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sebmojo posted:in, song me Welcome to the party! The ladies of Russia 2012: Buranovskiye Babushki - "Party For Everybody" are glad to see you.
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Mar 31, 2017 14:35
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  Eleven hours remain to sign up for the greatest spectacle in song! If you're considering going in and would like control over your own destiny, keep in mind these glorious and mostly unclaimed opportunities: the strawberry-banana druids of Armenia, Italy's breakdancing gorilla, the ever-beloved Sunstroke Project representing Moldova (not to mention that you get to arm-wrestle SkaAndScreenplays over that one), and Cyprus's gravitational earworm.
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Mar 31, 2017 19:00
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Sign-ups for Week CCXLIII are now CLOSED! Sing with valor, contestants, and bring glory to your countries.
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Apr 1, 2017 06:03
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Forty minutes remain! Will the lawn gnomes of Zdob și Zdub be neglected for a second time? Did Iceland's singer paint her cheekbones for nothing? Are Belarus's wolf holograms soon to drag a soul down to Toxxic Hell? Stay tuned!
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Apr 3, 2017 05:20
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Submissions for Week CCXLIII: We Are the Heroes of Our Time are now CLOSED! A whole mess of you have brought shame upon your adopted nations and yourselves by failing to show for the grand final. flerp, crabrock, sebmojo, Mrenda--did you have a wardrobe malfunction or what? Did you seriously think the Eurovision audience would care? You could have draped yourselves in strategic LEDs, jeeze. I'll crit your entries regardless if you post them within the next twenty-four hours. sparksbloom and SkaAndScreenplays, you especially disappoint me and face banishment from Everyone else, thank you! The jury will meet soon to decide your standings.
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Apr 3, 2017 06:27
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P.S.sebmojo posted:and since i failed as well, here's a I trust your honor to hold you to this, O modded one.
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Apr 3, 2017 06:36
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to crit every story in each week that I fail in
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Week CCXLIII Results: We Are the Heroes of Our Time Those of you who danced with the demons of your minds this week dazzled us with your terpsichorean power. Four Eurovision Weeks I've judged so far, and I can tell you in honesty and with delight that this was the strongest Grand Final to date. The lowest weren't that low. The highest fought for top honors. The real show on May 13 will include a break-dancer in a gorilla suit, and it still probably won't be as enjoyable as this. THE WINNER: Chili, come and collect your glass microphone! The characters and relationships in your story of grief provide it with such power that it has become your rocket to the stars. Congratulations; you had to do a drat fine job to end up on the top of this roster. HONORABLE MENTIONS go to Sailor Viy, who nailed the subprompt to the wall with his tale of Sisters and sisters, and Ironic Twist, whose inconclusive ending has a terrible, wonderful strength. THE LOSER: With some regret, I present this title to Ceighk. Ceighk, your entry isn't a terrible story in the sense that it's neither terrible nor a story. The men of Jeanette's village are up to something, but you never show what. Ossian is gathering guns, but you never show why. You give us the setup for a story of at least twice the length. I would read the full version, though I might get tired of the indistinguishable villagers before long. A DISHONORABLE MENTION goes out to The Cut of Your Jib for a story that isn't terrible either, but the prose of which both judges found off-putting. I called it white noise; Seafood called it purple; either way, you colored us blue. Thank you, all of you, for a spectacular performance. I can't wait for next year. In the meanwhile, wish Chili well in hosting our upcoming antics! Kaishai fucked around with this message at 03:28 on Jul 18, 2017 |
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Apr 5, 2017 05:12
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In with pyromania.
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Apr 5, 2017 17:48
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Fire Season (1,085 words) Diagnosis: Pyromania The battered Jeep on the side of the highway has its hood popped up to display its failings to the world. I drive past without trying to diagnose them. A couple of miles further on, its owner walks beside the road, and that's a problem I understand at a glance: I slow and slap two cheerful honks out of my horn. The man stops, and I pull over. "Headed to Red Glen?" I shout out the window of my truck. "Not that far. I'm due in the National Forest," he calls back. "Ranger station." I thumb the automatic lock. "That's easy. Hop on in." He looks at me for a maybe half a minute. There must not be much about a skinny woman in a baseball cap that makes him nervous, since he opens the door and climbs inside with a relieved grin. "My name's Kyle," he says. "Thanks." While he adjusts his seat belt, I take a fast inventory of his features: dark hair, grey eyes, tidy clothes, and a badge on his shirt reading Albedo County Fire Warden. "You must have interesting stories," I say. His glance follows mine to the badge. "Maybe a few. You want to hear one?" "Tell me about the biggest fire you ever saw." "That was in California," he says. "It burned up forest for a week before it hit a town. The people evacuated, but the houses were a loss. The fire flowed over everything." He sweeps his hands from left to right. "Sometimes creeping, sometimes rushing. At the end the place looked like a lake in Hell, with ripples of gold on the black, burnt-out ground." The polish on the last line tells me I'm not the first to hear this tale. I nod and keep my eyes on the road--though they see something entirely different than asphalt. Flames crackle in my imagination. "How about you?" Kyle asks. "Anything to tell?" Still half in dream, I say, "When I was about three, my mom and dad were screaming at each other in the kitchen. The fireplace was the only thing that seemed warm or safe. So I crawled inside, and I curled up on the logs and the ashes, and I let the fire hold me." Now I turn my head briefly, not to gauge Kyle's reaction--I can guess that--but to flash a wry smile. "Kid memory, huh?" Kyle chuckles, though I wouldn't lay money on the amusement being real. "I'm glad you didn't actually try that. I'd still be looking down the barrel of five hours' walk." The logs crumbled under my weight, back then; my mother spanked me for the ash on my pants that I didn't try to explain. None of it mattered while I remembered how the fire had bent around my skin, caressing without destroying, allowing me a safe haven. I will always remember. So this warden's discomfort doesn't have to matter either. Kyle doesn't lose time getting out of the truck once we reach the station. "Thanks again," he says. That much does sound sincere. "Be careful if you're headed north. This is fire season." Why did I tell him? As I lie on a motel bed a few miles away, I question myself. Why tell anyone? It's lonely to have a secret. But I should be used to loneliness, should expect disbelief. There's an answer to both of those things, and I seek it in matches. The burnt ends fall from my fingertips onto safe, wet porcelain of the shower. I could add another scorch mark to the sink and no one would care. Instead I leave the bathroom and turn on the TV. "Fire has broken out on the southern edge of the Gicino National Forest," the news anchor tells me, an image of smoke and light hovering over his shoulder. I'm in the truck and racing down the highway before I've learned more details. I know what I most want to know. I park on the shoulder once the smoke gets thick. Red and blue flashes signal a police barricade, but in the dusk, with my own lights off, they either haven't noticed me or have other worries. I run into the heat, toward the orange glow that roars its promise of warmth, of light, of love. My arms are in front of me when I finally reach it, as though I could hold the fire. I can't, but it holds me. The flame surrounds me, kissing my cheeks and whispering in my ears. One more time I'm three years old, safe, secure, and in need of nothing. I spin, and fire spins with me, dripping from my hair and my unmarked fingertips. But there's a sound beyond the roar: frantic barking. I follow the noise to a clearing where a golden retriever is trapped, his tail singed already--the blaze doesn't love him. He lets me scoop him into my arms and bend my body around him, cover him with my hair to protect him on the way back to the road. The dog starts to yelp again as the air gets easier to breathe, and his calls bring someone else running. Kyle the fire warden is there to see me come out of the flames unharmed. The dog wriggles free and bounds away. Tags jingle on his collar, which probably means I saved someone's pet. That will make me feel good later. Right now Kyle is staring, and I'm not sure I don't horrify him more than the inferno does. "Did you set this?" he demands. I shake my head, backing up. Just a few steps will get me back to the light. Maybe I can stay within it until it burns out. Maybe it will spread far enough to take me away from other people forever. Kyle's walkie-talkie buzzes, and he jabs its button. "There's a family of campers still out there! Last seen two miles west of you, Kyle." "Here." Digging my keys out of my pocket, I toss them to him. "My truck's close by." Kyle looks at the keys, and he looks at me. "You'd better drive," he says, throwing them back. "I'll navigate." "What?" "Well, I sure as hell can't walk through fire. Are you going to help me save these people?" It isn't exactly acceptance. More like necessity. But someone knows and believes, and he's calling on me for help. Warmth is possible outside the fire. "Of course," I tell him. "Point the way."
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Apr 10, 2017 04:53
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Thunderdome Recaps!  Have you ever done something you would later regret? Of course you have, or you wouldn't be reading this while Creative Convention is behind the paywall. Week 241: From Zero to Hero was all about redeeming past wrongs in theory, yet a few new literary misdemeanors were committed in practice, and Sitting Here, Ironic Twist, and I ponder how those sins might be redeemed. Eventually we change genres and expose our senses to the cacaphony of lions and tigers and gurus known as Week 242: Resonance of Words. The latter round supplies the episode's dramatic reading: Chairchucker's "Did he who Made the Lamb Make Thee?" Wilbur recorded his gameplay, he studied his losses, he owned his mistakes, and each time he lost, he became wiser, craftier, more deadly in the wastes. Though I for one regret nothing about Week 243: We Are the Heroes of Our Time, my singing in our recap of it could be better. Alas! We can't all warble as beautifully as Twist. Brace yourselves for music, for magic, and for reactions to some guy taking meth and then wanking for ten hours.* That is a thing that happened. Depending on your tastes, you may find our readings of Chairchucker's "The Undeath of the Party" and flerp's "Help! My Boyfriend Wants to Move On Instead of Getting Married!" to be somewhat lackluster in comparison. It wasn’t really a tragic death. I just wasn’t paying attention near a seaweed chipper and, long story short, fell in. Oh well, it happens to everybody. * Twist meant to link this instead. Why he had that other link handy is a question best left for the ages. Episodes past can be found here! Kaishai fucked around with this message at 01:01 on Apr 20, 2017 |
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Apr 20, 2017 00:53
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In.
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Apr 29, 2017 07:30
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Rose Gold (1,322 words) Read it in the archive. Kaishai fucked around with this message at 21:25 on Jan 1, 2018 |
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May 1, 2017 06:43
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Critiques for Week CCXLI: Words Beyond Redemption Honestly, this wasn't a terrible round. The worst fault of the entries was that they failed to distinguish themselves. Several did load themselves down with heavy weights of backstory, some to the point of forgetting to have a current story. Why are your characters talking about that time they watched anime instead of interacting with the guy whose face one of them set on fire? Seriously. It's not always a good idea to spend thousands of words hashing over the past but have little happen in the present, as more than one of you proved, and the hazards of leaning too much on dialogue became apparent a few times over. Chairchucker, "Is a Mushroom a Thallic Symbol?" “A bit anticlimactic, as battles go” would sum the whole thing up if there were real rising action or build up to even an anticlimax. Your lighter writing is like soda: refreshing and crisp and bubbly when the humor zings and the energy is there, or flat, tepid, and prone to getting stuffed back in the fridge when the jokes are weak and the story weaker. This is a Chairchucker story of the latter variety. I smiled once or twice during the fungal dithering, but these conversations aren't your strongest dialogue work, and the piece doesn't offer a whole lot else. ** *********** ** Mrenda, "Who Suffers Their Penance" It interests me that this story shows signs of possibly having been adjusted in a late editing pass to address concerns raised in crits of your other stories. The first paragraph doesn't name the protagonist, but she does get a name midway through the second. The middle of the story hints at a past tragedy, cagey about details--but Aoife's letter has already spelled out the situation for the police and for the reader, so all that hinting no longer seems coy. Promising! However, if that is what happened, the revisions were handled somewhat clumsily. Aoife's name should be right up front. Why delay it? Of more import, the conversation with the elderly man is made partially redundant by the letter. There isn't so much narrative need for him and Aoife to dance around her past. I say so much because the later steps of the dance tell me that this man is not only willing to accept the fiction that excuses Aoife but also eager for her to know it, which ties in to the heart of the story: these people's determination to cover up the past and deny Aoife healing by doing so. Rather than cutting the conversation, then, I'd suggest slimming it down. Cut the part where Aoife is hedging about the house she's renting, maybe. Isn't she trying to be open about the whole mess? Clarity's an issue. I'm guessing the godparents and the aunt and uncle are the same people, but the story doesn't say so. I don't have a clue why the uncle would have made her hit her brother and have no idea in this world why everyone so enthusiastically forgives her for beating her brother to death to the point that they engage in widespread conspiracy to keep her from punishment. Does this have something to do with the Christian Brothers group? You haven't provided enough context for me to understand. What happened to the godparents? Aoife's family and this incident are the crux of the tale. Without understanding them, I can't understand the rest. I'm left confused about the moving of bodies, the splashing of petrol, and what stops Aoife from lighting the match. Why the town should suffer for looking the other way must be clear for this story to hit. So must why they did look the other way and why they continue to do so no matter what Aoife does. Explain those elements better if you revise. I don't enjoy this as it stands; it's too muddled. There's meat on the bones, though, even if the cooking is still uneven. ** *********** ** flerp, "Something in the Blood" For a moment, seeing the first line, I think how awesome it would be if this were a story about a vampire bat mourning his wife. I'm sad that iffy sentence construction is more likely. The bat is a metaphor for Daniel's grief, I presume--its eyes probably aren't the same color as Mary's by coincidence. Metaphor or not, Daniel's remarkably blase about it. Where is the story set? Mexico? Maybe it should be set there, if only so the vampire bat is less WTF. You could be going for a touch of surreality here, but the bat is only a step removed from Poe's raven, not strange enough to be surreal and too strange for such a non-reaction. Daniel hasn't done anything that requires redemption, but he believes he has. He's mad at himself and eating himself alive with guilt over having been angry and upset at his wife's dying. As I see it, he wishes now he'd been perfectly patient and loving--never mind whether that's a reasonable thing to expect of a man. I think the picture chewing is a symbol of how he's allowing his grief and her illness and everything the bat represents to destroy his positive memories of Mary: he's letting them take her away from him. He would rather deny the final picture, but it's Mary, too, a fact he accepts n the end. I wouldn't say he finds peace, but he can face what happened. The grief-bat bites less deeply. Although the business with the bat could be less murky, this is a fair story of grief, or would be with some tinkering. Redemption? It isn't about that in any significant way: Daniel's acceptance doesn't redeem the emotions that were never a sin. ** *********** ** sparksbloom, "Steamed" As a character sketch, I dig this somewhat despite the moments when Nicole's actions cross the kingdom of rear end in a top hat and toe the border of Nonsense. It's a nice touch when she snaps at the kid not to take his poo poo out on other people even though he's doing nothing of the sort: she's projecting hard right then. She persists in buying a chai after he says he doesn't want one because she either won't let herself escape penance or won't let him stop her from balancing the scales. It's odd she still goes with chai instead of trying a different drink, but this would be a different story if she had any social awareness. All of this works. Calling it bullshit that he'd assume she didn't buy a soy chai? Not so much. Honestly, all this chai stuff is going over my head. I don't drink it, I have no idea what's in it, I don't know why she'd assume a random kid would want one, etc., which makes the exchange tedious. Around here is when things start to feel forced, with Nicole pushing the drink on the kid (why?) and then pouring boiling liquid over herself in solidarity. Her problems seem deeper than impulse control and anger management. The ending is likewise too heavy-handed: handcuffs? She's being arrested for what, a coffee accident? End on the police coming to investigate--without the sirens, because really now--and I'll buy it, maybe, but I balk at the cuffs. As a story, the piece is lacking. I can sum it up as "A woman is trying to be less of an rear end in a top hat and failing miserably," which isn't much of a plot, and though you sketch vague outlines of Nicole's larger tale, there are too many holes on one hand and irrelevant details on the other. David confused one of the other judges; I'm guessing he's the kid's john/Craigslist hook-up, but I'm unclear on what that adds to the story even if I'm right. Jamie's important to Nicole, ostensibly, but you provide zero detail about him, to the point that he's less of a character than that businessman with his spreadsheet and his flowers. Words are spent on the wrong things and scanted where they shouldn't be. I ranked this fairly high for the writing, the characterization, and the failed redemption that put a good spin on the prompt, but it needs to be longer--and it could have been. The extra-large word allowance this week leaves me scratching my head over its shortcomings. ** *********** ** Thranguy, "Suffer" One of those stories that doesn't hold together when I think about what it's trying to sell. An old god coming into a bar to deliver justice to guilty souls is a solid concept, sure--in theory. You don't do much to establish or explain your mythology. Either you're referencing something with which I'm not familiar, or--and I lean toward this since Google isn't helpful either--you've made it up, which sits poorly in an Earth setting. Not one of your characters wonders who or what the Griga are. They should. They should be rather less blase about the whole experience! This guy comes in and shoves a finger through a local hero, murdering him, and no one screams? The protagonist asks who Va is with no sign of emotion. He spends more thought on Moggi and the Elizabethan court gossip that he just "knows" has to be true. How, exactly? Everyone in the bar takes burning an alleged pedophile so completely in stride that it doesn't occur to any one of them that it might perhaps have been a sin. I don't buy this. No, sir, I don't. The entire piece seems less well thought out the longer it continues. Moggi presents a couple of large problems. First, the poison. How long has she been serving it? Is it slow-acting, in which case Va neutralizing one dose probably wouldn't accomplish much, or did she just so happen to choose tonight to murder everybody? Isn't that conveeeenient, to quote Dana Carvey. Then there's the ending, and this is probably what cost you a mention: your vengeful, poisoning witch goes to suffer eternal torments to save the people she hates because her friend has turned out to be as guilty as they. This doesn't compute. Even if you did more to establish Moggi and Ray's friendship, it would be a challenge to present this as a credible thing for the character to do. Strengthening that bond and giving it more life and depth than a few sentences of reference to late-night talks allow is your only hope of pulling off the conclusion. If it were me I'd rethink it, point blank, maybe in favor of Moggi and the townsmen somehow defeating Va--holding him in place long enough his prison to reclaim him?--and Moggi then leaving, never to be seen again, allowing the townsmen to live but not sacrificing herself on their behalf. That's a league too far for the character as shown. I'm not sure either that it would be possible to pick locks with spines, bendy things that they are. Maybe mouse femurs would be more appropriate. ** *********** ** Deltasquid, "The Hanged Men" That "I can't say I blame them" line is a misstep when it comes on the heels of the revelation that the deserters were a local menace, and it's worse when Dieter holds his sympathy for the deserters through being told of their pillaging and rape. I somehow doubt you mean to paint Dieter as a man who would shrug that off or do it himself if given the chance. He's later shown to be a man sympathetic to a desperate probable-widow. He's lived through the horrors of war, witnessed them, failed to stop them, but they don't mean nothing to him. Though it isn't the first war-is-hell story to cross my path in Thunderdome, I like this one, largely because of Dieter and his complex and uncertain road toward redemption. To atone for horrors, he commits more horrors. He keeps another's promise and breaks his own. What does he do instead of going home? That point could be more clear: whether he's going north to loot, to help, or to do something else I (and possibly he) can't imagine. But that uncertainty bothers me less than how little plot and how very much dialogue you've delivered. The conversations wear out their welcome. Dieter kills a man and it's over in a blink, but his talk, talk, talk with Sebastian goes on forever. You could easily boil hundreds of words of dialogue off this story, and you should, because the subject of your characters' discussion is interesting but the discussion itself is largely tepid. ** *********** ** Solitair, "Lessons" I'd rather see what Owen and his fire hands did to Bobby Kimball and why than get it half revealed to me through expository dialogue, but more than that, I'd rather this story were about Owen and Bobby Kimball--you know, the guy whose face he melted? The victim of the sin in need of redemption?--than Owen and the aggravating Millie, who when talking to a man who has melted someone's face recently makes his angst all about her and her animes. Owen should redeem himself by treating her better! Because sitting with your friend while she watches cartoons isn't enough; no, you have to watch them too. Because being preoccupied with your own problems when those problems involve a loss of livelihood is just terrible when you have a friend in romantic distress. Lord. Owen's sculpture at the end would be a touching tribute to friendship if this were a friendship worth celebrating. And have I mentioned that Owen melted someone's face? Because that seems important. To me, anyway, though apparently not to the story. Another judge pointed out to me that this is a sequel to your submission the previous week. That's interesting. I wouldn't have guessed it was one in a series, which means it more or less does what any good serial entry should do: it stands alone. So in one sense its sequel nature shouldn't matter. However, just about everything rotten about this story was born in that other one. If this were a completely new piece we might not have to endure Millie and her bloody animes! Perhaps the excellent way you convey Owen's power and fold it into the setting without excess exposition would come to something. The piece is so misfocused in its current form that I almost dislike it more for its strengths. With a solid main character possessed of an intriguing power and in need of redemption after a truly horrible act, this should be better than it is. I wouldn't be unhappy to read more about Owen someday. But leave Millie and her self-absorption at the door. ** *********** ** sebmojo, "Metamorphic" The voice in the front half is so great that it almost carries you over the hurdles you've thrown in your own path with the too-convenient-to-be-true action figure and the ability of a fat dude who just fell down a cliff, slamming his knee, to pick up a child and haul him right up that same cliff on his back with barely a pause. I'm so with you until Buzz Lightyear shows up. Your protagonist is an angry douche, but in a sadly believable manner: he's rather the sort of angry douche who might just tumble tail-over-topper down a cliffside. Then, though, contrivance strikes in the form of just the right toy in just the right place at just the right time, somehow identifiable from ten meters away. And as incredible as the physical aspects of the ending are, the emotional aspects aren't much better. From suicidal to climbing toward the light in three hundred words is a difficult sell. There's a chance this is less sloppy than it looks. It came up in judgechat that the boy is the protagonist's mirror, and in saving the kid, he saves himself, to the extent that the entire piece is more metaphor than a literal accounting of events. It's a compelling theory. Maybe the symbolic cliff was never as high as the protagonist believed, and having discovered that, he can pick himself up and recover from injuries that were always of mind more than body. The idea could be that he's reconnecting with who he was and the bright points of his past, carrying them with him as he surmounts the obstacles of the present. Yet it remains the case that details of this story don't make sense in a physical world, and there isn't enough suggestion of magical realism, surreality, or another sidestep away from the real to render the issue unimportant. If I'm shaking my head as your guy climbs up the cliff, I'm not feeling what you want me to feel. I couldn't vote for your work to win over Uranium Phoenix's with its second half full of logic holes, but I enjoyed it most. Take the same concept and either heighten the not-quite-real elements and/or expand the whole thing, maybe? ** *********** ** Metrofreak, "Oasis" I made it through my first read of this without stopping to write notes, which says something for your setting, plot, and writing in general. Your hook is standard gamer-story fare, but the Blightlands' combination of desert survival and PvP interests me. I'm curious about the Well Watcher, though I'd appreciate slightly less detail about Wilbur's play hours and his grinding of experience. The story never quite becomes boring despite the MMO minutiae. Also in your favor is that although Wilbur is a deeply dedicated gamer, he isn't shown as an obese, Cheeto-huffing man-child; that puts you a step ahead of way too many Thunderdome writers. What does Wilbur eat, though? When does he sleep? When does he use the plumbing facilities? What does he do in the majority of his day that can't be spent online? You can't think about this at all before the plot holes gape wide and swallow logic whole. Nothing Wilbur does, even murdering the Well Watcher, comes off as an act in need of redemption, possibly because the Watcher resumes her coded spiel almost immediately after asking for mercy. She doesn't become a person rather than a game construct. When Wilbur dismisses the whole thing and turns off the game, he's echoing my feeling to some degree. Unfortunately, he's also underlining how low the stakes have been throughout the story and how nothing that has happened has mattered in the wider world--or, ultimately, to Wilbur. Going back to the plot holes for a second, why do the game devs sit on their hands and allow their game to bleed users for weeks or months? This makes no sense! Maybe the game is magical rather than human-created? Maybe you should convey that better if so. One more thing I like in theory is the take on redemption: whether Wilbur is offered redemption for a real sin and refuses it or an outside power tries to force Wilbur into a redemption he doesn't need and he resists, it's interesting, and despite what I said above about the stakes, I'm happy he turned off the game rather than being trapped eternally in a Twilight Zone-style nightmare. The hollowness of Wilbur's world and of Wilbur himself lets you down. ** *********** ** Uranium Phoenix, "Pale Stars and Bones" The down sides, to get them out of the way: you've written a fairly standard, good-but-not-outstanding fantasy story that doesn't show the same level of creativity as your previous winning piece. It isn't stock, exactly, but it doesn't break ground. The line "Tell me what you know of the Witch Queen" is such a dead giveaway that it stops me in my tracks, and though Ekun does pick up on Nebet's identity, he does so more slowly than I would like considering how early I can guess it. Possibly he's not slow at all and is drawing her out? I doubt this when he says, “So who taught you your necromancy? A magi? The Witch-Queen herself?” If you took out the final question, whether he realizes who she is at that point would be more ambiguous, and I think this would be a good thing. The balance between Stuff Happening and exposition is out of whack. I'd consider putting at least some of the storytelling before Nebet finishes healing the sick, and spending more time on that part of the story. The up sides: your entry is the most complete package by far. It is a story, with interesting characters acting--or at least having acted--in an interesting world. The redemption theme comes through loud and clear; Nebet's redemption is still in progress when the piece ends, but that's fine. The point is that her journey to balance her scales will be a long one. Even though you end with Ekun joining her in her future travels, I don't get that sense of To be continued or an incomplete adventure that some such endings give me, probably because the history is the real tale here. Congratulations on having pulled that choice off. I might like a higher proportion of story to back story, but the entry is self-contained and satisfying. ** *********** ** Sitting Here, "Effigy" Several things about this one aggravate the bejayzus out of me. Hunter's probably the worst. His purpose would seem to be to serve as your mouthpiece, delivering the Moral of the Story without any subtlety. After a while I feel like I'm getting a sermon on what I'm supposed to think about Ethan, Olivia, love, personal growth, etc. every time he opens his mouth. I doubt I would enjoy that if I agreed with him, but it makes it rather worse that I don't. Ethan is a jerk about Olivia's choice to dump him, yes. He should let her go. But he didn't gently caress her over any more than she hosed herself over by getting too drunk to drive in public and then begging him to take her home. Hunter denies her agency and her responsibility when he puts the blame on Ethan, and with Ethan thinking about how gosh-darn right Hunter is later, you-the-writer are effectively doing the same thing. The second issue is bloat. The story meanders. It vaguely resembles a pair of twins conjoined at a foot: Ethan's story and Hunter's story, linked together but not integral to each other. Ethan's half of things addresses the prompt, but otherwise it's the weaker side as Ethan pursues no goal and is more or less hustled forward both physically and emotionally by Hunter. Hunter's search for shrine-guardian components involves more motion and less preaching, but it's a diversion from the redemption tale, and I can't be enthused about anything that drags out the interaction of these characters. That's a third point, come to think of it. Hunter and Ethan don't have good banter chemistry. I'm not even sure why they're friends. That's important and unfortunate when most of the piece is dialogue between them. Would it be a better story if Hunter were the main character and the shrine remained in center stage, with the Ethan-and-Olivia drama as the subplot? Hunter could well be a more appealing character when seen from the inside, even if his lines were exactly the same. Is there a reason he doesn't blame Olivia for anything that happened? Is he sweet on her himself? Why does he want to room with Ethan? Now I'm curious. ** *********** ** The Cut of Your Jib, "Sitting Back and Doing Nothing Works Sometimes" And sometimes, as in this case, it doesn't. There's a strange charm to Rich, obliviously meditating on his dad bod, and his relationship with the "Dr. Party" that he married; I figure this is what spared you my loss vote, since a mismatched polyamorous couple has enough novelty to be interesting when contrasted with another MMO story. Small details such as Rich's remodeling hobby build up some investment in his character. I care about whether he and Sue find happiness. Considering that sitting back and doing nothing is indeed Rich's entire playbook, that's impressive! It may not surprise you though that the ending deflates the rest. I want something more from Rich, some action to win Sue's affection. I wouldn't mind something more from Sue to show what he's ever seen in her. For Rich to have a happy ending with his wife despite or rather because of not doing anything to earn it is clearly your intention, the title being what it is, but what's the idea there? Is it a subversion of the happy ending in that neither party is likely to be happy for long, as Rich still has a wife who's at best settling for time with him and Sue has still made a fool of herself? All right, but why? It all feels pointless once it's over. Possibly your writing would have gotten you through unscathed (although possibly not; this DM is the only mention on which the judges were unanimous) if your entry's connection to the prompt were visible to the naked eye. No one is redeemed here. Considering that Rich and Sue both agreed to this oddball relationship, I can't argue that anyone has done anything in need of redemption no matter how distasteful I find Sue's behavior. Kaishai fucked around with this message at 04:24 on Jul 12, 2017 |
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May 16, 2017 04:08
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Critiques for Weeks CCXLII, CCXLIII, CCXLIV, CCXLV, CCXLVI, and CCXLVII: Dancing With the Demons in Our Minds Crits for Eurovision IV are forthcoming, I promise! In the meanwhile I've had some thoughts about the stories covered in recent recaps. Week 242: Resonance of Words Chairchucker, "Did he who Made the Lamb Make Thee?": Scanning the story again, I wonder if I'm supposed to read more into Khuram's social clumsiness than I do. He's a tiger and Lakshmi's an elephant, which is a level of difference not all that comparable to human genders and races, you know? His inability to tell elephants apart is just mildly funny. Maybe that's all it's meant to be, but I'm looking for something here that will support the final line by making me see Khuram as a loser before he tries to gnaw Lakshmi out of nowhere. A possibility exists that the whole thing was spun off the top of your head without much worrying on your part about whether it held together. From you I could buy either not-quite-successful satire or lackadaisical carelessness. Anyway, it's so benign that I'm sorry to see it lose, but the path of the benign nothing should be a risky one. ***** sebmojo, "Shredding": The weird evangelical lion falls just on the right side of the divide between ridiculous premises I can go along with for the sake of the story and ridiculous premises I resent having to turn my brain off to get through. It's a truly close thing, because of course the rock-star lion is absurd to the extreme, but--why not? Why not. Only then he moves from sharing the Word to reminding his audience, frequently, that he could eat him, ha ha, any minute now! Yes. Believe or a lion will chew your head off. Or not, since he's content to leave that poor man there with his pants pissed but his head intact and his beliefs uncertain. The musical metaphors for faith from a rock-star lion are the right sort of strange, but man, that threat shows up early and keeps getting dropped like a dubstep wub, and I like both the lion and the story a bit less every time it appears. I would have put this on the high end of the scale nonetheless, which goes to show the value humor can add when it lands and subtract when it fails. ***** Jay W. Friks, "अतीत से (Out of the Past)": The old man is the traveler spirit, isn't he, who doesn't tell stories because his stories have become lies? That's a nice if unsurprising turn for the story to take, though you do rely absolutely on the reader making that logical jump. You could justify that move more readily if, while making the old man's identity so obvious the reader should be able to guess, you didn't also claim an ancient lady has lived around the temple and the guru for innumerable years without coming near the truth. Her dislike of him is strange and childish when I consider her age. It appears to be there because you need it for the story's relatively minor conflict. There's nothing wrong with building conflict through character traits or story elements (how else would you do it?), but in this case, it doesn't make much sense to me in-world, so my sense of you-the-author at work is intruding on my immersion in the story. I would like to know why the old man did eventually settle, but that part of his history is a blank. What if you dropped the frame story entirely and focused on the core? Show Krelta and the traveler's tale; forget the songstress and the guru. You could end up with something neat. ******************** Week 244: Unspecified Word Disorder Jay W. Friks, "Aurumvorax": Your formatting is getting better. You still have work to do when it comes to punctuation, though. Check out the ugly comma splice in the last line of your first paragraph. If you want to vary the rhythm of your sentences--a good idea in many cases!--there are better ways to do it, and in this instance I'd suggest combining the third sentence with the first half of the fourth: "He coughed and spit into his palm, then rubbed the saliva onto a long iron poker with a little lead bead welded to the end." Or if you desperately desire a splice: "He coughed and spit into his palm, rubbed the saliva" etc. You have, horror of horrors, several instances of two people talking in the same paragraph, and I can't possibly say DON'T DO THAT!! with enough emphasis. Moving on! There isn't much story to this story: Lorenzo enacts his diagnosis, and that's all. Many of the details end up superfluous, never coming to anything and not adding enough depth, characterization, or interest to earn their inclusion. A goldsmith fighting with or embracing PICA is a fine idea; spin it into a plot and you'll approach being in business. ***** ThirdEmperor, "Future Not Included": Other entries of yours have had problems with clarity, but this one takes the cherry-red cake. You're going out of your way here to not say outright what is going on, calling a video game(?) a "wild spill of light" and driving "painting his wheels." Jack's on LSD, so maybe you're out to put us in his mindspace with this impression of a jumbled world, but your approach banks on the reader persevering through nonsense like "ached in the cold of his pillow"--a risky gamble at best. If I do understand your premise correctly, I don't buy it: the sort of sensory-overload ad you describe can't work in a world where humans still drive their own cars. A war-type ad would so obviously trigger PTSD that I'm having a hard time believing in it either. The gist appears to be that Jack tries to treat his problem with ads by taking LSD and playing video games, but his therapist disapproves, so he drives down the highway, finds a wreck, and helps pull a guy out; the real blood doesn't faze him. Finis. Okay, but so what? Rather like Jay W. Friks, you've written a vignette about your diagnosis rather than pulling a story out of it, and though you've put more effort into your worldbuilding, I prefer his bland prose to your contorted muddle. Side note: knowing you have to post on your phone explains the formatting, but it still looks bad. Read this post if you haven't already. ***** Uranium Phoenix, "Floodgates": Maybe the infodump Jacob's father lays down at the outset is more plausible than I think. The mania certainly comes through, but almost too clearly. The first section points so emphatically to The Problems of Being Bipolar (or of having a dad who is, anyway) that the exposition swamps the little bits of characterization floating in it. Worse: so many words are spent on Dad, and his disorder isn't the crux of the story. I enjoy the more subtle treatment of Jacob's diagnosis. (Though trying to avoid the karaoke party came across less as a social disorder and more as good sense.) It meshes well with his father's, in theory. If only something were done with that! For Jacob to connect instead to Nancy through a conversation that rushes into Nancy's tragic past then skips gleefully over Jacob's catharsis is disappointing on at least a couple of levels. The pacing and ending are both flawed to an unfortunate degree. ***** crabrock, "Hook, Line, and Sinker": That's a great opening, especially the first line. It's a shame about everything else! Nah, there are other things to enjoy here: the protagonist's unabashed glee in her diagnosis is fun, light, and refreshing when put up against the grimmer material. But you know darned well this is as thin as that lady's sundress. It's one more example of a character going through the motions of her disorder, this time with an ending that calls for a wa-wa trumpet. An entry centered on frottage could have been much worse, but it could have been a story, too. ***** RandomPauI, "Mental Illness in a World of Magic": The formatting guide may be of use to you as well. That said: what the hell? This is a cascade of exposition in the service of absolutely nothing. Tim's conversation with Janet goes nowhere because you hit the brakes before you get near an ending, the switch from hint hint kleptomania hint! to dealing with grief is so abrupt I think it's given me whiplash, you can't spell through, and there's nothing like a resolution. How something else lost will mystify me unto my death. Keep submitting, but write a conclusion next time. ******************** Week 245: it's all about me, fuckers Mrenda, "The Pride of Your Own": I feel like there's a decent story buried somewhere in here, but I can only make out some of it through the obscuring fog of clunky, meandering exposition. Look at the second paragraph. Why is it so convoluted? Try something like this: Turning the bend to home, she cursed the bus driver who hadn't bent the rules for her. Drivers could be replaced by a few cameras and a processor--her AI-researcher father had taught her that almost from the cradle. But this man held onto his job, and he'd scowled at her with pride in his place. He could keep her from her father's death bed for want of a travel voucher. And so he had, gleefully, surely knowing that her father could afford to run a fleet of buses for a year. That might not be your style; you'd want to phrase things differently, but do you see how my example puts the facts on the table in an easy-to-follow sequence? I didn't bring up his pride until I explained what he had to be proud about. I put the episode in the past perfect, so it's clear this is something that happened before the story began. The whole piece unspools backstory slowly. Grace, her apples, and her relationship with her father interest me enough to keep my attention, but I'm aware as I read of how little has happened: at the halfway point Grace is still delivering exposition with her thoughts but not doing much else. Her life situation isn't that compelling. Then... do I understand correctly that Grace's one action in this story (other than plucking a slug) is to refuse a ride to her father's bedside that would cost no one anything? Yowza. What a prideful bitch. And this is the point, I think, that for all her contempt for other people's pride, she has plenty of her own and then some; but "people are hypocrites" isn't a fresh or powerful moral, and I'm not happy that's all Grace's tale appears to amount to. ***** Uranium Phoenix, "A Part of Her": So why would anyone whose head wasn't cracked open get this symbiote? What does it do for humans? Everyone but Evelyn talks and acts exactly like a person of today, with a few forced nods to the near future like "I can give you an eBook on the subject.” Pshhh. (Why call them eBooks and not books if they're the norm, and if they aren't the norm, why put that in this story?) There's too much extraneous material here that never makes it beyond fluff, since it never becomes relevant to the central analogy Evelyn : Evelyn's mother :: Coralline : Evelyn. Some of it seems designed to pander harder to SH, but this backfires by drawing attention to itself without offering a payoff. See: those fungal symbiotes other people had for... some reason. If you held more tightly to the thread of Evelyn, Coralline, and the dreams, the piece would be better for it. ***** BeefSupreme, "The Ideal Husband": Dani's a bit unreasonable in holding Johnathan's use of her full name against him if she's never mentioned it. Then she's more unreasonable in holding what he is against him. Then she's ridiculous for killing him. Is that the point? A portrayal of someone we should all be thankful is paired to a robot instead of a real person, since her abusive impulses only kill a machine? Except I feel more for Johnathan than I do for her, machine or no. This is a Twilight Zone episode, and a bad one in that it doesn't make a point or entertain despite writing that's more than serviceable. I wish Johnathan had caught her hand and kept her from killing him, and that she'd had to deal in a less spoiled-toddler way with the relationship she created. That would be pretty TZ too if you played it for horror, but at least the less interesting character wouldn't be the one left standing. ******************** Week 246: You Need Satan More Than He Needs You Radical and BADical!, "The Devil Fell Down in Georgia": Good hook, decent prose--though you should take care with semicolons--tedious protagonist, unfortunate premise. Roz taking everything in stride and sassing Donnelly throughout doesn't do wonders for any sense of threat or tension here. But that's complaining about a mouse in the room and ignoring the elephant, isn't it? Your plot requires that Roz lie back and be raped in order to defeat the antagonist. You wrote that action into the story. The only reason for it to be there is as a "clever" solution to Roz's injuries, except it isn't clever; it isn't titillating (not that you mean it to be, thank God); it isn't horrifying either. I still never get an impression that Roz is in danger. So it's an egregious, unpleasant tidbit followed by egregious, unpleasant dick squick. The tone is a shoddy knock-off of Buffy, right down to a Hell Mouth. The obnoxious all-caps names end up being the least of your problems. Roziel's a cliche and a half as protagonists in urban fantasy go, more's the bloody pity: sassy, selfish, oh-so-tough, and empowered by some guy's dick. ***** Thranguy, "The Rebel's Part": Not one of your best. Not good, point blank. I enjoy the Dragon Age II-style frame less than the judges did and would rather see it cut altogether. What's the angel of loyalty doing in that bathroom, whether it's in Hell or on Earth? I'm unclear on that point. Lemuel sounds distinctly angelic/demonic, and other people are acting as though Jalthrak is a familiar figure, but seriously now. Why would there be toilets in Hell? Why would Malfunctioning Toilets be a domain, other than to let you riff on (to put it kindly) another Thunderdome writer's work? Yes, I'm questioning a piece that can't be meant to be much more than a joke. That means it isn't entertaining me enough. I expect you mean well even in the play on the Toilet Dimension--you aren't hiding what you're doing in the least, and for all I know the original writer gave you his blessing. But in the words of Shania Twain, that don't impress me much. Most of what this has going for it is a little life in the banter and an attempt to corral the jokes into a story shape. ******************** Week 247: Crimes Against Literature Fleta Mcgurn, "Journey to Zion": There's this thing called a hook that it's generally recommended that stories possess. Details about who sits where in the family sedan do not constitute one. I see what you're aiming for by opening with the multiple mothers, instantly suggesting Mormonism, but the religion isn't riveting on its own, and you dive head-first into stereotypes from there. The cooing. The patriarch. "He was fat, white, and mean, like every rural cop." FFS, it's like you're taking the lazy road on purpose and announcing it to the world lest we give you benefit of the doubt. To my astonishment, I come to the end and find there's nothing here except the stereotypes, not one hint of plot or climax or surprise or complexity or subtlety or particular skill in characterization. The writer of "Kotjebi" can do a drat sight better than this. Don't count on anyone enjoying your work because it slams an "acceptable" target: most of us want more from our reading experiences. ***** flerp, "The Memory Thief": We're off to a rocky start with the wrong tense (was diagnosed instead of had been diagnosed) and then a subject/verb disagreement (each is singular: use was, not were) in the second sentence. I don't even know what to say about A shook roared through my body. Or Walls were started to form. Somehow I get the feeling that if I point to every broken sentence, I'll be here all night. The technical errors definitely glare enough to hurt you, and it's depressing that they aren't the worst of your problems, but alas--your guy isn't a thief, he's a contracted worker. His memory-edit isn't presented as a crime. I can't figure out what Marleen will gain by forgetting her husband when she's soon to die, either. At first I thought Fred must be dead since what point would there be in forgetting him otherwise? She'll just meet him again when he visits her next. But if Fred's already gone, then erasing his memory still seems pointless and petty to boot, though there's some pathos in it. The marriage is effectively tragic. I realize when I think about it that Marleen must know (or believe) Fred would do anything for her, has loved her always, because the Fred we see is Fred as she remembers him. She knows this, but she wants him gone. That's sad from any angle. You could probably get somewhere by giving her feelings about Fred a less shallow treatment. What you couldn't get without a bottom-to-top rewrite is a crime story, so it's no wonder you ended up where you did. ***** Jay W. Friks, "The Blue Colby": Oh, Jay. This reminds me too much of Manos: the Hands of Fate for me to hate it, what with the sinister house and the strange man who takes care of the place while the master is away. Yet like Manos, it's too goofy and cheesy to pull off the moments where it tries to get serious. Maggie's relationship to the dumb-but-loving Colby is great, and his death is poignant right up until you think about the fact that he's dying because some random god/devil/Master likes to put cursed gems inside a sealed vault as bait for burglars and then leaves the now-giant gems around to be found and sold by whomever. What? Who does this? What's with the nitride cord? Why does the house disappear? I have so many questions. Exposition bogs the story down in the scene with Maggie and Lenore. Now let's take a step back and look at the formatting and prose--did you notice I didn't start the crit that way for once? You've definitely improved. But there are still problems, among them your dialogue attributions. You're using phrases like He waved it off and He yanked his right ear as attributions, following them with a comma and then speech, but they can't work that way: the verb of a dialogue tag must have something to do with speaking. So He said is fine; She laughs is arguable; He yanked his ear won't do because you can say words and you can laugh words, but you can't yank your ear words. I noticed too that your characters do a bunch of little actions only to break up the dialogue, like Colby inhaling or Lenore getting a cigarette from her purse. This sort of thing is fine if done sparingly. The trouble is you've done it often enough here that it starts catching my eye and drawing my attention. Even your characters' little actions should count toward telling you something about them or their world. If you're afraid you have so much exposition that you need to break it up before the reader gets bored, you probably do, but meaningless motions aren't the answer. ***** Uranium Phoenix, "Even the Gods Get Lost Here": Bloat is the main thing holding this otherwise solid, deserving winner back. That whole first section with Havil? You could cut it and have the same story. Sinjana's corpse-disposal business is a cool enough use of her mushroom powers, but the way your story stands now, Havil's betrayal is an extremely short-lived plot point that doesn't come up again, and his connection to Sinjana doesn't matter for much. Rather than see that intro go, though, I'd rather you made use of the Havil-Sinjana history by not having Havil get killed like a chump before the story's half over. You could combine his character with Sakris's, making him the ultimate betrayer with an axe to grind against Sinjana, or with Malek's, forcing the issue of whether Sinjana can trust him despite what he's done after Sakris betrays them both. Those are only two of several ways you could go! Right now your characters are too interchangeable, little more than powers and roles. Pacing is a factor again: the conversation with the Archivist drags out the ending and focuses on a subplot (Sinjana's backstory) that has gotten too little attention throughout the rest of the story to matter to me. The spotlight has been on the heist, and all my investment is in the heist's outcome, so that the book is immediately taken away and Sinjana has accomplished nothing beyond meeting Malek is something of an anticlimax. Tighten this up and spend more time on Sinjana's history if you want anyone to care about that in the end. You've got the action, the energy, the complications, and the heist tropes that will please many readers; now make sure your characters carry their weight. Kaishai fucked around with this message at 01:41 on Jun 1, 2017 |
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May 16, 2017 04:30
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Attention, all TD combatants desiring Thunderdome Archive accounts (yes, you there, the one with an outstanding request, I mean you): If you don't have plat, don't sign on to IRC, and don't e-mail crabrock, we have no way of getting your password to you. Nor any way of telling you what the problem is short of posting about it here, alas. Follow the directions and drop crabrock a line if you choose Method 2! If you do that and he doesn't answer within a few days, he didn't get your e-mail, so either try again or visit IRC long enough for one of us to help.
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May 16, 2017 23:50
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Thunderdome Recaps!  Recapping Week 244: Unspecified Word Disorder and Week 245: it's all about me, fuckers proves a trial as Ironic Twist, Sitting Here, and I diagnose both rounds with acute tedium. I'm just saying: when the featherweight story about a lady who lives for frottage is the most enjoyable thing we cover, it's a recipe for existential despair. crabrock's "Hook, Line, and Sinker" accordingly serves as dramatic-reading material. She’s an idiot, for sure, looking at the tank like it’s some magic eye that will suddenly pop out if she stares at it hard enough. A man of wealth and taste joins the crew in proposing sentences for Week 246: You Need Satan More Than He Needs You and Week 247: Crimes Against Literature: Bad Seafood, erstwhile King of Anime and well equipped as such to comment on creepy underaged marriages. Crystal curses and toilet travel? Yes, those too. This time around we read Jay W. Friks' "The Blue Colby", and we can but wonder whether the Master would approve. Roz reached down between her legs and ripped Donnelly's manhood clean off his body before stuffing it into his mouth. Episodes past can be found here! Kaishai fucked around with this message at 03:50 on May 17, 2017 |
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May 17, 2017 03:34
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In a world where all high-fashion clothing is woven from human hair.
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May 25, 2017 02:33
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The Quality of Mercy (1,234 words) Flash rule: In a world with intelligent, telepathic owls. Until she met the owl, Rill took her rage out on the forest. She broke uncountable deadwood branches against trunks, scoring her own palms with mold and filth but leaving little mark on the trees. They stood unyielding and merciless, and when she leaned against them, their knobs pressed into the bruises her mother's belt had made. The snapped-off blades of years' worth of her penknives rusted in knotholes. Those wooden eyes watched all she did with paternal indifference. Blood stained the back of Rill's shirt on the evening she tore a living bough loose. Her shoulders on fire, she still slammed the branch against its parent tree with force; her scream drowned out the snaps of twigs. She brought the weapon around again. Now that's a step too far. Claws seized the branch and stole it from her. Wings scraped the air by her ear, there and gone too fast for her wild slap to land. The bough hit the dirt in front of Rill, and the owl thief perched where she could see it in full measure. Yellow eyes sat in a round, grey face, half framed by white parentheses. Brown feathers mottled its body. Rill's eyes went to the talons--large, cruel things, even at rest. Break pieces off your own property, the owl said in her head, not mine. The voice was hollow, resonant, and feminine. "You own this tree?" They're all mine if I say they are. You aren't up to fighting my claim. Rill stooped and grabbed the branch. But she only held it, her knuckles white. The owl hooted. Right. You'd like to fight something, though, wouldn't you? So would I. We could tear chunks out of each other. Her talons dug into wood. Flecks of bark showered down. Or we could be partners in the arena. "The arena," Rill repeated, and as she did, pictures bloomed inside her mind courtesy of another mind entirely: rough stadium seats under dim light; sawdust; sweat; two owls and two humans in the center of it all, fists and claws drawing blood. One human-owl team stood proud in the end, green bills showering them like confetti. Money. A person could go a long way, with money. The alternative, to stay, was unthinkable. Rill said, "Show me how to get there." *** Of course the fights were illegal. Laws weren't made to benefit those who needed to brawl as much as to breathe. The stadium had been the basement of a lumber mill, once, and the old wreck of a building still creaked above ground, covering up the screeches and cheers below. Popular teams got their own rooms a little distance from the main chamber. After three weeks in the arena, Rill and Uyat--her owl; her partner--had plenty of fans to howl their names, and all of Rill's new bruises had been earned on the floor. Rill didn't recognize the pair they were fighting next. Uyat said, It doesn't matter. Look at that pale-faced idiot! I'll shred his wings and then his human, so just keep the man busy. "You know I can do better than that," Rill said. The announcer shouted to the crowd, "Place your bets! Last chance! It's Rill and Uyat, Ezric and Oowan, blood in the dust, here we go!" The eagle owl on his shoulder cried out mentally and physically, and Rill ran at that signal, crossing the sawdust-softened ground toward a man with a chain in his hands. The audience roared approval. Uyat shared her aerial view of Oowan flying up to meet her, so Rill didn't worry about him. Only that chain. And she didn't need Uyat's help to dodge its lash, catching and fouling the end with her quarterstaff instead of her body. She wheeled at the hip, dragging Ezric off balance, and kicked his leg hard. He stumbled, almost fell. She slapped the staff against his chest; the chain came loose, and she jogged back with her weapon free. Oowan's wings blurred Uyat's sight, but the owl still noticed a glint in Ezric's boot cuff. Rill struck for his hand as he pulled the knife, but she missed. The blade darted toward her arm and cut a new line in her skin. Uyat shrieked--but in triumph, not fear. A tan body hit the floor to Rill's right. Then a grey one slammed into Ezric, its claws ripping his right ear, and Uyat screamed, Kill the owl! Kill! The barn owl Oowan stared up at the ceiling, still alive, twitching. One blow to his keel bone would fix that. But he was harmless, already out of the fight. Kill! Rill battered Ezric's knee instead, taking him down, and the announcer called, "Win to Uyat and Rill!" Some of the money thrown to them landed in blood. The medics allowed Rill to gather the spoils before they herded her and her opponents away. Weak, Uyat hissed in her mind. Fool! Never hesitate again. Rill's dreams that night were full of shattering bones, but she was the barn owl on the floor, and the woman who brought the staff down had her mother's face and Uyat's. *** Two weeks later, in a match against a horned owl and a woman with brass knuckles, Rill called to Uyat for help. But the owl didn't answer. Rill saw the woman's throat torn open through Uyat's eyes as talons raked across her own, and a claw pierced the left one so suddenly it almost didn't hurt; and some time after she collapsed, her hands covering the ruined socket, Uyat knocked the horned owl away to claim a victory. The crowd cheered more loudly than ever. *** "Maybe the right one can still see," a medic told Rill. "Won't know 'til the bandages can come off. He got your lid good, but--maybe. I don't expect you'll be fighting again for a long while either way." "Can't," Rill mumbled, drowsy on painkillers. "No partner." Uyat's thoughts hadn't touched hers once since the match had ended. The medic patted her shoulder. "Rest now, and I'll see about scrounging up a glass eye. It'll be on the house, when you've healed enough." Rill said into the darkness, "He's almost kind." Yes, he is. I think he likes it that you didn't kill me. "What?" One more time an image slid into her head, the view from someone else's eyes: herself in a bed, stitched and bound up, as seen from a few feet to her right. The mind that provided it wasn't familiar, but given what it had said-- Oowan, yes. I've been in this room ever since. Uyat broke some important bones. "Then you won't be fighting again soon either." Or ever. What about you? Rill reached up to touch the edges of the bandages on her face--saw herself do it through his sight, how pathetic she looked, and she laughed. She laughed until each sound was a croaking hiccup. "It doesn't look like it." I have a suggestion, then, Oowan thought quietly. You spared my life. I'll be your eyes, once we can leave this place. No more fights. We'll find somewhere safe to be. Could you be happy? Happy without violence? With a companion? Happy, leaving Uyat and her parents all healthy and well behind her? "Yes, please," Rill said to his question and to hers. "As long as it's far from here."
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May 29, 2017 06:40
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In.
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Jun 3, 2017 06:23
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Under Glass (1,168 words) The floodlights still glow outside the garden dome and the tunnels, pushing darkness away from me. The lamps burn inside, always. According to the computer, their nuclear batteries will keep them alive long after I'm as dead as everyone else, so maybe someday a ship from Earth will pass by, see the light, and find what's left of the colony--the messages my people cut into the glass as they were dying. Names and dates and verses glitter between me and the stars. My fingers trace the poet Henley's words: I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul. I don't know who left them here; the plague made a lie of them anyway. It could have been my mother or my father, since their names are carved inside a heart just below. They wrote Jacqueline, too, because I was too little to do it, and they never expected me to survive. There's a room in this place that's full of bones. I still dream about dragging bodies inside. I couldn't and I can't leave the habitat to give them a better grave. Turning from the glass, I burrow into the dome's orchard to pick an apple and then sprawl between rows of cabbage to eat it, breathing in the green smells of the crops. It's about time to rotate them, probably. I want to try growing flowers again. So far I've only seen marigolds in the image archive, but if the computer can work out the proper soil treatment for all these vegetables, then surely-- Did something move outside the dome? Hunkering down, I crawl toward the glass. It's been ages since I last convinced myself there could be a probe or rescue team out there. The flat, barren dust plain stretches on like always, except this time there is a figure standing on it, pale and way too thin to be wearing a space suit. The tendrils on its head might mean it's another girl, if they're hair, and if alien girls wear their hair long. An alien is all the creature could be. It's staring at the dome, assuming those spheres that look like eyes are eyes. I crouch lower and try not to breathe. But the maybe-eyes find me, and neither of us blinks--does it need to blink?--until I can't stand not to, and the second I move, the alien vanishes. It drops into the ground, feet first. "What was that?" I ask the words on the glass, though I know them all by heart and I know they don't have answers. The next day, the alien is back again. And the next. The computer won't obey my LIGHTS OFF command, and I'm sort of glad. The alien could be an animal that just looks humanoid, but when our eyes meet I'm sure it's intelligent. It doesn't threaten me or do much of anything but stare, stare, stare at me and the dome, then disappear in that way that shouldn't be possible. At one point I wave to it--well, I wiggle my fingers a little--and it dives into the earth so fast then that it raises a column of dust. A few hours later I go back to the garden. The ground outside is dry and barren, but it isn't flat anymore. Ridges flow into each other in a series of shapes I don't know at all. It's designed, though, I'm sure of that. It means something, if only I was here. Like a name cut into glass. I grab a pencil and paper from my room, and once I finish my work with them I sit inside the dome until the alien reappears. Right away I hold up my drawn copy of the symbol. The alien does its staring act; its head tilts to one side, then to the other as I flip the paper over and start drawing again. My marigold is lopsided and honestly kind of ugly, but I show it to the alien anyway. The creature sinks out of sight. Then the soil humps up as I watch, like something below is pushing it, and a rough mirror of my sketch forms on the dirt. That's the last I see of the alien for a few weeks. The exchange told it whatever it wanted to know. I'm more troubled by loneliness than I have been in years, because I've remembered there's an alternative. Only there isn't, is there? No messages come from Earth. The only people who talk to me do so in epitaphs. The trembles start while I'm sleeping--I wake up to blaring alarms and the computer shouting EMERGENCY! so loud I think for a second the noise is what's making my walls shake. I run down the tunnel, into the garden, and see my trees shivering. A new shape covers the ground beyond the dome. It's so enormous that the quake hasn't destroyed it yet. This one I can almost read: a crack breaking a solid line. The alien's told me how I'm going to die. I huddle by the glass beside my parents' names and my own, pressing my palm to their heart so I'll feel it until the end. But a not-quite-human hand shoots out of the dirt just outside, followed by a face. It gestures frantically. The dome shudders; I hear a crack and leap up, running for the never-used, pressure-locked door out that's visibly jittering now. I yank the lever to release the lock. EMERGENCY! the computer yells. And the door flies open. I stumble out into the airless world. The hand is waiting. It catches my ankle and pulls me down--through the ground that's coming apart. The alien wraps its arms around me and carries me along a tunnel that opens in front of it and closes behind it as it moves. I choke on dust. I black out, I think, not long after a monstrous crash vibrates along the rock around me. Then I'm in an open space, slumped on my side and coughing. I struggle to kneel. The alien slaps my back a few times. When I inhale, I suck in air. A soft glow outlines the cave for me, coming from thick clumps of mushrooms on the walls. The alien pulls one free and offers it. It takes another for itself and bites down. "Thank you," I say. The alien makes a noise I don't understand. Did it understand me? I think so, because it sits beside me as we eat the mushrooms. I wish mine were an apple. I won't taste an apple again. I'll never grow a marigold. The colony is buried; the bones are in the ground. No one else will see its messages now. That's the thought that starts me crying, huge sobs I stifle with both hands. I don't think the alien understands that. It still stays with me while I bawl. My past has finished dying, but I'm not alone anymore.
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Jun 5, 2017 08:30
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Thunderdome Recaps!  Faster than a speeding deadline, able to leap wide gaps in logic in a single bound, the recap team is here to save the day! Or to ramble for two hours about quantum immortal mutagens. One of these things is more likely than the other. Bad Seafood again joins Sitting Here and me in a study of literary carnage, which in this case refers to Week 248: A Vision of the Future and Week 249: Thunderdomers Assemble! Our lengthy debate re: cougars is capped off by a reading of ThirdEmperor's "Murder on the Ockient Express." "No, no, I’m really still hung up on how much you care about this." In Week 250: Everything Means Nothing Anymore, the Dome wrote about shattered worldviews, and we recappers feel our own crack a little under the weight of so much unexpected wolf dick. We sail over the calm-if-furry waters of the positive mentions but crash hard against nihilism and homicidal lesbians, as you do; The Cut of Your Jib's "Anemic Structure" receives the dubious honor of a performance. "DId you see that news anchor’s arms? Mocha latte hoochie mama. Holy poo poo.” Episodes past can be found here! Kaishai fucked around with this message at 04:39 on Jun 6, 2017 |
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Jun 6, 2017 04:22
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Critiques for Weeks CCXLVIII, CCXLIX, CCL, and CCLI: A List of Undeniable Problems Catching up to the recaps once again, possibly for the last time for a while: I still owe those crits for Eurovision IV. This project is on hiatus until I'm out of debt. See you in December! Week 248: A Vision of the Future ThirdEmperor, "Murder on the Ockient Express": Inconceivable (n): impossible to comprehend. "That your story wasn't intentionally written to annoy is inconceivable." You had to know this was a bad idea. Ignore the in joke for a minute--I wonder now if it isn't a joke around a joke, actually, never meant to invoke the spirit of ock but instead to riff on in jokes in general--and look at the way Cobb persistently and actively refuses to have anything to do with the mystery at hand. Consider the goofy scene you've built, for which no plausible explanation comes to my mind. Nor to yours, I think. Odds are you have no idea how that man ended up dead with his pants down. Your characters are poorly animated cartoons, and your ending doesn't exist. But the notion that the piece is about getting drawn into something by an obscure reference that refuses to leave your radar renders it conceivable, if barely, that you were out to do more than aggravate here. ***** Jay W. Friks, "In the Marshes of Lerna a Young Man Drowns": A tense gaffe appears in the second line. An apostrophe in the possessive its mars the third. Worse: I think those first two paragraphs are supposed to be a recording to which the main character is listening, but there's no visual signifier of this. Am I right? It helps with reading comprehension to set things like that aside, most commonly by putting them in italics. This is very hard to follow without any such markers. Here's what I get: the protagonist is the son of the scientist who worked with Dr. Zhang to develop the age-freeze technology. He's listening to recordings of Dr. Zhang explaining the science as the story opens. Although his body has never aged beyond eighteen, he prefers mature women for some reason, and this sets up his discomfort with his physical age vs. his mental age and with the plans the Cabal have for the world. (Other than formatting, the Cabal is the first misstep. Shadowy cabals aren't all that interesting when they aren't explained as anything but, you know, a shadowy cabal.) His dissatisfaction with his body grows on me as a character trait as the story continues: at first it doesn't ring true, but then I realize that a young man could well still be in that growthy, gawky stage at eighteen. To be trapped with a body forever at its most awkward point could create that sense of never, ever feeling right. Okay! And the mourning for Dr. Zhang is good. But the Cabal's plan doesn't make sense no matter how I think about it. Killing off the human race so a bunch of eternal teenagers can run the show is an incredibly dumb thing for the ostensible masters of the universe to do. It's peculiar also that the kids find so many fresh corpses. Why are the local people among the last in all the world to die? The overarching Cabal plot more or less kills this piece, but I wouldn't have DMed it despite that. It's a decent look at the psyche of a man trapped in a life he doesn't want by circumstances beyond his control, ruled by his father even after the man's death, unable to cope with eternal life because of his conscience. You could make a Twilight Zone episode out of this; unlike a lot of TD stories, it would possibly be a good one. ***** The Cut of Your Jib, "10^123 or The List of Undecidable Problems": A solid first paragraph, but it goes to waste as it's followed by relationship exposition and details about a scientist's messy house. The text meanders and gathers wool. What it doesn't do is tell a story. You go on and on about quantum theory and quantum computers as though the prompt were to talk about future tech rather than to make it an element of fiction, and it's so disappointingly dull, dull, dull that I'd almost rather read ThirdEmperor's non-story. I imagine you're trying to turn the quantum concepts into a mirror of the relationship between Rosa and the professor. The problem there is, who gives a flying flip about Rosa and the professor? I know next to nothing about them as people before you ask me to care about this romance. I know next to nothing about them as people when the story closes, because most of the nine-hundred-plus words just past were spent on a metaphor. ******************** Week 249: Thunderdomers Assemble! A disclaimer: I dislike superhero stories about as much as I do surrealism. Apply a grain of salt or two to my criticisms if you will, but not too much. I don't have to enjoy the taste of goat meat to be able to tell when it's rotten. Fleta Mcgurn, "Children of Rho-Man, Issue #300- The Dissolution": How much I should ding you for a story that reads like a riff on Greek mythology with thin and nonsensical superhero trappings I don't know, since I'm aware Thor is a superhero somehow, and for all I know his heroic veneer is no thicker. Nevertheless, your premise doesn't work. Possibly it could in a longer, complete, standalone story that weren't limited to 1,200 words, though I imagine the second-best thing you could do for this piece would be to strip off the superhero facade and stick to gods as gods. The best thing would be to make it more than an episodic fragment. Fill in more back story: tell me what happened to Jupiter and Juno. Give me a glimpse of Diana's feelings about her twin brother's disappearance. (It's odd this glosses over so many points of interest to a mythology fan while also making a reference to the story of Actaeon--not the most obscure myth, but more so than Leda and the swan.) Don't end on a cliffhanger, for crying out loud, and slash that scene with Cassandra if it isn't going to go anywhere. I'd probably scrap what you have and write a different god story if it were me, but the tail end of a war in the Roman pantheon over the fate of their city is an awesome setting and general concept, maybe worth revisiting. ***** flerp, "The Return of the Merman Hero, Moustache": To be clear: you haven't escaped the problems that plague Thunderdome serials. Moustache lacks sound motivation for his villainy. Has he no faith in his facial hair?? A superhero who hamstrings a rival isn't much of a hero at all! (Do fish have hamstrings? Probably not.) I'm sad to see Moustache brought down so low. I won't pretend I'm not happy to see him in general, even though I'll readily admit that yours is an objectively weaksauce entry. It's fun! It's silly! It makes me laugh! Comedy is so powerful when it works that I want to wave off flaws in this that I'd castigate in anything boring. I wouldn't have voted for this to HM or anything--good lord, no. But I'll read any Moustache story you put in front of me. ***** Hawklad, "Dirk Biggly and His Hands of Destiny": There's every chance it isn't your fault that the SUPR dystopia doesn't feel like a superhero world. It has to have been part of a shared-world premise. Still: humans mutated by drugs aren't superheroes, and no one in your particular story does anything heroic. Dirk plays football for a good half of it, then spends a quarter wandering around as a bum, then accidentally catches a villain and maaaaybe becomes a hero later? The prompt forbade origin stories, so going this route screwed you just about every way from Sunday. As Seafood points out in the recap, Dirk is terribly passive as protagonists go, subject to the whims of fate without showing interest in control over his own destiny. It would help if he chose to catch Fistlord rather than doing so by reflex. But the elephant in the room is the ambiguous ending, which cheats us out of seeing the one real choice Dirk makes and ensures he never develops a clear personality. ***** Jay W. Friks, "Jack-in-the-box": Your characters are arguing about whether Jack is the sort of man to commit petty theft when he's just killed two elderly ladies. Really, now. I don't think this is intended to establish just how black Jack's soul is, either, since the story itself appears to forget all about that small detail. Miss Ambrosia's plan is nearly as baffling, assuming I understand it--did she spike her company's drugs with more, different drugs in order to mind-control Jack into openly committing criminal acts... in order to punish him for using her drugs to commit criminal acts? What? She can't have done this to burn Jack's alternate identity, because she tries to kill Jack immediately after. There would be no point. Everything would make a lot more sense if she stuck to the long-distance assassination attempt--a warning to those in the know that bad things happen to people who mess with SUPR. The gargoyle is a thorough misstep, introduced too late in the story and offering a cop-out solution that doesn't cost Jack any effort. The cliffhanger ending puts the cherry on the suckdae: I can't guess how Jack will salvage his situation, and I don't much care. ******************** Week 250: Everything Means Nothing Anymore Meinberg, "Nihilism is My Kink": TMI, sir. I suspect you did enjoy writing this paean to nihilism a little too much. It has, intentionally or not, the smug, self-satisfied tone of an author on his soapbox, stabbing at strawmen to make a point. Your Jacob is virtuous: he treats his friends well, works hard at his job, helps people, shows consideration for others, appreciates life's simple gifts, etc., etc.; yet I get an impression from lines like Jacob Johnson thought he was a virtuous person that you-the-writer mean for his concept of cosmic justice to cancel out his good points. (Maybe I'm reading a stress on thought that you didn't intend. The whole story invites me to scorn this poor fool's delusions, though, so I have doubts.) The conga line of misfortune you dump on him becomes ridiculous around the time his boss lets him go, and it gets worse and less credible before it's through. A whole jury corrupted, huh? And there's no media outcry despite the shooter--a politician's son--having been identified by multiple witnesses? Sure. His friends of years don't care at all? Right. You've gone over the top and convinced me (further) that I want no part of nihilism, which would appear somewhat counter to your aim. ***** Thranguy, "Girl, You’ll Be a Wolfman, Soon": You can be very clever about prompts, and you know it's not necessary to incorporate every single element. So why the wolf dick? A distressing number of your words are spent on furry sex, and I can't for the life of me see the rationale. Remove that element and you'd have a story about a young woman, cursed by something she did in the past, realizing she wouldn't change her actions if she could and becoming comfortable with the consequences. That part is good! The part where her punishment for accidentally killing the pedo trying to rape her is a raging, unceasing erection, not so much. The sexual aspects do not play well together. Also, you and she brush right over that whole thing where she permanently maimed a man for making a joke, which I'd guess you're trying to play for laughs, but the violence elsewhere in the story is too serious for such glibness to fly. If she bit him without tearing his fingers off, that issue would disappear. If the wolf dick disappeared with it, all the better. ***** ThirdEmperor, "Satyric Humor": Trimming five hundred or so words would improve this. Its main flaw as it stands is that the satyrs outstay their welcome, and Ambrose's conversations with them repeat the same themes and ideas at least once too often. I have one foot over the boredom line by the time the final beat arrives; fortunately it's a strong ending, pulling off its lack of change in the outward status quo by nailing the inward change in Ambrose. His situation is the same. His perception of it and of himself has suffered considerably. I appreciate the unhappiness here, and the last line is so pitch perfect that it hoists my opinion of the whole thing up a notch or two. ***** The Cut of Your Jib, "Anemic Structure": Terrible proofing, unlikeable and uninteresting characters, an unclear sequence of events, too many points of view, a last-minute perspective shift, and a structure not so much anemic as meandering and muddled. I know and you know that you're better than this. Your entry almost reads like a satire of vampire stories, or like a jab at of a type of female character in the case of Rowan. To assume satirical intent would probably be to give the work too much credit, however: it's a mess of words at the end of which a man is killed with a piece of meat, and any light it has is hidden beneath one heck of a bushel. ***** Fleta Mcgurn, "The Girl in the Vlog": I don't enjoy the handling of Venus-chan--it flies too close to the sun that is authorial scorn. I think the story aims for the idea that Mandy leaps to all sorts of conclusions after watching the Venus videos, and more than one of them turns out to be wrong, but... when Venus lies about their encounter in her vlog at the end, that strips away the thin coat of character dimension you lent her in the restaurant. She's shown to be a histrionic drama queen claiming threats that never happened. It's hard to understand why Mandy feels guilty after seeing that. My guess is, you still intend me to feel sorry for Venus and shake my head at Mandy's presumption/assumptions/judgment, but Venus actually does seem to be the embodiment of a stereotype. There are ways to tone her down: remove the lie (I don't count the stalker bit as a lie, but there's no way to interpret anything Mandy says as a threat) and rethink having Venus show off her facial hair on camera--that strikes me as extraneous. Shattering Mandy's worldview twice would be more effective if the second shattering were convincing. ******************** Week 251: We're Grammarpunk Now Obliterati, "Salt the Earth": Dad and Alice have such a genuine father-child relationship that the story almost doesn't need cool salt magic or the concept of sunken continents to be good. It's nice to have them, though! I like this one all around except--and it's a big except--for the faceless, purposeless, soulless Sun Fleet. They go around burning up ships why? Not for plunder. Not in retribution unless there's a lot of back story between the Stone Fleet and the Sun Fleet that you're not sharing. Any half-decent human villain is going to have some reason for doing what he does, something that he wants, but these guys just attack so Dad can die and Alice can have her Goku moment. Although I understand why you won, that flaw is damaging; any revision of this piece should include a clear goal for the antagonists. ***** QuoProQuid, "Hunger": Between your entry and Obliterati's, which is the stronger is a toss up. Your antagonist, whether that's Denny or society, has reasons for doing what he/it does--excellent reasons in the latter case, short-sighted reasons in the former, but hey. Teenagers, right? And maybe Denny is out to suicide, on some level; maybe that's why he lets Eli go so easily in the end, which is my prime beef. The body horror early on is exquisitely awful. Eli's dilemma, and the implication that what's left of a billion kids might be facing it too, horrifies quite well. But Denny sets up a high-stakes situation, showing his friends a man he's in the process of eating to death, letting them know about the cops he's called in to be his next meal, and then doesn't fight Rob or Eli when they choose to leave. He doesn't even argue. It's anticlimactic, and I wouldn't be surprised if the flat ending cost you. I sort of want the boys to fight and for Eli to get a mouthful of Denny's flesh and like it a little too much, then to run, so the confrontation would have more teeth--sorry--and Eli's hunger would stay front and center. It disappears a bit in the last section. ***** Hawklad, "Something New": The writing in this one is strong enough that I read a good ways into it before I understood how it could have DMed, and that's not bad for a story that opens with a poo poo turbine. Liselle falls in the "bitter whiner" range on the lovely youth spectrum, a less than thrilling thing when we're stuck in her head, but I'm never bored despite the familiar generation-ship scenario. Religious autocracy took control of ship society awfully fast. How long has it been since the colonists woke up? Ten years? And how old is Liselle? The line about her not being scheduled to marry for ten years more makes me wonder. She acts fourteen or fifteen; again, not thrilling given the circumstances. All these quibbles are irrelevant beside my largest one: Liselle thinks oh so angrily about how godawful life is on the ship and what a lovely gift life on it will be to their descendants... and then immediately plans to try again to get pregnant. What. WHAT. How hateful is she? Are you seriously telling me she wants to go through the physical rigors and agonies of pregnancy, never mind whatever punishment her father would come up with, explicitly to make another human suffer for all its life? You need to do a much better job of selling this if you want me to buy. Couldn't she paint a mural on a hallway or something? ***** Fuubi, "High Noon": After the opening paragraphs of roundabout exposition, the seventh of which finally clarifies what the heck is going on, you abandon the premise of an ever-present sun (which you handwaved to pieces anyway) to trot out a rant straight off of Facebook. Tell me the truth: did you always intend to end the entry this way, or did the sun problem stump you and leave you scrambling for a closer? The first two paragraphs could have been written last. I like this theory, because otherwise I'm at a loss for what you think omnipresent light and chatting with your neighbors have to do with each other. Gary's plan is so nebulous that I'm confident you have no idea how he changes the world. It sounds like he's heading off to go shoot somebody. I can only assume the somebody is the sun, and I'm vexed you didn't write that scene out. ***** SurreptitiousMuffin, "Up-and-up-and-up": Foetid and wen' don't go together--nothing goes with wen', as 1.) thoughts don't work that way, and 2.) if they did, one would think William would drop the T off went consistently. I appreciate the restraint you're showing with the dialect but dislike the places it clashes with the tone and other vocabulary. The opening poem doesn't do much for you. I'm not a fan of fuckface shittyboy myself, as I see it as another place where the voice slips: that particular phrasing sounds like a modern Internet poster's. And what was coughing? The door? Why? The climax and conclusion leave me wanting something more, though I've convinced myself the story is a metaphor for growing up, and there's something to be said for the horrors a child has been warned about proving to be real but the child proceeding on his path anyway--the metaphor (if metaphor it is) just needs to land a little better, perhaps. Those are the things I don't like about this one, but the setting and atmosphere make up for at least some of them, not to mention the text itself that has moments of simple perfection such as He knew he wasn't allowed to touch the bones. He touched the bones. All the changes needed to make this story glow are small. ***** Fuschia tude, "The Revolution Continues": Just about the only thing I admire here is the ambition. You're out to tell a hell of a story. The scope is broad; you've tried to incorporate history, action, and emotional connection, and that's no modest goal. Alas that none of it works. There's not that much story to the story, considering its size. A vast swath of the first half is exposition about the setting. In the third section the piece abruptly changes tracks for a long fight sequence, and at this point I've been lulled into caring about only the setting. You haven't fleshed out Jorgen, his father is just a shadow, and the fight subsequently outlasts my interest. Whether pacing or too much focus on the wrong things is the trouble, I'm not sure. Maybe both! The end, then, is a twist revelation (!) that Jorgen was never alone, that he's brought an army with him, and that taking this prison compound has somehow defeated the old regime!! Wait, what? This deus ex machina falls flat on its face, and so does the Wildcat's death scene. The sense of Jorgen as a character that I need to feel for him in that moment is missing. It's a big old electrified mess even ignoring the fumbled flash rule--yes, I see you trying to force the rebellion theme by claiming silence is a rebellion against words, study is a rebellion against memory, etc. Stop that. Kaishai fucked around with this message at 14:57 on Jun 16, 2017 |
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Jun 9, 2017 02:55
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Playstation 4 posted:Hi I'm your friendly Kirb-Bot, here to bring you fond memories of ThunderDome's past. Yes, that's familiar, but a reminder of crabrock's excellent ragecrit is always welcome.
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Jun 10, 2017 13:10
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Thunderdome Recaps!  Two episodes. Three weeks. More incredibly awful people than you can shake a stick at, and that's without Twist. Sitting Here, Bad Seafood, and I rebel against certain concepts present in Week 251: We're Grammarpunk Now--it turns out none of us are in favor of malicious conception. Who knew? The highlights of the round receive a share of attention, but the dramatic spotlight shines on the loser: Fuubi's "High Noon." I liked it better at the start of all this, when you were raging, rioting, wrecking everything around you. When you showed your passion, and a will to fight and live! From there we move on to the browner pastures of Week 252: Your Cardboard Protagonist Was Here and Week 253: The road to lovely fiction is paved with good intentions. Even sticking to the negative mentions, we still ramble on for nearly two hours about the care and handling of terrible people, the definition of flash fiction, how closely to follow a prompt, and name changes, and then we go on a magical journey through Entenzahn's "Graffiti Bros: Graffic Adventures with Julius Caesar." “Hey,” a Jesus said, “can any of you torture me, I kinda need to suffer for the sins of humanity.” He exploded. Episodes past can be found here!
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Jun 20, 2017 03:49
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In. Wizards.
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Jul 7, 2017 08:00
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From Death Wizardry: You're the wizard of that ol' swamp magic. Fiddles in the bayou, will-o-wisp lights hovering over bogs. You can call dark, beautiful, or terrible things from the mud, loam, and stagnant water. (1,089 words) The warmouth that came up out of the black water on Ezekiel's line was a full foot long, fat as a setting sun. Ezekiel's shouted "Hallelujah!" shut even the mosquitoes up for a second. He hauled the fish in and tapped it gently on a gill. Its thrashing stopped. It slid into his bucket soft and clean, and Ezekiel turned his canoe's nose toward home with a sense of joy in all Creation. But a craggy body rose up beside him then, bigger than he was and older too; the gator's eye was a dark marble in which Ezekiel saw a death. Not his, though. Never his, not since he'd given the monster a finger, eaten one of its toes, and formed an alliance through the trade. He tasted pale meat again as he fixed on the eye and what it showed: a young man squelching through the boundaries of the marsh, the body of a boy in his arms. "Dead?" he asked the gator. The stabbing pain where his left pinkie had been was its way of saying No. "Dammitall," Ezekiel said, cradling his hand. He whistled a slow, low note that rose as it went on. Will-o'-the-wisps rose with it. Their green-gold fungus glow drifted up from the cattails and the sunken cypress roots to hover, waiting. Lose him, he could tell them, and they'd go to the man and ensure he never brought or made another body. Except the boy was still alive--no chance the alligator would be wrong about that. Ezekiel said, "Lead him to my place." He threw his warmouth to the gator. The monster snatched it and sank below sight, and Ezekiel's canoe glided over the black water and onto a pool that stank of life. There, on the verdant shore, stood the shack he'd banged together when the swamp became his haven. It wore moss on its roof like a bridal veil and had a heron's legs, thin and sticking up out of the murk. A knotty hammock hung above the porch. He settled into it, watching for the wisp glow. They're coming, the frogs sang. One dies. One grieves. "Not yet," he murmured. The wisps brought the man right to Ezekiel's yard, such as it was. Then they vanished, and the man woke out of their dream. "Where--?" He splashed a step backward, craned his neck to look up at the house, and his face went wild with hope. "Thank God. It's you, ain't it? Please!" "You're wanting the swamp man, then," Ezekiel said. "If you can make life out of death, like they say in town. If you can save my brother." Free of the wisps' compulsion, the man shook, his legs and arms struggling with their burden: the boy was skeletal, but so was he. Still, he tried to lift the child so Ezekiel could see. Ezekiel solved the problem by dropping down from his hammock. Even up there, he'd smelled the blood. The boy's shirt was dyed with it, darkest by the wad of cloth bound above his heart, and the man's missing sleeve told Ezekiel what that must once have been. Flies hummed around them both. There would be eggs, sure as sinking. The man said, "It was an accident." "Tell me." "An accident. Ma was hunting squirrels, saw Pat moving in a tree, shot before she knew--" As he spoke the scum on the pool's surface broke apart, reforming in narrative shapes. A woman as thin as her sons aimed at a thing in a tree, sure enough, though God never made a squirrel that size. It fell. She stood still. The scream came late. Ezekiel touched the boy's bright copper hair. "You don't have enough to feed three, do you." "I can't pay, but I'll work for you, do anything." "Not what I meant," Ezekiel said, and the man's mouth clamped shut. Without the pool's help, Ezekiel saw--again; for the thousandth time--his sister's braids floating on a bed of green. Heard his pa's voice: "I told her not to swim there. I told her." His little brother had disappeared the next lean winter. "He's run off, and damned smart of him." But his bones had bobbed up in the spring, freed from a rotted bag, and the hole in the skull had been neat and round. Ezekiel had fled without hearing one more story. The swamp had taken him to kin. Ezekiel held out his hand. Moss tumbled down from his roof, and he caught it. He pulled the filthy cloth away and packed the moss into both sides of Pat's neat, round wound. The flies' eggs stuck to his fingers when he drew them back; he flicked them away, laid his hands on Pat's chest. And he whistled. The frog song, the bird song, the fly buzz all changed to match his note. Ezekiel would have bet money his visitor's shaking then had more to do with fear than anything, yet the man held onto his tongue and his brother. Under Ezekiel's touch, muscle flowed into muscle. Skin into skin. Moss tied bone to bone. The man whispered, "Is he--?" Ezekiel looked up. "He's lost too much blood. He'll need more from somewhere." The man shut his eyes. "Take it, then." "Not yours, big brother," Ezekiel said, "but hold on to him tight, bad as it's going to look." He called the mosquitoes before the man could ask anything--hundreds of them, thousands upon thousands, swarming up and covering Pat in a blanket of needles and wings. The man screamed as loud as his mother ever had and maybe louder, but he held and kept on holding as the mosquitoes gave Pat the blood in their stomachs. Only a minute and it was done, and the cloud rose away from a sleeping boy rather than a corpse in the making. Ezekiel said, "You go home now and put him in a bed. The wisps will show you to the swamp's edge." "Thank you. Thank you. God bless you." After they had gone, Ezekiel spoke to the mosquitoes waiting for their repayment. "Drink fast. I want her gone before they find her." The swarm streamed off to take what it had given to the son back from the mother. Another swarm had taken as much, long ago, from Ezekiel's father. And so they would all live on. Life out of death. Ezekiel climbed up to his shack and closed the door, shutting out the reek of blood.
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Jul 10, 2017 07:54
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Entrants: If you have PMs, please send me a message telling me your pair when you post your story. If not, post it in the thread sometime after judgment.
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Jul 16, 2017 20:19
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Thunderdome Recap!  Dog Week! Where did the stories go? Dog Week! Nobody knows where they are! Without a loser in Week 254: dog week on which to focus our ire, Sitting Here, Djeser, super-special guest flerp, and I settle for prodding the winning entry and the lone negative mention with our critical sticks. But not for long! Soon we're blasting off into Week 255: RAY-LORDS FROM BEYOND GALAXY 9! Join us in admiring the beaver clones that inspired whatever ThirdEmperor is on about! Yawn along as we trudge through a tale about a man with a tank for a head that somehow is boring! Then raise a glass, as we do, to the memory of the SilverHawks, who fly again (sort of) in our dramatic reading of Jay W. Friks' "Hanna-Barbera's Stool." “Fear not Queen President! I, Captain Dikok and the Knights of the Tesseract table shall fight off this plasma infused poultry!” Episodes past can be found here! Kaishai fucked around with this message at 22:21 on Jul 24, 2017 |
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Jul 18, 2017 03:20
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Please include your prompt in your post. If it's too late, then to make another post clarifying your choice would be jolly considerate of you.
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Jul 24, 2017 01:28
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In with the Magic School Bus:
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Jul 29, 2017 05:29
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So Far Away (798 words) The bus looked derelict the first time Orrin saw it, at seventeen and drunk on gas-station beer. Someone had tried to cover up the school-bus canary with other colors: green and white, like the sea. But the yellow bled through, worse than rust. Orrin grabbed a rock and threw it at the socket where a headlight had been. The trees all around muffled the clang into a pathetic note, and the vehicle's cracked windows stared impassively down, and Orrin felt shame and self-disgust arm-wrestling inside him to decide which would make him feel like more of a poo poo. The bus's open door offered a flimsy escape. Inside, its seats held boxes. Cans. A cooler. Orrin cracked that open and found more beers sitting in lukewarm water and drowned flies. He took one and held the aluminum to his forehead without drinking. One peeling leather cushion was clear of debris. Flopping onto it, Orrin curled himself up so his knees were braced against the seat-back in front of him, let his head slump against the wall, and closed his eyes, just for a while. A branch hit him in the face and woke him. Up front sat a driver, big and bearded. The bus rumbled through the woods, trees reaching in where there wasn't any window glass; one of them had slapped Orrin good, and he jerked upright and hollered, "Hey! What the hell!" He scrambled for the door. "Let me off!" But there wasn't enough space between the bus and the trees to fit a gnat. Orrin was getting a good idea through his headache of why the paint job was so damaged. Jumping out into that? He wasn't suicidal. Quite. The bus kept moving; he lurched back down the aisle, and he met the driver's eyes in the rearview mirror. "You got somewhere else to be?" the man asked him. Orrin sank back into the seat. "No," he said. "Not really." The bus slid through the forest, over creeks, past collapsing shacks, staying off anything like a road. Orrin watched strange landmarks pass until they lulled him into sleep again. He came awake at night, the bus no longer moving, the driver gone--the door hanging open and a highway right outside. Orrin took another beer for the road and followed the asphalt into a new town. The second time he found the bus, he was twenty-two and stone-cold sober. And when he climbed on, the driver was already there reading a battered Tom Clancy paperback. The driver set the book down and reached for the keys. "Going to be a long trip." Orrin didn't say a word, just settled into the same seat. He didn't think of Francine or her pleas for him to stay. Didn't think of the shouting, her refusal to abort. He very carefully and deliberately did not. Much later, as the bus disgorged him on a boardwalk by the ocean, he avoided thinking of anything at all. The bus ambushed him the third time. It stood where he never would have looked for it: on the lot of a terminal, at the edge and under shadow but unmistakable in its broken livery. Orrin, on the business end of thirty, took a step backward from it. His debit card would cover a Greyhound fare. But then he thought of speed and wheels that didn't need a road. "I need you to take me to somewhere," Orrin said to the familiar driver once he was inside. "Where?" "My kid's sick in Kansas City. Francine says she has to have bone marrow." The big man hoisted himself out of the front seat. "You'd better do the driving, boy." The old plastic smelled stale, like sweat and age, and a few important dials had gone missing from the dash. Nothing measured this bus's fuel. Orrin pointed its nose at the trees verging the terminal. They pulled aside to let him through. He drove due east, over rippling, baked sand. The bus crested dunes as easily as it did mountains. Orrin said, "I didn't ask for my parents." Moonlight paled the rocky ridges in front of him. "Didn't ask to be a parent. Can't afford it." The wheels threw up spray from the Arkansas River, drops that splashed in and spattered the old boxes. "I've never seen my daughter. She didn't ask for me, either." The sunrise turned Nebraska's wheat to gold. "I can do this much for her," Orrin said, parking the bus in a stretch of trees three miles from the hospital. He stood on numb legs and turned to check the ruined aisle, the cans and the cooler. There was no driver present but himself. Orrin left the keys in the ignition and didn't look back to watch the bus go.
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Jul 30, 2017 19:15
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Thunderdome Week CCLXI: You Are Cordially Invited to the Dome of a Thousand Doors Party Planners: Kaishai, SurreptitiousMuffin, and Uranium Phoenix. Lord Thaddeus Domerci, a man of mystery around whom many rumors and dire foretellings swirl, has invited us one and all to celebrate his birthday in the magnificent Domerci Manor. Stories are told about this house--as many stories, nearly, as the house has rooms, though the exact count of chambers is vague. You see, there's no end to the Manor's doors. Past each one waits a room that's distinct from every other; a gentleman's study from the late nineteenth century sits across the hall from a glass dome looking out on the vacuum of space. Lord Domerci has more gardens besides than any one man should. I've heard tell of a pond in one with swan boats that glide on their own, and another, they say, holds a graveyard with epitaphs no one still living can read.... Your protagonists have come to Domerci Manor on the night of the festivities. Why? That's up to you. The eccentric lord has sent invitations to the rich and the poor alike, but any party like this one will also have its gate crashers. Maybe your characters are looking for something, or for someone. Maybe they're only here for the drinks and will get caught up in matters beyond their comprehension. They could find love! Or hate! Or death! Or a necrophiliac orgy in the basement! (Please don't find a necrophiliac orgy in the basement.) Anything is possible--it's that kind of evening. This is a shared world prompt, but one that allows you to go your own way if you'd rather. It's entirely possible to be at Domerci's party and miss any number of happenings, especially if you're caught up in your own! Entrants are welcome to conspire, to share characters and rooms--IRC is useful for this--but keep this in mind: Each story must have one author. Each story must stand alone. Don't depend on someone else's work to explain yours. If collaboration isn't your thing, then create your own room or rooms and don't worry about what anyone else is doing. The judges won't hold that against you. There's one character who should be at least slightly consistent, so have a brief description of the Man Himself: Kaishai posted:
Can't decide on what room(s) you'd like to explore? You're in luck, sort of, because the judge team will hear your pleas and assign you a past week of Thunderdome to use as setting inspiration. Setting, note! Let's say you get Week CCV. Your room had better be cosmic and horrifying, but if you want to use it as a backdrop for a touching romance or a buddy comedy, have at. Flash rules and other sub-rules of past weeks aren't part of your room assignments! As is traditional when it comes to special anniversary shenanigans, the winner of this week won't run the next week. That honor/horror belongs to Fleta Mcgurn. Instead, the victor gets the thrill of beating everybody else into the ground, perhaps a sparkly new avatar, and delightful freedom from having to do any work afterward! No fanfiction, nonfiction, erotica, poetry, political satire, political screeds, or GoogleDocs. Sign-up deadline: Friday, August 4, 11:59pm USA Eastern Submission deadline: Sunday, August 6, 11:59pm USA Eastern Maximum word count: 1,500 VIP Guests: super sweet best pal (Room LXVI) Fleta Mcgurn Thranguy (Room LXXXI): "The Huntress and the Thief" Sitting Here: "In Which an Unwanted Gift is Returned" Fuubi sebmojo (Room LXXXV): "Astronomical Unit" Hawklad (Room CXXV): "The Fisherman and the Eel" MysticalHaberdasher Dr. Kloctopussy (Room CXXXVII): "Falling Stars" big scary monsters (Room CLXXX) crabrock (Room CLXIV) Jay W. Friks: "Dirty Pool" Wizgot (Room CLXXXVI) Mercedes (Room CLXIII): "The Pyramid Scheme" RandomPauI (Room LXVII): "Her Rehearsal." (Submitted past the deadline.) Benny Profane (Room XXI): "The Potato Thief" flerp (Room CXXII) sparksbloom (Room CLXXXI) dmboogie: "i bet one day we'll look back on this and laugh but for tonight could you just buy me a drink" GenJoe Chairchucker (Room CCII) Solitair (Room CII): "Theorycraps" Noah Nethilia: "Lost and Found" Pippin: "What's Behind Door Number One?" blue squares: "While Searching for an Answer" Kaishai fucked around with this message at 01:28 on Aug 9, 2017 |
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Aug 1, 2017 09:28
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Your room assignments, honored guests! Remember, you're free to wander through the house, but at least part of your story must now take place in a location related somehow to your week. While I've included a suggestion for each, you're free to ignore those and offer your own interpretations. super sweet best pal posted:In and please give me a room. You may find cards and poker chips plentiful in Room LXVI (Know When to Fold 'Em). Thranguy posted:in and room me up. Who knew Lord Domerci had enough plastic bricks to fill Room LXXXI (LEGO Stories with Chairchucker)? sebmojo posted:in, room me up Letters abound in Room LXXXV (Ground Control to Major Tom). Hawklad posted:In, I will take a room. Everything's better down where it's wetter in Room CXXV (Thunderdome is Comin' to Town). I suppose sparkling mermen are optional. Dr. Kloctopussy posted:In and ready to be visited by the ghost of Thunderdomes past. Stroll through the gallery in Room CXXXVII (A Picture is Worth rand( ) % 1500 words). big scary monsters posted:I've had a really dreadful idea for a story and if I don't think of anything better I'm going to have to write it, so please give me a room. Maybe you can lose that idea in Lord Domerci's labyrinth, contained in Room CLXXX (Maybe I'm a Maze). Note to all: "rooms" can absolutely be somewhere out on the Manor grounds! crabrock posted:give me a week pls. Dare you find out what's cooking in Room CLXIV (I Shouldn't Have Eaten That Souvlaki)? Wizgot posted:I'm in. Room me up. Be careful with the Bunsen burners in Room CLXXXVI (Giving away prizes for doing f'd-up things). Mercedes posted:That post was poorly planned. There were no I's nor N's close to each other. Give me a room Arf arf arf! Nah, just fooling. Lord Domerci's private collection occupies Room CLXIII (YOUR STUPID poo poo BELONGS IN A MUSEUM).
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Aug 2, 2017 00:08
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RandomPauI posted:Do we have to choose a room number from past thunderdomes? Nope! You can either ask for such a number or make up your own room(s) out of whole cloth. Oh, hey, a new page. Well, since this worked so well for Seafood.... Kaishai posted:Thunderdome Week CCLXI: You Are Cordially Invited to the Dome of a Thousand Doors Kaishai fucked around with this message at 01:29 on Aug 9, 2017 |
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Aug 2, 2017 00:10
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RandomPauI posted:Edit: In, and I'll take a room. Ignore all the roaring coming from Room LXVII (Lions and Tigers and Bears). Surely no thoughtful host would let beasts roam free in his chambers. Benny Profane posted:In, and requesting a room. The sensory deprivation tanks in Room XXI (Welcome to My Sensorium) are top-notch, I'm told.
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Aug 2, 2017 01:00
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flerp posted:in give me a room Everybody knows your name in Room CXXII (Bar-back).
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Aug 2, 2017 01:13
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sparksbloom posted:In. I'll take a room Uniforms aren't strictly required in Room CLXXXI (We like bloodsports and we don't care who knows!), but a competitive spirit is a must.
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Aug 2, 2017 02:25
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Chairchucker posted::O Merc's in? There's more than Cheerios to be found in the pantry of Room CCII (THUNDER-O-S!). Or is there?
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Aug 2, 2017 13:33
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Flash rules and other sub-rules of past weeks aren't part of your room assignments. But since I didn't stipulate that in the prompt post, what the heck: Chairchucker posted:"Should your feelings on cereal tend towards ambivalence, you may request a cereal as a flash rule." You get a catchy jingle! The cereal, too, I guess: Fruity Marshmallow Krispies. Dr. Kloctopussy posted:I would like an Art, please  Starry Night Over the Rhone, by Vincent van Gogh. Only punitive flash rules past this point.
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Aug 3, 2017 01:36
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| # ¿ May 12, 2024 06:24 |
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  Our Gracious Host! Lord Thaddeus Domerci is the intimate acquaintance of no one. To the best of society's knowledge, his life is free of the encumbrance of love. His heart is dedicated instead to his Manor and the preservation thereof--a trying task, as any of his servants would tell you--and a passion for competition in all its forms, whether it be a friendly game or the sort of brawl that fills graves. It is said by some that he is a literary connoisseur. Those who have seen any of his libraries (did you imagine the Manor had only one?) question both that statement and his taste, however. Despite his less than empathetic nature, Lord Domerci will be found roaming the halls of his party, sharing wine with the guests he recognizes and with those he doesn't. The majority will be of the latter type. His cryptic manner may charm, unsettle, or anger, but no reaction fazes him. Is he even listening when you speak? Perhaps. He's certainly attentive to anything that threatens to bring his party to a halt. Persistent threats may be put down with more force than one mortal man should be able to muster. He has a black goatee, a sharp tongue, the apparel of a gentleman, and eyes that have stared unblinking at a thousand horrors.
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Aug 3, 2017 03:15
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