sort of. He didn't really do it, but he can imagine that the universe hates Ryde as badly as he does. And maybe it does, Ryde sounds like a douche. gently caress Daniel Ryde. Let us choke on ash by flerp Omega prompt 3: wonder Holy poo poo, flerp. I loved this. There's wonder in both the gravity of the situation and in the power of refusing to roll over in the face of it. Refusing to be numb to how poo poo everything is, refusing to be paralyzed. I feel paralyzed like, all the loving time so this really spoke to me. I don't have a ton of notes, but maybe there's supposed to be a spaced paragraph break in between "We're supposed to get on hightays littered with cars and drive all the way home./ We're supposed to look at the blistering red sun..." But that's a super minor detail and it's possible that's intentional. The Wizard by Staggy Omega prompt 3: wonder A very sweet account of a grandfather putting a remote control back together and impressing the heck out of his grandchild. It's simple and sweet, you do a great job with sensory experience here. I don't really have any edits to suggest, this is very cozy, and it begins and ends nicely. Rite of Passage by Fumblemouse a [lard] agonises over [a terrible weasel man] I liked all the individual bits of this, but I don't think they came together in the cohesive whole you were going for. I'm going to put that down to the lack of information about the setting. I don't know if this is happening in a real world, post-human apocalypse, weasels rediscover Buddhism type thing or if it's like, in a videogame and the bodhisattva is an algorithm designed to facilitate prosocial behavior or what. I definitely feel like it's the latter? But I don't know. I think if you clarify the world your story occupies it will flow a lot more easily. Your prose is perfectly adequate, I think this was hindered more than helped by the prompt. Wax Wings by hard counter [i]Omega prompt 2: autobiography[/b] Lovely. You captured the intensity of the dream and how it motivated you to do all this research. On the initial read, I thought that the stuff with your father might have come up a bit late, but on subsequent reads I don't think that's necessarily true at all. The way you've written it allows it to be sweet and sad without being oversentimental and maudlin. You walked a fine line between those and you walked it well, congrats!
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Aug 11, 2022 16:46
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week 522 crits i literally used a random number generator to choose the stories Beezus - Sstrizzr, King Lizzr first, i saw a crit saying clownworld meatprison (great name, btw) should be funnier but i disagree. as someone who plays ff14 as Boy Kisser, if youre joining a random party even with a funny name, youre def not gonna be a funny person. i actually really enjoyed clownworld because they were a necessary foil to keep us from getting too wrapped into this being serious and keep us in game logic. overall, this story is pretty fun as a MMO player, since we all kinda know that tedious roleplayer/cutscene enjoyer and its fun to think of a game where lore and roleplaying beats the enemy instead of just knowing how the game works and playing well. its hard to really critique this because like, its a party clearing a dungeon in an MMO, there’s not much to really do here, and it does what it can while being enjoyable, which is a win. my only prime issue is a logistical one -- this party is already farming this dungeon, so they know the fight, so the surprises feel arbitrary but also a bit too constructed. like, why are there new adds just because theyre failing? it makes the plausibility of this being a real game not really land. i think if they had done this fight blind while progging or leveling, this sort of “omg this is really hard why are there so many adds this all seems off” feel wouldve kept us viewing this as a real MMO with maybe an odd difficulty curve and could keep us in the game-world longer rather than being a bit too clearly fake MMO. a small thing, but is pretty fun. maybe a bit too bloated at the beginning with the logistics of real life getting in the way of gaming but idk. Tars Tarkas - On the Way to Fuzzy Wuzzy World there’s something interesting in here that can get mined out of this piece. im reminded of a story i heard about a Rothko once, where a woman walked into a museum and broke down at the sight of a huge Rothko in a museum, and that kind of emotion and moment is a great focus for a micro-fic like this. the Fuzzy Wuzzy World stuff is a bit of an afterthought and im not sure what they do. a statue on the way to an amusement park is fine (it reminds me of those sorts of gimmick landmarks you find on the drive to Las Vegas, if you’ve ever gone/heard of them/played New Vegas), but a lot of attention (and the title) is centered on Fuzzy Wuzzy World, and with so few words, your story cant bear the weight of Fuzzy Wuzzy World you give it. with how much attention you place on Fuzzy Wuzzy World, it needs to be in this piece or excised. i think honing in on that statue, trying to really capture that deep emotion one might experience seeing something like that, is where this story will really work. QuoProQuid - Do No Harm there’s a lot of solid technical skill that cant be understated. characters are fairly distinct, the conflict feels solid, the writing is good, the tension and actions ramp up, but i just feel… off when i reach the end, and im not sure what exactly. i think, to me, this feels like a bit of prelude, not quite the calm before the storm, but a sort of moment that leads up to that explosion, where these two characters really collide into each other. so i feel this build up to that moment, but i dont get to actually see that moment, which i think i really wanted to see. im not sure if the story should only be that moment, or if this needs piece to be there first for us to see the context before we get to that confrontation, but without it, i feel blue balled. yeah, i think thats my main issue. this isnt where the story ends, there’s a lot more here, and without that more, it just feels incomplete. its quite good technically, but not enough. Lippincott - Untitled (rear end wasps) yep this is a story about rear end wasps. some of the description here is solid, esp from the wasp’s pov, but this story is a bit too much of a straight line for me to really care. i dont really care about the wasp or the youtuber and its like, alright, cool, a little bit of a nature documentary/poo poo-head youtuber/wasp pov, which is fine, but idk, this is just lacking from its concept. not much occurs and what does occur is okay, but the wasp pov isnt interesting enough stylistically to be much more, and theres not really much being said here besides whats happening that i cant care much more about this piece. Uranium Phoenix - The True Nature of Reality this is cute, and it is fun to kind of reminiscence on the childlike thoughts we used to have about what reality was (i remember as a kid believing that i was somehow controlled like i was a video game character, which for me was a lot less fun and lead to me being a six year old having existential crisis BUT what im saying is that i understand where youre coming from), but this story goes very long about your kid brain logic which is fun but sort of insubstantial because there’s no real reflection or thought about what that means, its just sort of presented to us. then the shift to adulthood doesnt really work to bridge it all together because it ends up just coming out of nowhere and now everything’s gone, that wonder is gone, that made-up reality just shattered like that, and its like, that’s it. and maybe that’s sort of how life is, but i think we at least needed something more than “welp, all my thoughts about reality as a kid are gone, that kinda sucks, oh well.” The Saddest Rhino - Art is Subjective and So Is Your Dumbass Opinion lol this is very dumb and silly but a blast to read. its a good amount of irreverent with a nice variety of gags (i love the characters going woe is me while the hair lady is playing a game). idk, i dont really have much to say here mostly because its a comedy story that doesnt have any pretensions about being anything else and it made me giggle and for whatever reason, the final reason made me laugh out loud. so yeah mission accomplished, i would say. Applewhite - The Final Blasphemy oof wow thats a lot of Capital Words. the gag on the rubick’s cube made me laugh. this is a little bloated at the beginning with all the capital words, but it gets into a nice fun rhythm. it ends a bit too dramatically for me, but its funny to see a post-apocalypse society that reacts to a time capsule and the relics that people left behind and determining if theyre blasphemous or not. the mistaking of superman for himself is funny. its a nice piece because it doesnt try too hard on its gag, and keeps itself light and simple. like i said, i think the end gets a bit overly dramatic, and i wonder if the ending could be a bit more fun. for my two cents, i wonder if the seneschal deciding to make his own comic book series would be fun. but im not saying do that. My Shark Waifuu - Fly Ball that line from the coach is a great way of pulling this whole piece together. the piece itself is light and small but it stands stronger than just an anecdote because of that line. i can see why and how this moment matters, in a small way, to a person’s life, and while it isnt exactly formative, its a lesson learned and a feeling felt that has more impact than one would expect. i think the beginning is a bit too focused on explaining baseball and left field and all that. this might be my americanness, as even as someone who has never played baseball and rarely watches it, i know what baseball is and how it works and what the left field is. i think there’s a compromise where you dont have to explain as much as baseball but just give enough of an impression for people unfamiliar with baseball to get it. besides that, i think this is pretty well done with a decent autobiographical voice that ends strong. it may be a smidge too “personal essay i work in high school” voice though and could stand to have a bit of a stronger personal voice. Mocking Quantum - Siren Song ok, metal band awakening ancient horrors through their music, yes, great, im in, but that needs to be the start, not after 300 words of preamble. overall, good concept, decent followthrough, but it lacks a so-what. like, its just a day in the life of for a music wizard. which isnt bad, but it doesnt do more than it advertises. i wanted something more here, something larger conflict or moment or anything, but its unfortunately too flat. also, yeah, cut that intro by a lot. i dont need flights, i dont need those details. pull me in with metal bands happening to create music that wake up cosmic horrors because thats good poo poo. then, once you get me in, try to push that idea, try to see what else can be done. My Shark Waifuu - Total Eclipse of the Heart cute and light, but is a bit too fabley for me. like, why does the oak care? the pine’s casualness was one thing that worked for me well because like, why would a tree care? but then that pushes on why does the oak care? i also dont really particularly think the conflict here is that engaging. the prose is a bit too workmanlike for me too, i kind of want some more out of the prose here than just fairly flat description. this is overall fine, but nothing in here really excites. it has a good concept, but i feel like it needs more on everything, like character and prose and conflict. everything here is just a bit too flat.
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Aug 11, 2022 21:08
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crits for stories above & below mine edit: i only had 7 to crit because of how the subs rolled in Old Bones by Hawklad -disclaimer: i'd recently read the underground railroad by whitehead, and its unsettling depiction of the slave/master dynamic within individual relationships and broader society is still heavy with me -i appreciate the contrast woven into this piece re: the fates of underclasses versus those of their abusers, it works pretty well as the moral fulcrum for turning the story; it was both a sound choice in concept and in execution imho, good job -the descriptions of the abuses of plantation owners are in pretty good agreement with descriptions found elsewhere, in fiction and history, so the authenticity seemed there imho -i mostly just have mild technical criticisms -i get this distinct impression that a significant number of your descriptions were undermined by later descriptions and events; for e.g. the statement that (my paraphrasing) 'slave murder is still murder, after all' is a pretty strong statement of equivalence, which of course conflicts with the overt injustice splattered all over the story, where the protagonist's murder produces just one big argument and no other consequences (that incident's also juxtaposed with the growth of a mass grave for other slaves, which implicitly generalizes/multiplies these injustices further) -this sort of poor agreement seemed chronic enough that i wondered if the dissonance was a deliberate choice, if so, you might've wanted to underscore that the protagonist's frequent, disparate descriptions were rooted in something in their persona -if it's not a choice, then this stuff's just a technical issue, making more deliberate word choices in the future will fix it -anyway, since the piece does a great job of setting up the moral scales by which the reader will judge the outcome, i think it deserved something stronger than a seasonally-appropriate one-liner to close off on -in general, given that the last line was also one of the only pieces of dialogue here, its uniqueness within the story will naturally draw a lot of attention to it, if you didn't want that kind of scrutiny put on it you might've wanted to restructure the piece slightly -sorry to make mountains of molehills here, this story was otherwise pretty darn solid Pushing The Limits by Chernobyl Princess -disclaimer: i noticed that one's your 4th prompt, climbing the omega ladder was pretty exhausting for me and i felt pretty baked by the 4th entry (your experiences might be different), so i'm probably going to unconsciously critique this one accordingly, i hope it's still useful -i thought this piece satisfied the prompt in a pretty entertaining way, i smiled in a variety of places, good work -establishing the lack of appreciation in Zanzi's professional life was a neat and efficient lead-in to the oak/vine's own complaints about the lack of appreciation for what they do -it seemed like, however, Zanzi had some inner conflict about actually crediting them, since Zanzi only does so begrudgingly; i'd like to have read more about what caused that inner conflict; understanding it might've heightened the tension of the moment -otherwise great job here Untitled (prompt: A [YouTuber] agonizes over [rear end in a top hat wasp]) by Lippincott -disclaimer: i don't really watch any of these kinds of videos on youtube, so i'll have to infer what i can about them -Great work differentiating the two primary speakers, not just through language and tone, but also through perspective, motivation, and world understanding -despite never settling on one voice, this piece generally read quite smoothly, with great pacing overall -i rather enjoyed ending on the note of more wasps emerging from the butt after the youtuber already got the stinging of a lifetime -my minor critique involves the implied time frame the story takes place over -not only are the wasp's various activities interspersed between bits of the youtuber's dialogue, but there are points where it switches from past to present tense to describe things that happened long before; this caused a lot of rapid shifting between past and present for the wasp in what was also a very short time-frame for the youtuber -since this pieces uses concurrence to contrast the youtuber and the wasp, it might've been stronger if were slightly reworked so most of the wasp's actions were somehow concurrent as well, instead having this rapid flicking between past and present -otherwise, except for that minor thing, i enjoyed this story Still Life by Staggy -disclaimer: i noticed that one's your 4th prompt, climbing the omega ladder was pretty exhausting for me and i felt baked by the 4th entry (your experiences might be different), so i'm probably going to unconsciously critique this one on a curve, i hope it's still useful anyway -the emotional core of the piece is pretty sound, grief and love are a pretty explosive combination and this piece establishes both reasonably well; the story (conceptually) unfurled in a pretty reasonable way as well -in general, i like how you made use of your flashrule; good work -however, there's a suite of (minor) technical issues in its writing, which caused the language to come off as generally stilted and awkward in a way that went beyond style; stuff like breaking some of your own conventions within the first paragraph, descriptions at odds with one another, lines whose content less enticed me with its mystery and more baffled me until i had enough context from later lines to decode them, etc -most of those issues would've been resolved with more editing, which you probably would've done under normal circumstances, so i'm not going to agonize over these minor issues -i couldn't quite see what you were going for on the note the story ended on; you did solid work in arriving at the moment where Aviar recognized the faulty nature of his creations, their unreality, their toll on his memories, etc so he abandons his attempt to recreate/resurrect his husband; but we end on Aviar creating a companion for Gimlet (which was also a means of evicting his memories of Gimlet) -that strikes me as act that drains the weight of Aviar's earlier realization, while also being a bit at odds with the final lines "He... took only his memories with him." -maybe the end was making a finer point than my limited reading comprehension can manage, maybe Aviar had learned something but he wasn't finished processing it yet, and was still prone to error, but i personally wasn't clear on that; i think this last part deserves some consideration for improvement -otherwise, this story was fine My Daddy by The man called M -disclaimer: it looked to me like your prompt was tough, oof, sometimes that happens -this read a little like a deranged children's story, like the kind you'd read in something like Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark; in my books that's a good thing -it's interesting that this story (apparently) sets the protagonist's growing resentment of their father against their growing love of grass & composting 'til the two finally collide, that's a very exotic choice imho -my critiques are mostly structural, the events seem to develop a little arbitrarily -i think a more natural story progression might've emphasized your exotic choices a little more, making its narrative and growing intensity stronger too -assuming i've read your intention right, a scheme like (for example): first being introduced to grass, being in awe of it, then trying to share that wonder with father, and then having him reject that wonder with growing cruel intensity again and again as the protagonists falls deeper into their composting rabbit hole, then a pay-off, might've aligned the growth of compost-love and father-resentment a little more -that's just a suggestion though, ultimately it's up to you how you want to grow your story; sometimes scary stories like this have their own demented, nightmare logic; if that was your intention, maybe you'd want to play into that angle a little more instead -overall, this wasn't bad for being so short The Wizard Watched Trading Places Right Before This Story by Tars Tarkas -disclaimer: another omega ladder 4th prompt; this time i noticed that, like me, you submitted this one only a few minutes before the original deadline... i feel the struggle too, friend -this piece did a pretty solid job of expanding its prompt into an interesting premise for a story, its world felt nice and rich for a short story, the little details everywhere added a lot here imho -the primary conflict here was this amusing, if one-sided, rivalry that potentially buds into a future relationship, and while the details of your story subtly emphasizes the direction of this development (Balan, for example, enjoys Office fanfics where Jim and Dwight, two characters in a TV-rivalry, are shipped together), i think emphasizing that a bit more in the direct narrative would've enhanced this piece -it's perfectly fine to tell stories mainly through details, don't get me wrong, it's just the direct narrative doesn't provide a tangible hook for the start of their relationship until the last line; until then, Balan seemed genuinely contemptful imho, it's only in the outward similarity between the way Balan clowns krombolo and the way Jim clowns Dwight that we have a hook -it'd have been nice if (for example) we saw Balan being inwardly energized by the argument as it went (since he so rarely interacts with others), even if he projected a contemptful appearance outward -otherwise, nice work for something probably hastily submitted with only a few minutes left Iceberg Theory by rohan -disclaimer: your prompt looked like a non-sequitur, so i was already intrigued to see where it went... -...and i was rewarded with some wonderful absurdism, great job; the ridiculous premise did a lot of heavy lifting in making the one really enjoyable to read -the language flowed quite naturally, as did the overall narrative imho -my minor critique is that the piece seemed to shift from its initial focus of the owner's (sometimes strained) relationship with their 'pet,' and his undesirable habits, to the pet's personal struggles with uh, his impulse control, irrespective of their owner's involvement, with the finale being hemingway's spectacular defeat to lust -i think the story would've cohered a little better if the owners were integrated more into the ending, it seemed like this was more their story than hemingway's until the end -otherwise, this story stands pretty well on its own two feet, i think it might've been my favourite of this bunch hard counter fucked around with this message at 22:53 on Aug 11, 2022 |
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Crits for Week 522 Complete Ladders: Part 1 a friendly penguin - Two Spies Walk into a Bakery https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10782&title=Two+Spies+Walk+into+a+Bakery Good service of the prompt! It feels a little strange for a spy to be trying to talk about their feelings in the middle of the missions, but that was pretty explicitly the prompt you got, lol. Really good description of action throughout. I don’t want a lot of spy movies, but this definitely gave me those vibes. Actually elements of it remind me of Marvel movies, how they’ll be doing crazy death-defying stuff but just carrying on an unrelated conversation throughout. So if that’s the sort of vibe you were going for, good work! Both Grace and Lee strike me as overthinkers, but in different ways. Grace seems like they are the kind of person who likes to define things and establish expectations. Lee seems like he is bookish, but a little bit oblivious. Beyond that I didn’t know a ton about them, but I still got the sense that they are comfortable with each other and trust each other. I hope they figure out they care about each other and become awesome spy besties. Note: typo in third-to-last paragraph. I think “now” should be “not” a friendly penguin - The Color of Laughter https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10785&title=The+Color+of+Laughter The language of your POV in this is very charming. It added a very personal flavor to see things through your eyes. Some of it was a little disarming because it was a little unexpected and pretty charged language (“enemies”, “vampires”, “lairs”). It was also very defensive and combative (“Maybe ruining their research was the best way to keep them from taking the bits of herself she had stashed away.”). That’s an honest perspective if it’s the lens through which you view the world. But as a reader it made it a little unclear what your motivations were beat-to-beat. And at times it also felt a little more like you might rather alienate the reader (another kind of emotional wall) rather than have them empathize with you and see things from your perspective. Plus the fact that the bulk of the story was about how you started laughing and couldn’t stop. And I definitely think a lot of us have been in a situation like that before. But reading it, I found myself feeling a little bit more like K and sort of wondering what was going on with you, rather than really identifying with you. Who is K? Because if this is the story of how you first met someone important in your life it’s very sweet. But it doesn’t really say that, so it feels a bit random. Maybe K is your partner and other TDers would know that reading this story and I just don’t because I haven’t known you as long? If that is the case, it would be nice to have that baked into the ending somehow. As-is, for all I know you e-mail K back “Yep you’re creepy” and never talk to them again and then this story isn’t really about anything. I do enjoy the visualization of feeling colorless, and having communications with K bring some color to you. I think that was lovely. a friendly penguin - Art https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10812&title=Art “Symphonizing the vicinity” didn’t work for me. Similarly “...in perpendicularity, curling in a golden ratio of gravity”. Both those phrases kind of took me out, they distracted me from the imagery and made me focus on the words instead. I think Simon mentioned this too, but the rats weaving between feet instead of in and out of feet might be clearer. Other than those couple pieces, I thought the imagery was great. I could see it, smell it, hear it, feel it. I felt like I was there, and I was reveling in the same experience. I really like the reveal at the end. It sort of reframes the picture in a more chaotic but still lovely way. I wonder if you want to say “...enact *my* will upon these wonders”, and not maybe *her* will? I feel like if you enacted your will upon the wonders it would be doing exactly what you’re doing then. Or maybe you can find a different way to describe what your landlord wants to do to the nature. a friendly penguin - Words of Power https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10835&title=Words+of+Power Yuck watermelon-flavored White Claw sounds like poison. This is so cute! It’s so funny that you managed to make a story about a fantastically powerful wizard translate into something that feels universal. I think a lot of people have gone through feelings like Waldo has: they’ve realized their life looks different than it used to, and they’re deciding whether or not they’re happy about/despite the changes. Waldo had fantastic adventures, and he enjoyed them, and now he’s not having adventures, so he must be sad. But then Waldo realizes that his life is good now, and he is happy even without those adventures. This story is charming and contemplative, but in a way that still has forward momentum and character development. Waldo has learned and grown and made a new friend. And he’s realized ways to use his powers that he enjoys, and that other people may not react as poorly to. I wish “The Backyard” was a cooler/lamer name, like “The Hip Hangout” or something. Something a dad would think is clever, and fits the vibe of Cool Cabal of Conjurers. “The Backyard” didn’t feel unique enough for the giants to bother coming over. I liked it! My a friendly penguin Ranking Words of Power Art Two Spies Walk into a Bakery The Color of Laughter Best story arc gets 1st. Best imagery gets 2nd. Bakery had more motive and intention. Color of Laughter was cute but needed a bit more. Antivehicular - The Archeopteryges and the Giant Freaky Dragonflies https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10806&title=The+Archeopteryges+and+the+Giant+Freaky+Dragonflies I mean, this story is just undeniably RAD. Velociraptorman, album covers with lasers, laboratory sex. What else could one need? Even though it was a unique setting with a bizarre character, I felt like I completely understood who both of them are, and their relationship with each other. I liked how Theo sort of annoyed Jamie, and Jamie is sort of undeniably using Theo, but also Jamie does clearly care enough about Theo to carefully give him the s-e-x tal. That spoke volumes about their relationship. I knew what Theo’s music sounds like, and I can vividly picture the album covers. I didn’t know exactly like why Theo existed and what his relationship with the lab was, but I sort of liked not knowing because that wasn’t what this story was about. Overall it was a fantastic story. Well done! Antivehicular - Disappointment Foreshadowed https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10856&title=Disappointment+Foreshadowed Wow. Okay here’s what’s crazy: this is a 900+ word story about a person sitting in a chair and then getting out of the chair. But it was SO GOOD! How did you do that? The whole story was about capturing the feeling of being afraid of heights, which is a feeling I don’t relate to at all. I am dangerously unafraid of heights. But I DID relate to it! I felt what you were feeling. When you would talk about jumping out of the chair I was like “No don’t do it you’re too high!”. And then when you finally did jump down I cheered and celebrated for you. loving A, well done. I’ve read quite a few of these Prompt 2s now, and so many of them fell into the same trap of describing events in a very passive way. But what you described had barely any action, but it was engaging and relatable and I loved it. Antivehicular - Wondering and Wishing https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10858&title=Wondering+and+Wishing What the hell how do you keep doing this. You captured such an abstract feeling, and one I hadn’t given much thought to before. Lots of people find interesting ways to describe joy or sadness or what an orgasm feels like. But you’ve managed here to immerse me in an even more complex emotion in such a crystallized way. I read every word of this thinking “omg I think that sometimes too!” and it felt so universal in such a deeply personal way. Antivehicular - Something Like Necromancy https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10872&title=Something+Like+Necromancy This was a very lovely story, and a very good fulfillment of the prompt. I also appreciate that it sort of inverts the usual tropes. I feel like normally when there’s a necromancer or wizard for hire, they end up fulfilling people’s wishes in a way that makes them regret it. But I loved that the Witch of the Camera patiently ensured a situation that would be best for Mike, Jeremy, and their child. She does the magic thing, but ultimately her priority is making sure the little family is off to a good start. And it’s so hard when the client is only mostly heeding her advice, but gets there in the end. You could feel her gently steering, and then celebrating with Mike when he reaches a workable solution. It’s so sweet and hopeful. My Antivehicular Ranking gently caress this is probably the hardest ranking yet. I think I’ll go with: Disappointment Foreshadowed Wondering and Wishing Something Like Necromancy The Archeopteryges and the Giant Freaky Dragonflies I ranked Disappointment Foreshadowed first because if all I was told about it was “A person scared of heights gets down off a big chair” I’d be like “Ugh boring, NEXT!” but it was so engaging and surprising and kind of magic. Then Wondering and Wishing for similar reasons: nothing happens and it’s mostly just describing a feeling but it’s done so well it’s perfect. Then Something Like Necromancy, only because I was rooting for the characters in that one a little more than in The Archeopteryges and the Giant Freaky Dragonflies. But I also hate that The Archeopteryges is last because it’s so good too. Bad Seafood - Lunar Libertines https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10837&title=Lunar+Libertines Welp I did my homework and read Rural Rentboys and The Golden Bean so thanks for destroying my innocence I guess. I’m glad you mentioned that your gerund was the reading because I assumed that but also would have spent too much energy wondering. I mean, this story is sort of a vehicle for a few TD in-jokes. But it was for birthday week so that’s perfect! Also that being said, the in-jokes fit within a framework that was interesting on its own. A gerund as a main character is tricky, and making that the reading was clever. It made it so your POV character was a relatable person, but was part of the reading group agonizing over the spooky moon man. So it fulfilled the prompt deftly. Also even though the Rural Rentboys was mostly fanservice for the long-term Domers, it still had a purpose in the story beyond the joke. Narratively, Xargon needed a weird story to tell, so that worked! And even The Golden Bean at the end worked well as a bizarre and memorable ending to this story. I think this was an absolutely great story to kick off birthday week. It felt like a birthday card to Thunderdome. Bad Seafood - Crunch Time https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10838&title=Crunch+Time I already mentioned to you in Discord how much I liked this story when I read it during birthday week, and I stand by that on the re-read. There are so many threads of memories weaving through your life, and they all become entangled during this traumatic event. It jumps around between memories, like in a movie when someone’s life flashes before their eyes. But then it’s sort of naturally reveals why they are all relevant and how this event brought them all up for you. It’s a really lovely way of making the story incredibly personal, and reframing your experience. Missed a capitalization on Dad in paragraph beginning “I’d always been a cautious driver” It took me a little bit to understand that the car behind you pushed you into the car in front of you. Since you said that you stopped just in time, and then there was only one crunch, I thought you had just been hit. Bad Seafood - Roi Soleil https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10839&title=Roi+Soleil Okay so full disclosure, I wrote this flash rule. But I did it before I knew what prompts 2 and 3 were going to be, and I was hoping no one would get it for either of these. So sorry for that! That being said, you did a good job with this! It was a good way to interpret it to make it fit the flash. But it’s just sooo tricky to do something more complex with such a low word count. Overall it felt a little more like “worship” or “power” maybe than “wonder”. But that may also be because I’ve read a few wonder stories by now and most people went more poetic and contemplative, without really characters or a plot. So since your story has those things, it’s more of a story, but it also suffers I think more under the low word count. Bad Seafood - Magic Scrolls https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10869&title=Magic+Scrolls  I didn’t know who Harryhausen was. Had to look up.This was a very cool juxtaposition of a dungeon crawler setting but with modern, instagrammy references. It makes it feel anachronistic in a pretty delightful way. It’s a bit tongue in cheek and a little insincere, but I was okay with it. It’s a funny read, though it felt a bit like it was trying to reign in the humor at times. Like Mune was funny, and both Freki and the story itself were kind of the straight man. So it made Mune feel a little out of place a little moreso than a mashup. Like I said, it still worked for me, especially when Freki got in on the humor, like at the ending. Which, by the way, I really liked. It was a good button to the story and really sort of summed up the ideas in a cute way. My Bad Seafood Ranking Crunch Time Lunar Libertines Magic Scrolls Roi Soleil Crunch Time was deftly written, personal, and interesting. Lunar Libertines was perfect for this week, which I will of course rank highly because I have become possessed by the spirit of birthday week. Then Magic Scrolls is above Roi Soleil because I found it just a bit more engaging. Chernobyl Princess - Just Like Tesco! (what the gently caress is wrong with me) https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10783&title=Just+Like+Tesco%21+%28what+the+gently caress+is+wrong+with+me%29 Honestly I think this is a really tricky kind of story to write and you handled it really well. The POV is deeply flawed but is working hard to learn and grow. So you want to make them relatable, but not in a way that makes it feel like any of their racism is in any way acceptable. Antiheroes are so hard to write, and there’s definitely a reason why so many of them end up not being antiheroes, but just heroes for lovely people (The Joker, Tyler Durden, Walter White, etc.). I really liked how you handled this, that Carl is working to change, but so much of his racism is so ingrained that it’s taking him time to recognize and reshape those thoughts. Reading it was both frustrating (because it made me think of people I know) but also hopeful. Not a ton happens in it, but it felt like a station along Carl’s journey of growth. The very last sentence was pretty long. I liked everything in it, it just felt like too many commas. Chernobyl Princess - Ski Jump https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10797&title=Ski+Jump I thought this was really great! The story, not that this happened to you. But it’s such a good description of how these things usually happen. It’s so scary and bizarre and hilarious. I’m glad I saw you mention in the Discord that you made it out okay (well as okay as one really can be for having broken their back) because I was worried. It’s amazing how fear and humor can really coexist (especially when pain meds are involved) and I think this story illustrates that really well. I do wish you’d been able to convey a little bit more of the sense of “Why is no one telling me what is happening?!” because other than an overdramatic nurse, there isn’t a ton of it. It sort of felt like you (and by extension, the reader) didn’t know you were seriously injured beyond the leg break. So if there was some indication earlier that you knew or suspected something might be Big Bad, but everyone was being cagey because they thought it would make you feel better, but it made it so much worse, I think that would add a lot of weight to the middle of the story. When the nurse tells you that you broke your back, it’s already pretty heartbreaking and scary. But if some of that dread had built up to that point, it might add that element of confirming the worst, rather than sort of being like “oh holy crap what?!” Chernobyl Princess - Sledding https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10810&title=Sledding I. Love. Sledding. I grew up in Minnesota and I have so many fond memories of it. I loved the descriptions of the snow and ice, but I found myself actually wanting more imagery of the cold, especially since the last sentence references the cold. This felt a bit more like Hollywood winter scenes, where everything is beautiful and lovely but you watch it going “Omg how is no one wearing hats or mittens” and their hair is perfect and their nose isn’t even pink. Basically for me this captured a lot of the sights and sounds in a really beautiful way, but lacked a bit in the physical sensations. Also I read this right after Ski Jump so I was like “No Chernobyl Princess! Stay out of the snow! Go inside and drink cocoa and be SAFE!” The second sentence lost me just a little bit. If it’s not obvious by now I get overwhelmed easily by long sentences. Limned- had to look that up. Chernobyl Princess - Pushing the Limits https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10849&title=Pushing+The+Limits Hmm you seem to be a fan of long second sentences lol. Oak is MVP of this story. I kind of loved it. I actually wish a little more of the focus was on the relationship between the Orchid and the Oak, almost like an arranged marriage. I also didn’t know how much of the Orchid was its idiosyncratic personality, or if it was more of a joke about how orchids are hard to grow (so I have been told)(I’ve never really tried to grow any plants because my cat is a terror). When the scientific paper is brought up it feels a bit out of nowhere. It was first established that Zanzi’s goal was to “help farmers maintain yields that kept the kingdom fed”, then she was making this pairing to work out the potion that would expand how much magical information objects could store. But then by the end it seems like she’s doing it more for research/acclaim than practical purposes. I think a bit more unity in motivation would help this story resonate a little bit more for me, and help me understand Zanzi a little bit better. My Chernobyl Princess Ranking Ski Jump Just Like Tesco! (what the gently caress is wrong with me) Pushing the Limits Sledding Ski Jump was the most engaging story. Just Like Tesco had a protagonist I was rooting for. Pushing the Limits felt a bit like a biopic, where it makes longer time jumps than you expect and things happen in a less narrative way but just because that’s what happened. And then Sledding is last because it had some very cool imagery but it felt a little more two-dimensional. hard counter - The Amazing Technicolor Scream Coat: An Editorial written by Winston A.S. Parish for the TheDailyClickBait.com https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10843...lyClickBait.com Okay I’m new to Thunderdome and completely unfamiliar with SomethingAwful as a whole, so I apologize if the goon prompt affected things in this story that I won’t catch on. The title threw me off. It set very different expectations for me going into the story than ended up happening. I’ve learned that I tend to gravitate toward stories with simpler language, featuring characters with clear and relatable motivations. Barring that, I appreciate imagery that evokes a clear emotional response. That is all to say, I think this is a well-written story, but it’s not really for me. The POV character’s experiences with the spiders feel a bit disconnected, like they’re analyzing their feelings a bit more than feeling them. And the language is very well-crafted, and gives me a clear visual pictures, but it doesn’t necessarily make me feel anything about what’s happening, or make me feel like I’m a part of the experience. I don’t know how to describe it except that it feels like a story that is happening at an arm’s length, and is described more objectively than subjectively. hard counter - Wax Wings https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10850&title=Wax+Wings The third paragraph had some language that felt repetitive and I didn’t know if it was intentional. Mostly “I’d see the most brilliant rainbow I’d ever see… just below the brightest moon I’d ever seen… unlike anything ever produced on Earth.” I understand the imagery is meant to feel brilliant and hyperbolic, but something about the phrasing sort of took me out of it. On my initial readthrough (which I usually skim pretty quickly) I thought this was a little overly scholarly and self-indulgent. But then on my second read-though (which I read much more slowly and carefully), I really really liked it. The research section felt more like a nagging obsession than a sort of humblebrag. And when I read it quickly, the stuff about your dad felt like it came out of nowhere. But on the second read it felt like a natural progression, and sort of revealing what the story was really about. There was some personal, emotional stuff in there, it just took until the end to seep out. hard counter - A Treasure’s Worth https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10852&title=A+Treasure%27s+Worth This was quite lovely. An awe at the joy of learning, a wonder at the fact that you’re a little dragon on your hoard of knowledge. It’s a very neat concept and I think you describe it well. Some of the repeated use of “giddy” is a bit simplistic. I know it’s a short word count, but since at its core, this is a story about the joys of teaching and learning, I wish that was featured more prominently. A lot of the words are spent on snowflakes in the first paragraph in ways that don’t serve the thesis quite as well. The “smile reaching to her eyes” bit from the teacher, then repeated later took me out a bit. I think I know what you’re describing, but I feel like most genuine smiles reach the eyes? Unless you’re Patrick Bateman? hard counter - Please Watch Dad Do… https://thunderdome.cc/?story=10867&title=Please+Watch+Dad+Do+a+Cannonball Hmm. In the second paragraph I got stuck on the sentence “Lately, she hadn’t been.” It followed “...if she took her studies seriously.” Since that’s past tense, shouldn’t it just be “Lately, she hadn’t.”? I’m not a grammar wizard. It may be correct as-is, or may be a situation where either is correct. But whatever the case, it felt odd to me. Overall I sort of feel for Collin, but not quite as much as I feel like I’m supposed to. I definitely understand that he wants to share his love for the practical magicks with Elizabeth, but I feel like I’m missing a little bit of the depth of their relationship. He feels a little more like a teacher than a dad to me. Like he cares more about Elizabeth liking practical magicks because he does, and not because of anything that would help her or his relationship with her. He tries hard to get her attention, but then ignores her when she talks to him. It feels a bit like you’re trying to be cagey about what her device is. When you talk about a preteen staring at their device and ignoring their parents, your reader will automatically picture a smartphone. Then when you talk about its screen, and it taking videos with the filters on, and even “there’s an app for that”, it just reinforces it. But it felt somehow like you didn’t want it to just be a magic smartphone, which it kind of was. I really liked what this story was trying to do, and it was mostly successful. It felt like it was a story about a dad trying to reconnect with his daughter, but in a magical setting. But overall nothing really happened as far as that was concerned, and the plot was in the magical library goings-on. It felt like that was supposed to be an event that might be a catalyst for change in the relationship between Collin and Elizabeth, or between Elizabeth and Practical Magicks, or between Collin and the Device. But then nothing really changed in any of those dynamics. My hard counter Ranking Wax Wings A Treasure’s Worth Please Watch Dad Do a Cannonball The Amazing Technicolor Scream Coat: An Editorial written by Winston A.S. Parish for the TheDailyClickBait.com Mostly ranked in order of how earnest the story felt to me.
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Aug 12, 2022 00:51
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