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Alright, I'm in. I'll whip something up right quick.
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Apr 30, 2021 15:05
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Archived.
Uranium Phoenix fucked around with this message at 03:02 on May 9, 2021 |
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Apr 30, 2021 15:08
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 Thunderdome Week 457: The Frontier Was Everywhere Humanity has had a lot of frontiers. About 250,000 years ago, that frontier was everywhere. Frontiers and exploration have long fascinated us and shaped how we view the world. Your task will be to write a story in which a frontier and exploration figures prominently. When you sign up, pick past, present, or future. You’ll be assigned a frontier related to that era. What will you get? Well, you’ll just have to explore that by signing up  .Shenanigans -Some frontiers are classic enough that you can just pick them from this list for a -300 word penalty instead of dealing with all the bullshit:
-If you want bonus words, you may post crits of up to 10 stories for 150 words per crit. Again, stories from a week you were not a judge (if you have outstanding crits you should be doing those anyways  ). Must be posted before the sign-up deadline.-You can also  to request hellrules. This confers no benefits, only suffering.Rules: No erotica, poetry, nonfiction, rants, googledocs, fanfic, etc. To be clear: If you post “in”, also either post the rule you want or the era you want a random rule from. Word Count: 1800 Sign-up deadline: Friday 11:59pm Pacific Story deadline: Sunday 11:59pm Pacific Judges:
Explorers: -Simply Simon (future; Europa +1500 bonus words) -brotherly (past; Amazon) -J.A.B.C. (present; dreams) -Azza Bamboo (past; Mediterranean) -Thranguy (future; wormholes +1500 bonus words) -Gorka (past; African coast) -My Shark Waifuu (present; microscopic) -Obliterati (future; alien relics) -Trex (future; time) -seaborgium (present; ocean floor) -Tosk (future; nebulae) -crabrock (present; mind) -flerp (future; andromeda) Uranium Phoenix fucked around with this message at 05:19 on May 12, 2021 |
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May 4, 2021 12:51
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Simply Simon posted:This sounds fun as hell, in for random future brotherly posted:In, random past please J.A.B.C. posted:It's been a long while since I Thunderdome'd, sign me up for a random present please.
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May 4, 2021 14:12
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Azza Bamboo posted:
Thranguy posted:In, random future. Gorka posted:In, I'll explore the past My Shark Waifuu posted:In, give me a present!
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May 4, 2021 18:26
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Obliterati posted:FUTURE ME
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May 5, 2021 07:03
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Tyrannosaurus posted:The past is dead. The future is now.
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May 5, 2021 15:16
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flerp posted:in Read the prompt, friend.
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May 5, 2021 23:56
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seaborgium posted:In present, sorry. Tosk posted:In for future, please. Thranguy posted:Idiotism Crits (week 448) Flesnolk posted:I can judge if you still want folks Yoruichi posted:you should catch up on crits before judging again
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May 6, 2021 14:24
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crabrock posted:In, present
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May 6, 2021 15:31
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Signups are closed, in case anyone needs to be told that. Go forth, valiant explorers! (Cowardly explorers can also proceed).
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May 8, 2021 14:47
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Submissions are closed. Interprompt: Necromancer labor shortage
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May 10, 2021 11:17
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The frontiers for week 457 have closed. Judgement. At the bottom: Loss: seaborgium's Cavern. DM: My Shark Waifuu's Supersymmetry At the top, it was a hard fight. HMs go to J.A.B.C.'s Chasing and Obliterati's How To Navigate The Remains of Ross-248-b. For the throne, there was a slugfest. flerp's If I could give you these stars... threw out emotional haymakers, while Thranguy's The First Four Frontiers managed to cram an entire space opera full of all sorts of references into a surprisingly small package, the density allowing it to gracefully take the hits. In the end, it was Thranguy's story still standing, full of jam-packed mysteries and all the boundless frontiers the prompt was looking for. flerp's If I could give you these stars... takes a grand HM, while Thranguy's The First Four Frontiers lets him ascends once again to the bloodthrone with the Win. Congratulations again are in order. Detailed crits Uranium Phoenix fucked around with this message at 18:47 on May 15, 2021 |
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May 12, 2021 05:32
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Week 457 - Frontier Crits Part 1: The Part Oneining The Little God There’s a lot of little pieces to this story that didn’t quite fit for me. I’ll start with the biggest: Is this a story about Vern Ashar, legendary god-imprisoner, or Kor and Favola’s relationship with the god? (Both is fine, but both need work). Vern Ashar is set up as this larger than life, maniacal god-slayer, but the gravitas he should have versus how the characters treat him is different. He laughs, calls them nerds, and presses on, but we don’t get enough dialog between him and another character to properly establish how people feel about him and react to him, and we need that; as it is, Kor is dismissive of him and his stories. Why? They clearly believe his reputation, because Kor notes Ashar will trap the god; it’s a foregone conclusion. I like the idea of this character, but he needs to be kicked up a notch. There’s a lot of side-characters dying, Kor makes a joke about it and Favola rolls his e yes. Why? How does the rest of the group react? By the way, I don’t get a sense that this is a fairly large group until the second section. Why are they so blase about death? The general reason (gods were bad, mostly, it outweighed the good) is tossed in at one point, but especially for our main characters (and for a bit of flavor for the unnamed NPCs tagging along), we need personal reasons that stick. I don’t get a good sense of the motivations of Favola and Kor until latter in the story with some muddled conversation. Their relationship also feels tangential; a thing that is present, but not a focus. What brings them together? Why do they like each other? Too much is missing for me to feel these characters, and that sabotages your ending. I like the idea of the ending: Favola wanting something else, but not the last god to die. But it has no emotional impact for me. I need the wants and passions of these characters developed. There’s other details too: I get whiplash going from paragraph 1 to 2. I wonder why these explorers don’t bother ripping the gold and jewels from these temples—seems a bit reserved for a company already bent on deicide (and drat how many die along the way!). As a final note, I don’t get a sense of mystery and exploration. They apparently know what lurks in the hidden jungle temple. They know what will happen when they get there. They know how to get there—there’s no suspense. there is a reason why my story feels familiar A lot of this story is the explanation about time travel. I don’t think it works out, it just goes on a little too long. The funny metaphor about it gets a chuckle the first time, but isn’t funnier the second time. I like the idea; playing with the effects and mental state of time-merged minds, of layering foreknowledge to the point of toxicity. There’s good stuff there, and hints at characters, but not enough time perhaps spent on it. There’s a bit too much drag from the exposition, and the events are too vague to really hook. The ending saves this; I admired the moxie of that ending. It does some work, and had me laughing. I hope it got some folks to glance. It’s a great gambit; I just need the parts leading up to it to hook us and drag us along a bit better. Terwaworld I have three words for you; just three words: Cum cargo ship. Okay, I have more than that. First, an explanation. When an American says “Europa,” they mean this: [img]https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330035054/figure/fig1/AS:710605220630538@1546432895897/Europa-in-front-of-Jupiter-photographed-by-Voyager-1-on-March-3rd-1979.jpg[/timg] Other context clues: ice wrapped around hidden oceans. I guess you interpreted it as “Europe,” which, uh, fair enough I guess. Moving on. You got a bunch of bonus words. I don’t think you should have used so many. The story rambled, especially in the middle. There’s “as you know” in a few places (”Your Institute developed ratwe…”) and mumbling about the science behind a fake thing, and honestly, the more the story talks about the fake science, the more I roll my eyes and feel the urge to skim. Zoe and Ureos don’t have a lot going for them as characters; they feel more like symbolic decision points: new world or old. It would be better if they felt like both. It would be better if there was a real decision. The revelation ‘the old world was bad’ from Ureos didn’t do much for me, having lived in this world. There’s an interesting idea behind “actually, the apocalypse is an improvement,” but this story doesn’t quite touch it; the alternative is cancerous mutants, so obviously that’s bad. There’s extended action with water-zombies, and Zoe splashing around, but I don’t know that does anything to make the story better. The last thing I’ll say is: I love that ending. The visual of Zoe floating on a puddle of water amidst a different kind of water, slowly expanding out like a halo around her—that’s powerful. That’s loving great. I just want a strong story preceding it to make that moment really shine. Cavern You’re in luck: I have a lot to say about this story. Not nice things, mind you; it’ll be hard to read. I’m going to excoriate your words. But if you read it all and take the critique to heart, your flayed soul will re-emerge stronger. An important note, before we begin: One of the hardest parts of writing is that you have all the context of the story in your head, and your brain assumes other people will pick up what you mean, but they don’t: They only read what you actually say. Let’s talk about what you have: Characters: Characters are the reason most people keep reading a story. Your story doesn’t have any. The drone operator is unnamed, and utterly emotionless. Even when confronting what I will refer to as the MYSTERIOUS BLACK SHADOW-ORB, we get no emotional reaction from him; no hint of nerves, no shock when encountering an unexpected event, no words spoken, just the unbiased actions of an Extremely Rational Human Male, which is the only thing I can tell you about him at all. This means the reader has no one to relate to, which means all you have left to carry the story are the prose, setting, and plot. Setting: There’s a lot missing here. When does this story take place? Somewhat close to modern times, I can tell, because you mention roombas and the drone is mostly self-guided (though I’m going to tell you that when the story claims that a self-driving drone is anything like a roomba, I don’t believe it for a moment. Where does the story take place? An ocean. That doesn’t narrow things down much. Worse, I don’t have the context of anything else. This guy appears to be up on a boat all on his own—exploring marine canyons to the depth where bioluminescence is common. How? Him and what budget? What kind of ship is he on? The story tells me that he has ‘untrained eyes,’ that he doesn’t know the names of fishes even, that he’s not an expert in any of this stuff—then why the hell is he out there!? Ocean ships are expensive! Anything exploring significant depths is expensive! This doesn’t make me wonder about the deep mysteries of the story, by the way. It makes me disbelieve that the story knows what it’s talking about; I don’t buy for a moment that this is real, because it doesn’t connect with anything I know about ocean research, deep sea exploration, and programming—which is not a lot, mind you, but enough to know this ain’t it. Plot: A man pilots a drone down to an undiscovered cavern, encounters something weird, and leaves. There is not a lot there; no symbolism, no themes, no characters, no tension. This story meandered at an excruciating pace while nothing happened, and then when something did happened, nothing resulted. There is no plot. The interesting thing that might have happened was the encounter with the MYSTERIOUS BLACK SHADOW-ORB, but you remove it from the story before anything interesting can happen. You don’t give the reader a reason to care about what is happening or why, and do not indicate that anything you’re saying is of any import. This leaves you with one recourse: Dazzle them with your prose. Prose: I’m going to point out a few examples of where the sentence level writing goes wrong: “Rising over the ridge, the drone kicked up a small amount of silt from its twin fans as it advanced towards the canyon ahead.” I’m imagining a helicopter drone at this point. When you mention he’s three miles above, that gives me pause, but only three sentences in do I suddenly need to change everything I just imagined to underwater, and that’s jarring. When you say “glow in the dark fish, or maybe a giant squid,” I can tell this story doesn’t know much about the ocean its exploring. You ramble on about the capabilities of the sea-Roomba a lot, and all of that can be cut: If you don’t need exposition, get rid of it. A comment on “…the pilot felt it was important to have an accurate scan. “ and “The hard part was going to be figuring out what it was, and if he could get something out of it.”—the character should have had an interesting motivation established, but we don’t even get that he’ll get paid out of this. He doesn’t even know why he’s out here, I expect because you might not know either. He finds a vague topological feature, but this is boring as anything because the reader doesn’t know why it’s important. You have to give the reader a taste of the mystery, just a little hit so they know what the good poo poo is like so you can hook ‘em. "but after a moment he realized he thought was colorful static was in fact an almost hypnotic pattern of swirling particles, cascading in and around each other in a whirl of scintillation" is harmful to read; Try something like this:"He realized it wasn't static on the screen, but scintillating particles, swirling and rippling in the current. After awhile, he blinked. How long had he been staring at it?" Because "hypnotic pattern" and "whirl" say the same thing; colorful static and particles... scintillation and swirling/cascading all repeat an image, and the order it's introduced is all wrong. I don't normally comment on passive voice, because it has a place, but, "Slight resistance was felt... this was attributed to the cloud..." it is all over the place and it is noticeable and distracting. You also just have formatting errors (like a missing paragraph break) and inconsistencies like: Third and 4th, then fifth. And typos like "It's arm" (it’s is only ever short for ‘it is’). Overall, this adds up to create a story that is painful to read, and has no redeeming features. I strongly recommend you read some of the HMs this week (or actual, published stories) with an eye for how they establish characters, plot, and setting. Then try and bring something from what you read to the next story you write—and there better be a loving ‘nother one, because I didn’t write this all so you could quit and learn nothing. So, Amon There’s a lighthearted tone to the story, which indicates an attempt at humor. Certainly, there’s no gravitas to anything that happens, but the levity doesn’t land for me, it just makes me not take the story seriously. There’s a bunch of biblical references to tell me the setting, but these don’t feel like historical people or like the story really knows the setting. Lines like “A boat… like the Egyptians, and the Phoenicians” doesn’t feel like something anyone in ancient Jericho would say. Then, there’s the positioning of the army outside of Jericho: ‘They’ll invade one day.’ Uh, is this a city under siege? It sure doesn’t feel like it. And ‘one day’ is not ‘tomorrow,’ but yeah, they invaded the very next day. But these didn’t feel like people dealing with an army threatening their town. The prose doesn’t sell the chaos of a city being sacked. I also don’t buy Malek building a boat big enough to fit multiple people and just, by himself, flipping it from his roof. There’s not really a tension either: everyone says ‘no the boat is a silly idea’ and then immediately ‘alright well they invaded I guess we’ll go on that boat’; the characters don’t feel in danger. Instead of getting any emotional resonance as people beg to be saved, we just get it breezed by. I hate to say “show, don’t tell,” but—sometimes. Yeah. It’s also just absurd logistics: A bunch of random dudes are carrying this boat a half-mile overland to a river. Then, they don’t even use that boat for sailing the ocean, like the story said earlier, but they trade it for cows. So, uh, how did they finally end up with a boat? Well, that’s glossed over. Then the ending goes “by the way that guy totally did sail the Mediterranean, later, offscreen, so please don’t DQ this, anyways, we’re on our way back to get all my friends (also just out of the frame).” This dodged the spirit of the prompt hard, and avoided any pathos or doing or saying anything interesting. You can thank the other judges it didn’t DM, as I thought it was about as attractive as a rotting pile of murex shells left over from a batch of Tyrian purple and still don’t understand what redeeming qualities they saw in it.
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May 13, 2021 04:48
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Week 457 - Frontier Crits Part 2: The Second Part Anyone new or struggling this week, I’m going to recommend you read the stories that won/HM’d and their crits, because I think it’s instructive to understand how and why they worked. Chasing This is a story about trying to find joy and fulfillment in life. The character’s real life—an experience in our modern corporate dystopia and the ennui of boring routine—is deeply unsatisfying, and so they seek that through dreams. Many people will find the description of the dissatisfaction relatable, though their escape mechanisms might vary. A strong first section. The second section is weaker; paragraphs 1 and 2 sort of ramble a bit. The third paragraph (”He’d look back…”) is better, as it starts to play with this idea of the dream world being vivid and the real this fuzzy vagueness, a reversal that is interesting and could be further developed. The third section has some interesting descriptions, and an important character moment, as he reaches a low. I would further develop the idea between the colorful world and the gray one, the real and the dream. It feels like the fourth paragraph plays with the idea of a relationship tempting the character away from his dreams, but there’s not much there. I’m not entirely sure the reason for the fourth section; perhaps emphasizing his disconnect from all community and connection? The end is a strength; in the end, happiness will not come from lucid dreaming, and the character has fallen far enough that they can’t imagine what it is they really want and is stumbling through life, with dream and reality blurred together. It feels like the story is about two things; this gray death of hope, that the character cannot even dream it, and the mixing/contrast of dreams and reality. I think there are places where the story can narrow its focus on these things and make each line serve these themes. If I could give you these stars… There is a lot this story does right. The opening line is great, but the story also plays with this expectation; it’s not actually about a breakup, but giving up being together in order to better fulfill each other’s dreams. It’s the definition of bittersweet, this inevitable tragedy. Lines like ““You would’ve wanted me to go,” you said. No hesitation. That still makes me smile. I’m glad you knew me well enough to say that” and the ending are great at selling the strength of their relationship. There’s lots of little emotional punches, and the story explores a classic idea in scifi: The massive distances between the stars requiring anyone exploring them to disconnect from the people they knew and the world they came from. It’s the knowledge of the scifi genre where the story struggles. The prompt specifies “Andromeda, once 2.5 million light years distant”; to explore it, this either implies 4.5 billion years have passed and the galaxies are colliding, or your society has ships that can exceed the speed of light (or get around it) by a lot, or something weird happened and Andromeda is suddenly a lot closer (in which case, someone would surely comment). There’s places in the story that imply the story doesn’t know this: “We’d be gone for what felt like a few years, but on Earth, we’d be gone for a century at least.” (This also contradicts the early line “Not for a few million years”). The ship can’t be traveling fast because he can look out a window and see “the countless stars and drifting moons….” And they’re going slow enough to investigate the exoplanets they pass. And there’s lines like “it was a recon mission,… so intelligence wasn’t important” that stick in the craw. That’s all easy to fix; if you edit it, the prompt can get chucked in the bin, so you can narrow the scope of the exploration but still keep the critical separation of the characters, and the story is mostly solid. If you’re going to write it as sci-fi, though, you have to give the genre it’s due; alternatively, you can take it into full don’t-give-a-gently caress land like Obliterati’s piece. Either way, it was an enjoyable read; thanks for the words. How To Navigate The Remains of Ross-248-b This story does it what it loving wants and it knows it. There’s a confidence to it that tells the reader to sit down, and if they don’t get it, maybe they’re a fuckin idiot who needs to reread it until they do? There’s an implied depth to it, and so the story also acts as a puzzle. It also knows its own setting; it’s not sci-fi, it’s just in space; it doesn’t care about technology, and so it doesn’t waste time explaining those parts because they don’t matter. I like lines like, “This is where you’ll learn if you chose your captain well. Good ones flip and burn, match velocities, and make new maps.” It doesn’t really explain, but it does imply, and the jargon makes it beyond reproach. Even the most pedantic of sci-fi nerds cannot possibly find a crack to dig into. Lines like “It is tumbling through space at half the speed of light. It orbits a cooling fragment of a shattered world. It’s yellow.”—that’s fuckin’ great, the contrast. The “theories” bit tells us that no one really gets what happened, so it’s okay if they don’t. What’s this story about? Well I’m not to sure, and that’s both good and bad. The impenetrability can also keep a reader from getting to close to it. I think what happened is this: an alien planet exploded (duh), and the remains are heading toward the solar system, but a piece of Earth, displaced, perhaps sucked into a wormhole, perhaps from alternate realities colliding, was part of that. That piece of Earth, including the museum and train, was an integral part of the narrator’s kid’s childhood. The narrator regrets the parent he was, and advises his kid not to look to the shattered past, but the future I like the ending; it’s a parent trying to prevent his kid from following his path, trying his best, even if he knows it wasn’t as good as it should have been. That’s relatable, even in the context of blurred reality and space trains. If you want the reader to know what’s going on, you’ll need to clarify. If you want them to wonder, this story’s on the right track. Keep Sailing South First, I’m going to acknowledge that I think you were trying to break from convention; these aren’t Spanish or Portuguese explorers, as one might immediately consider when seeing the prompt (having been indoctrinated with the classic Western history narrative of the age of exploration). However, what the setting is is less clear. What time period is this taking place in? I can’t actually tell; not from the terms (kingdom; vague) or the technology on the ship (sail and a very small crew). What are they looking for? I can Google “Ge’ez” and get that this puts them as either setting out from or having previously traded with the Eritrea/Ethiopia area and probably setting out well before 1200 AD. But you need something that’s going to situate the reader in when they are, and referencing ‘gold coins’ and nondescript items (and refusing to describe the ship or clothing or context of the events) leaves them wondering. There’s also a lack of characterization. I get very little sense of who these people are, what their desires are, or what they believe. Next, the voice of these characters feels off; you use a lot of modern terms rather than historical ones. "Something unique to bring back home" is weak; "The king/queen demands a tribute worthy of their name. Do you think they funded this expedition for colored berries?" would build some setting and context. And—why the hell is the expedition bringing back berries anyways? Gonna agree with Kabur here that these dudes are morons. And people weren’t going to be dumb enough to eat random berries they found (mostly poisonous). Your description of the berries is also weak, and emblematic of the vague nature of almost all the descriptions in this story. You’re not even going to tell me what color the berries are? “He’s been weakened by some kind of affliction,” is vague; try “He tried to hide his shaking and the fever,” and then maybe think about the context: Ancient people usually understood enough about disease to know you didn’t just let someone with the plague keep running around. What’s the crew’s reaction? So many descriptions in this story are vague. "Some kind of metal"--lazy! How many metals does the older historical world have? Bronze. Tin. Iron. That's basically it. This story needs an editing pass: "They do not speak neither our language nor Greek.” This also has some really jarring tense shifts;"I've managed to buy one..." "They also had some primative tools..." This feels like it might be improved by being diary entries. "The language barrier" is such a modern term it feels out of place. Also, historical people not being okay with abduction and slavery is, sadly, a bit rare. And there's too little about the characters. Accusations of mutiny and "my father will hear of this!" (okay Malfoy) don't have the context of the time or situation. Too much takes me out of the story. The ending doesn’t really resolve anything, and I still don’t even understand what they were looking for. “Something” is too vague; historical expeditions had a purpose beyond ‘just gonna see what’s there.’ By adding context and specifics, you’ll place the reader in the world, rather than wondering when and where they are (or waiting until the penultimate line to let them know they originated from Mosylon, which no one is going to know about without Googling it). To summarize: Remember to develop your characters. They should have motivations. Descriptions should be specific and help develop the setting. Make sure to include a plot. Supersymmetry Alright, I’m gonna tell you what I told the other sea-based username: I have a lot to say about this, and it ain’t nice stuff, but after you read it you’ll emerge stronger. I don’t know how you tell if a shark is stronger. Bulging fins? Anyways: The story can’t help but repeatedly inform readers that it doesn’t understand how science works. You start okay: we’re at the LHC, you mention electrons and supersymmetry, but it falls apart as soon as Guy Prime meets Guy Secundus. You have to understand. These are physicists. They’re fuckin’ nerds. They’re not going to punch each other as a dream-check. This would be the most exciting thing to possibly happen to them: they’re going to want to analyze it, and discuss the physics, and discuss the implications. They have entire different realities to compare! That’s exciting! That’s why they’re at CERN! These sound like lazy office workers, and one is entirely bored by it, and the other is like ‘man, my reality-clone sure is crazy lol.’ "Okay smarty pants" --definitely a thing a grown adult with a PhD in physics would say having breached another dimension. I don’t buy the characters, I don’t buy their reactions, and therefore I don’t buy any of what happens next. Why does Guy Prime start lying? And so implausibly? They’re in a secure facility—random brothers are not just walking in! And there’s no reason for deception! “this is a remarkable opportunity to study the fundamental differences between universes” explains what should be happening, and the CHIEF SCIENCE DIRECTOR of the facility that ALREADY INSTALLED THE MACGUFFIN THAT PREVENTS WORMHOLES FROM FORMING (THAT THEY KNOW ABOUT) is not going to skeptical of a wormhole displacing people because they INSTALLED THE TECH TO STOP THAT FROM HAPPENING and the only way they know about it is because they must have, at some point, gotten the data to prove it! The story doesn’t know itself and it’s infuriating. So anyways, apparently reality can’t abide by two people from the same reality for some reason, which I’m sure is based on that wacky theory that popped up when the LHC was just starting where people were like “haha maybe it’ll never start because the universe is preventing it because [thing]” which was asinine, but sure, there’s your plot I guess. Everyone is pretty blase about these disasters and an person from another dimension running around, so it doesn’t feel real, just like the story is churning through its plot because it knows it needs to get to the end. Happily, physics is simple enough that Guy Secundus can just explain how a Schwarzchild limiter works in a few minutes and solve everything. In summary: Your characters don’t feel real from a combination of their actions and dialogue. The story doesn’t sell itself as plausible, and the demands of the plot rush the reader through events on a railroad that leaves no time for discussions, reactions, or emotions. The First Four Frontiers This story feels like a sci-fi tribute, and it’s really impressive how much it manages to cram in given its size. We’ve got Mark One way the story is able to able to manage this is quick setting jumps; as silly as pointing out ‘notice the author just told us the place and time’ is, there were a few stories that could have benefited from that this week. Lines like “…even with input from the World Climate Council through laser transmission” and “Then the radical Preservations are out of the coalition?” advance the plot and also tell us critical details about the setting, hinting at how the world has changed. It also gives depth to the world, as does the political intrigue implicit in the last scene; these are clearly people living in a world with different motivations. The story is dense with information about setting, character, motivations, and themes. There’s an intellectual aspect to the story; thinking about solving the mysteries the characters are engaged with, exploring what galactic politics might look like (with the Axu’s philosophy and the Scourge’s), and exploring what the human reaction might be to it all (with Peter and Ng). The weakness of the story is that it’s dense and fast-paced enough that there’s not really room for emotions and really feeling attached to any of the characters. They come and go too fast. The story’s ending leaves an open frontier, which is thematically justified, but perhaps unsatisfying. Even that sense of longing for closure is not as strong as it could be; many stories this week had a solid ending, but not the setup to support it, while this one suffers the opposite. It might be the scope of the story was too ambitious, and it might be better to just focus on the parts of the world that the wormholes swapped; or perhaps, the story could be expanded. Obviously, though, the density, structure, flow, and interesting parts of the story brought it to the well deserved win.
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May 15, 2021 18:42
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Tosk posted:The Necromancer Crit of interprompt story The Necromancer The first noticeable thing: You use non English alphabetic characters in the story, including for the main character’s name. I cannot even begin to know how to pronounce them, and I’m going to tell you your average English reader isn’t either. When your story gets to bolded section, I read it as “Introduction of _____ to the ______" and it means nothing. It’s a big distractor, and the fact that your reader cannot read the words out loud is a problem; and what purpose does it serve? In your second post, you refer to it as “it worked as a similar device.” Doing what? Similar to what? The things you write in a story should serve a purpose, the benefits to the story should outweigh the costs. You use an archaic voice in the story. This is fine, but again comes with a cost: As you achieve this, you completely omit dialogue. This makes it hard to put the reader in a scene; the entire thing is “tell,” with no “show.” Again, that can work, but you should be aware this keeps the reader distant, and in your story’s case, makes reading it something of a chore. I don’t give a poo poo about this boy or the father, and what reason have you given me to? The prose fits the archaic style, but there’s a reason I don’t read old books with that style a lot: I find the style difficult to read, and my eyes start to glaze over. The italicized part is especially onerous; try reading it out loud. Take something like: “They emerged from deeper passages, to teach us in the otherwise sepulchral stillness of temples become tombs the secrets they had plundered from the gods and from death... and as knowledge is passed from father to son, we inherited the Art from others who had pursued it longer and to greater heights than we could ever imagine.” Good god, I’ll need a necromancer to reanimate my eyeballs after beholding that. You said you know your prose is purple. You may wish to make an effort to try writing with more simplicity and clarity and see what kind of writing that produces. Your reader is under no obligation to read what you have written. Had I not committed to reading your piece and critiquing it, you would have lost me in the italicized section. This is compounded by your introduction. Your hook is that there’s some prophesy. Okay. Then what? What is this story about? The kid is a necromancer. Fine; that’s vague. Why am I reading this story? In a novel, you have time to durdle around. In a flash or short, you need to hook your reader faster. Take a look at how flerp, Thranguy, and Obliterati introduced their stories last week. Think about how those lines hook the reader, and how they also inform the reader what the rest of the story is about. Fully through the first section of your story, I still am not sure what yours is getting to. The italicized section is entirely worldbuilding/backstory, and I think it should all be cut. Anything you need from it should be incorporated into a scene or dialogue exchange. You have some good lines. For example: “When it became clear that these terrifying strangers would not leave without his son, he brandished his axe at them and is buried now beneath the beech tree, beside a man that stole a goat.” A lot of your story rambles, but this doesn’t. It’s a quick punch, and it tells us the love the father has for his son and the brutality of the empire and its servants, as well as the justice system of the rural society. “For this he drew life from the fields, and over the years the earth grew barren there; as a price for himself, he exacted seven years from the life of every child, and this he collected in the crystal hanging from his neck in the shape of an icosahedron, most ideal of geometries for the suspension of ethereal currents.” This is something I think the story should delve more into: The cost of necromancy, and how that exchange affects the land and people. If you turn the story away from the strict ‘tell only,’ you might have an exchange between the necromancer and a family he’s helping, and give us the reactions of the people. As it is, this does wordbuilding and characterizes the protagonist as ruthless. Consider, though: What if the story was mostly about the cost of necromancy? Years drained away, fields bloom but then are barren, fertility stolen—there’s interesting ideas there to play with, and how different people might react to it, but currently, your story mostly just mentions these tidbits in passing to no real effect. The actual conflict you settled on, a hero fighting the necromancer, appears suddenly at the end of the story with no foreshadowing (despite your reference to prophesy). But instead of having an ending that focuses on the result (dead lands for leagues and leagues! What does this lead to?), it’s just: oh, he won, the prince looted the sword, and he keeps going around raising the dead. You end the story at the grave of the son’s father, which should be an emotional moment for the reader (since I think you mean to show the inhumanity and disconnect of the son), but there’s nothing; it’s breezed over. The ending should hit like an iron rib, but instead, we get a wet noodle. To summarize: You successfully adopt an archaic style, but it comes at the cost of ease of reading. Your characters are unrelatable, and a reader will find little way to connect with them or feel any emotions because the story keeps them at a distance. The story is bloated with unneeded worldbuilding, and the reader is lost, not sure of what the story is about (a problem only compounded by the obfuscating nature of the prose). There are, however, solid tidbits here that can be expanded on. I hope that your next story considers these critiques.
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May 16, 2021 17:34
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Punked Out 2: Do you feel lucky: Week 458: Critpunk: The Crittening Untitled Dieselpunk First crit: title your story. That’s prime real estate you’re wasting that could be used to set up a theme, character, expectation, etc. Second crit: Characters. There’s not much there. He’s a discarded student who had some bad stuff happen. Time is spent on what he knows how to do, but we don’t really understand his history, personality, etc., and mostly that’s because he interacts with environments, but not other characters. He has a goal, and he does it, but we need more. Setting, you have, and it’s both diesel and punk. It’s heavy-handed: Big corporations sucking up homes. Acid rain. Diesel smoke everywhere. But it’s present and obvious. The biggest thing is you have a lot of long rambling worldbuilding going on, and most of it doesn’t help us get to know our character any better, or develop themes or anything interesting. Spend less time on the history of atomics in relation to dieselworld; it doesn’t matter. Who this character is and why they decide to die for their cause is better. Though society’s ills rarely have a magic one-shot solution like the unnamed protagonist’s magic hydrocarbon-eating bacteria that he got after a week of research (lol) that he tosses into a fuel center like a hobbit chucking a ring into Mt. Doom; that felt a bit trite. How to Change Stone into Bread Alchemypunk This story has the alchemy, and it’s got a pair of The Faceless Artist Artpunk Heavy-handed is the hand that wields the paintbrush; there’s not a lot of subtle strokes in your introduction, and both the intro and the middle sections are your weakest parts. They meander, and I would cut at them relentlessly until you get the barest pieces from them you need. Certainly you don’t need the hustler, and you can give us the setting and the world politics we need in fewer words. The end is a fun bit, with a fun twist of a betrayal that speaks at the ruthlessness and corruption a genre like this demands. Jacques is about an inch deep as a character until he finally gets a moment at the end where he gets to make a punk choice. More time in the story needs to bring out who he (and his nasty master) are so that the betrayal actually hurts the reader. What does Jacques have to lose? Where does he come from? One infers CR is clever, since he’s got a bunch of rebels in his pocket and is just using them, but again, the story doesn’t explore much of this. It also feels like you need to get serious with that paintbrush: For a story about art, I didn’t get the powerful visuals I’d like to see. The red canvas is a start, but I need more vivid imagery. Heaven's Door Biopunk Monolith means “one rock” and it’s a big rock, not a living planet. (The secondary definitions are figurative, and refer to social structures, so your world-organism doesn’t fit there either). Okay, on to the biggest thing: This is a LOT of exposition. A loving lot. And there’s also no established purpose to any of it yet; why do I care? You endlessly wax on about the setting and slam down history book chapters, and so by the time I even meet a single character (and character is a strong word for Sil-K1, who not developed with much), I’m already rolling my eyes and falling asleep. You can cut huge chunks out of this and lose nothing. Onto the plot: Dunno what it is. This is partially a character problem: I don’t know your character’s motivations. I’m not sure why the clans are meeting, or what it’s about. Even the dialogue is just an excuse for more exposition on boring history. When you finally tell us about the discovery of the weird thing, I still am lost, because despite the previous exposition, they’re on a [weird object]; I don’t know what’s normal and what’s not. Flatly put: This isn’t biopunk; there’s no rebels, and the focus is on the setting, not the bio tech; it’s a neat setting (as a note, if you want to see this setting done right, read The Stars Are Legion by Kameron Hurley), but clarity is big problem here. There’s some sort of ‘revelation’ at the end, but it makes no sense. There’s something interesting buried here, but I couldn’t begin to tell you what it is or what you were trying to do. Warp and Weft Loompunk There’s a lot of good stuff here. The spinning wheel and weaves of light conjure up mythologies and the themes that come with them. The story is also quick to establish its purpose. It’s a bit on the nose predicting the trend of society, and it feels like it simplifies the industrialization of England as a process of widespread acceptance, rather than the widespread resistance and brutality it entailed. It’s not very punk, though, yeah, they are rebelling against the system. Still, it has strong characters speaking meaningfully, and the solution doesn’t come easily. I like the image of woven solidarity in the end. Dig Deep For Victory Fungalpunk This is the good poo poo; it’s brutal and dystopian, and our rebel protagonist is trapped, with no real good choices. She is well characterized with her motivations, but we also get her son, with his own motivations and experiences. The metaphors are clear, but not overwrought. There’s also a lot of solid description and setting that helps fuel the feel of creeping towards the despair that lands at the end. Welcome Friends Open Cuddlepunk A lot of solid moments here that hit the aesthetic. The story doesn’t spend much time contrasting this cuddle-rebellion to the reality, just a few lines and Mallet’s experience with his boss, but the reader probably is familiar enough with the alternative from their own life experience, as the story’s world sort of assumes The Present But More. It’s an interesting job to make a cuddle-hacker brutal, and the twists in the story are fun, with the protagonist jolted around. I get a sense of Callie; the boss is an archetype, so not deep but serves his story function. I do think there’s more to be done with Mallet; he’s not much like a cop, and is the decision at the end really a decision for him? We don’t see that cop side, just his sort of pathetic history that shows why he’s so attracted to the cuddle-side. Still, this nails the ‘punk and has other solids, like dialogue and a good beat at the end. Underground Resistance Arcanepunk This does what several stories this week did, though it does it a bit better than the alchemypunk or the diselpunk ones. It does feel cliche though; this and the examples listed have a predictability to them, and not quite as original a spin as the high end of the week. The world is black and white in the sides, and a bit on the nose, though you certainly can’t deny it’s got the corporate dystopia part of the ‘punk genres. The characters are there, but they’re not quite memorable. It’s hard for me to put a finger exactly on what is missing, because I don’t think it’s just one thing, sort of a combination of a lot of factors that would need to be strengthened a notch. I do wonder what kind of story we would have seen if you’d started with that low moment where she shoots her husband and boss, rather than making that the ending. Playing with the story structure so it’s not so linear, or the protagonist at her lowest might take things in a more interesting direction. the future is closer than you think Atompunk There’s a lot of exposition here, and as much talking, but it doesn’t feel like dialogue. There’s a metaphor the story tries for: the fissioned atom, the fissioned people, but too much here bounces off me. I don’t really get a sense of the characters, and therefore I’m not sympathetic to their relationship woes. There’s too much abstraction in the story, I think. I also didn’t really feel like this was properly ‘punk, and didn’t get a good sense of the setting either. There needs to be something more concrete and visceral for the reader to hold on to. Untitled Knitpunk It’s a functional story, but extremely predictable, and there’s not really a reason the grandma can’t tell the kid what she’s doing to shut him up earlier rather than later when she does anyways. I knew exactly where the story would go after the first section, and then it did. That steals away all the tension; even when a German soldier is interrogating them, there’s no tension—but there should be. It’s a spy thriller, right? Then it needs to feel like the characters are in danger! Or the plot needs some twists. The kid as a character doesn’t really land, because they’re a mix of little kid and adult. One thing you can do to get a better sense of how kids talk is do a search for “student talk” and look for classroom videos. Kids are hard to get right, but they certainly aren’t saying “Don’t you want revenge? They took your own daughter away” at like age, like, 8 or whatever. The other characters don’t feel as off, but they’re not particularly deep either, they’re very much archetypes. I also don’t feel it hits the genre; it’s not very ‘punk, and knitting is just a thing that happens, rather than an integral part of the setting or theme. New Beginnings Ghostpunk There’s a couple of typos, which indicates you might not have reread this. Certainly, it feels like there’s a lot to revise. Where’s the “punk” part? We really don’t really need all the worldbuilding. There’s no story here, just a long ramble about inventing a better ghost-battery. I can’t really say a lot more than that, because you’re not giving me much to work with. There’s no dialogue. No conflict. I have some homework for you for your next story: Two characters who have opposed interests must have a conversation, and at the end of that conversation, something important to one of them must have changed. Cinderella...but with swords Swordpunk This story knows how to have fun. The voice was distinct and memorable, and it gives a good energy and character to our narrator. It also lands a lot of humor, which is a tough thing to do. The fast pace also carries the reader through the story breezily. Because the story pulls from Cinderella, it gets to take a lot of shortcuts that keep it lighter, but it does miss out on giving much depth to other characters. We get a bit: Gareth the chivalrous, Mordred the creep, lines like “does the girl come with the factory” / “sure why not” (nice), but it’s mostly light strokes. Perhaps delving more into the acidic villainy of the step-nemesi would make the ending more cathartic. I also might spend a bit more time on 15) with, say, the step-mom’s bawling or some other nudge to her victory, though the last line is funny. If you need me to go through and point out your best lines, there’s a bunch, but I can do that. I suspect, though, you already have a good idea of which are which. Anyways, thanks; it was a fun read.
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May 19, 2021 04:57
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In.
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May 29, 2021 03:55
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Cascadaria, the Where the Fires Died ~3125 words You have come to Cascadaria, as many before you have. If you came over the mountain passes, and the skies were clear, you must have seen Mount Raither, smoke drifting from the high crater at its summit, though the crater was not as large as you’d imagined from the stories you’d heard. But as you saw the glistening ice crowning it, you marveled. Real snow, white and gleaming, this far south? This close to the Great Deserts? You might have seen it, and its cousin Mount Ba’kier, if you braved the churning currents and bursting squalls of the Salish Sea. If you were lucky, you saw the greater whales breaching those gray waters and are now blessed with fortune. Either way you arrived, you’ve seen the ruins. Coasts and islands full of ruins, and the blasted towers of unfathomable size lying prone. Great stone roads, perhaps once conduits to distant lands. You’ve heard the gulls now, mourning. The legends say God’s Fire died here, but you should not seek it. Why You Came Perhaps you heard that the lands are fertile and untouched. Far from it—this place tasted the old wars and the great heat, just as the others. But it, unlike other lands, was reborn. The Priests of Climaton will tell you the land is kept cool and wet through a trick of fluid dynamics, the cold arctic currents, and the shelter of those high mountains. The Lushootseed clans know better; a Duwamish elder who has carried their chain of memories down from time immemorial will tell you that the great curse that was put on the land was broken, and the land transformed. If you’ve seen the black and white orcas, their fins cutting through the bays, or the black and white eagles soaring above, you know that they carry the blessing of the red-touched fish. If you eat that sacred salmon, you must give thanks to its soul, or else the land will reject you; twice-cursed, you will find the blessings here turn to ash in your fingers, and all the green will fade to gray in your eyes. If building a peaceful life was your calling, you were right to come here. You will find work and rest in equal measure. If you’ve come to scour the old secrets from the ruins, you will regret waking the malevolent spirits that rest in their metallic hollows. There will be no rest for your spirit. Approaching the Grave of a Hundred Spires Past the emerald forests, along the coast, are the greatest ruins. Be warned again; you are not the first to seek fortune and lore here, and the people here are right when they tell you to leave the old ghosts lie. There is a name to this place, where millions of souls built toward the heavens, but no one here will speak it, lest they disturb the spirit of the one for who the city was named. As your sail-skiff clips along the waves, black fins may race you. Look below, and you will see more than their graceful forms; you will see parts of that once-great city. The waters are murky, but you will make out the shadowy forms of those buildings, still preserved by the waters. If you insist on pushing forward, you will want to stop at the town of Alki that rests on the northern point of the nearby island. It is easy to spot. Look for the bright-painted wooden statues along the coast. Most of the town is nestled inland, among pines and maples, neither new nor old. The ruins here have been picked clean, then buried under mulch. Take care to learn from the wisdom of the townsfolk here, for it is the grandfathers and grandmothers here that planted the trees you see, and it is in their children’s shade that you rest beneath. People of the Inside The Priest of Climaton, Joseon, is gnarled and old as the trees, but has a kind smile. He will ask if you know of the sacred science, and trades in both seeds and wisdom. No other currency means anything to him. The gardens of cultivars you see are his, as is the Sun Harvester Tower at the edge of town. He observes the sacred geometry of the world, and seeks blessed numbers. If you have a careful hand, you might find rare plants for him, and his arcane devices will grow it; you will see blooms that you have never seen, and colors that cannot be described. He can tell you which plants are medicines, and show you how to extract the blessed substances within them. But if you bring up the Grave of a Hundred Spires, he will cast his gaze to the east, and then slowly shake his head. He will tell you there is nothing worth finding there. The Elder of Alki, Sbahqua, is stern, but do not mistake her harsh tone for hostility. She is fair in trade and justice. You will know her by her straight, black hair, and the symbol she wears of the Great Blue Heron. And while she can mimic their call perfectly, as well as many other birds and beasts, the heron that perches on her shoulder is a simulacrum, part flesh and part machine. It does not need light to see, and should you make enemies of the People, it and the other simulacra will hunt you relentlessly. Did you think all the orcas in the Sound were flesh and blood? She is here for her people, her family, though, not you. Should you wish to join this family, you must show loyalty and care, and it must be you who learns the ways of the People, for she is too busy to baby the oft-transient outsiders that pass through Alki. Since you seek the Grave of a Hundred Spires, she has no time for you, though do not think she will not keep her eyes watching. Armaan is in charge of trading to the towns south of the island. Look for the young man with a smile, even when the rain is pouring down. He has a head for numbers, and has great dreams for building up Alki. There is great glory found in the monotony of weekly expeditions and planning buildings. Hm. But you seek greater treasures? Then he will send you away, even if he still smiles at the day. You will find Zahlra and Lagi minding the canoes. The two women are inseparable now, the wanderlust of their youths cured by each other. The former is thin and wiry, the latter you will know by her muscles. They can read the oceans like a book, and can tell you where distant islands are only from the swells of the seas. They know what map the stars show. The double-hulled canoe up on the drydock? They say Lagi sailed it across the Pacific, the first to use the new currents. She intended to return, but found peace here. Zahlra has the heart of an artist in her, and her brush keeps the canoes painted with the sinuous symbols of the Duwamish and the distant land of her ancestors. Together, they trade with the other islands, and sometimes travel as far as the Emerald Forest at the foot of the Olympic Mountains. But if you insist on seeking the Hundred Spires, you will take your own boats to that cemetery of concrete and steel, not theirs. They could navigate the strong current and treacherous artificial shoals with ease, but neither are fools. Old Winter stands at the edge of town like a statue, wearing his feathered cloak of many eyes. He does not sleep. The crows keep him company, and he will sing with the birds. If you treat him with kindness, he will tell you of the only person here who will help you on your ill-advised path. Only one person here will deal with seekers of that place: The Worm-Merchant. They are tolerated by the town because they have a deft hand with the pre-collapse artifacts. Joseon considers them a friend, though it is hard to say if the feeling is mutual. The Worm-Merchant trades in the relics from that place. They far older than their smooth face would have you believe; you cannot deceive the Worm-Merchant about the value of old devices, but you can be sure they will try to deceive you. Do you find the symbiote that crawls through their skull disturbing? Slithering steel, looping through that empty eye socket, coiling about their pale flesh. You should. The machines inside them that you hear whirring—there are more like it in the ruined city, and unlike these, they will mean you harm. But fine: Trade your knowledge of the past, trade your old treasures. The Worm-Merchant will tell you how to enter the deep places of that city, for a price. The Channel of the Drowned Path Now you must cross the channel, to the Grave of a Hundred Spires itself. This is the channel where Mount Raither’s fury once reached; the river still cuts at the lahars that it left behind. If you go south along it it, you will see where it gets its name. If the water is clear, you will see the great drowned causeways, and the submerged homes and buildings by its side. But you will not go south, not yet. The secrets of the spires still call to you. It is a shame you cannot ignore their siren call. There are more buildings beneath the water as you approach, some quite shallow, as the wrecked vessels tangled in the ruins will attest. If the water is murky, you should turn back. The worst of the creatures stay to the deep ocean, but the cold currents here are rich in the substances that the ocean creatures crave, and it is the days where storms churn up the sediment that the largest beasts come. Beware the spotted orange tentacles that crawl up the hulls of ships; the bane-squid do not like the surface, nor the daylight, but will brave them both for easy prey. If the tentacles blend in with the gray churning seas, you are probably dead already. The wraith-octopus is no legend, and far worse than its adaptive camouflage and venomous stingers is its mind. It is too-clever by far. So wait for the clear waters, and look for the black fins. If you have Sbahqua’s blessing, you will see both. If you scorned her, you will only see the former, and you should know that the seas change quickly here, and the squalls come fast through the sound. The Grave of a Hundred Spires Up close, you now understand the scale of the structures that rest here. If you feel a tingling up your spine, if you sense that you are being watched—you no doubt are. There are old things that rest here. You were warned already that the war came here as well. Much of once was has fallen to disrepair, and only the expertise of someone on par of the Worm-Merchant can salvage them. Other devices were build to last, and if you can understand the old magics that powered them, you can make your way into the deep places here. Beware the red eyes in the dark. Beware the sound of steel tapping in rhythm. Beware the storm-tides that seep into the hollows of the towers. Beware when the silence is total. Beware, beware, beware— But you will insist that you must know what lies in these ruins. Any archaeologist will find the truths of what happened in the war, and be able to piece together the baffling lives your predecessors led, and you should know that there are many old archives preserved inside those colossal towers. Salvagers too will need to go deeper in the ruins to find anything worth the trip; no doubt one of the Steel Worms now follows you, both your access key and invigilator. The oldest buildings were merely steel, glass and concrete. They have been picked clean of artifacts, or their contents turned to mulch by the storms and fauna of the island. If you simply want old steel for your weapons, there is plenty here, and the smiths back at Alki Point know well how to work it. The towers built just before war were made of arcane materials, and engineered so even as they toppled, the structures stayed intact, metal and stone somehow woven. Some few may be reachable by a deft climber. With grapples and strong rope, one might brave the perilous mazes of twisted beams and crumbling concrete. The real treasures, though, lie in the belly of the towers that have no windows, only thick doors that remain sealed. If the Steel Worm is with you, it will open them for you. Be ready to fight. Above you, a black-and-white eagle will circle on thermals, watching your progress. Hopefully, you did not think you could deceive Sbahqua about your purpose. The greatest treasures lie in the greatest spire. You will know it easily. It is the cylindrical one whose bottom third still stands, and even toppled, you know why they were called skyscrapers. Imagine what it looked like before it fell, and perhaps the legends that the old civilization pulled stars down from the sky is not so unbelievable. At the zenith of such a tower, they might only have had to reach out. You cannot climb the sheer outsides, and no arm, whether augmented or magic, can throw a grapple high enough. You will have to pass through the great door, and the Worm will be watching. There are basements too in that tower, though they often flood in a storm-tide, drowning the fools come to pick at their insides. The guardians of this place can be defeated, though you should be warned they will return. Some power regenerates them, and you are unlikely to find a way to keep them dead. There is plenty here to keep you and the townsfolk of Alki happy. Icy caverns with steel walls contain the frozen pieces of old plants and animals, the ones that came before the collapse. Devices full of prewar magic are here in great number. But it is not enough, is it? You want great secrets? You want power? Travel higher. Travel to the highest surviving floor. Crush the burning heart of the adamantine golem there. Slice your way through the steel spider swarms. At the top of the tower, a single ray of light will pierce through the thick ceiling, illuminating the circular chamber at its heights. There, you will see the murals. You will find the key, a pitch-black box that cannot be opened. You should leave both behind, and forget you saw them. They were hidden here for a reason. The Earth Rests Pray while you are exploring that the Earth continues its slumber. It likely will. But the land here is not always still. Once, it shook apart this city; it can do so again. If it wakes while you delve in the deep shadows, you will surely die. The Stolen Sun Legend says that there used to be a thousand suns, but humanity shackled them, until only one was left in the sky. If you found the old murals painted in the greatest spire, then you no-doubt learned of where one was imprisoned. The graveyard of that star still smolders. You should have turned back. Return to Alki If you merely brought old treasures to delight the Worm-Merchant, or the boxes of frozen organics for the Priest of Climaton, the town will welcome you back. If you come with steel scrap and a hull packed full of material, Armaan will thank you. If you have the Black Key, if you read the legends on those murals, they will not. Do not pass through Alki if you took those things, for they will kill you, and rightfully so. They know what you may awaken, and have a right to protect themselves and their lands. Where God’s Fires Died You know of the Old Empire; of course you do, every child knows. But you can’t understand its size. This place, for a hundred square miles, was an arm of a titanic warrior. It was part of the hundred-armed beast that enforced the will of that Empire; this one held one of the swords that contained one of the Fires of God. The runes, if you can read them, will call the sword the held Nu Kuleer, sealed by the sigil of a circle surrounded by six rays, three of shadow, three of light. That sword was forged from the heart of a star, plucked from God’s Heaven. Should you seek that relic of war, you will go south along the Channel of the Drowned Path, south along the Gray Road where the river cuts at the fossilized lahar, then west towards the setting sun. You will know you are close when the night has come, but the horizon glows with dusk-light. If you thought the dangers of the Hundred Spires were treacherous, if you thought the protectors of the last spire were great, they are nothing. Their war-sorcerers crafted terrible things. They will bite at you with teeth of fire. They will rip your limbs apart. The cloaks of invisibility, the spells of camouflage—they will not hide you from the eyes of the predators here, nor the eye above. Look for that star above that does not move. It is the gaze of their great warrior, who well jealously guard the power here. Your flesh will burn, either by beams of light or the smoldering fire that will poison your very spirit. Spirits will tear the very color from your eyes. The plants of this land are poison. If those things do not kill you, keep a close ear. The Worm-Merchant fears what may be unearthed here, and their agents will watch you with great interest. Sbahqua does not fear what lies here, no; but she knows of it. If you are not torn apart by the mystic machines in front of you, then it may be silent simulacra from behind. They would be right to kill you, to seize that key and drown it. The fires that died here should not be reignited. You should have turned back.
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May 31, 2021 00:59
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in. give me my GOT DAM BIRD
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Jul 7, 2021 20:39
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Lawyers In Space: The Deadbeat Space Dad, or How To Get Child Support From The Organic Metasapience Orbiting A Black Hole 1196 words Jiiana Lum is with her lawyer, Jain Jolson, en route to the nearby black hole when the trouble begins. Or rather, intensifies, since all the preceding bureaucratic nonsense was certainly trouble. Jiiana has been granted the judicial-frigate Full Court Service, by judge’s order for extraordinary circumstances in a proceeding, thanks in no part to the heroic efforts of Jain Jolson. Ms. Jolson set the Federation record for Most Class L2 Forms Accurately Filled Out In 24 Hours. The attached Witness (an AI running the Full Court Service), currently using a cybernetic sparrow as its avatar for reasons that are unrelated to any of these events, is the first to spot the problem. “SHIP!” it tweets at incredible volume, and indeed, blocking them a mere three parsecs away is a ship of unknown class and allegiance. “poo poo!” parrots Leon Lum, Jiiana’s toddler (strapped into a regulation child seat), who is still unable to differentiate between “t” and “p” sounds due to the developmental limitation of ‘being two.’ Then, “What’s poo poo, mommy?” “Comes out of a butt,” Jiiana says, which sends Leon giggling. “Ms. Jolson, what’s your recommended course of action?” Ms. Jolson frowns. “The indicted defendant and his coparty have formally denied having military vessels of any kind, using the court’s definition of ‘military vessel,’ which is quite encompassing. We should send a formal request for ID.” She pauses. “I wish you hadn’t brought the kid.” Jiiana sighs. “Can you prep the form?” “Already filled out. Signed and--” Ms. Jolson points to the bird. “WITNESSED!” it squawks, flapping its tiny wings aggressively. The computer makes a “ding!” noise. Message away. Meanwhile, Jiiana says, “Hey Leon, how do you feel about daycare?” Leon’s face immediately falls. “Norobottoocolddon’tlikenonono want mommy no robot!” he says, and then starts crying. “That’s why,” Jiiana says. “I’ll spend less on the inevitable therapist this way. Leon! No daycare. Do you want candy? Red or blue?” “RED!” shouts Leon. “Indoor voice, please. Oh poo poo, we’re getting a transmission back.” “poo poo!” Leon says, face already sticky with his automatically delivered red candy. “Natkin tease!” Leon, being two, has trouble talking without exclamation marks. Jiiana hands him a wet towel. Ms. Jolson gets a grim look. “Well, it tried to pack a virus into that transmission, so any court will recognize the upcoming conflict as clear self defense--” “WITNESSED!” the sparrow shrieks again. “--but it also sent its origin history, which was a seed-system of autonomous drones. No official affiliation to the defendant or his coparty. We could prove that the Ascending Metasapience created it, but it might take years.” “But if it has no affiliation, we can destroy it, right?” Jiiana asks. Then: “Does this ship have weapons? They’ve fired missiles at us.” “Technically, we’re not authorized to fire weapons, and by legal definition, no.” Jiiana’s heart falls. She looks back at Leon’s stupid, sticky, happy face, and can’t bear the thought of needing to retreat and drag the boy through more tribulations. Then Ms. Jolson says: “...but we do have defensive measures. And that’s under the antefederal legacy definitions. Witness?” “DEFENSIVE MISSILES FREE!” the sparrow trills, and all of a sudden, rushing to meet the five red missiles coming in are-- Well, Jiiana can’t count them. A lot of missiles. As Leon would say: “Many!” “POINT DEFENSE SYSTEM ACTIVE!” An autocannon starts spewing near-light projectiles at the enemy ship. There’s a pause, and then the enemy ship lights up like a small sun. Explosions continue, gratuitously, for a full two minutes, before it stops, leaving a black smudge across the stars and one ludicrously excited cybernetic bird. The way is clear to the Station of the Ascending Metasapience. Jiiana gulps. The station is a ring that hovers in stationary orbit around a black hole. Periodically, the black hole sends out pulses of x-rays powerful enough to vaporize a planet. Also, the station is itself a titanic organism. It’s a pretty reasonable thing to be worried about. “Remember, they’ve reversed the gravitational time dilation around apex of the black hole, so for the defendant--” “Yeah, yeah. Thirty years have passed, instead of two.” The entire time they’re docking, Ms. Jolson is talking to the station in legalese so dense it might as well have come from the singularity below them, and Jiiana’s heart is in her throat, and Leon has started to babble incoherently. When the docking clamps finally ooze onto the ship with the wet sound of flesh, Jiiana shutters, but also breathes in relief. Jiiana unbuckles Leon, and with the lawyer and the Witness’s avatar, they set forth. “Mommy, why is the floor making a funny noise?” Leon asks. She can’t properly relate the connotations of ‘this station is made from living flesh and that’s what we’re walking on,’ so Jiiana goes with “They didn’t clean their room.” “Gross!” Leon says, and then stomps faster so he hears more squelching noises. They reach the communication room near the docks. There, they look upon a vast chamber of pulsing membranes, and five hundred thousand faces, mostly partially subsumed, gaze back at them. Whispers echo in the room. A voice like a roaring waterfall all around them booms, “WHAT BRINGS YOU TO THE METASAPIENCE?” Jiiana turns to Ms. Jolson. “We wish to speak to the defendant, formally known as Jimothy Lum, who is formally indicted by the Federated Court for missing thirty years (relative to your timeframe) of child support payments, the cost of a month’s lease of a judicial frigate, and lawyer fees.” Most of the faces vanish. One rises before them in prominence. “YOU CANNOT CONCEIVE OF THE FATHOMLESS DEPTHS OF OUR MIND. TO US, YOU ARE MOTES OF DUST, LOST IN THE--” “Oh for gently caress’s sake, Jimothy! It’s been thirty years, not eons. I know how the drat metasapience works, you’ve barely begun integration. Enough time, I’d hoped, for you to mature a bit.” The voice is quieter now. “Alright. Uh. Yeah, I guess I don’t have any timeless wisdom yet. I was hoping…” “This is Leon. Leon, say hi to daddy. He’s part of a flesh-station now.” Leon looks puzzled. “Don’t you have anything to say to your son?” Jiiana asks. Jimothy looks hurt. “I wasn’t ready for kids. I didn’t realize that at the time, but… no. I want to find a higher purpose now. Can’t you be happy for me? I’ve finally found my calling!” “Whatever,” Jiiana says, because it’s easier to say that than the tome-length tirade that would actually express her feelings. “That’s your choice. But you have a responsibility.” A long pause. The pulsing of flesh in the background. Then, “And if I fight you?” “Go ahead. It’ll take five years on my end, which will be a pain. But you’ll experience the court’s sword of Damocles hanging over you for seventy-five years.” There’s silence again, except for the whispers and a tumultuous heartbeat. “I miss you,” Jimothy says. “Then you should have stayed.” A sigh. “I’ll pay up,” he says. “WITNESSED!” screams the bird. On the way back, Jiiana holds Leon’s little hand, wondering what sort of future he’ll have. “At least, whatever it is, you’ll have what you need for it,” she whispers.
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Jul 9, 2021 19:10
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Whoops, prompt for above story is here:
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Jul 9, 2021 19:11
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Week 467 Mysterious Crits My name is Twist Story - Light humor piece. Feels like stream-of-conscious writing. Would probably be funnier if I was drunk. This was the funniest joke: “P.P. nods solemnly. He says, "I feel like if I'd been there for a longer part of your journey this would be much more significant reveal to me. But, even so, I just want you to know that I recognize what you're doing and that I see you. I see you healing."” Really, the jokes need a bit more setup and refinement. The story itself is obviously terrible, as it has shallow characters and racer ex machina, but it does have a, I’m going to say “focused,” plot. Mystery - The concept is used as a joke, so obviously it’s present but not in a way that intrigues the reader. Word - Yes Misery Loves Company Story - Another stream-of-consciousness piece, but this one feels more intentional as a way to develop the narrator. No way did a piece of space station survive re-entry tho. Needs a few less asides, as they can get tiresome when every thought leads to one. The story jumps around rapidly, not seeming to know what it is. Huge chunks of the start can be cut, condensed, or re-ordered, because I think the mystery finally is introduced in the chat in the third section, and the story should get there sooner if the part about hiding from the crime syndicate doesn’t matter (and it doesn’t, which the author knows: “Except the crime syndicate/cocaine/hiding part. That’s not really relevant to the Ghost Question.”). It feels like the start of section four should be the end, with the reveal. The whole ‘hell ghosts’ thing is rather confusing and dumb. Mystery - Ghosts! … ghosts? …hell ghosts? Word - Technically The Story of the Sealed Cave Story - Stylized as oral legend/myth, and has the abundance of “telling” that such a story entails. I got distracted by the ecosystems. We have savannas (implied by rhinos), wetlands (stated), and desert (stated), temperate coast (implied by seals), and various temperate areas (implied by wisnet) all referred to. At first I thought we were in prehistoric Africa, but while some combinations of ecosystems listed might be in close proximity together, others are not. Given that one tribe hunts seal (usually in cooler, temperate or arctic oceans), and another has both rhinos and desert wolves being hunted (historically in lower Africa and SE Asia for the rhino, presumably desert for the latter), and another wisent (had to look that up; European buffalo, historically in eastern Europe), and Prsk is in a wetland—well, we have a story with creatures often separated by hundreds if not thousands of miles, meaning I have no idea where this is set, and honestly, I don’t think it’s possible to name any historical region that would have had any of these within a hundred miles of each other. I’ve belabored this point because part of what an oral legend does is teach about history, a moral lesson, and about the land and its creatures (things important to the culture passing the tale), but you make it so the reader cannot grasp the setting, and therefore has no entry point into the rest (murder = bad is basically in every society). Once you’ve done that, your reader cannot trust you, and instead of being pulled along by the story, they’re questioning it, which is bad. I disliked the resolution to the mystery. See below. In the end, the mystery is the primary focus, and there’s a lot of worldbuilding crap that can be cut because it detracts from that focus. Either that, or condense and adjust it so that you have a plausibly visualizable region. Mystery - Next, our plot has a Sherlock (Sekwe) and Watson (Prsk), one who does all the solving, and the other who sits there like a dummy. The mystery is literally solved deus ex. A literal god of secrets is a bit overkill here, isn’t it? It’s also Sherlockian in that the character is able to infer absolutely bonkers stuff given like Word - You didn’t include your word, so I assume you failed to include it loving Tourists Story - I don’t have any idea what this story is about or what is going on. The biggest sin of this story is lack of clarity. By the end of the story, I still don’t know what the Lurk is or who anyone is or what they do (second readthrough: Lurk’s a van?); there’s a muddle of characters, people yelling about tourists, and 6 different scenes all crammed in (though I’m not sure why some of them have scene breaks in them, since they seem to happen in close temporal proximity), and I don’t know what each one is supposed to contribute to the story or what is going on. There’s a nice description about ‘being embarrassed’ in paragraph 1, but other than that, a lot of missing setting and context. Going back to figure out why it’s so muddled, it’s because I don’t know what characters are present in a scene or who is saying what at any given time. Like in paragraph 2, who is the narrator talking to? None of the dialogue is tagged, so I don’t even know who is saying what. Don’t think “who is talking at any given time” is supposed to be a mystery!!! And it’s basically every line of dialogue missing a tag. Buddy, I CTRL-F’d your story and it was entirely missing the word “said.” Good god, WHY!? The total narrative confusion severely impedes establishing your characters in a story that, presumably, is a slice-of-life focused on characters. You’re going to have to keep entering so that you can improve, because there’s no way you can just drop this turd and leave. Mystery - Dunno what the mystery is supposed to be. Word - I guess!! I couldn’t tell you who the tourists are though Non-Disclosure Story - Use “***” or something to indicate new sections. There’s two blank lines in some areas, but I’m not clear if that’s a mistake or a new scene. Nice start; establishes the characters, setting, and mystery. However, a lab tech going “we’re studying something not human!!!” is, uh, not really suspicious. You’re more likely to be studying nematodes or fruit flies than monkeys, anyways, so while the “we literally can’t talk about work to non-coworkers” is a good inciting incident, “it’s not human” needs some weirdening up so that any reader can clearly see something is wrong. These scientists don’t quite feel like scientists. It’s a fun ending that wraps things up (or at least, wrapped up enough for a story this size—it could be expanded, since the ending isn’t very final). I also wonder if there’s a way to reduce the amount of exposition at the end from Dr. Clay. Also, maybe something about our protagonist: How have they changed? What made them decide differently this time? What about the other characters means they can’t succeed? Mystery - Yeah, good job. Word - Ehhhh, kinda. Beyond the Vault Story - Nice that I can tell early on it’s a heist. Check your formatting, you missed hitting “enter” to space stuff out consistently. Cut superfluous stuff: “The cellar was designed like a maze Mystery - Sort of. Word - Yeah, work on “magical” though. The Church Story - Good start with characterizing our unhoused, downtrodden narrator and they’re perspective. The story goes along at a good clip. The conversation between the narrator and the (priest?) is nice, because it’s both ominous and hopeful, hinting at the supernatural. The encounter ends with the narrator’s survival (presumably, their acceptance of the man’s offer might have ended poorly). There’s symbolism aplenty, and a sort of disturbed feeling at the end, which I assume is what the story was going for. This was my favorite story of the week, and felt like a solid horror story. Mystery - A bit. I thought it was plenty sufficient. Word - Yeah To Go Story - This story starts off by telling you it’s ridiculous and shouldn’t be taken seriously, because it has a Chad Biker shooting people and a cashier who doesn’t care. The narrator feels more like a detective, though, with some soft noir vibes. But, uh, if a fast-food cashier has Powerful Loser Contacts, why are they still in fast food? Needs an editing pass for conventions (”just quit.” she said…” and “The tailor was not amused, she dropped her…”). I’m not entirely sure there’s much humor (presumably what the story is still going for) to be found in taking a bets on suicides, but it does make the characters truly loathsome, and kills the previous vibes of the story. Then you add Actual Magic and power armor and I have no idea what this story is trying to be. Sadly, it’s not funny, just all over the place, and it doesn’t quite rise to the “so ridiculous it’s good” you would need to properly shoot the moon here. The ending is rushed as hell. Mystery - Sorta. Word - Sure. A Dirty Shame Story - Oh, that’s a drat good first sentence; gets us character history and present setting. This is a solid mystery and story, with some classic, if not particularly unique characters. I was hoping more might be done with Detective Alison’s history and how that makes her feel about this strange, sad case. This story seems to do what it set out to do, and it’s hard to find complaint with it, but it’s also hard to find a particularly outstanding or distinguishing part. Mystery - Woah an actual mystery in mystery week??? One problem with the mystery is the clues aren’t set up in a way that the reader can really guess it before it’s resolved. They are more a spectator than a participant. That said, it felt solidly in the genre. Word - Quite The Case of the Violist Story - Classic Chairchucker. Obviously goes for humor. I like the line “The orchestra members sat on the edge of their seat. It was a rare treat to witness a detective’s closing monologue.”, it’s probably the best of the “this murder mystery is exciting” jokes. The dramatic reveal is also a good joke, playing mostly on the genre expectations, and fits the previously established tone. There’s work to be done to expand the humor, and maybe beef up the foreshadowing so the big jokes land harder. Perhaps also some work to make the characters more distinguished, and perhaps a little less tonally the same. Fine piece tho. Mystery - Slash also humor, yeah Word - Yes The Delve Story - A lot of story and characters crammed in fast. Probably too much worldbuilding crammed in, specifically with three precursor civs and linguistic trivia, when the story primarily starts off saying it’s about a betrayal after finding a trove and something bad happens (but what?). More time needed on Gull, Dom, and Rebekah, who are all fairly blank characters. Some cleanup required: “So we pressed on.” (next paragraph) “The four of us were pressing onward….” Also, given the complexity of flashbacks, it’s hard to pick out the strict order of events in the story. The “what happened” is not clear; the decision they make at the end is not clear (though the reader can infer a few possibilities). In the end, this story is trying to cram too much into too short a word count. If it keeps the original scope, it needs more room for the events and characters to breathe. If condensed, it needs at least one thread cut. Since making a decision about the ancient alien prisoner is where the story ends, the events surrounding that need focus, and more importantly, the character’s reactions to those events. Some world-building, several characters, and much of the intro can be condensed or cut. Mystery - Present, but not really resolved, and the focus jumps back and forth between the mystery and other things. This was sci-fi horror, though, where not resolving a mystery feels appropriate. Word - Yeah
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Jul 20, 2021 01:33
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Gonna be in with a lot of things, but in the mean time, I need 3 slices of pizzaTyrannosaurus posted:Pizza! +300 words Already gotten the medieval bit: 
Uranium Phoenix fucked around with this message at 23:42 on Jul 26, 2021 |
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Jul 26, 2021 23:27
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Flash Rules (10):
****** Private Memory Files of Worn Node 41719 Observing the Conflicts Relating to the Imperial Church’s Attempt to Control the Milky Way Spiral Arm Sector 6d9 2800 words A post-human Eyes of Light neophyte, a Faithful refugee, and a Node of the Autamarchy all board a ship. The ship says, “What is this, some kind of joke?” It didn’t actually say that, though, when I boarded. Instead, it said, “If your components will be damaged by 25G acceleration and transition into warp, please get in a pod.” The human, Tau Mary, stopped glaring at the post-human and ran for the first pod. “How do I…?” she started to ask, right before the membranes reached out and drew her in with a squelch! The post-human, Priestess Cataline 405nm, calmly looked around the slick fleshy walls of the ship and asked, “Will my antlers fit?” The ship, Gravity is the Situation, replied “Yes. We accelerate in five seconds.” The three of us could all detect Cataline 405nm’s heart jumping in fear, but none of that was betrayed by the regal steps and upright posture that she approached the pod with. With about 32 milliseconds left before departure, with the other two passengers safely sealed away, I asked over the datastream, <May I have non-proprietary sensor access?> The ship didn’t reply, but as my metal chassis slammed against the chitinous rear wall of the ship, I started receiving a stream of images and datalogs, far beyond even my processor’s capabilities to track. <Truncated>, I amended. A moment later, the WAP (warp-accelerated antimatter projectile) hit the planet we’d just left, and there was a blinding burst of gamma radiation. I added several emotional notes to my entries for the Autamarchy: Reaction: Surprised. Did not expect to live. Reaction: Dismayed. The heretical colony of Violet and its archaeological digs were obliterated. So many lives wasted and so much knowledge lost. Stellar-political implications: Likely casus belli for heretical breakaway, the Violet Order. Expect war between them and the Imperial Church of the Eyes of Light. I watched in awe through the ship’s sensors, staring at where the mantle of the planet had been pierced, where globs of lava and bloomed out, and as the atmosphere burned, a ring of fire embracing the planet. It was beautiful, in the most terrible way. Reaction, I added to my record. Overwhelming awe and sadness. I had already known the Gravity is the Situation was packing some serious tech when it picked us up. Instead of staying in orbit and launching a shuttle, like a normal ship, it had actually gone into the atmosphere. Cataline, Tau Mary, and I had been standing on the roof of the Amaranth Temple (it was a bit of a story how we got there after most of the planet was already evacuated; suffice to say it involved several unlikely coincidences). Somehow, the ship had projected a field out that had torn away the entire temple and a half-kilometer of the ground beneath it. It wasn’t manipulating electromagnetism, like a tractor-beam—that only worked in space. It was doing something else entirely. Diplomatic: this Node recommends the Autamarchy investigate formal alliance with the unnamed eco-anarchic space-based faction. <Actually>, the Gravity is the Situation broadcast, <You’re not going to be sending them that note. We don’t enter into formal relationships with states>. <You can read my thoughts?> I asked, unnecessarily. <The problem with computer-based consciousness is that if you build all the brains the same way, all using the same language, you can figure out how they think. Biological brains, with their psuedorandom growth, can only have thought-trends picked up on, unless you have an extraordinary long time with a single specimen.> <I see>, I said, and made another note. Existential crisis: The Autamarchy exists at the whim of the unnamed eco-anarchic space-based faction. Civilization-ending security flaw discovered. Personal note: Requesting visit to therapist upon return. The acceleration stopped, and I found myself floating through the ship. Deep in its flesh, in the x-ray spectrum, I could see the tiny bursts of nuclear radiation all around as its cells guided individual uranium atoms into each other for the most precise fission I’d ever seen. It was a brilliant solution to the food-into-energy problem that most living ships ran into. Nuclear energy was a lot easier to carry around than, say, loads of potatoes. Near the rear of the ship, I could sense the powerful magnetic fields containing the antimatter. That would be for the warp bubbles and weapons. The two pods opened. Tau Mary made a gurgling sound as she emerged, then vomited, though the colors were wrong for human internals. The ship quickly absorbed the fluid while the woman looked around wide-eyed. As I floated by, her eyes narrowed and she glared at me. I waved. Cataline also vomited, but she did so regally, wiping her lips with the corner of her dress as if she were at a formal dinner and had just told the waiter that the vintage of wine he’d brought was not acceptable. “Would you like some gravity?” the Gravity is the Situation asked. “Yes, please,” said Tau Mary. Parts of the room began to luminesce, and I felt the gentle pull. Interestingly, the internal gravity the ship was generating pulled Tau Mary and Cataline in two other directions, so we all ended up standing on different walls, staring up at each other. <You see the Eyes of Light fleet pursuing us, right?> I asked the ship. Six battleships, two fleet carriers, and a fabricator by my count. <Obviously,> it said. Out loud, it said, “I suppose you’re all wondering why I gathered you here today.” Cataline snorted. “You just saw what the Imperial Church did to that planet. If you have any sense of justice, you’ll ally with the Violet Order and ensure they can never do that again.” Tau Mary interjected. “You sure you didn’t mean the ‘violent order?’ Your people had no trouble killing off mine. We came to you as refugees, and you—” “We did no such thing.” “Or perhaps you’re not wondering at all,” Gravity is the Situation said. “So I’ll tell you: This edge of the galactic spiral contains a number of novel ecosystems untouched by human-kind, spread across forty-eight planets. War erupting in this region would mean those big fabricator ships would be looking for material, and would probably destroy them, irrevocably. We would prefer that those ecosystems remain untouched.” “There can be no peace with war criminals,” Cataline announced. “I didn’t say we wanted peace. There’s other ways to protect them. You want peace though. You really do.” “Why did you save us?” Tau Mary demanded. “Because the Node there asked nicely,” the ship replied. The two of them looked at me. “It never hurts to ask.” I was also monitoring the situation in space. The Gravity is the Situation was still accelerating, albeit not as quickly, and somehow, the acceleration wasn’t detectable on the ship. The Eyes of Light fleet was attempting to catch up. The ships weren’t visible anymore, but their warp bubbles were. That meant everyone involved was burning antimatter. It seemed unlikely to me that this ship had more than the much larger ships, which meant, by my reckoning, we were doomed. “Why us though?” Tau Mary asked. “You can represent the Faithful,” the ship said, then to Cataline, “And you, the Eyes of Light faction. And you,” it said to me, “the Autamarchy.” “The Autamarchy are just observers,” I protested. “I know you believe that,” the ship said. That shut me up. “Unfortunately, my position is such that I cannot officially represent the true church,” the heretic said. “True church my rear end,” Tau Mary scoffed. “But she’s right, I’m not one of the Blessed. I can recommend it to my archdiocese, but--” The ship made a trill of annoyance, interrupting her. “These are arbitrary hierarchies. You are representatives.” “You don’t have that authority,” Cataline said coldly. “Neither do your leaders. Nevertheless.” <This is probably intractable,> I said. “Worn Node,” the ship replied out loud, “I don’t need you all to resolve your differences. I need you to exist in such a way that you are not forces of extermination. Let us talk metaphorically: A tree and a fungus will never reconcile because they are fundamentally different. But they live in symbiosis: Trees need decomposers, and fungi needs photosynthesizers. Even roles that consume each other may exist in harmony. The beetle needs the woodpecker so that it does not destroy the all the trees that makes their food; the deer needs the wolf; the wolf needs the deer. None are asked to reconcile or become each other. But while the monkey who slays a single snake is justified, the monkey that seeks to destroy every snake in the jungle has done evil.” “That’s anthropomorphism. The nature of the Universe cannot be seen by a human eye,” Cataline said. “Yes, because I’m talking to various flavors of humans. If I was talking to a tree, I’d be using pheromones and explaining it very differently. But you see my point.” It was not common knowledge that the Autamarchy’s robotic hive had, thousands of years ago, come from humans. <What wave of human expansion were you from?> I asked. <I wasn’t> it replied. And that shut me up again. “There’s no living in harmony with the Eyes of Light. God created humanity in Their image. The Eyes have decided to blaspheme by mutilating their bodies. They’ve chased us from our homes—” “Oh shut up,” Cataline snapped. “You still believe that infantile scripture—that God wrote a book for one planet. Funnily enough, it says you can have dominion over every living thing that moves on the Earth. But you decided that wasn’t convenient, so you decided that all the earth-like planets were yours to pillage. Do you know what your so-called ‘Faithful’ did to Jata 3a?” “Doesn’t seem as bad as what just happened to the planet behind us,” Tau Mary said, teeth clenched. “What is more likely? That God wrote a book, or that the true nature of God can be observed by studying the Universe itself?” Tau Mary shook her head. “You’ve closed yourself off to the word of God. Of course you can’t hear Them. Or the truth.” “The idea that you can understand the universe and God using basic evolved features—absurd. We don’t see reality. You know that, right? Or maybe you don’t. We just see electromagnetic waves reflected off atoms, as interpreted by the brain, by default. You still just see visible light. But the Eyes of Light will not remain static. We will change ourselves to better see reality. You are free to keep your head buried, though. Humanity has moved on without you.” The two continued, but I was only half-listening. Another part of my attention was on the approaching fleet. It seemed they were catching up to us. The last part was on my internal thoughts; I was not transcribing them as I usually did. The Autamarchy considered itself above the petty conflicts of the near-humans. “Bears and wolves avoid each other,” I finally said. Both of them turned to me; Tau Mary looked at me like I was a turd, while Cataline merely implied I smelled like one. “You both want to look for god in your own way. Neither needs to kill the other over it. Stay away from each other.” “Where? My people are refugees now, with no—” “You just need a place?” I said, at the same time the ship said, “If that’s all you need, I can help build a space station or two.” “The Autamarchy can help build it,” I added. “Assuming your factions sign treaties of nonaggression. Just them—no treaties for you,” I told the Gravity is the Situation. “I don’t do treaties,” it said. Cataline said, “This is all irrelevant. The heretics will destroy what they can’t control. It’s their word they need.” “Great!” Gravity is the Situation said. “I’ll settle that shortly. You two take a look at the galactic map." A holographic projector grew out of the middle of the room, and a shift in the gravity caused us to float next to each other around the newly grown table, rather than across the room from each other. My attention was fully on the outside, though. Warp bubbles were only supposed to move in straight lines. Once you formed one, it couldn’t maneuver; that was just the nature of stretching and contracting spacetime. Nevertheless, the ship’s warp bubble had curved, bringing the incoming fleet completely out of alignment. They’d miss the Gravity is the Situation by a parsec. And they wouldn’t like that. WAPs were fine for destroying planets, but a warp-capable ship was just going to move out of the way. The fleet’s warp bubbles flashed off, revealing the ships. Slowly, their maneuvering thrusters fired up to change their direction. As they did, the Gravity continued to spiral around, until it was nearly on top of them. It was suicidal. Then, the fleet began to move again. Or rather, parts of it. Suddenly, there was a storm of metal flying in all directions—entire bulkheads zipping off, while a turret tore itself lose and moved the opposite direction. It was as if the ships were being disassembled—except the life support systems remained intact. The rest of the ships—turrets, engines, armor—all gathered themselves in a single spot. Then, there was a flash—a burst of x-rays erupted from a small singularity. For a moment, space warped in front of us, and there was a little black hole, blotting out the stars. Then it vanished, and in its place was blob of metal, perfectly spherical, and so hot it was glowing. It was a beautiful thing to watch, more like an artist with a paintbrush than the battle I had been expecting. <You can manipulate fundamental particles of gravity?> I asked. <Sure,> the ship replied. <Can you teach us?> I asked. <Absolutely not,> it said. A screen grew above the holoprojector, the edges of the membrane pulsing slightly. The screen lit up, and a man appeared, wearing a stiff white uniform, with the same light-infused eyes on a dark face that Cataline had, though he had a long set of spines going down his back rather than the antlers. Someone in the background said, surprised, “Oh. They answered the hail! Wow.” The uniformed man said, “This is Admiral Croc Matisse of the Eyes of Light. Why have you attacked us?” The ship sounded like it was instructing a child. “You blew up a planet, idiot. Did you think there wouldn’t be a consequence?” “His name’s Croc?” Tau Mary muttered. The admiral stiffened. “This is casus belli.” “That’s fine,” the Gravity is the Situation said. “You can declare war on me. Meanwhile, I’d like to introduce you to three other factions who you’re already in conflict with, and you’re going to negotiate a treaty together, since you all seem to like making arbitrary rules to follow—or not, if it’s inconvenient.” That conversation went a lot longer, but in the end, the Eyes of Light military group realized they were rather at the mercy of the Gravity. I, for the most part, stayed out of it, except to say that any Node of the Autamarchy could act as a representative, and that I thought it was quite likely we would ratify the result. When it was all done, the screen swapped to show the vast space around us, and Tau Mary started out at it pensively. “Do you think it’ll work?” she asked no one in particular. “Maybe,” I said. “For a time. Most things are ephemeral. Even stars.” “The faithless will break it. And the heretics. Neither abide not being able to dominate others,” Cataline said in her usual cool tone. She was looking at the screen as well, eyes darting about, counting stars. “Our cities are ash. Few things grow from such ruin.” “As are ours,” Tau Mary said, with the still-bitter tone that implied thanks to you. I joined them. “Every one of those stars started as dust,” I said. “Perhaps we are honored to have such a beginning.” The Gravity is the Situation said nothing to us; it was busy sending off warp-encased packets of radio signals in all different directions as it gathered the various hollowed-out ships around it to tow. Perhaps it wasn’t a permanent resolution, but as we moved, I felt a bubbling romanticism welling up. I didn’t dare record it as a note, nor my unfounded sense of hope, but I marked the day on my calendar. With some luck, this was the day that a new peace was born.
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Aug 2, 2021 02:18
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Tyrannosaurus posted:If you want to dance, you know you can just ask, right? You don't need to be a petulant little bitch about it. Simonosaurus Brawl Write a story that involves a choice by a character to follow the rules (or break them). In the spirit of dual stories and only sorta looking at the prompt, your story also involves dueling narrators. In the spirit of doing whatever the hell you want, here are some vaguely inspiring symbols: The Lone Mountain - This is a destination that can never be reached. The crystal glaciers glimmer; the zenith promises glory, but the journey seems impossible, the trials among the foothills multiply with each step closer. The Comet - Perhaps an ill omen, perhaps a herald of great change. Something in the cosmic balance has shifted. The Spire - What good does it do to stand higher than everyone else when you are consumed by loneliness? It takes great strength to survive when so much around you perishes, but all most ever see is the outside of the tower, not its ruined interior. Those trapped in it see father, but also know despair. As demanded by the whinier participant, these rules must be strictly adhered to in a spiritual sense, which is to say--not literally. But there is a literal spirit in your stories. 2k words max. Give me your words in two weeks by midnight. That's 8/23/21 at 11:59pm pacific time.
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Aug 9, 2021 16:35
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In.
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Aug 10, 2021 18:26
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Tyrannosaurus posted:Uranium Phoenix, for saving Thunderdome, also gets a reward of 69 bonus words to call in at any time for any prompt. Huzzah! Archived. Uranium Phoenix fucked around with this message at 06:25 on Sep 5, 2021 |
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Aug 13, 2021 16:32
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Inventory of Attic: 1 writing table (auction) 1 antique rifle (auction) 1 award for 38 years of service (dispose) 5 pens (distributed) 37 transfer request forms, denied (dispose) 1,981 love letters (dispose)
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Aug 17, 2021 20:55
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Uranium Phoenix posted:Simonosaurus Brawl Simon - Knight’s Quest, Hero’s Desire Read-through Thoughts: First impression: Comedy. Can’t have the name ‘Ungor-Discombobulator’ and then go for a serious story. So let’s see how that holds up. Well, hopefully we do better than ‘vaguely gross food analogies.’ I like the idea of thought-slime and soul-singing, and hope the story doe something interesting with those. “As every enlightened of the hero’s species knew…” This is clunky. I’m hoping we get, perhaps, a description of this species. In fact, any sort of description of the knight, Ungor, Discombobulator, or setting might be nice, beyond what the viscera of the Discombobulator and Knight’s wounds. The pulpy sci-fi names aren’t doing much for me. If this is going to be humor, it needs better jokes. Also: Bit of a plot hole, maybe. If the Ungor can instantly sing life/death to something, why do they need someone else to kill the Discombobulator? (The vivication powers don’t apply to the first combat). Combobulated Critique: This is a story about mixed loyalties. It tries to keep a light tone, and pays tribute to the (frankly) poorly written pulp sci-fi out there and the episodic style of story. There’s an attempt made in the story to have the “warring spirits” of mixed loyalties play out with the italicized prose and the regular prose, but the two different voices there are not so different as to be easily distinguishable, and certainly, neither tries to wrest control of the story from the other. The story attempts to foreshadow the Knight killing the Emperor since, in italics, the Knight has begun to question his quests for the Emperor. Problematically, this also is where the Ungor tell us how the power works, their small array of Chekov’s firearms being neatly presented to the reader either just before or just after the gun fires (such as: “Surely, this can be undone? The knight’s tone had an edge of desperation. His mind tumbled over said edge when the Ungor informed him that a death delivered by the power was irreversible.”; we are only told how the power works after the fact). By the time the narrator, in unitalicized prose, tells us “This kind of man would not reign just as the dictator he’d just felled,” we are to buy that the knight/story thinks of the emperor as a dictator, but I don’t really buy that shift. The characters here, both the knight and the emperor, are very weak; I can’t tell you anything about them other than their symbolic role and literal actions. In order for a conflict of the heart to be meaningful, you need a solid enough character to The story is not very funny. This is because while it tries to play light fun with the names and descriptions, the story takes itself more seriously, and attempts no other jokes. The lack of dialogue and characters don’t help here either, as that opportunity for, say, a funny character or line is squandered. The setting of this story is missing in action. I know there are planets and spaceships and the blood of the Discombobulator is white, and that the emperor’s concubine has slime-sacks, and basically nothing else. You can still leave imagery up to the reader while giving them at least a framework to work with. The story also concludes that mixed loyalties can only be settled by… fighting? The Knight only finds solace in the battle. That’s not really a resolution to the idea that he’s not sure what is the right thing to do is. It’s not a resolution of the idea that being heroic might contradict his ideas of loyalty. It’s a cop-out, and while I can’t say its out of character (given there’s so little “character” there to work with), I can say this thematic strand is frayed and weak. Overall, I don’t like this story at all. It certainly fulfills the criteria of the prompt in its most literal sense, but if your idea is that you can write a better story by ignoring the parts of the prompt you don’t like, I wish you’d have done that here to create something stronger. However, your story does do something important here: It is exists. Sadly, your competitor’s story is fatally flawed in that regard. Trex How shameful, to be seated on such a grand throne, leering at your enemies, but when a single gauntlet is cast in your direction, to flee in terror, leaving that seat empty. To be given the grace of time, and still leave that throne vacant. Tyrannosaurus loses by default. Simply Simon claims victory in the Simonosaurus brawl.
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Aug 29, 2021 18:01
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In. No rules no masters.
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Sep 3, 2021 13:50
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Weltlich posted:Thunderdome #474: Save Room for a Slice Plenty of weeks out there full of Week 464 Bonus Crits, Appropriately, For A Week About Time Capsules (Get It? It’s Like I Dug Up These Old Stories From A Time Capsule) As a pattern note, I saw several stories take their prompt and interpret the picture as literally as possible. Got a picture of a rat being held in a hand? That happens, exactly, in story. Picture of a lady with a balloon hat? Story is about analyzing that exact picture. Dude has a Baltimore flag in a photo? Gonna have that be my opening line and just copy the characters from that picture directly into the story. Got a dolphin picture? Gonna write, literally, about dolphins. Genius…. (Borat pause) NOT!! Maybe try to move away from literal interpretations if you did that during the week. CitizenKeen - Denric and the Knife: This story is about a laborer (poor) and merchant (not as poor) trying to get a very special knife that will sell for a lot of money in some ruins (old). They encounter a cat and person; one presumably dies, the other escapes. There’s some good use of visual details to briefly outline the setting (caste system, pillared ruins). There’s also some incongruities: Velra darting from rock to rock implies hastened stealth, but if they’re talking normally, feloids are still going to hear them (cats, I retroactively assume). Gonna say that I was visualizing the cast as humans dealing with giants right up until “white hot lightning originating in his tail.” The fact that these characters are mice-people (assuming that based on the tail, squeak, and prompt picture) needs to come way sooner than 75% of the way through the story. That’s not a twist or anything, so don’t hide it from the reader. Your plot is serviceable, though I’d spend more time on dealing with the horror of giant creatures stalking you and less exploring the ruins boringly; too much time is spent re-describing them. There’s a nice moment where Denric hears the ominous thuds of the person-giant approaching. The story should focus more on moments like that. The characters need work; there’s just not much to say about either of them. Their dialogue focuses on the plot and explaining the world, and too little focuses on who they are as Ironic Twist - Statuesque: Good first line; does a lot of character work quickly. The first scene also shines, giving us an idea of when this takes place and what kind of people these are (carriages, 10 cent beer, the snake-oil scheme), though that gets thoroughly disrupted by the detail “the sun glinting off their smartphones” which makes my eyebrows furrow mightily. The story, I realize after the first section, is not about a snake-oil scheme, but a character who can’t let go of the past and another who’s willing to indulge his delusions for profit. In that sense, the story succeeds; there’s a futility to preserving the past, and though Valdo can’t admit it, the reader sees it with his failure to lift the statue. I suppose the unchanging town actually does exist in the modern era, and some other magic, related to the sacred well, preserves it. The dialogue is too concise in some places for me to fully understand the conversation between Valdo and Galette. I don’t quite understand their deal, who Galette is, or what they’re doing ‘selling’ snake-oil to a town that already has memorialized them. I suppose Valdo is just performing because he likes it, and Galette is indulging him so he can drag him off to the coasts where the real profit is, or something, and I guess Galette told the feds about their secret well? While the conversation seems real, in that they don’t do any “as you know,” poo poo, it also makes it hard to parse since we as the reader don’t know the context or implications. Overall a solid piece though, with characters and emotions—that good poo poo, you know? Five bucks a bottle. Chili - Hole Out: The opening is weird; it’s hardened prisoners, but acting like kids (snug as a bug in a rug, the dum-dums). Either there’s time shenanigans (not really explained), or kids are sent to jail for… crimes they committed? Their future selves committed? Something with memory wipes? “I hear my brother promise me that he took really good care of my Yu-Gi-Oh cards which I tell him are all now.” —editing pass needed. Or is this all just an overly-dramatic time-out? But based on the letter to himself, he really did miss out on his siblings big moments. No clue what he did, though, except Generic Bad Crimes. The ending implies he’s reformed, but there was never any real doubt of that in the story. We already know Treimar didn’t remember being an angry young man, his apparent rough history was memory wiped, and he only ever acts reformed—so there’s a real lack of conflict. Why did the narrator or his friend think he wouldn’t write? We’re told that, but given no reason to think of it. This story mostly suffers from a lack of clarity. I think it assumes the reader picks up far more than they actually can. Yoruichi - My Grandmother: Some nice descriptions to start us out, of a rather surreal world. The main character is looking for resolution about their grandmother, who they didn’t know. The story goes back and forth between these recollections of moments, trying to make sense of who the grandmother was, and the strong descriptive language. Some nice sensory bits, like “Its abdomen sucked in…” and “breath pressing like hands upon my back.” The physical action (nearly being sucked into a giant angel-trumpet is cool, but again doesn’t feel real given the character’s response. I guess it’s a story about the regret of not knowing someone you feel you should have known. And it does that. And again, it has some nice descriptions, but the entirety of the story is basically separate from them except for whatever vague symbolism the trumpet and angels might represent, and there’s no much that actually happens. The character doesn’t change, only stays in incertitude. It feels like this isn’t quite complete, but that could be the intention here. Drone - Nothing of Value was Gained: Reading the title—is this a story about your posting? ZING! JK (that means “just kidding” in internet lingo)! Anyways, this is a story about humankind’s posting history, which is found lacking. However, a lone robot finds value in it, an maybe a bit of sapience, before all is erased. I don’t really buy that Unit would only think, at the end, after a ‘lifetime’ of devotion to the task, that “she had rarely ever given consideration to the fact that she was reading the tombstone of an entire civilization.” Statements like “Her whole life had been devoted to…” (first paragraph) contradict statements like “For the first time since her activation…” and questions like “Am I… alive?” later on, which is sloppy editing, and feels more like the author figuring out the character more than the character’s own reflections. If this is about a robot gaining consciousness, it might be a growing gradual awareness, but the story starts with this robot seemingly already aware of having thoughts and not wondering at that. As a story, it’s not very interesting. As sci-fi, it’s not particularly original—I’ve seen these ideas plenty of times before, which would be fine, but there isn’t any character work done to make Unit memorable or different than Generic Robot Protagonist That Becomes Aware, nor the setting particularly interesting—the story is utterly devoid of setting and says nothing about the civilization that Unit is a part of. There could be an opportunity to highlight or guess at some aspect of humanity that most people don’t consider valuable, but an alien species might, but instead the story just wants to be misanthropic, which is not particularly interesting or original either. Chairchucker - Pete: This is a light piece going for humor (bit of a shock, I realize), that owns its pyramidal conceit with no apology. It reads like middle-grade fiction (though I think some of the dry humor might go over their heads), what with the whole oblivious parents thing and kids acting more like characters than kids (if that makes sense; think the Magic Treehouse protagonists), and ‘the moral of the story is’ at the end, which is fine. The story seems to do what it intends, then departs. I think places it could be improved are, perhaps, descriptions (which could be more humorous and, frankly, existent), a pass for places to add jokes. Dunno. It’s hard to say, because the story is functional, but not shining, but while a polish might be nice, the story is made of matte material. Remember to like and subscribe to my post history for more tortured metaphors that may not make sense. Chernobyl Princess - Snake: Right, you did what I’m now noticing was a pattern this week, which was interpret your picture as literally as possible, probably to the story’s detriment. Making a story about making fun of the Tea Party is tough, because that was already done to death for literal years, and I was bored of it then, too. You decide to tell us “Ultimately both protest and counter-protest were dull,” which is a sign that maybe most of the first part of the story should have been cut. If these are dull events that don’t matter, why tell us about them? The amount of work you do with the characters, which seems far more important to focus on, is sparse: “In a way the friendly argument was comforting. Facebook groups and their Warcraft guild had kept them in contact when they’d left for different colleges. Candace was satisfied to know their friendship was unchanged in person.” We should see more development of who these people are, since that’s the apparent focus of the story (certainly, it’s not the protest). I like the Jurassic Park/Clever girl banter, which is exactly how nerds sound when they talk (I can say that, I, uh, know several nerds), but—man, this story is just full of nothing at all happening. It turns out, I discovered about 648 words into the story, that this story is about friends dealing with a supernatural event. By then, it’s too late: I’m bored. You should probably cut the approximately 500 words that aren’t about that or doing solid character work earlier in the story. Anyways, a bunch of characters I don’t care about (because they and they’re friendships weren’t really developed, and neither were the deep-church CIA priests) kill each other with guns/locusts. There’s an interesting story involving a traumatized girl who discovered miracles are real and has a Biblical artifact running away from a clandestine, powerful priesthood, and I wish you’d told that story instead. The biggest sin you had here was that you didn’t revise this—you needed to go back after this draft (this feels like a first draft) and find the juicy bits, instead of leaving the exploratory parts in that needed to be cut. Simply Simon - Shackled Soul: Two scavengers, one with Void powers(?) hunt for stuff to lead to food-getting. We hear about Souls and a fascist regime. It turns out the pod they found had a dude, and there’s lots of pods keeping people’s souls trapped, which has to do with a Tyrant doing his Evil Plot(tm). He’s a clone-hopping guy, so Cythnia kills friend and sacrifices herself to stop him again—but for how long!? There’s a lot of infodumping, and not a lot of character development. A lot of the first section feels very disconnected from the rest of it. I don’t really need to hear about the Academy, when this story is about the weird creature that is the Tyrant and keeping him imprisoned. I would trim the story so that it covers its main thread, and then use the rest of your words to strengthen the characters—the decision for Cynthia to stab her good friend occurs lightning fast, and feels inhuman with how confident she is of her conclusion and how rapid she turns on him (use of the given name is already established as a thing that can happen given Synth did it to him earlier for emphasis). After all, Synth was wrong about her initial hypothesis. The setting could also be better developed with visuals, and finally, perhaps foreshadow the Tyrant, who is only ever mentioned at the story’s halfway point as an off-handed comment that ends up being suspiciously relevant (and the first thing Synth thinks of when she sees the second clone—but why?—we aren’t given enough background on the Tyrant, how these characters know about him, how temporally proximate he is to them, and so much more). flerp - The Pull of the Moon: Good hook. There’s also good character work in the story surrounding this main thread of the What can I say to a successful story like this? Perhaps it could be expanded, and we could get Papa’s experiences that relate to our narrator’s, or perhaps we see part of the trials the boy goes through with his mom and getting kicked out and then reflect back on this moment (unmarred, where future moments are). There’s other places the story might explore, if it wants, with the same conceit, but it’s also fine as it is. I also want to direct a portion of this critique to anyone else from this week reading it: Note how flerp’s story is clearly inspired by the prompt picture, but it goes in a direction that leads to a strong story, and is not even close to a literal interpretation, and note how focused the story is on its core (especially the characters and theme). My Shark Waifuu - A Gift for Grandpa: This is a story about what it will be like to buy a SA account in the future. Well, not really; it’s just reflecting on the current internet zeitgeist with a light tone, referencing bitcoin, emojis, and Elon Muskrat and—are vbucks fortnite or roblox? All I know is my students crave them. Anyways, it has a very good punchline, and is a fast enough read to get there the rest of the story can be forgiven. Serious crit, though, I think it might be worth a pass to see if the humor (or setup of gramps as a character) can be punched up. ZearothK - Like the Lion Eats the Antilope: The story starts with one side of a conversation, a monologue without context, and that’s a risky maneuver to pull off. The premise of the story is basically a post by one of the militant internet atheists from the early 00s, but bumped up to the cyberfuture so that it’s a cyberathiest talking to his cyberfriend, which doesn’t really make it better (see the previous story, Gift for Grandpa, for tips on how to pull off the on-the-nose cyberspace stuff). He’s killed by his friend, who cleans up. Then, and this seems completely unrelated to the rest of the story, some satanists active an antipope. So, one, the tone-shifts in the story are violent and don’t benefit the story. The third part seems unrelated to the first two, and I don’t see how it connects. The monologue is weak, and the story is not an interesting one. The characters are not really developed. Since there’s no dialogue, the story misses a key opportunity to have Mark and his heritic bud play off each other and develop. Again, this is a story that took its prompt picture in the most literal way possible, to, I think, the detriment of the story. Azza Bamboo - The Mother of Potatoes: This is a story about launching potatoes really fast. I don’t really understand the punchline(s). The humor in this story is the kind of “monkey random cheese bannana!” humor, relying on, perhaps, the humor inherent to tuberosum, which is not a lot. The characters are light and undeveloped—Darrell is perhaps the most developed, perhaps a former CIA goon, but even he’s an outline rather than anyone filled in. The plot nonsensical. There’s descriptions that are fine, but they don’t quite service the intent of the story, which I think is to be funny (I’d look into Terry Pratchett for how to make descriptions funny). Not much else to say about this. t a s t e - To Hodson: This is an nested epistolary about, presumably, a mysterious disappearance. The cause is one of those Lovecraftian-style unfathomable things, in this case, some sort of fractal art. The nested format here really sucks to read on the thunderdome.cc site, and in another form, I’d use either fonts or something to help distinguish the nested letters. (SA does okay with nested quotes I guess, but it’s annoying I had to go read it there). If you’re looking for an example of another story that did this effectively, I’d check out Before the Lion, he laid Bare. It’s a nice little horror story, and I appreciate the challenge you took on in making it a nested epistolary. I don’t know, however, that it’s the most effective delivery vehicle for the growing horror feeling you might be looking for. rohan - Voted Most Likely to Survive the Apocalypse: This is a story about high school cliques warring in the generic apocalypse. The story references tropes related to these groups for humor. They (sort of) resolve their differences upon learning most time capsules contain mundane yearbooks, and kids can learn to get a long (except music kids). I dunno what to say to this one, because it’s hard to give advice on how specifically to bump up humor. There is something important to a joke though, and I think that unexpected is important—or if it is expected/inevitable, it better be a good punchline (read A Gift For Gramdpa from this week, I suppose). All of these jokes are… expected? It’s just references piled on top of each other, which I guess some people like. Obviously, since this story is so focused on humor, it eschews a sensible plot, characters with any depth or humanity (they’re all stereotypes, and there’s a lot of them) so there’s not much there, and sticks with an incredibly generic desert setting. That’s rather to its detriment if the humor doesn’t land. tuyop - The Cats Keep Blowing Up: So we’re really going to go with “ah, there’s a cat in my picture, so it’s a story about cats?” Alright. This is a story about cats getting big. The humor seems to rely on cats as inherently funny, sort of how an earlier story relies on potatoes behind inherently funny or a SMBC comic might take a given silly law or event to a ridiculous conclusion. It’s also about the trauma of a mother’s Alzheimer’s, which leads to something of a violent tonal clash. This is then mixed with the sudden sapience and language granted to the cat, and the even weirder conceit-bullet fired at the reader with nary a Chekov’s gun to prepare them for it. Whereas a story like flerp’s this week had its conceit but a clear theme, I don’t know what the theme, message, or purpose of this story was, or what it was trying to do. Would it be weird if cats all got bigger and some of them ate parents to preserve their memories? Sure thing buddy. But I don’t see what this monkey-cheese-random poo poo has to do with anything else, like characters, plot, or theme. Thranguy - Perilous: It feels like there’s too much dumped into this world. We have a post-apoc world, presumably a far future, though it’s not clear if its Earth, high EMP markets, giant owls, moongates, emperor’s vaults, a high school where it’s not supposed to be (with stuff in it), green doppelgangers, and I’m not sure what’s going on. I guess it’s about two girls who didn’t get along having a reunion and figuring out how to do that. Or moongates. The characters have some details, but not as much depth as they could, and it feels like the story needs more of a tight focus for me even to know what it’s trying to do. This is another story that feels like an overly-literal interpretation of its picture. I think a story about an old demolished high school reappearing and a girl exploring it (and reflecting on her past) could be fine, but as it is, it’s too busy, and this story doesn’t feel like it even has an ending; definitely feels rushed. Antivehicular - Scavenging a Dream: Aww. A heartwarming story about how hardboiled scavengers get a soft spot for cute animals and maybe turn that into money. It’s a quick read, and there’s at least two characters I get a sense of. It also starts with them deciding to let the pets die, so the fact that something within the story changes is satisfying. There’s also sort of a fun meta-aspect to it, where you’re playing with the reader’s emotions by using an easy method (cute pets), and also having that be the plot of the story. Not too much to say here: It’s a solid story, and nothing stood out particularly as lacking. Maybe bump up some of the descriptions of the setting? I don’t get much of a visual of these ships or people. Weltlich - The Fog: Good hook. This is a story of a guy dealing with nightmares and lost time. It’s a story I think designed to instill a sense of the surreal, since our protagonist skips from liquor-store employee to aquarium security guard in an instant and isn’t sure what’s real, and he’s doing weird poo poo like scavenging aquatic medical equipment. We learn it’s probably PTSD (or related), related to some traumatic moment where he didn’t have enough medical equipment to save people, explaining his present obsessive behavior, which leaves us with a haunting image. Sort of surprised this one didn’t HM, as it’s quite solid. The character is distant, but that feels intentional. His companions are brief, and could be bumped up a notch. I liked Des leaping the counter, but maybe spend more time conversing with them. Taletel - Red in tooth and claw: Well, there’s a hell of a story conceit (apparently ‘conceit’ is my word of the week): psychic powers for everyone. Let’s see how it plays out. Alright, first, a line like “Wars of untold magnitude were waged by mankind’s newest weapon” is boring. Skip the exposition next time. Just throw us right into the story where psychic dolphins are in charge swimming along human ruins. I don’t need a purely expository intro for a 940 word story. Second, proofread. Semicolons don’t work like you think they do; they’re not a period. Avoid clunky lines like “A scream was let out. A human was lifted…” that are passive (passive voice is fine sometimes, but not here) and vague. We should know who is doing the action. Third, don’t assume your reader is a total moron. Anyone literate certainly knows dolphins are intelligent, and they have already decided if they think they’re cute or not, so you can cut those words. Fourth… drat, what the hell is this plot? Alright, same advice I gave several people this week: Just because you got a picture of a dolphin does not mean you need to literally write a story about dolphins. Then the dolphins are going around murdering humans. In fact, it’s their number one rule. Great. Why? Does that make an interesting story? (Spoiler: No). Is Sea World bad? Yes. That’s not worth a story to expound on, you could just go post “seaworld bad” on facebook or something. Is it interesting to listen to a dolphin recite a bunch of backstory? Nope. These characters, dolphin or not, have about as much depth and complexity as a dry puddle. The main conflict is an ethical one (is murdering an entire species bad???? Gosh, glad we’re contemplating that one), but not one that is very interesting. Honestly, I think the best advice I can give is to look at some of the HMs and the Win this week (or other weeks) and look at how those stories are spending their words and how they use dialogue or advance the plot. Uranium Phoenix fucked around with this message at 06:09 on Sep 5, 2021 |
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Sep 5, 2021 05:46
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Living With What Happened: A Day in the Lives Of Those Affected By the Arc-Seven Station Attack by Senior Columnist Peter O. Sellenger 3598 words of (1500 words + ~4400 bonus words) Longtime readers will know it’s not often that I get to ride the space elevator on the Time’s dime, and so as I rode up to the shuttle that would take me to the Arc-Seven Station, I felt nervous elation. It was far away from my penthouse in New Chicago and the heart of the republic. This wasn’t me visiting flyover country, this was flies over country. We’ve all gotten used to seeing those eight Arc stations glimmer in geostationary orbit above, and so used to the bounty of materials they send down, but it’s one thing to know they’re your fellow countrymen, and another to meet them on such a haunting day. The attack on Arc-Seven a year ago, after all, wasn’t just an assault on the station. It was an assault on freedom, a barrage targeting democracy, and an incursion into our minds. I remember that day clearly. I remember watching in horror at the feeds, watching on repeat how the shuttle smashed into Arc-Seven’s core, and the expanding debris that glittered in the harsh, unfiltered light of the Sun. “We’re all living with trauma now,” the shuttle pilot told me on the way over, and that reminds me how much wisdom common folk can have. When I ran my idea to interview random people on the Arc-Seven station past my editor, she instantly agreed. “We have to get their story out there,” she said. “Their lived experience. There’s enough focus on the Venusian Separatists,” she said, those last two words leaving her mouth like a bitter taste. It’s Times like these, if you’ll excuse the pun, that I feel that swell of pride, working for one of the last traditional newspapers in the world. Still, I couldn’t help but feel anxious about it all. Would it seem crass to pry into their lives? Or would they welcome someone finally telling their story? I hoped, as I approached the behemoth space colony, with its splayed out wings of solar panels and thick chrome cylinder dotted by glimmering domes of artificial ecosystems, that it would be the latter. The Janitor I decided to interview anyone I came across. I came across Omar Al Quinn-Escobar mopping floors in the hall next to the docking bay. He was spry—most of the colonists were, since they spent only some time at the edge of the cylinder where they got a full 1G—and balding, but had a friendly demeanor. His warm brown eyes seemed like they were laughing at a joke only he’d heard. When I asked if I could interview him, he said, “Sure, but only if you don’t mind that I keep mopping. I’ve got a quota, after all!” You really have to admire the work ethic. No other country in the world matches it, whether on land or in space. (Editor’s note: Conversations have been edited only for readability) Sellenger: So how are you? Omar: Is that… are we starting the interview? I’m fine. Busy, of course. Sellenger: That’s good to hear. What brought you to Arc-Seven? Omar: I was born here. Sellenger: So that puts the kibosh on my next question—I was going ask how it’s different here than on continental Earth. Omar: That’s right, I don’t know. Never visited. Sellenger: Do you hope to? Omar pauses mopping. He looks out the window, and I know he’s looking for that blue-green jewel out there, half-shrouded in shadow. “Yeah,” he says. Sellenger: So what’s a day in your life look like? Omar: Well, I wake up, get a quick nutrition packet, and head center to the docks. I’m in charge of the east docks, and despite the title, it’s critical work. Humans are constantly shedding skin, and not all of it makes it to the dust-collectors in the vents. Any sort of carbon build-up—or any number of chemicals—can pose fire risks. I have a degree in static-electricity and a minor in chemistry, you know. Had to, even for a low-rung job. Anyways, I get a ten minute lunch break, which I usually watch the shuttles on, mostly miners coming in from Atek-40, that’s that platinum rich asteroid they’ve been after, then finish the east wing. I go on a walk in the tropical biome pod, then watch the feeds during dinner. Sellenger: And on weekends? Omar: Ah. Hm. You… well that’s a bit awkward. Not a lot of colonists since the… well. You know. We’ve been short-staffed, just keeping the station functional. There’s a lot. I don’t really—well, I’m accumulating weekend time, but that’s being paid out in recreation-hour equivalent credits. Sellenger: Oh! I’m so sorry. You know, here we are, on the anniversary of—well, the attack. Do you mind me asking? What was it like? Omar stops mopping again and looks at me. All that laugher that was in his eyes, it leaves. He stands there awhile, then swallows. I notice his left hand starts rubbing his ring finger. He looks out the window again, then finally says, “I’d rather not talk about it, if that’s alright with you.” “Of course,” I say, and thank him for his time. The Hydroponicist I’d seen hydroponics before in the vertical farms of New Chicago, of course, but it was nothing like the density here on Arc-Seven. Automated harvesters moved on rail tracks, making the sunlamps flicker periodically as they passed overhead. Among the foliage were networks of pipes, color-coded shiny plastic like an intertwined rainbow. I met Evelin Brunichev when she squirmed out from under a metal grate holding up crowded lettuce plants, muttering about root-rot, nearly stepping on her. Her dirty-blond hair was shaved to the aptly-named crew cut, and her sleek work-suit covered in a mix of grime and plant debris. She swore, admonishing me to be careful, but after a brief bout of apologies, she agreed to talk to me. Sellenger: Good to meet you. How long have you worked on Arc-Seven? Evelin: Nearly a year. Sellenger: So you came over after? Evelin: Yeah. It was a nightmare. All the shuttles from the space elevator were secured-to-dock under a fire order, but Seven needed us. They had two biomes failing and were going to run low on food within the week. So I came. Been busting my—does the paper let you swear?—well. You get the idea. Sellenger: Where were you before? Evelin: Arc-Four. It takes me a moment to understand, but when I do, my eyes go wide, and she nods. I marvel at how small the world feels some days. Sellenger: So you were on that rogue rescue mission, the one that only got pardoned later. Evelin: That’s right. We’d been forbidden by Stellar Control to assist—they were so terrified of another attack, but if we hadn’t come here, I think a lot more people would have died. So I don’t regret it. We did the right thing. Sellenger: What was it like, flying over? After the attack, there was that shuttle— Evelin: Jasper-9A. Sellenger: —that’s the one. It got shot down by a government Seeker. There was that communications mix-up and—well, it was tragic. You weren’t scared that might happen? Evelin: We didn’t leave it to chance. We had orbital guy calculate the intercept times. The only danger was Arc-Seven shooting at us, and we knew… well, they knew we were coming to help. Sellenger: They knew? Evelin: Yeah. There were some programmers on Seven, they figured out how to override the remote emergency protocol. Sellenger: And station security didn’t stop them? Evelin stops there. She’d been trimming a root system by scalpel, tying off the tiny nubs so they couldn’t reach at some of the pipes below, but here she gave me a quizzical look. “Which paper did you say you worked for, again?” she asks. “The New Chicago Times,” I tell her proudly. Evelin: Oh. Well, there… you know there was that training exercise that day, right? I know you didn’t report on it, but… they were off-station. So no, there weren’t any security officers to stop them. (Editor’s Note: Please see our article “Quashing the Unfounded Rumors Over the Arc-Seven Attacks” for more details about this.) Sellenger: Well thank you for talking to me. Is there anything you’d like to say to your continent-bound friends out there? Evelin: We’re still recovering up here. We’d like—we give a lot, you know. We know a lot of people on Earth are depending on us. But it’s been hard. We’re all overworked up here, and we’re still waiting on some critical replacement parts that were promised by—well, I don’t want to get political or anything, but it’s… it’s a lot. We could use all the help we can get. I thanked her, and let her know her words would indeed reach the masses below. The Conspiracy Theorist I nearly ran into my next interviewee. We were in the zero-G of the station’s central column, and I was trying not to toss my lunch out at the spinning cylinder below, or accidentally slam into any of the workers zipping around me. It turned out, it took a bit of a knack for moving about while weightless, and while the folks here made it look easy—it wasn’t. “Watch it!” the man said as I nearly careened into him. At first, I didn’t see him or the tether. I was too busy watching the station rotating, the mix of greenery and chrome buildings like a hypnotic spiral. “Sorry,” I said, and then introduced myself. Thessa, who did not give his last name, was even thinner than Omar, nearly looking malnourished with how pale and skinny he was. He had soft features, and brilliant violet dyed hair—and, as I would find out shortly—a snippy attitude. Thessa: I know who you are. Sellenger: You’ve only read my best columns, I hope! Thessa: Calling what you write ‘columns’ is a bit like calling a child’s scribbles ‘art,’ wouldn’t you say? That took me aback, and I had a quick decision to make. I could end the interview now—I could tell already he would be hostile—or I could keep going. Didn’t I owe it to these people to listen to anyone who would talk? After all, how often did newspaper reporters actually ask for their stories? I decided to proceed, even though the views he would spout I strongly suspect were not the usual ones on the station, and certainly not anything an informed member of the general public would believe. Sellenger: I’m interviewing people on the anniversary of the attack, trying to get your stories. Thessa: Are you going around kicking people in the balls, too? They might like that more. Sellenger: So you don’t want to— Thessa: No, I’ll talk to you. I don’t give a poo poo. I’m sure you’ll slander my name anyways. Certainly, your paper won’t dare print the truth. Sellenger: On the contrary, it’s what we dedicate ourselves to. Thessa: Well, go on. Ask that burning question. Sellenger: What’s your daily life like on the station? Thessa: No, not that one. Overworked, underpaid. Just reprint those words for any worker you talk to, you’ll save yourself on the word-count. The other question. Sellenger: So, what’s it been like? The attack on Arc-Seven was so— Thessa: You really think it was Venusian Separatists? Sellenger: Well, the Day of Sorrow Commission Report found— Thessa: Delrin Castor was on the loving commission, of course he didn’t find that his agency was culpable— (Editor’s Note: Please see our series of articles on the DoS Commission Report, as well as refutations for the misleading information forthcoming here) Sellenger: —found it was the Separatists, and Stellar Intelligence found their manifestos, and there’s the security camera footage of them boarding that shuttle— Thessa: —right, like CGI can’t fake grainy cam footage of a few people boarding a shuttle— Sellenger: —and the footage was verified. Thessa: —look at it this way: None of those alleged people were trained pilots, or hackers. They would have had to override the autopilot and then—did you see the footage? Professor Olinmeyer did frame-by-frame analysis and found they would have had to be pulling 13-Gs in a tight spiral while evading the automated defense systems from Arc-Seven—which, I might add, were suspiciously off-line, until enabled just prior to impact, and I know the excuse is the training exercise, but that’s horseshit, as are all the missing security officers who should have been in that section that day. No, that shuttle was running an autopilot program. And who benefited? Stellar Control and Intelligence, of course, and their corporate lackeys. They got everything they wanted. Now they have their excuse to tighten their grip on all the Arc stations, and we bust our asses, stuck up here. For what? Not the profits of all that ore coming in from the space mining operations. They did what power has always done: Frighten people so they can be controlled and exploited. Sellenger: The report explains all of that. These conspiracy theories— Thessa: And what should we call an actual conspiracy? What evidence would you accept? Sellenger: Well, the report, for one, and the parliamentary investigation results. Thessa: Again, controlled by the people who should be under investigation. You know, all you media types are just as culpable. None of you bothered to investigate. You just took the press releases from the Stellar Premiere’s office and pasted them into your articles. Funny, how the Premiere got all those laws passed right afterward. Funny those key members of the opposition died of super-bacteria right after. It didn’t work, you know. No one actually believes the ‘official’ narrative. Sellenger: It was a lot of people, actually, and it’s been known for some time that bacteria mutate into more lethal forms in space on their own. Cosmic radiation increases the mutation rate by— Thessa: Never mind. I don’t know why I’m wasting my breath. Keep printing whatever you want on that trash-rag you call a paper. I already knew there’d be no justice for my friends. And then Thessa was off, a bit redder in the face, spouting profanities as he went. I watched him go, and thought of the deep breathing techniques my therapist had been teaching me. Wow! Of course, I couldn’t believe a word he said, but at least I could appreciate his passion. It’s hard to deal with such a tragedy, knowing the perpetrators are already dead, and therefore will never get justice. Enraging enough, I suppose, that it leads people down all sorts of wild paths. It was tragic, though, to hear an otherwise well spoken man fall prey to misinformation. I gathered my wits together and proceeded along the column, still a bit woozy. The Officer Officer Richard White met me with all smiles. He had a firm handshake, and was well muscled, filling out his sharp uniform. He had an air of confidence that felt infectious. He met me at the break-room of the security post, and set the auto-espresso machine to work. We talked over the thick aroma of fresh-roasted beans. Sellenger: First of all, officer, thank you for your service. Officer White: Of course. Sellenger: So how’s life up here? Officer White: The pay’s good. The coffee’s fresh. Bit of a luxury up here, this espresso, but of course, it makes sense for it to be a benefit. We’ve always got to be on alert. Sellenger: Preventing the next attack. Officer White: That’s right. We can’t know where it might come from. Vigilance is the price we pay for democracy. Sellenger: It sure is. Speaking of which, are there plans to restart elections on Arc-Seven, now that it’s been a year? Officer White doesn’t stop showing that polished smile, but his eyes change, and his voice lowers an octave. “We’re still in a state of emergency, you understand. Stellar Intelligence took out the most prominent cell, but those Venusian Separatists are still out there. Probably some on each station, under deep cover. More than just the lives of the people on the stations are at stake. People on Earth are depending on us.” Sellenger: Of course! No, I totally understand. And yes, a lot depends on you all. We’re grateful for it every day. Have you made any other arrests that you can talk about? Of those Venusian cells? Officer White: I can’t confirm or deny anything like that, unfortunately. A lot of what we’re doing is classified. Sellenger: Absolutely. Well, again, we’re all so thankful for all you do. Officer White: It’s an honor to serve. It feels good shaking his hand again, and I leave the meeting—brief as it was—feeling refreshed. The Grandmother It had been a hell of a day. In the station mall, the feeds were playing footage from that tragic day, and I found myself stopping to watch. It was horrible to watch, but I felt I had to. It was, after all, a specter still haunting this station. My last interviewee was on her way to her shift, but she agreed to talk to me. It was strange to me that the day and night cycles were different depending on where you lived on the station. For me, it was the end of the day—for her, the start. Daiyu Meers had rings around her eyes, and wrinkles creasing her face. It seemed like her solid black bangs ought to have some gray, but there was no hint of it. Despite how tired she looked, she managed a pleasant smile, the kind that puts people at ease. Sellenger: It’s good to meet you. How long have you been on Arc-Seven? Daiyu: I helped build it. Sellenger: Oh, wow. Really? Daiyu: That’s right. Sellenger: Well that’s amazing. So what do you do on the station? Daiyu: I work in the nuclear synthetics division. Sellenger: Oh? What does that involve? Daiyu: Well, it’s a bit hard to explain. Sellenger: Try me. Daiyu: We use, well, this is a bit of a simplification, but we use targeted radioactive bombardment of polymer and crystalline structures to change the structure of molecules. This lets of fabricate substances we either don’t have the chemicals for—and there’s a lot we’re missing on the station—or can’t be made through chemical processes at all. That’s where ultra-high tensile materials that structures like these stations and the space elevator use come from. Sellenger: Wow, that does sound complicated. What do you like to do to relax? Daiyu: I don’t get much time to do that. Mostly, I’m helping my granddaughter. The classes up here are overcrowded. Not many teachers want to come to Arc-Seven. So I tutor her on her letters, and the rest of the time we just explore the station. She likes visiting the arctic biome. Well, really, she just likes the penguins. That’s her goal in life right now: to become a penguin. I also help run the community events of my block. Sellenger: You sound busy! I’ve heard a lot of people talking about how hard it is up here. There’s a lot of work to do. Daiyu: Oh, sure. Sure. But I don’t complain. Sellenger: That’s very noble of you. Daiyu says, “I don’t think so.” She’s very humble. Then she gets a strange look in her eyes. “Do you ever wonder why nothing changes?” she asks. Sellenger: What do you mean? Daiyu: The rhymes of history. We’ve come so far with our technology, and yet—where is our better future? There’s still… Sellenger: The Venusians? Daiyu: Them too. Yes. That’s not all but… yes. Sellenger: How are you feeling about that? It’s been a year since— Daiyu interrupts me. Suddenly, it feels like she’s in a hurry. “Fine. I’m fine. I try not to think about it,” she says. “I just try to be kind to others, and do the best I can for my granddaughter. Now if that’s all, please excuse me. I have a shift to get to, and I’ll be fired if I’m late again.” She walks off at a clip, and soon enough, she’s just another person in the crowd. *** As I head back to the shuttle bay, I think about all the lives that tragic day touched. But Daiyu is right: All we can do is keep our heads down, get to work, and try to smile for each other. Talking to so many people on the station has really put into perspective how much work the Arc Stations are, and how dedicated the workers up there are. The shuttle departs, first drifting, then the engines fire, and I’m pressed back into my seat, watching on the feed as the sphere of Earth slowly grows. I think about all we take for granted down there. A Stellar Control Interdictor passes to our left, sleek silver body cutting through the void, and I feel a sense of calm pass over me. I salute it, even though I know the crew can’t see me, and hope the day comes soon where justice has come, and we live in a world free from terror.
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Sep 5, 2021 17:32
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Give me would like 1 (one) orb, pleases
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Dec 4, 2021 03:05
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Prompt: Birdorb https://imgur.com/xBbkuMo Archived. Uranium Phoenix fucked around with this message at 22:41 on Dec 20, 2021 |
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Dec 6, 2021 01:32
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gonna crack open a pack and see what kind of broken rares I can pile together
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Dec 11, 2021 03:44
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Archived.
Uranium Phoenix fucked around with this message at 18:07 on Dec 31, 2021 |
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Dec 13, 2021 01:22
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as more of an ideas guy, i'm judge
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Dec 15, 2021 03:31
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Dumb Ideas Executed: Crits for Week #489 General notes: Remember, the words below are not merely a tired poster rambling about whatever nonsense came into his head whilst reading your words, but divine judgment on your soul. Most of that divine judgment is “maybe don’t take the prompt as literally as possible.” In one of the examples cited in the prompt post, the author didn’t literally have the Roman Legionaries hocking pokeballs. The strict adherence to the prompt led to most posters choosing the same path: ridiculous humor. A few jokes stood out. Most didn’t. Humor’s hard. In the end, a lot of the stories felt like nothing distinguished them from the others: tonally, in terms of absurdity, in characters, in humor. There were several stories this week that felt like they had potential, some strong, but nothing was truly elevated above the others. ================================== Sonny - Tiger Flip: Pedantry: Usually you would write out “there meters” for small numbers. Also, at three meters she is taller than the tallest person in recorded history, and certainly taller than the tallest tiger. Tigers are also solitary. Crit: I think one mistake people make with prompts sometimes is interpreting them as literally as possible. These appear to be literal tiger-people who are punk-rock. In one of the examples cited in the prompt post, the author didn’t literally have the Roman Legionaries hocking pokeballs, but when you realize the inspiration it’s retroactively obvious. You also spend a lot of time describing what people look like, but after you get the point that this group wears black leather, you really don’t need to keep repeating it. You also have very shallow characters. The protagonist just sort of goes along with everything, and it takes three sentences for this girl he (she?) presumably just met to convince him to join in an armed (and toothed) robbery/homicide. Also I don’t know why you spend so much time on the weird hypnotic-tiger transformation, but it doesn’t add much. It could, possibly—we could get more about what the narrator thinks about it all or something of a more genuine reaction to it so we learn something about him, but we don’t. Bigsy wears black leather and makes people into literal tigers, but I don’t know anything else about her. Plot-wise, it turns out it was all a lie after the narrator grotesquely murders this random dude, but again, the narrator doesn’t really think about anything, just struggles a bit. Finally, and most damningly, I don’t know what the gently caress this story was about. Am I supposed to feel anything? Find anything interesting? Why did I just read all these words about hypno-tiger homicide, and why wasn’t it funny? And there wasn’t even any martial arts fighting. I think if you’d jumped the shark (or tiger, in this case) and just gone for an over-the-top story, it would have benefited by at least having some humor to it, but as it is, it was pretty boring. You’ll have to return with a better story. Chernobyl Princess - Breaking Hearts At Camp Kippakriptid: Source Material Guess: Through introducing gorgons and the fact that they’re all, even the ancient monsters, basically teens, we’re clearly in Monster Camp / Monster Prom fanfic territory by about paragraph 6. If this is not the case and I’m actually off-base and you’ve never heard of them, you may wish to play those games and take notes on how the do humor/characters. Crit: Good use of title to prepare readers. We get subtle introductions of Maeve, Ness, and Zip, but you have to outright state the narrator is a harpy, and there’s got to be a more clever way to do it. Or you could make her a Siren (same genre) and talk about the time she almost got with Odysseus but didn’t realize he was into that bondage stuff or earwax play. This is another story that takes the prompt literally. It gets the dumb teenage drama right. This is all dumb teenage drama. It almost gets funny in some places, like when Zip says “You need revenge,” that gets us her personality and a chuckle. But the followup isn’t as good, and I don’t think it’s taking advantage of the humor inherent to the concept. The romance arc is serviceable, but nothing special, and I think more needs to be done to bump up the characters and/or jokes a notch. ChickenOfTomorrow - Awakenings: Crit: Good emotions and characterization to start. Paragraph 2 gives context for the problem facing Whitney. Solid descriptions (”resinous perfume”, “Miss Huilung's hair was too shiny, her eyes too clear, for Whitney to look up. She knew she was going to die if she acknowledged either of them.”). I think the “magical Ativan” threw me off because it was late enough in the story I wasn’t expecting magic to be real; I think we need some indication of that earlier. (I also had to Google “Ativan”). I don’t really understand why Butler and Huilung are having a Calm_Fight, and I feel the ending misses the landing because it’s tonally completely different than the rest of the story and “ Sailor Viy - Wings Against Stone: Crit: Good hook. Well, it’s certainly bird-hell. I don’t really know that you need to tell the reader that explicitly as you do, because if they didn’t get it after the first 8 paragraphs, that’s their fault. I wonder how to make this story more interesting, because it’s a lot of bird-torture and description. I think we need more about the narrator and his pre-life connections, conversations. For example, when the narrator encounters literal God, what does he think about this? How does this change how he views the world? No time is spent on this. Lines like “Did You really send me to the hell of birds by mistake?” really need to be cut. I do think there’s a lot of potential in this story. The idea that God recruits him to be the savior of birds. I like the flashback in his second encounter. I like the end. It’s the story’s core that needs polish, and most critically, the narrator in this story needs more life, more context for who he is and what his religious journey has been. Of all the stories this week, though, I think this one has the most potential for publication. Despite the win, it was a narrow victory, and it’s not head and shoulders above the rest—yet. Weltlich - Well Rooted: Crit: The problem of the story is clear: how 2 make money on farm?? Next we have two characters not getting along, so the story probably resolves that too. Or something with Danny. The dogs and coyotes arguing is a bit of a fun moment. “Inside the rooster was screaming “shitpussy” over and over and over again” also got a laugh from me. Good moment of tension with the coyote/dog fight. Does a coyote fight lead to cracked ribs? Anyways, the story resolves as it promises. It feels like something is missing in the latter part of the story. Possibly, it’s that Danny’s character is… too perfect? She’s missing any flaws and it’s not clear why the narrator wants the farm to work so bad, and why he’s reluctant to give it up despite the constant losses. So giving it up at the end is too easy. Azza Bamboo - From The Memoirs of a Grey Alien Diplomat: Crit: “On my way here I saw at least fifty thousand of their refugees evacuating from a single car” is a good clown joke. The rest is just clown references. There’s technically a story buried in those references, but it’s pretty shallow. There’s a totally different route you could have taken, and that is one where cultural expectations (or lived experiences) are so radically different that you get something interesting—and you make a gesture in that direction with the sad-clown. But overall, there’s not much to take seriously, and I don’t know how to advise you to bump up the humor. Simply Simon - Horse Out of Hell: Crit: This is a story about the Greed laggards of a hellish invasion of a German town and what appears to be a self-insert helping ward it off. Some passive voice in the descriptions becomes noticeable, and is not necessary. Is it Karla or Klara? And as the story calls out, a mad scientist with prisoner trope. And references. And a pact. There’s a lot of jokes in here; most of them don’t land for me. I do like “I did not remain accident-free my entire life by speeding”, the old Doktor grunted” and “Only two left in the undergrads’ fridge.” It feels like ““Klara, my future Rosswurst stirs” should be funny. But humor is all this has going for it, so it’s a risk for the whole story to hinge on that and then not quite complete the turn. It feels like large parts of the first part can be cut, since Ryder doesn’t exist for much. I will say the prompt here was probably overly specific, which restrained the story to some degree. Carl Killer Miller - The Nixon Cheese: Crit: “He hastily placed the cheese back in the drawer” is a good line. I feel like “person who is passionate about [X] doesn’t understand why other people aren’t, even though [X] is ridiculous” is a bit overdone. As with the above stories, this is also a story with a bunch of references and jokes, but they just don’t quite land for me. Tosk - While My (Air) Guitar Gently Weeps: Crit: As I’m reading this, my first thought is ‘cut the intro.’ There’s a lot there we don’t need. Like, you want to establish a mood in the first few paragraphs. Give us a few details about air guiatr spells, give us the man standing in the shaft of light with the Escalade, give us the awkward silence, but skip the rest. There’s also got to be a better way to introduce the air guitar death duel. Maybe when he gets to the underground arena the narrator lets some of the info you’ve told us slip in a conversation; this would serve the purpose of helping characterize him (how he delivers the dialogue) and feeding us the plot. Something like someone asking him who he is, and the narrator mentioning, “Oh, I’m [CEO name’s] stand-in.” Then you get other characters to react to that and can reference the headlines—but less is going to be more here. Leave some of it to the reader’s imagination. Again, I think you can trim a lot off this and not lose anything. Next, you’ve got contradictions. “We'd gone through the official channels to set up our bout” does not match “…but they'd long since been outlawed. There were no rules in a duel between air guitar wizards.” And you really need more showing and less telling: “I also noticed that I was utterly terrified”—weak! Finally, the ending is weak as hell. If air druming is the forbidden art, you need to establish that in the story so that if you’re going to end the story right after it begins, the audience understands the implications. I don’t feel the desperation that should be there in the narrator; the fight is just not intense. As it is, you just have a story without the ending. Finally finally, the ridiculous nature of the story’s premise is not properly taken advantage of. Yoruichi - Buzzer Beater: Crit: We have a protagonist dealing with relationship troubles, financial troubles, and roller hockey troubles. And big pigeons. Said narrator spends a lot of time in their own head. Then, not totally out the blue, but mostly, in the middle of the story, we have Attack of the Doomsday Pigeons. Unable to resolve most of the aforementioned problems at all because of this apocalypse, Helen scores a goal, for herself. It’s sort of a weird story, akin to spitting at a giant meteor about to hit Earth; “She knew it was pointless but she wanted it all the more because of that” sums it up. Perhaps the absurdity would land better in a week that wasn’t completely full of absurdity, or maybe it needs to be leaned into more. Giant pigeons tearing apart the world must be funny. Maybe Helen can have even more problems, like getting a call from her family and saying she’s no longer welcome for Christmas, just piling the absolutely disasters on so that the last goal is more meaningful. Either way, there needs to be something more to polish the story to a shine. QuoProQuid - Leonardo (or How I Learned To Start Worrying and Hate The Time Travel): Crit: “They still hadn’t realized my real passion was making hyper-realistic sculptures of horse heads” is funny. The line “An expert of all manners of intrigues, I immediately stripped myself naked and shattered an urn of olive oil over my form” is a good way of telling the reader exactly how seriously they should take the story. I do want premiere Renaissance Man, Leonardo, to describe the time portal better than “a giant portal of swirling light and sound.” There’s room to either get some of how his artist’s eye sees it or a crack about the kind of science contemporary people would have, (e.g. ‘The portal was of suspended, glowing silver. Perhaps I had dismissed the potential advances of creating mercury vapors too soon…’). The line you’re using for a repetitive joke (“Boy, birds sure are something”) feels like it needs different phrasing to be funnier. “I can’t tell you the number of times I tried slathering myself in oil to escape the base” is good and got a guffaw out of me, as did the visual of Leonardo convincing Julius Caesar to get on his lovely screw-helicopter prototype. At a certain point though, the references to historical figures gets overdone; just mentioning them without a punchline does nothing. Perhaps you need some dialogue among them, so that Leonardo’s love of horses can be contrasted with someone else’s idea. Lost opportunity to have Leonardo fall in love with Odysseus. The ending where everyone just dies to a bird-dropped-nuke is fine, but the last few paragraphs (from “I was unstuck in time”) are the weakest and need an alternate take. I’d scrap that part and try a different tact. Still, I had fun with this story. With some strong revisions, especially in the second half, I think this could be funny enough to reach publication quality. My Shark Waifuu - Prisoners: Crit: I like it. A nice, haunting story, with that Hotel California energy. I wonder what the story would look like if a part of the narrator didn’t want to leave—after all, that dancing and great steak must have had some effect, right? Why leave this place of comfort? I do like how the criminal stand in (feels like a devil-ish character) has no real explanation, and that the story doesn’t bother with that part. I would like to see more about what the narrator feels about the dream and the Waffle House; he wants to go back, so tell us more about that, perhaps more about not being able to go there. I’d also try and get some more depth to the characters. We have some light strokes painting them, but they could use a bit more color and history. I’d also change the dialogue near the end about escaping and the nature of the place—more subtlety. Overall, a nice story that carried me through it easily and flows well. Burning_Conch - Nuclear Blues: Crit: A mouse band plays at a nuclear power plant for some cats. They rock so hard the power plant melts down. Then one mouse sings something in Spanish and it’s so dramatic that the power plant core cries, stopping the reaction. Not clear are the physics here; if the core is weeping in such a way water is extruded from the core, that lack of moderator would speed up the reaction, whereas if it is creating water from nothing, as a crying uranium pellet might, that might slow it down. Evaporation of tear-sized drops is simply not going to remove enough heat to do anything. The ending, “I hope you all have someone you care about, hold them tightly, and never let go” feels like a strong ending for a story we didn’t get. Or maybe we did get it! I don’t read Spanish nearly well enough to do more than pick out a few words here or there. Perhaps the meaning of the song for Jorge needs to be explicated. Perhaps we need stronger descriptions of emotion, facial expressions, or character reactions. Either way, some work needs to be done to take the ridiculous premise and make the emotions at the end land properly. There’s room to cut at the intro; as long as you establish them feeling out of place, you don’t need that much dedicated to their entry. Also, I have no idea why they need to be cats and mice. One might do that metaphorically with class differences (well credentialed middle class engineers certainly might make a financially pressed Mexican band feel out of place) The man called M - They are made of stupid: Crit: Having the entire story be untagged dialogue with only interjections for how much time has passed is a risky move. If you’re going to violate all the rules of good writing, you need to have a payoff that makes it worth it. And you don’t. I know you’re conforming to the prompt, but the implementation makes no sense. The jokes aren’t funny, and there’s nothing else supporting this mess, because you don’t have any work done to make your characters anything, and no setting. I think there’s an interesting story to be told about different civilizations using drastically different ways of communicating, but you avoid doing anything interesting with that idea at all. Next, the fact that Phil and Gene are communicating using words means they don’t have to communicate using crosswords or art or whatever. Also, any aliens intelligent enough to achieve long distance space travel must be intelligent, so the story is unable to defend its own internal logic. This story feels lazy and hastily written. Pththya-lyi - Fly Me to the Moon, Let Me Kick Its loving rear end: Crit: “but the 700 kilometer-long letters spelling SUCK IT HUMANS on the Moon’s surface was the very last straw. To preserve the Earth’s honor, NASA hastily assembled and landed a crack team of astronauts on the Moon to defeat it in hand-to-hand combat” got a ‘lol’ from me. The middle of the story sort of muddles forward, with jokes not nearly as strong as the intro. There’s a bunch of events, but they don’t really develop characters or help set up jokes, so they just feel like filler. The “juijitsu” bit is telegraphed way too hard. The Witch thing, conversely, is not foreshadowed at all, and like Apollo 13, doesn’t land. Chairchucker - Could Also Be a Squid, I Guess, I Mean I’m No Marine Biologist: Crit: This has a bunch of chill characters having chill conversations about weird stuff in your trademark style. It flows fine, with easy dialogue. It’s light in tone and message, with all the characters taking things in stride. While tonally consistent, it also leads to most of the characters feeling same-y. The ending is a biiiit rushed. Needs some more time to properly work. rohan - Agent Double-Oh-Sexy in: Big Shoes To Fill: Crit: Why did you claim 3 prompts? Bit greedy imo. The story does lean fully in to its ridiculousness, to some advantage. Cream pie and agent number two are good jokes, technically set up well. It doesn’t feel like there’s an actual time loop, though. I know there is one, but the ‘attempts’ earlier could be referencing other stuff. There’s a lot of jokes here, and the story does well to embrace its over-the-top nature, but it felt like it was missing some key pieces to become truly funny. Thranguy - What the Poor Man Has, What the Rich Man Needs: Crit: The introduction leaves me very confused very quickly. The first sentence seems entirely unrelated to the next two. By “Mom’s detective show” I get it, but a bit of clarity might be in order. It feels like we need more time in fairy-land. “Of course, it didn't work out that way, but that another story, a story that ends with me negotiating with a Queen of Fairy, my glass dagger with its shadow-sharp blade pressed tight to her ivory throat” is a real Rothfuss move, which is to say, not going into a much more interesting story than the one present. I’d delve more into the characters adventures and reactions to fair-land, describe the wonders, and then something about their return. As it is, the story feels blasé about itself, which undermines the nice parts it has. Alternatively, you could tell the story of him reclaiming his firstborn and just allude to the vacuum tube adventure that started it all in passing. Captain_Indigo - Four More Years: Crit: I’m 100% sure it would be “Madam President.” Also, that entire first section? Cut it. If you really want a lab scene where aborted anime projects get pocky thrown at them (the only good joke in that scene), you can insert it somewhere else. I think there’s a more interesting story (or better jokes to be told) in anime action or something, rather than just retrospectively reflecting on all the shenanigans and cramming as many references as possible into the story (a trend this week to be sure). The best joke of the story is obviously at the end: ““Nothing personal, kid.” President Obama drew her katana.” I think the jokes will land better if they’re in the moment, rather than a long, boring conversation. sebmojo - The role of works in a sinful world: Crit: ““Why did you punch them? Why did you punch my sing-men!”” lol. This is definitely a story about punching things, repeatedly. It sadly lands at the end of a week of stories just like it. The writing is solid, and has decent characters in Jimmy, the priest, and God, and has some nice set pieces (the choir) but is missing whatever what make it truly shine. At this point, I don’t know why things are funny anymore. All I ask for is the mercy of rest.
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Dec 21, 2021 00:35
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In. The Dead. ... 
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Dec 21, 2021 15:16
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