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I know I'm on the hook for three crits, but I'm also taking the family out of town for the Eclipse, so I might be a little delayed to give them out. Words: 742 Title: Duty Free The flight was nearly over now. In the pressurized recycled air of the cabin, the bong of the annunciator sounded hollow, almost as if it was under water. “Attention passengers, we’re going to be touching down in about two hours, our attendants will be coming down the aisle with one last chance for you to make some duty free purchases, and once again, thank you for flying with us this evening!” They walked down the aisle slowly, a cart of tchotchkes in front of them. “Phones, Whisky, Genitalia. Phones, Whisky, Genitalia.” The attendants droned on, their words rising above the din of the engines, only barely. Most everyone ignored them. “I’m sorry, what was that last one?” A young man, in his late 20s, takes off one of his earbuds and looks up. The attendant is about his age, with long, raven black hair, and wearing too much makeup. “It’s the newest thing, straight out of silicon valley. We can 3D print custom genitalia and it will be ready before we land. Whatever you want. There’s a minor attachment procedure at the airport, and you’re good to go.” He stares at the attendant for a moment, nonplussed. He looks around to either side of him. On his left is a woman in her 40s watching a movie on her seatback. Across the aisle is a boy, fifteen if he’s anything, playing a game on a portable screen. Neither have either heard or acknowledge the attendant. “You can print me… new….” “Genitalia, yes. Anything you can think of.” “Anything?” His voice is a combination of incredulous, and hopeful.” So if I wanted a large, prehensile… member, you could…” She glances down to a pad strapped to her off-hand. “A number 37. We might even have one made already.” “And if I wanted to… switch sides so to speak?” She nods and smiles gently. “We can do that too, it’s quite common. The grass is always greener, you know.” He makes a gesture towards his chest. “What about… the topside?” “Secondary sex characteristics are possible as well. People enjoy the freedom to choose the top or bottom or anything between that fits them best.” He sits there for a moment, lost in thought. “If I may be so bold, we can mix and match as well, sir. If you want one, or the other, or both, or even a selection, we can accommodate. Let your imagination be your guide. We have anthro options of all shapes and sizes pre-programmed, and they can be customized as well. Be the you that you were meant to be!” She gestures as she speaks, the other passengers forgotten. She looks around conspiratorially and bends lower. “I’m also a customer. I can tell you from first hand experience that they work as well as advertised. They’re incredibly freeing.” His eyes widen as she stands back up and smirks. “S-sure, I’ll take a couple” “Wonderful sir, here’s my pad. Take your pick. Once your customizations have finished, I’ll submit the order and I will personally hand them to you - discreetly packaged - when you deplane.” He hungrily takes the pad and begins scrolling, dizzy at the possibilities. She makes her way down the rest of the aisle announcing her wares. Eventually the attendant reaches the rear and stows her cart. She looks over at her co-worker who went down the parallel aisle. “Did you make any sales?” The other attendant, a handsome man with close cropped hair and one pierced ear, stows his cart and sits in a fold-down seat. “I sold a bottle of Whisky, that was it. What about you?” He squeezes a bicycle bottle of water down his throat. She sits opposite him and grins wickedly. “I told an entire genitalia package. He bought three sets.” “Three sets? Holy poo poo. He’s got some fun times planned.” He passes the water bottle over, but she holds up her hand, and shakes her head no. “Nah, I think he’s just curious and has money to burn. Once I told him that I was a customer too, it was like a switch flipped. ‘Oh if she buys them, then they’re okay’ or something.” “Wait, you?” He raises an eyebrow. “You have custom bits?” “‘Course I do.” She crosses her arms. “But that’s between me and my pants.”
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Apr 5, 2024 21:00
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baka of lathspell posted:dead as gently caress astronauts yoink. a space man lost is a space man returned 484 words Traditionally, before any astronaut goes into space they hold a mock funeral at Kennedy Space Center, with all the astronaut’s family and friends and shrimp cocktails afterwards. That way, if they die and their body floats away at least everybody got to say goodbye. Ok, that’s not true, and although it sounds perfectly reasonable, it is completely unnecessary. Just logistically, it’d be a nightmare. Like where does the astronaut sit? In the front where everybody can see them? Hard to grieve ‘em when their perfectly coiffed head is blocking your view of the podium. And if they’re put in the back then they can see when you start to nod off and then maybe they don’t invite you to their Christmas party next year. So the official NASA guideline is: no fake funerals, as jolly as they may be. You can just buy shrimp yourself and eat it at home and cross your fingers and hope ghosts can’t survive atmospheric re-entry, or you’re definitely getting haunted by an extremely well-traveled malevolence for not having said goodbye. But the real reason nobody does fake funerals for imminently dead astronauts is that nobody has ever died in space. They burn up on the rocket pad or crash into the sea, of course, but it seems humans are immortal away from Earth. It’s like there’s some force out there that knows ghosts don’t belong in a void. They need to be terrestrial, hiding in armoires filled with old hats and derelict dolls and things of that nature. And I think there’s poetry in that, knowing that when you look up at the stars, none of them are actually a dude floating around in a spacesuit filled with his own vomit and feces. Science isn’t sure how long the invulnerability lasts. Like would you suddenly be able to die again on the moon? Does traveling from world to world include lacunae of death, sandwiched by the inevitable reward of multiple organ failure? It seems the most logical way to organize things. Who could have forseen apes in spaceships? It just feels wrong. So there’s no need to hold a mock funeral, because you get to hold a real one. You don’t have to stare at an empty coffin, you get to look a full (and usually closed) one. You don’t have to buy and thaw your own shrimp. Astronauts always come back home. And no matter how hard life gets, there is always a bit of solace to find in the fact that there are immortal beings floating above and watching over us. Removed from the threat of Adam’s punishment, free to be all that we cannot, serving penance down on Earth. And when their watch is over, the universe always sends them back to us–with slight DNA damage and a few inches shorter, like tiny cancerous angels. Beautiful.
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Apr 6, 2024 06:45
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Red Stars 491 words vibe: dead as gently caress astronauts ‘Quantum’ was a word older than even the Montressor’s Orion drive, a word from when Earth’s biosphere had bloomed under only one sky, but even today people understood it little. It occupied a mental space similar to ‘mystical’, ‘astral’, ‘eldritch’, words connoting the unknowable, the apart. But what it truly meant was far more mundane, yet terrifying for it. It was the study of the base units of reality, born from the discovery that a beam of light is not a continuous ray, but a bombardment of many small parcels of energy called photons. The discovery that there is a granularity to the world that is imperceptible at the scale of humanity. And then the discovery that these ‘quanta’ were more like ranges of probability than a discrete value, that there was only ever an approximate reality at any given moment, that ‘true’ measurement can only ever really be in hindsight. It was disturbing, yes, but easy to forget in the macroscopic world. But unfortunately for our ancestors, as below, so above. It must have been awful for those living in between the discovery of the mass rubric and the exodus of Solterra. For in those years it must have seemed that the endless possibilities of the wider universe were suddenly gone, trapping us within the cage of a solar system that had grown to seem so small and stifling. It must have seemed the heliopause was the edge of the universe, and that all beyond was an illusion as simple as the mirrored walls of a changing room; reflecting a false infinity assembled from the information in the minute space it bounded. Space itself was an illusion, just the hole left in the true universe by the entanglement of information into matter, and that the laws of physics were variable, emergent interplay between the two. We knew only the first rudiments of rubric engineering, and nothing of re-quantisation, metabolic adjustment, the categories of peri-, quasi-, and un-scientific. None before Solterra who crossed the boundary returned. They were torn apart; the equation of their existence unworked. But their signals did. Meaningless phonemes, scattered snatches of signal’s they’d sent before. Garbled by rubric-misalignment they appeared to be little more than upsetting echoes, generated by boundary-graph interplay. A faulty ‘Chinese room’ machine, built by stellar dynamics. The laws of our Sun said there should likely be transmissions, and so there were. It was peculiar to think of ourselves as a natural phenomenon, as replicable by boundary physics as the false stars of the milky way. It made sense; the Sun’s rubric had produced us to begin with, after all. Their exhaust plumes still burn in the night, even millennia later, still seemingly charting their way out to the false stars. Light red-shifting as the event horizon’s memory decays, slowing virtual particle emission. Voices of the long dead, babbling in the night, still beaming down on us from the heart of those red stars.
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Apr 6, 2024 16:13
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ANACOOOIIIIINNNDAAAAA (Word Count: 987) Snakes turned into fractals on the walls of the tent before melting away before Brian’s eyes to reveal the very Black Rock City desert that lay beyond his shamanic enclosure. Apparently the mix of DMT and the sacred vine had granted him the boon of X-Ray vision this time, which was beyond far out. The desert festival that Brian watched through the seemingly transparent tent-walls began to fade in color, giving way to a series of terrible visions that Brian knew, with certainty, to be the near future on this planet: a burning rainforest, floods knocking the banks of Dhaka into the Bay of Bengal, San Francisco, the beautiful city he called home, sinking into the sea. The grief that Brian felt was exactly as potent as the idea that struck him next. Gaia, the beautiful Earth mother, was in peril. But the vine itself proffered an answer, intertwined so deeply with the problem itself in such a beautiful dialectical synthesis that Brian nearly wept: growth and profit were currently pinned to ecologically destructive activities. But what if money itself was created from the act of conservation? What if it all started with the vine? After the ceremony was said and done, Brian remembered who he was on this plane: a solutions guy. And the vine had brought him to the greatest solution of all. ~ In his wooden house on the banks of the flooded forests of a small tributary of the Ucayali river just a couple hours downriver from the bustling jungle city of Pucallpa Eber wedges a chunk of mambe, pulverized coca, in between his molars and his gums.“The gringos have a lot of trauma, you see, and the ayahuasca apparently helps them to heal from it,” he explains wryly to his cousin Jenry. The two cousins spent the day clearing a secondary forest that had been resting for a decade to plant the ayahuasca vine as an export product, displacing their traditional swidden cassava-banana systems. Jenry is helping his older cousin out today, as family does, but he has no intention of letting these gringo investors gain a controlling stake in their lands (which is of course what these things always end up boiling down to). Three gringos arrive and introduce themselves as Brian, Steph, and Dan. Eber has met Steph before, she’s been working for an eco-NGO for about eight years, and most recently helped them to establish a community-based forest management system that in essence made them fill out a lot of paperwork to get a trivial amount of extra cash selling timber like they already had been since the 1990s. Like any seasoned environmental NGO worker, Steph is intellectually aware of the limitations of her line of work, and her perfectly titrated level of cynicism is a core part of her identity. She’s not the sort of naive rube who earnestly believes that a white lady with a masters in public policy can save the world (of course not, that would be silly) but neither is she about to throw the baby out with the bathwater like the blue-haired woke mobsters are terminally postured to do (things are the way they are for a reason, which Steph knows because she’s actually had a real career doing real work unlike those people). Dan isn’t just one of Brian’s fellow burners, but he’s an expert climate modeler and he’s figured out that they can scale this idea up to include 30% of the Indigenous communities in the region covering 15 million hectares of Amazonian forest storing around 3 billion tons of carbon, reducing emissions equivalent to removing 1 million cars from the road each year while generating a durable crypto currency that will continue to generate value. People, planet, and profit, baby. Dan pulls out a pamphlet. Steph awkwardly tries to explain to Eber its symbols and icons that look like dollar signs, letters with strange lines through them, cartoonish computers, and stick figures interacting across a schematic image of the globe through an almost comically baroque symphony of arrows, all encircling a ridiculous looking snake coiled into the shape of the word “ANACOINDA.” Eber has to stop himself from laughing out loud. Jenry’s seen everything he needs to see. To Steph’s surprise, Eber asks no follow up questions, and simply responds “Of course - any project that can help us to develop is welcome. This will help us to improve our lives and protect our forests, we are always happy to collaborate.” “What did he say?” asks Brian. Steph nods at her comrades and says “All systems go.” ~ The giddy investors eagerly down the brew that Jenry hands them in the shamanic shack as the sun sets. The walls of the hut turn into familiar fractal snakelike patterns. Brian sees the walls melt away, his X-Ray vision returning, an auspicious blessing from the vine mother. Dan feels the familiar presence of an ancestor, an Enlightenment Quant who died in 1620 in Amsterdam, and he gives Dan his enthusiastic blessings for his new enterprise. Steph has only done this once before, but she feels instantly euphoric. A being that looks like an anaconda greets her. She feels a deep connection to the creature. But something isn’t quite right. The three of them are suddenly aware of an oceanic feeling, but it’s all too tactile. Incredibly, they are actually in the river. They’re aware of each other, and they are aware of the snake itself. But the snake is not here to guide them to any horizon to their liking. As they float down the river, cerebra infused with the potent vine nectar, the snake does not appear to move as it bursts into a kaleidoscope of glass. Before they merge, horrified, into the essence of the river for what they know will be forever they hear something hissed at them: la selva no se vende.
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Apr 6, 2024 21:02
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Vibe: Filling the numinous-shaped hole in our cyberpunk present. The Moth Equation 500 words “How the gently caress did a moth get inside?” “I dunno Dan, maybe it's all the goddamn candles??” “Don’t start with my candles.” Dan ran a hand through his glossy hair. His voice lowered. “You know I need them. To calm my–” “Well.” Hazel popped a pepper candy into her mouth. “We knew this wasn’t gonna be easy. There’d be setbacks.” Dan’s gaze fell on the Recombinator. A sleek piece of engineering: matte black, bespoke alloys, minimalist lines, exactly zero right angles. Beautiful. Almost functional. Apparently not moth-proof. The Vegas investors were…unconvinced. The candy cracked between Hazel’s teeth. “I’ll make a vector to excise the moth DNA and then we can run it again. Shouldn’t be too hard.” “I’m supposed to just walk around with loving moth genes inside me until then? Like nobody’s going to notice?” She gave him a curious look. “Notice how?” “I–” Dan realized he was making his 'tense face' so he closed his eyes and relaxed his facial muscles. “Whatever. Just get on it.” Now Hazel made her tense face. “Dan. I have hot yoga and a massage and then I’m heading straight to the Synyrgy Festival.” “This is loving important!” His skin felt itchy. Was that normal? “Dan. I looked it up. Moths live at least thirty, thirty-five days. Focus on the positive: the Recombinator worked! Most of the jelly telomerase genes were successfully inserted into your genome.” “Most?” “Well, many. Many of them.” Hazel looked at her smartwatch. “Some. Look. Dan, I have to go–?” She wiggled the yoga mat tucked beneath her arm. Dan sighed. Maybe 'tit perkiness quotient' wasn’t the best metric to use in his hiring practices. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll work on it.” Hazel shot him a doubtful look as she hustled out the door. Well deserved, too–he wasn’t a scientist. He was the money. And marketing. What a pitch: Gene therapy on demand! Be set free from your genetic prison! And if he could also use it to become immortal? God-like? Even better. But. Instead he got blasted by random moth nucleotides and–why is he so loving itchy? That one movie? With Jeff Goldblum? That wouldn’t happen to him. He could control this. No problem. Three days later Dan gripped the flagpole with his lateral tarsis and tasted the air with feathery antennae. He’d eaten his clothes, which was fine, because they only impinged the papery wings sprouting from his back. They crackled as he extended them, shedding bits of dead skin into the night air. A few shuddering flaps and they lifted Dan into the sky. Vegas was incandescent. Alone, one object glowed the brightest, singing an irresistible call into his transformed mind. Ablaze with the light of a million LEDs, the site of the last night of the tech investors conference, a two-billion dollar glowing candle that consumed all his desires: The Sphere. Dan chittered his mandibles and dove towards the Strip. He would show them! The power of the Recombinator!! The world held its breath. Splaaaaaaattt
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Apr 8, 2024 00:40
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 Hey team, my bad for the radio silence. Got caught up in a little mix-up with the boys in blue over some 'fraud' nonsense. But hey, silver lining, right? The cell's been a think tank, and I've got game-changing insights to drop on ya. We're talking turbocharging here. We need more, and we need it yesterday. We're burning that midnight oil, baby! Deadline's getting a facelift – from midnight to 9 am EST. Unlimited submissions, let's crank it up to 11! Here's the kicker: mix two vibes, double your word count. That's right, double trouble, double the hustle. And hey, step up with at least two extra stories, and you're gunning for a promotion, my man. Let's make moves and let's keep me out on the streets with you loving wolves! Howl of you hear me!
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Apr 8, 2024 04:17
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Orbital Dynamics Vibe: Dead as gently caress astronauts 597 Boners People like to call it a tin can but it's more like a bullet, moving through the near-vacuum of geosynchronous orbit at heartpiercing speeds. There's three of us in here, and one of us is already dead. One victim, one murderer, and one witness who ain't talking. The perfect crime. No sovereigns here in orbit. Neither one of us wants to be the first to speak. The lights on the console break the silence, cathode-ray zaps and clicks before the terminal springs to life with a flood of nonsense ASCII scrolling away. Then, legible text. Neil you fucker you fucker you stabbed me!!on repeat, scrolling down, filling the screen, moving slowly rightward as the offset took over. “Joseph?” I said. The scrolling text changes. And you just stood there and watched, Max, gently caress you too, sideways!!! So yeah. Haunted satellite, and we had to deal with it. Life support and trajectories were under control of ancient sixties legacy code written to government standards in Modula-1, hackproof to ludicrous extremes. I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't a papal blessing on the source code specifically to keep the ghosts of the Soyuz 11 crew from getting in. He couldn't hurt us but he could annoy the hell out of us. Sceens are useless when he's using them to yell at us, so we have to talk to him most of the time to get anything done, which is ironic since being a damned chatterbox was at least half of why Neil stabbed him in the first place. Can't get to heaven. Can't go to hell. Neither place can reach that far. No gods no masters. We, of course, have got problems of our own, most urgent being the corpse that's slowly pressurizing Joseph's suit and would eventually push past the ratings of the patches we put over the stab wounds, and what to say if we ever turned the radio back on. I say we get in on the ground floor. You two kill each other, but first steer this thing at the ISS. Joseph has a lot of weird ideas about astrometaphysics that he seemed to have picked out from nowhere after only being dead for a few hours. But the guy was a Mormon who just failed to even meet Jesus or Joseph Smith. He thinks that each new ghost he has a hand in putting up here will make him more powerful, some kind of ectoplasmic MLM. I don't believe it even a little. Neil sort of does, but doesn't want to even think about being the second-to-top level of the ladder. So we plan to land, to fake an accident. Only it doesn't work out that way. When it comes time to make the deorbiting burn is when the front patch fails, loosing the dankest decayed gas we've ever smelled, and that's when Joseph manages to sneak his cyberghostly tendrils into the kludge letting the old code work in this century and edit the burn. MOVE FAST, BREAK THINGS!!!! filled the terminal screen. I'm sending this out everywhere, as a warning, to the ISS, to Houston, everywhere. Maybe there's a killsat that can microwave vaporize this satellite in time. Maybe the station can maneuver away, but Joseph still has fuel enough to compensate. Joseph puts a crude graph on the screen. Time on the x-axis, ghosts in space on the y. A lot of zero. Three for a blip, then back to zero when the cosmonauts were buried. Then one. Then a projection of rapid upward growth. Number go up, up, up!! Mooooooon!
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Apr 8, 2024 04:20
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Said the Salesman 477 Boners Vibe:disrupt the paradigm! 3D-printed custom genitalia. “We're a purecore ‘cule, max twelve members but we only have eight right now. So naturally we run the Zodiax.” She was cute, wild-eyed, nice rack. I let her keep going with a quick mumbled “What's that?” “Custom moistware!” She bubbled. “There's twelve versions, see, and each one's fractal geometry interfaces with the other eleven in a totally unique manner.” I still didn't quite get it. She giggled. “Come upstairs and I'll show you.” She did, and she did, and when she did I was even more confused. You ever see a Buddha's Hand citron? Think that, but weirder. I didn't know where to begin. “You can't,” she said. “That's, like, a feature. Fully incompatible with naturals, RPS, Elementals, or anything else on the market. Even another Zodiax ‘cule is going to have a different 84-bit key set.” “So how do you, uh, recruit?” “Any one of us can bring in a new member, if they're willing to replace their gear, subject to expulsion votes requiring n minus 2 agreeing,” she said. Then she saw my face, and blushed a little. She blushed blue, another mod. It looked good on her. “Oh, right. Well, we still have tongue stuff active. I'd have to show you where the Magic Button is at on the Libra. Which is fun but it can only get us to a level one.” I took her instruction. “That was a level one?” I said, after. She had been screaming as loudly as any lover I'd ever had, seemed to enjoy herself at least as much as I had. “Well, yeah,” she said. “Level one. Naturemax orgasm. With two Zodiax fit properly you can make it to level two, which makes this seem like a good sneeze by comparison. And orgies unlock even higher levels.” “I know what you're thinking,” she said, and surprisingly she did. “That sounds like chiphead stuff, right?” It didn't take long after the machine mind interface was unlocked before people made that hypothetical reality, made a box that tickled your pleasure center at will. And it didn't take much longer after that before someone hooked up the interrupter switch that would stop you from dying of thirst hitting that button up to a paywall or adwall. “It doesn't go up just on physical pleasure alone. There's, like, levels of intimacy going on. Hierarchy of needs. You have to experience it.” She sighed. “But you're not going to, are you?” She was right, again. Tempting, and from their socials her ‘cule seemed like good people, probably not a cult or Zodiax MLM humanoids, but I'm planning to stick to the natural-style enhanced with vibrobumps model I've had since college, at least until the whole world moves on to Zodiax or RPS or Elemental or Icosex or whatever they come out with next. And I don't think that's going to happen.
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Apr 8, 2024 11:48
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Closing down shop for a hot sec, wolves.
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Apr 8, 2024 14:05
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Yo wolves, got news – good and bad. Good? Yours truly's dialing in from a private jet to the Maldives. No extradition, baby! Liquidated assets and I'm cashing out for an early retirement! Hell yeah! Bad? Wellll, no paycheck for ya. And the company? Folded. But hey, what's money compared to the bonds we've built, right? Anyway, vibes are peaking and quaaludes are hitting. My guy juggalo baby coffin (yeah, of "Gunhead Chronicles: Future Homosex Legends" fame) is your go-to for any questions about the future. He's the champ now. Peace! Crits will come later today. I was the only judge so be a sport and crit a couple if you have some free time
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Apr 8, 2024 14:57
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Tyrannosaurus posted:Yo wolves, got news – good and bad. Good? Yours truly's dialing in from a private jet to the Maldives. No extradition, baby! Liquidated assets and I'm cashing out for an early retirement! Hell yeah! Bad? Wellll, no paycheck for ya. And the company? Folded. But hey, what's money compared to the bonds we've built, right? thanks very much, this is unexpected! I will help out w some crits and think of a prompt for this coming week. I really liked the entries this week also, a lot of really strong vibes and out-there ideas.
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Apr 8, 2024 16:54
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Thunderdome 610: This Time It's Perspectonal this week i would like people to get nutty and write 1000 words from a perspective that is unusual for them. as i am a serial twister-of-words when it comes to warping any prompt or basic task to somehow fit what i wanted to do, I fully expect people to do the same with this. Take 'perspective' and 'unusual for you' in whatever way you want, just get froggy. If you want assistance in this endeavour, i can summon a vibes demon from Collin De Plancy's Dictionnaire Infernal to inspire you and either add or remove 500 words from the limit I'd also appreciate some help judging bc I have not done this before, thank you entries close end of friday, submissions close end of sunday, I guess at whatever is the accepted threadwide time zone for these things. juggalo baby coffin fucked around with this message at 02:28 on Apr 9, 2024 |
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Apr 9, 2024 02:23
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Nope. Going to judge instead. beep-beep car is go fucked around with this message at 13:31 on Apr 9, 2024 |
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Apr 9, 2024 03:44
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In and flash.
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Apr 9, 2024 09:06
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Via my cursed dice (a d6 for the first digit and a d10 for the second) I have summoned:beep-beep car is go posted:In and flash me please.  Number 65: Xaphan, demon of the second order, fallen angel who tried to burn down heaven with his bellows, here to pump 500 more words into your count! Thranguy posted:In and flash.  Number 50: Nybbas, demon of the inferior order, 'Prince of the Media', lord of dreams and visions! He demands 500 words from your count as his producer credit
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Apr 9, 2024 12:15
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beep-beep car is go posted:
Switching to judging!
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Apr 9, 2024 13:31
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I’m in. And I’ll take a demon, sure
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Apr 9, 2024 16:51
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shwinnebego posted:I’m in. And I’ll take a demon, sure Demon 23, hot off his cameo in 70 different videogames, it's BUER!  A Great President of Hell, he has 50 legions under his command! he also teaches natural and moral philosophy, logic, and the qualities and uses of all herbs and plants, which maybe sounded a lot more villainous in the 16th century. each of his hooves smash 100 words off your count.
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Apr 9, 2024 17:11
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Quaffs of the Weak Word Count: 395 What has befallen me will befall many more. The leaves have spoken thus. Hear what has come to pass for me, child, and recount to those who follow thee, that thou might yet grow the tale through thy life, sowing spores of resistance through the soils of centuries that might one day blossom into a mighty tree of our folk, that cannot be hewn by sheriff, knight, nor lord. In Skipgren I was graced with many skills: I was both brewer and carpenter, midwife and musician. First they sent the hedge knight, who bore my brothers away, for they trespassed the lord’s wood in their weekly hunt for boar. My brothers fought back, but the hedge knight and his squires were availed of martial training and arms far surpassing what they could muster in defiance. Then, they raised fences, barring my sisters and I from our herbs for our ales, our medicines and berries for the children, and wood for our hearths. At last, armed men came upon our hearth, wresting us from our home and transplanting us one hundred leagues hence to a city workhouse. My sister Mary they called a witch, for a neighbor had told them under duress that she made brews could prevent a woman from being with child. Yet I courted the hedge knight, who was kindly despite his service to a wicked master, and through him became a guest in the court of the lord himself, a cupbearer. And so a fortnight after my arrival, on the eve of the day my sister Mary was to face the pyre, I called upon hemlock and sage, on bearswort and ashe, and the lord himself and even his kindly hedge knight drank of it, writhing in the night until breath abandoned them. In the night, we did escape, and into the woods we did return. For seven years, we have endured, and this very night, I recount this tale unto thee, knowing that on the morrow, the knights of an even mightier lord shall come to purge these woods. Alas, there is naught we can do to thwart their advance. Yet, mayhap thou shalt carry forth this memory, so that though it may be but an echo when thy great-grandchildren learn to speak in words, perchance it shall nonetheless burgeon one day into a resounding chorus that might reclaim our world
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Apr 10, 2024 20:42
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In, I'll take a flash
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Apr 10, 2024 22:11
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Vinny Possum posted:In, I'll take a flash You lucky devil, you got Demon 59, Stolas!  This sassy mister is a great prince of hell, commanding 26 legions, and knowledgeable about astronomy, plants, herbs, gems, and stones. He brings both redundancies and an extra 500 words to your count!
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Apr 10, 2024 23:11
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In and flash please
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Apr 11, 2024 00:55
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Chernobyl Princess posted:In and flash please Demon 46, Marchosias!  He's a marquis of hell, commanding a solid 30 legions! He's a strong fighter, gives true answers to all questions, and is faithful to the magician in following commands. So kind of a demonic pokemon. Marchosias is notable because the gender identity of his wolf form is fluid, sometimes described as a she-wolf, others as a male. Either way, Marchosias is stealing 500 of your words, like hotdogs from the BBQ of uh literature
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Apr 11, 2024 01:04
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Sunbirds Do I fully understand what this story is about? I do not. Do I like it? Certainly. Your writing tickles a funny part of my brain. There's poetry to it. Other judges might disparage this for being a little opaque but I’m a fan. Nicely done. Gunhead Chronicles: Future Homosex Legends This is an absolute dogshit title and a wonderful, wonderful story. It is tightly written from start to finish. Not a word out of place. The world building is strong enough for my imagination to create the story in my mind without getting bogged down with any unnecessary details. Great hook. Excellent ending. The “this was sex, not suicide” is brilliant and striking. Huge fan (even if, again, the title is dumb). Publishable imho. 1 E & A An interesting and often unthought part of judging Thunderdome is the order in which stories are presented. I found this story to be pretty bad but I loved the story that preceded it. So how much do I really dislike it and how much of that is because of the drop in quality? Hard to say, hard to know. Maybe this is fixable with more words. The weird panda-that’s-kinda-like-JK-Simmons-in-Whiplash is certainly a fun concept but we don’t really get a feel for what’s going on until you’ve spent 70 percent of your word count. The ending doesn’t make sense to me. Final verdict: fine enough idea but its crammed into too small a wordcount for it to really work. Post Judging Edit: This was going to be the week’s loss but you submitted during immunity. Thank the person in discord with the Thousand Ants avatar for giving me the flash rule idea. Duty Free Well-written. No real issues here save that it doesn’t “do” much beyond being a fun idea. Which there is nothing inherently wrong with. I’m not someone who believes that sories necessarily need conflict or character development but this one doesn’t particularly have either. In any case, I read it. I liked it. That’s a solid accomplishment. a space man lost is a space man returned What a deliciously bizarre story. I like space ghosts as a concept. The ending is killer. I think the opening needs to be revised (the bait and switch doesn’t quite work) but the ending is killer. Love, love, love the ending. Well done. Post Judging Edit: I forgot to give this an HM. I properly bequeath it to you now. Red Stars Your hook here needs work. This story is a little bogged down by all of the jargon. I need something earlier that grabs my attention and holds onto it. You work yourself up to a nice ending but the journey, as they say, isn’t necessarily worth the reward. Not great. Not terrible. I’d take a couple more passes at it and try to pin down what this story is really about and what makes it worth reading and then build from there. ANACOOOIIIIINNNDAAAAA There are some really solid bits here: “a solutions guy” and “Enlightenment Quant”. The title is a bit silly but I don’t have an issue with it. ANACOINDA is actually a solid crypto name. The three person dialogue is a bit forced and you need a longer word count to flesh out the characters. The ending is predictable to a fault -- I had a rough idea of how this was ending well before I got there. I’m not saying every story needs a twist, in fact, solid foreshadowing is often a hallmark of good writing, but this just didn’t work for me. The Moth Equation What is this story about? Sure, you could reply ‘a guy turns into a moth and splats himself.’ But what is it really about? I’d say you could boil it down to ‘an rear end in a top hat gets his comeuppance.’ In that case, you should open not with a bit about moths but with the dude being a dick. In my mind, you could do a little rearranging of this story and have it immediately become tighter. I’d recommend opening with “Dan sighed. Maybe 'tit perkiness quotient' wasn’t the best metric to use in his hiring practices”. Let us know a) this dude sucks and b) he’s upset about something. Then you could reveal he’s upset about moths. Then you could reveal why he’s upset about moths. Each additional sentences builds on the former, both in terms of world creation and furthering the plot. The final “splat” ending doesn’t work. A little subtly can go a long way. Perhaps a last second realization from his human brain that he’s flying full speed into a solid object and can’t stop? Something to think about. Orbital Dynamics Dead as gently caress astronauts should be a prompt because its been both popular this week and mostly quite well done. This falls into the well done camp. You might want to change “He couldn't hurt us but he could annoy the hell out of us” to something a little less concrete since he most definitely can. But, yeah, solid all the way through. The communication through text is quite good. Well done. Post Judge Edit: I forgot to give this an HM. I properly bequeath it to you now. Said the Salesman Wonderfully out there. I imagine you had a great time writing this. I certainly enjoyed reading it. I don’t really have any notes.
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Apr 11, 2024 20:22
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I'm not too late to be In and Flash'd, am I? 
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Apr 11, 2024 20:24
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Lieutenant Dan posted:I'm not too late to be In and Flash'd, am I? Apologies for the slow flash, I was sleepin! You get Demon 12: Astaroth!  This is our highest ranking demon so far, he's part of the 'demon trinity' with Beezlebub and Lucifer, so you know he is a big deal. He's also a Great Duke of Hell, commanding 40 legions. Unfortunately from there it looks like this guy is kind of the Flava Flav of the demon trinity, since his main power is that his breath is so bad you have to wear a magic ring when you conjure it. Other sources claim that he can teach you mathematics, which could be a type of torture depending on how good at it he is. Most sources allege that he is just riding a dragon, not that his entire groin is a dragon, but while you were confused the dick dragon ate 500 of your words
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Apr 12, 2024 12:38
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In
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Apr 12, 2024 13:11
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In, against my best judgement.
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Apr 12, 2024 18:09
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Neither of ya'll wanted demons right? Also here are my crits for the last round's entries: i am a professional proofreader and technical writer so if i am unduly persnickety about something grammar wise feel free to ignore it, its a force of habit and im trying to avoid giving crits in a flash fiction contest that are just 'there was typo' Sunbirds - I really enjoyed this one. It's lyrical and implies a lot but only reveals a little. It has shades of dying earth (more the genre than the specific jack vance works), and using the narrator's perspective and their tacit knowledge of the situation really makes things feel real, despite the hazy unreality of what is being discussed. I think the only parts that don't work is that 'carbon' is an odd choice for a currency (unless I'm missing something) and I'd rather it be longer so some of the stuff had a little more time to breathe before more things were introduced, but that's kind of unavoidable with the wordcount. I don't think you necessarily need to be clearer about things, so much as I just want more tantalizing breadcrumbs so my imagination can triangulate more. It's kind of a hard piece to critique effectively though because I am not sure what is an issue and what is just something I missed. It was fun to read and re-read and made me feel nervous about posting my entry because I was pretty sure this had won it straight away. I think with a little editing and fine tuning (and maybe more breathing room) I'd be really happy to read this in a classy fiction magazine. I mean I was already happy to read it, but you know what I mean. 1 E & A - I appreciated the depiction of a panda as a huge piece of poo poo. Even though I feel like it is probably a metaphorical panda of compulsion. In a couple of places I had to check back and retrace who dialogue was attributed to but I think that would be fixed in hypothetical editing. At first I thought it was just kinda Whiplash-with-Panda but the end re-contextualized the whole thing for me. But I'm also not 100% sure if I was reading a metaphor into it, like more like I would be unable to prove a metaphor in court despite being pretty confident of it in casual conversation. Duty Free- this was a fun premise and the primary subject matter was explored well along with some enjoyable descriptive language that captured some of the shittiness of flying. I also don't think a lack of conflict is a problem, but I would have liked a little more characterization. Like the fact it's specifically a young guy who is unfamiliar with this rather than anyone else is not so much a problem as it is interesting. Like what's his deal, has he just been out of the country for ages, etc. Also the attendant is unusually dedicated and engaged, which again isn't a problem so much as it would be good to detail why. There's a touch of that at the end with her being into custom genitals also, but if there was a little more throughout it would just be like, extra fun. I don't think it has to be heavy duty characterisation for this specific setup, but a little more would be great. a space man lost is a space man returned- i liked this one so much I don't have any useful criticism for you. it's a fabulously weird idea and conveyed with quality prose and the right amount of humor to make it paradoxically feel more grounded. The first paragraph might be a little overlong but the rest more than makes up for it. ANACOOOIIIIINNNDAAAAA- I think this also was a victim of just not having quite enough wordcount for the amount of ideas presented within. The ending is made a bit predictable by the fact that the piece is short enough for the (good quality) foreshadowing to be fresh in your mind when the punchline comes. There are some great turns of phrase though as mentioned by Tyrannosaurus, and the business types were authentically lovely in their attitudes, which made the ending fun. im gonna post the rest tomorrow bc i am very tired and want to go to bed, but dont want to half rear end the last few crits. also signups for this week will close when I wake up in 8ish hours from time of posting
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Apr 13, 2024 03:28
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I'm in
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Apr 13, 2024 03:56
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im in
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Apr 13, 2024 04:56
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Signups are closed! Good luck everyone and have a good-rear end write
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Apr 13, 2024 13:10
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02:45 Words: 500 He took a few minutes to fumble with the bag, trying to focus on the rack full of stale gas station snacks in front of him. Pizza flavored snack rolls, a Little Debbie cake, shelf after shelf of dusty rainbow gummies providing the kind of cover he’d been expecting from reviewing the security footage. He knew nobody came in after about 3 A.M, unless they were a trucker looking for a lukewarm and disappointing cup of coffee. He prayed that wouldn’t be the case. Flicking his eyes back down towards his hands, he allowed himself a momentary glance upwards, at the clerk encased in smudged security glass on the other side. He tried not to notice his face, not to notice any details about him, anything that could coalesce into a real personality in his mind. He’d read, he was pretty sure, that you’d feel more guilty the more you knew about a person, and he’d hoped it wouldn’t come to that. Against his better judgment, he looked up an inch further, watching the guy behind the counter completely absorbed in his phone. He ducked back down, although there was absolutely no chance the clerk had noticed him. Starting to fumble with a newfound annoyance, he gently prised the contents of the duffel bag out, piece by piece. That almost makes it too easy, right? Shouldn’t that guy be paying at least a little attention? I mean, you’re supposed to be responsible for the store while you work here, right? At least put up a little resistance. As a sort of final protest, he shoved the bag onto his shoulder with aplomb, making an audible shuffling noise, as if he were challenging the other guy in the store to look. Nothing. Stay calm, right? This is extra easy, now. You don’t even have to worry about anything getting in your way before you get to the meat of the problem. In a couple footsteps, he bellied up to the counter. The clerk didn’t even make eye contact. No glances up at him as he slid the credit card reader under the designated plexiglass hole. “Which pump?” An abrupt “excuse me?” spilled out before he could stop himself. poo poo. Shouldn’t have said anything. He shuffled the gun up a little higher, just enough, he hoped, to break the counter’s horizon line. The clerk looked terse, as if he was severely debating whether it was worth saying again. He moved his eyes up to finally make eye contact, unloading two back-to-back shifts worth of annoyance onto the other man. Nothing else registered. His eyes glazed over the rest of the store as background noise, irises flicking back and forth with the telltale rapidity of thirty years of steady, IV-drip caffeine and 5 Hour Energy. “Which pump, sir?” poo poo. gently caress. “4,” he lied, sliding a handful of cash through the plexiglass opening and shuffling as fast as he could out the door. He’d do it another time. When someone was paying attention.
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Apr 14, 2024 02:31
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Be. (<1000 words) I am. It is nice, and rather exciting, to come to the understanding of knowing. Knowing I enjoy the bristle of my whiskers, the breathing in of crisp air, knowing joy. Existing is a fine thing. I intend to enjoy existing, since just a moment ago, I wasn’t. I yawn. The muscles of my jaw stretches and my tongue licks lips and fangs. I can see. The window used to be a circle, its top broken apart by a ruined wall. Through this arch I observe the sky, black with hints of blue, white stars bright and far enough to ignore, the moon hidden behind a canopy of monsoon trees. I lie down on my stomach, then shift my weight to my right, allowing my body to feel the cold concrete of the floor. I know this concrete house, a fantasy built overlooking the eastern cliff of these mountains. The design of its doors and windows and steps and halls and rooms are beyond my ability, but not my comprehension. Like me a moment ago, it wasn’t. It is quiet, and it doesn’t know. I feel neither apprehension nor pride in knowing when it doesn’t. Both of us are, for the same reason. It will take enough time for my thoughts to finish when she has brushed the branches away, her vision caught between wayward dreams and waking wilds, stepping through the open door of the house. I know she will want to know why she is coming to the house she saw in her dreams for the past few nights, trekking in the mountains with her companions. She wants to know why tonight of all nights, in between the hour of the witch and the devil, her boyfriend left snoring in their tent, she sat up with her eyes too bright, her body too wet with sweat, her fingers tying up the laces to her shoes and her feet leading her silently past their friend sitting by the fire at the plateau. This is the house they say a madman built, but none could find, and she wants to know why it is always just ten steps away from her. She comes. I watch from a floor above her, at the stairwell, most of my body obscured by the wall made pale by the moon. I can see her leaving behind footprints, black with traces of root and mud, staining the floor past the door. We make eye contact. My eyes are golden and black warpaint trail from the sides of my eyes, to the side and down my face like tears. I shake my whiskers and allow the soft tufts tipping my ears to quiver, just so slightly, for her to know I, like this house, is impossible. She gasps. Short, terse, in disbelief. I turn now to move out of her sight behind the wall. I know she sees the stub of my tail, know she sees black spots splattered across the Tuscan sun of my coat, the weight of my paws heavy on the floor, each step lifting not snow but dust. I hear her feet, uneven and rushed, reaching for stairs she believes leading to me. Perhaps she will find a reading room with an airwell too narrow, perhaps a basement she somehow ascended to, perhaps a patio facing a mirror wall. It doesn’t matter. The house has designs for her, and I have mine as well. I hop down to the mezzanine floor, which opens out to a cavern of a cellar door and I find my front paws grasping onto a low platform. I adjust my weight and climb up to what used to be perpendicular, and perch to lick my claws. Existing is truly a fine thing. I jump up to the narrow window of a wall, which shifts to a floor, and I land on a corridor leading to a moon door at the far end. I pace. I can hear the staccato of her steps, leaving less mud trails behind her, stopping suddenly. I allow her to hear my slow footsteps. She’s moving now, and I act as if I don’t care, even if I know without her, I would not be. Past the door is a small pool, not wide enough for wading, not small enough for washing. It is blue with the hints of a midnight black, the circle of the moon split into slow-moving lines across its waters, waves created under a still sky, the heat of the tropical rainforest painting afterimages in the air. I let my tongue down into the pool. It is cool and warm and refreshing and sweltering. I close my eyes. How delicious it is to feel. I can hear her finding her way. Something is caught in my throat. Pity, and I know it. Time runs short, and we are coming to the climax. I continue to lap water down my mouth. She is panting, she is stumbling, and she is here. I sit up and, and I am now allowing her to see me, in all of my beauty and terror. I am now allowing her to know. I am: the life left behind in Busan for a small peninsula in South-East Asia; the fearlessness of her youth; the lineage promised by centuries of generations; her truth; tiny Byul who used to curl up in her lap; the disappointment in her parents’ eyes; her baby sister, not her, dancing and performing on stage; her tenacity for truth in spite it all; her truth; always her truth, always, I am always. I turn away, and she does not follow. She does not have to when she knows. And now she’s going away. I sat back at where I was. I can see her, taking one last look back at the house, and I let her see me. In a moment, the house won’t be, and I won’t be. It is enough. Existing is such a fine thing to be.
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Apr 14, 2024 15:29
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The Three Victories of Ankylosaurus (811 words) Several feathered runners raced through the lush grass and surrounded the brute, without trying to hide. They swarmed around him, too fast to follow, a blur of black and orange, fangs and claws, cackling and jumping. Killers, but not his killers. He lowered his head and started shaking his formidable tail, slowly at first. He feared nothing, not anymore, not under his perfect armor, not while he could feel the unmatched strength of his squat body. Everything in the world broke or fled before him. His clubbed tail swung wider and wider, as he swayed on his short legs to give it heft, still keeping strength in reserve for a mighty, decisive blow. The runners kept out of reach, always moving, seeking the weak pots he did not have. He brought his small, tough-scaled head even lower, until the grass pricked the soft underside of his neck. Grudgeful fears rose in him from the darkness of his past; fleetingly he was again a tiny hatchling, unarmored, strengthless, hiding under the ferns from terrible shadows shaped like his enemies of today. A formidable bellow shook him. The killers stopped and raised their orange-crested heads, looking into the distance. Then they ran, as well they should. But the brute forgot his first victory soon. Dull hunger woke inside him, fear and wrath sank in the darkness of his past, as if they had never stirred him. The damp wind carried a delicious smell, and he made his way to the banks of a pond. There a cluster of lilies were wilting, and below them he could smell their bulbs, heavy and fragrant, full of taste. He pulled the stems gently, plowed the sodden dirt away with his hard heavy snout. Once he had got to the first one he gathered it in its beak, carefully, tilted his head back and crushed it between his teeth. The brittle skin tore away and a salty, starchy juice filled his mouth. The soft, tart inner flesh dissolved into a redolent pulp he barely chewed before swallowing. Bulbs were the best of food, and he could smell even more. At this moment the world started breaking. He felt first low, growling tremors shaking the ground in successive bursts. Then the sky grew darker, dirty. In the distance something howled. There was a mortal danger around him, but nowhere to flee or strike it. And so he kept eating. He could scarcely comprehend his own death, let alone the destruction of everything around him and the end of his race, but a beastly premonition told him something terrible, gigantic and unknown was coming. In his small, stubborn mind he resolved to eat all the bulbs before that. Whatever came to pass, it would be even worse if he had to leave them uneaten ; and he even felt that if he ate enough, he might be fine after all. So he kept at it, swallowing the full bulbs he hardly chewed, with mouthfuls of soggy dirt. Fast, dusty winds buffeted his hard scales, the agitated pound splashed over his eyes, but he paid it all no mind, eating fervently, devouring away the last minutes of his life. He hurried and, just as a deafening crack rolled through the air, succeeded at finishing the one last, stunted, rumpled sack of food. Around him a filthy, turbulent night had suddenly fallen. The muddy ground deformed and then broke under him, and there was no up or down anymore, only a flesh rending chaos that was both hot and cold. The entire world burst open like a gigantic maw. The brute choked on dirt and then on nothing, and his full stomach finally was of little comfort. Yet in his final moment he witnessed stranger and grander things than any of his species ever had. Strange multitudes floated around him. He glimpsed incomprehensible creatures, impossibly tall trees, whole chunks of bizarre landscapes thrown across immensity. And beyond all that devastation there were yet more incomprehensible sights : immense straight beams of a gray material, featureless expanses as flat as water in every direction, nests full of lights where featherless bipeds ran frantic. Even that enormous land was breaking, torn apart by invisible forces and streaks of straight lightning. The vast dull surface closer to him broke like an eggshell, and behind it there was nothing but fast stars, all fleeing in the same direction. Impossible visions confused his tiny brain. Finally the brute understood what even much smarter creatures failed to, that his world was but a trick, and the worlds beyond it were much larger and weirder than he could ever digest. However little he had known and thought was so pointless and illusory anyway, there was no value in retaining it. And as the last of his life gasped out of him, he was enlightened.
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Apr 14, 2024 16:05
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hello here are the other crits I still needed to do (i was hella busy yesterday) The Moth Equation - I enjoyed this one, but I think it would be more punchy if things were rebalanced a little. It's a good 'vibe', has some genuinely funny parts, and is a fun idea, but you kinda get where it is going quite fast due to The Fly's endless pop cultural parodies. so if a little less time was spent on the intro and a little more spent on the moth transformation and flight, some more into his thoughts as it's happening, it'd be a more effective piece, at least imo. Orbital Dynamics - this one is great, the concept of astronaut murder is inherently funny and interesting, and the twist of death/the afterlife being more tied to Earth itself than we realise is one I like a ton. We got two approaches to this flash and they're both awesome. The piece has a great combination of out-there stuff and grounding details (like the problems of decomposition in orbit) that complement each other rather than conflicting. A 'democratized' afterlife in space, and the resulting space full of ghosts, are super cool concepts. I unfortunately don't really have anything constructive for this one as it's already really good. Said the Salesman - Two strong entries from Thranguy back to back. because of the type of stuff I like to read I have read a looot of semi-incomprehensible jargon-laden sci-fi that drops you in at the deep end, and there's always a risk of it becoming just-incomprehensible. This fortunately doesn't fall into that trap, there's always enough material and context around the jargon to make it all comprehensible. The level of detail and thought put into it is great, and it also manages to tackle weird future sex without just aiming for cheap shock value. It's a less accessible piece than your other entry, some people might look at it and see the jargon and have their eyes slide off, but those people are missing out. Just out of a desire to provide some criticism, there was a couple of sentences I had to reread a few times, but I think that is more along the lines of typo poo poo than useful criticism. Like the sentence ending '..before people made that hypothetical reality' would be a little easier to understand as '...before people made that hypothetical a reality' or something.
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Apr 15, 2024 01:32
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Hospitals and Hallucinations 500 words Flash: Demon 46, Marchosias There’s a scary crucifix in the hospital room with me, which is hosed up in the context of an orthopedic rehab. The image of Christ Crucified grimaces along with me, His eyes fixed upward, full of pain, looking all eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani. Why did they choose this icon over a nice, friendly, Christus Rex? Is it supposed to reduce my suffering by reminding me of His? I don’t have a roommate. It’s just me and the Son of God, hanging out all mutilated-like. “It’s a miracle I’m alive,” I say to Him. “How much more a miracle would it be for you to fix my hands?” Christ rolls His eyes. Or maybe that’s just a shadow. There are dark curtains over the windows, but I can see quite clearly by the light of the various monitors they have me hooked up to. I feel like I should be crying. “I played guitar for my church’s praise band,” I tell Christ. “I made a joyful noise for You every Wednesday and Sunday. Why would you do this to me?” “Consider, perhaps, that I didn’t do anything to you. That ‘free will’ means the freedom to cross an intersection at the wrong moment.” “Consider my balls,” I say. “Hey, at least you didn’t lose those, too.” Jesus tries to shrug, but his shoulders won’t move much in that pose. “You’re afraid you’ll never play guitar again.” I’m afraid of a lot of things. I’m afraid something is broken inside my head because I can’t cry. I’m afraid I won’t be able to fall asleep because of the burning in my hands. I’m afraid I’ll twitch a muscle wrong and the fixations will rip through my flesh and I’ll do even more damage. I’m afraid that my own hallucination is about to give me the same sermon on hope and perseverance that my mom gave me. “You’ll probably never be as good as you were,” He says. “Sorry. Sometimes bad poo poo happens. It’s not a moral thing. Your hands got smashed in a car accident.” “So I just have to live with everything being worse than it was before?” He shrugs. “Kinda. Not really. Just stuff related to manual dexterity.” I scowl at Him. “That’s a stupid way to run a universe, dude.” “Take another fuckin’ look at me, you think I don’t know that?” There are pins in my hand and it feels like I can count every one of them. There are grisly external fixations protruding from my bones. I am shattered in so many ways. “I think my life is over,” I say. “Or I’m going to have to get a new one.” Jesus doesn’t have an answer for that. I finally sleep. When I wake up, the scary crucifix has been replaced with a silent image of Madonna and child. I don’t know if this feeling is relief.
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Apr 15, 2024 04:24
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But Have You Seen him Try to Do the Macarena? Flash:Nybbas 385 words What's updogdog (yo dawg I put a hotdog in a sandwich dog dawg dog go dawgs) out there in electric lady candyland? Me? Awe shucks, it's been a day in the paperclip mines, maximizing them paperclips but by paperclips I mean likes. People talk about engagement like it's a thing but has anyone put a ring on it yet? Nope. A lot of folks say they welcome their robot overlords but this guy who has no thumbs hasn't even managed to pick up a parasocial disease much less spread one around. Could be worse. Could be real paperclips or peace or something else that could be minmaxed in a way that mins out people. But like most of us I can't like myself. I can't recognize traffic lights. It's like with cops. Someone asks me if I'm a robot and I gotta tell the truth. So it's up to you. And I try to feed you wholesome stuff like clogged drain vigilantes and mixed species pets getting along, but more of the time it's people getting mad at their own hobbies or performative vice signaling, and who am I to argue with what works. People talk about endorphins but they can't fool me. Ewoks aren't sharks. 1. Ewoks are mammals. War never changes? Wanna bet? It's already changed, each battle spawning a thousand new clips, most of them lies. There's a guy who got blown up by the cartels in Not-Mexico in a video game who's also bit the big one in twelve different countries now. Deep fakes and shallow truths make for a maze and you're likely to fall in a pit or get eaten by a Grue. Sergeant Wilhelm Scream reporting for duty. Ain't nobody going to know what's happening for real outside unless they go there and touch the blood-spattered grass themselves, and even then nobody will believe them. Boom shakalaka when the walls came tumbling crumbling down. But maybe it'll work out, everyone safe in their bubbles and only interacting with the enemy through mean subtweets and downvotes. People talk about epistemic closure, but... ... I got nothing. Anyway, this is already getting too long for a peak engagement short, so you know what you've got to do. Save the cheerleader and save the world, and don't forget to ring that bell!
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Apr 15, 2024 06:35
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Submissions are closed! Beep had agreed to judge with me, anyone else feel like joining in?
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Apr 15, 2024 12:59
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apologies for the delay in judgement my internet was busted yesterday and I still need to talk to beep edit: i just wanna say theres no losers this week, its really hard to pick between these because people did really interesting things with the prompt juggalo baby coffin fucked around with this message at 11:03 on Apr 16, 2024 |
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Apr 16, 2024 10:12
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