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sebmojo posted:Week 524: In Michigan it is Illegal to Hurl an Octopus in but primarily because I want to know more about your pasti-moonlight-destruction job in the legal field
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Aug 17, 2022 06:42
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 11:49 |
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An Undue Undulation of Ungulate Glue 1165 words You never realize how much you need glue until you don't have it. That sticky-slick slime is all that stands between us and the cavemen. It seals our letters and affixes our stamps. It binds our sutures shut after surgery. It's the goo that makes the world go round. And I make it. At least, I will. As soon as I finish breakfast. 100g of bacon, baked (80ºC for 10 minutes) to precisely control the level of doneness and facilitate the draining of grease. Two 50g eggs, precisely weighed, fried in 10g of butter, flipped halfway through and topped with 1g each salt and pepper. Two 25g slices of bread, toasted under the broiler for one minute on each side, then topped with 5g butter and 10g jelly. 200ml grapefruit juice, freshly pressed. As soon as I have it all ready to eat, just as I'm sitting down, I'm interrupted in my own kitchen. “Hey, rear end in a top hat. We're out of milk.” This is Tosh. Tosh is my roommate. Tosh is, in fact, the one who is the rear end in a top hat. Tosh calls himself Tachyon. He's that kind of guy. “You know I don't drink that,” I say. I break off a sliver of bacon and raise it to my lips. “Yeah, whatever. Maybe I had some cereal last night. But I can't get started up there without it.” “You get it, then.” I slice off a strip of egg white and carefully slide it onto my fork. My ears detect something and I look up. “Stop that!” Tosh is picking his nails at the table. “Whatever. And no, I can't. My license is suspended.” “How—” My toast is cooling. “Long story. I just can't, OK? I get caught driving now while I'm on probation, I'm going to jail for sure. Just do it, Fer. That horse won't melt itself.” “Well, actually, if you wait long enough—” “Yeah, in this heat, with how rank that carcass already is, I'm waiting maybe half an hour. If you're not back by then, I'm going for a long walk, for I don't know how long. Maybe an hour. Maybe several. OK?” My breakfast is congealing. Our horse upstairs is putrefying. And Tosh is revolting. “You're obnoxious.” I stand. Tosh smiles even though he is missing a tooth. “That's a good boy.” I don't give him the finger. But I really want to. Plan: break down the horse down to its parts, then sell them. Horse goo (depending on the purity) can be very lucrative. Step one: sourcing a large dead horse and putting it in your tub upstairs because that's the only container in all the shithole of a house you're renting that can hold it. But that's the easy part, when your roommate's family owns a horse petting zoo slash stabling slash pony ride rental service. When one of their horses gets too old to work and it's not worth paying to feed and board it anymore, Tosh gets a phone call, then a loaded pickup. Getting it up the stairs is trickier. Two guys (I have a back condition, Tosh knows that) do not have an easy time getting 300+ kilos of fresh horse meat and all its associated parts up the stairs. I provided a modified Christmas sled (don't ask) which helped. Eventually they got it up and into the tub. The real trick is breaking it down. Follow every step, measure out all the chemicals sized precisely to match the body weight, and apply each at the prescribed time. All totally illegal, of course. The powers that be clearly do not want average Joes to make a buck without their getting a cut, hence the endless certifications and inspections and signoffs. But I have a condition so they can go to hell. Once I'm back with two gallons of milk, just in case, I hand them to Tosh as he's sitting in the kitchen. The plate is clean. My plate is clean. “Eggs weren't bad, but the bacon was too dry,” he says. “Take this and get started before I seriously lose my cool.” “Whatever.” He does and goes and I sigh and carefully pull the scale back down from the top of the cabinet. Tosh doesn't have any clue what he's doing. He provides the raw materials (bought, or pilfered from his family's stores) and some of the funding (ditto) and the brute strength and I provide the chemical industrial know-how and oversight and monitoring of his progress. I also pay him for his time. And I post the instructions and warnings and motivational texts around the bathroom. Good for morale. “That all appears satisfactory.” I place the last bite of the last piece of my second bacon between my teeth and commence chewing. “Yeah, I bet it does. Hey Fer, I don't suppose you could help me with this giant bag of ammoniaL” He hefts it beside the jacuzzi. The tub's contents bubble in a bright and cheerful color. “Tosh, I have—” “Yeah. A condition. I know. I was just hoping, maybe—” “I don't want to aggravate my condition.” He knows this. “No, we wouldn't want that.” “Exactly.” Tosh mutters something, an unpleasant habit of his which he so far has proven unable to break. By nightfall, the tub has reached the roiling stage, which is acceptable progress, and I let Tosh go for the day. I double-check that the retrofitted vent system remains in good working order, as this will be vital at this stage. Satisfied, I close the door and climb the 17 stairs (plus one landing between steps 15 and 16 where the staircase makes a 90º turn) to my attic bedroom and I climb into bed and I go to sleep. I wake up to beeping. Tosh is yelling. My eyes are burning. It's still dark. I roll out of bed and squish on my slippers and find my nightgown and tie it closed and descend the 17 stairs (plus landing) again. Tosh is in the bathroom. The beeping is louder. The tub is bubbling black with gray smoke. “What happened?” I keep blinking. “It set off the smoke alarm!” Tosh is pacing in front of the tub. “It's wired to the fire department! We're going to have to flush this and, uh, hide the bones somewhere!” “OK.” “Help me!” “I have a condition! Use the gloves and pull the plug.” He does and he does. All the hair and sediment clog the pipes though and it doesn't drain and the firetrucks come and Tosh says “I'm out” and he goes. The firemen come in and the firemen see the mess and they yell at me. Why did you do this Mr. Wheeler they say. We're making glue I say. Why didn't you separate the hide and hooves that is what glue is made from why did you do it all together have you ever made glue before in your life. No I say but that doesn't matter I know all the chemicals. And that's why you can't keep a horse in your tub. Prompt: in south Carolina, allegedly, it is not permitted to keep horses in bathtubs
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Aug 22, 2022 08:01
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sebmojo posted:Fuschia Tude Thanks sebbo!
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Aug 23, 2022 17:57
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Something Else posted:Week 526 The Planter That's a nice reveal about what the metamorphasis is/is going to be. Hmm. A lot of these details are cute, but I'm not sure about what they add up to. I'm not entirely sure what she's implying at the end, and the bush planted to cover him up... for modesty? And to cover the scratch? That's it? This just seemed to kind of get weird and hard to parse the meaning of by the last scene. Everyone's suddenly talking so obliquely. Sparkle the Soccer Horse or All Praise to The Eye (All Praise to The Eye) Some decent voice writing and a cool weird mutation. Description of the Lovecraftian event around the hole/tear is kind of bland and generic. I like this new development with the animals learning, though. Overall verdict: cute. Delivery Well that was cool. Kind of consistently surprising all the way through. I don't really know any details of the deal, and it's a bit funny that the mutation is hypothetical, future, and promised rather than actualized in the story, but somehow I'm OK with that. Ohhh, I just realized from Muzzle's review that the viewpoint character possibly used his powers to get the bag of cash, rather than the little homunculus. I guess it's up to interpretation. Forgotten Toys Hmm. This is all competently written, and nothing glaring stands out. The stilted language of the mice aside, I guess. But nothing about this story really grabbed me. You're just bored exploring the attic with Mick, and then confused stuck in the dollhouse with him, the end. It's like it tries to be a horror story, without ever creating a feeling of dread, or even mystery (aside from "what is going on there at the end" because it's so out of left field). The Sounding of My Voice Oh. That title. This is pretty cool. Weird and obscene and I don't get it at all and cool. I get the feeling it's not quite true to the experience of being deaf--a lot of people wouldn't necessarily get the connection between 'baloney' and 'balogna' at all if they'd never heard it, because the one doesn't look similar to how they're both pronounced, for instance--but that's not a huge deal. weirdo fish guy Huh. This is a cool meditation. Unlike a lot of this week's stories I get the feeling this one isn't literal and really isn't trying to be. The Metamorphosis (IRL) Ah, of course I should have anticipated a Kafka reference with this week's subject. Oh, huh, this is a direct rewrite of its namesake into modern day. OK. And I think this story is also really not trying to be literal. But then, Kafka's arguably wasn't, either. I wish you had twisted or altered the Kafka story in some way, though, rather than just hitting every single beat of it in order. Good job translating it into 2021 America and flash fiction format, I guess? Like, it's all competently written at a technical level, but structurally? Besides a thin commentary on modern remote meetinged socially disconnected WFH life (...and Twitch streamers...?), what's the point? Emblazoned So it's a superhero story. For such a short story it's chock full of proper nouns and I'm not sure it needed to be quite so thick with them. I'm more interested in some of these one-line throwaway references like titanium and alien tech. It's kind of annoying how often you use pronouns instead of names, even when you're referring to different people in the same paragraph or across multiple paragraphs. The "lovers as teens" paragraph in particular I kept getting hung up on trying to figure out who was the subject. Eventually I figured out the "he" was Marcus/Blazon, since he is the topic of the story. But I'm not quite sure why, and I'm not sure what happened in the end. I don't know how he died... twice? Did getting headshot uncure him of his superpowers? This feels like you tried to cram a whole multi-issue story arc into a two-page story and it really suffers for not having the space to breathe. It's just not remotely able to grasp what it's reaching for. To be honest, I was into that weird-something-happening-in-high-school story it started out as, and I wish it had stayed there for the whole length. Kiddo and the Bull Superpowers in a normal setting. OK. Seems like plausible child's reasoning so far. Interesting choice to make the transformed one the non-viewpoint character, and that it happened a lifetime ago. Nice enough. Despite the length it was quick to read. Good Boy This is an interesting story so far. Some technical errors at the construction level, lots of run-ons and splices, but the story structure is compelling. But then it all falls apart in the last act. Everything from the discovery of the barrel on is rote, perfunctory, like you couldn't think of anything to write but the most obvious thing, and I'd say you should read some good fight scenes, not to copy them but just to note how and why they set things up and advance events sentence by sentence and why they work. Disappointing, especially after the promising opening. Ten Feet This feels like an unusual number of superhero stories for a typical week. I guess a topic like 'metamorphosis' makes people think of Spider-Man. This opening half is just dull. Wayyy too many words for way too little happening. At least in the second part things are moving. I don't know. That ending didn't feel earned. Especially after that opening sequence. We just don't have the context for what he's feeling about the past, since we never saw him with his powers, and all we see of him is mostly from that first scene, which does not paint him in a good light at all. True Name of the Sun This started out interesting, but then it just became a parade of talking heads burping out backstory. You write these characters like they're NPCs in, well, Fallout, just there to infodump worldbuilding cruft. Establish shelters huh? So this literally is Fallout. And then it just goes there at the end. A Battlestar Galactica reboot episode. I wish you had done anything to put an interesting spin on the situation. All of the action was predictable and all of the worldbuilding  was wayyyyyy too long.
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Sep 6, 2022 12:12
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Uranium Phoenix posted:One of the reasons I sometimes don't bother to enter, even if I like a prompt, is that I figure there's a pretty good chance I only get a single crit. Maybe. And sometimes its weeks after I enter that I finally get one, or get a second one. A major attractor to me with Thunderdome was timely, honest crits, and several of them to cross-reference. I've always made sure to put the effort in when I'm judge to give good crits, and it's deeply frustrating to me when people sign up to judge and don't bother. Perhaps my perception of this overweighs how often it happens. Nevertheless, "do I get my crits" doesn't feel like it should be a roll of the dice, and that is what it feels like. Yeah, I remember that bothered me when I first joined. There was a long streak of several years after that which was a lot better in that regard, though.
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Dec 24, 2022 00:20
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Albatrossy_Rodent posted:Unfortunately, Antivehicular posted:Yeah, I think it's an emotionally tricky scenario. I can see the intimidation problem. Maybe there's space for a second non-TD weekly prompt writing thread? And it wouldn't be tier-based to keep newcomers out of TD, but exactly the opposite; you can only write in the starter thread if you don't have more than a couple wins, in either thread. TD itself still remains all comers served. That way TD itself doesn't need to change, just an onboarding thing is added to the side. The new thread would have the same requirement to post crits, the same general judging rules, aside from the fact that obviously nobody would be chief judge more than a couple times. No losertar, to continue with the lower barriers to entry, less punishing idea; maybe each week's winner can get a free av, or gift cert, or something similar.
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Dec 30, 2022 11:40
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 11:49 |
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sebmojo posted:honestly, just start a thread. use discord to scare up some participants, and dropping a link in td to let people know its there is fine too within reason. Yeah that's what I was leaning to do.
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Dec 31, 2022 08:11
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