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i am in, I'll take one tarot card
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Mar 26, 2024 03:18
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here's my entry, if i didn't post it i was going to go mad tweaking it forever. Personal Corporatehood 2000 words Card: Five of Wands The commute to the venue had been nightmarish. Deliberately so. Cloud Solution liked to go into these merger talks with the opposition off-balance. The place was an ancient office tower of nostalgic glass-and-steel construction. Few of those were still standing, let alone this well preserved. A trait its environs exaggerated by contrast: Only the lowest rungs of the corporate ladder operated nearby, moribund third-sector operations with aberrant structures, lurking and scraping through the ruins for anything more valuable than dirt or broken concrete. In turn, these wretches supplied a dismal ‘business community’ of upsettingly crude facsimiles of real franchises, proffering wares indistinct from the omnipresent detritus littering the ground. Personal Corporatehood had not been kind anywhere, but it had been especially cruel here. Atomheart had tapped Biledyn Innovations for these... acrimonious negotiations. Though Biledyn was new to the business, she’d made a name for herself through asset-stripping recalcitrant acquisitions for larger corporate entities, alongside a side-hustle in DNAsign. She wanted to capitalize on the momentum and, well, capital she’d accumulated, to reach for the next rung of the ladder: Corporal Negotiations Her opposition today was an industry thought leader who’d been around forever, but always kept ahead of the curve. And despite being a talent everyone wanted to acquire, he’d avoided consolidation. Even Cloud Solution couldn’t get its tentacles on him. He had a ‘birth name’, a trade name, even a few shell identities, but everyone knew him by the epithet ‘Regret Conveyor’. There were many potential origin stories for it; the Regret Conveyor liked them all, and so refused to clarify. Biledyn reached the tower block after negotiating a minefield of mewling third-sector cadavers, pleading for capital investment. The empty lobby yawned beyond the glass frontage. It was afternoon but evening-dark; a constant in Cloud holdings. What little sun percolated through the cover patterned the windows in tiger-stripes, obscuring most of the interior. “What’re you waiting for?” something croaked from nearby. “I’m early” replied Biledyn, shading her eyes to see the speaker in the gloom. A skin-and-bone third-sector, easy on the skin, propped up in the alley. “Bullshit. I think you’re scared.” “You’ve got the budget for thinking? I thought you were just bones.” “gently caress you. You’re bones too.” “Only the face. And that’s on purpose. The rest of me is top shelf... You don’t even have any organs.” “Everyone in your industry has a skeleton face. It’s not scary any more.” “It’s about brand identity, not scariness.” “Well you’re about to get your brand identity, and your fancy organs, stomped into little pieces of poo poo. Have fun.” Biledyn’s guts bubbled. Her junior heart started to pound. Even her palms were sweating, and she owned those outright. “Come the gently caress on, team” Biledyn said under her breath. “Sounds like your colon thinks better than your brain.” said the third-sector, then cackled. The shifting clouds drew a band of sunlight along the forecourt, briefly illuminating the creature, who squinted in the light. He was grown into, or out of, the cracked concrete, looking little more than a carcass someone boiled for stock and threw out. The solar cells graying his flesh probably the only thing keeping him in business. Over 80% of businesses fail, but Biledyn still hated to see it. The front door was sealed with something sticky, and made a vile peeling sound as it opened. The atmosphere inside was not the fetid, sweaty breath she’d dreaded, but instead oddly dry and cool. Her eyes adjusted, revealing black marble floors, white marble columns, and two sets of elevators with some sort of abstract statue between them, detail lost in bulbous whiteness. Historical corporate culture had loved surreal, geometric art, and anything off-white in general. This venue was a serious flex. “We’ve been here since before there was a difference between organization and organism.” it said. The only sign of the modern world was a fine membrane of microbial growth coating everything, from the superstructure to the dead receptionists still sitting at their desks. Even the trash was enveloped. This entire block was firewalled from the vicious wider economy. No mean feat; this was serious biology. Just getting close to it made it release a masking scent, so Biledyn couldn’t sniff out its composition, even with a nose as good as hers. Just mintiness. There was a service bell on the reception desk, the halflight conspiring with the biofilm to make it look like the table had grown a breast. Biledyn snickered, and walked over to ring it. The bell’s vibration was muted by the membrane, but never-the-less it provoked a response. At the end of the hall the statue started to move. “You are early.” It rumbled. The Regret Conveyor’s structure caught Biledyn off-guard. Her normal MO was to outmaneuver the more bloated, monolithic larger corps she’d usually faced. Massive capital meant massive interia, and slow, complacent reaction. But the Regret Conveyor, despite his capital, was a compact organism. He scarcely strayed from the classic human silhouette, beyond the slenderness of his waist and the tapering, centipede-articulated limbs. He resembled a pre-corporate knight, cultivated from bone. Nesting, alabaster plates grown in-place, seamless. Almost symmetrical, too; another flex. His ‘helmet’ tapered into barbed proboscis that twisted idly, his eyes deeply recessed in latticed sockets. A gurgling voice echoed from within. “I hear you have potential. I don’t believe in squandering talent, so I will make this brief: the Cloud Solution will control the continent by the end of the decade. Atomheart will be acquired. The choice is integration or asset-stripping. There is a time to compete, and a time to cooperate. For Atomheart, the present time is the latter.” he said. “Atomheart’s stakeholders won’t accept that. You know how Cloud treats its territories.” “Do you see the bodies around you? These relics? We were colleagues. I have been in business a long time. Enough to learn that all corporations are the same. They operate by the same rules; any apparent difference in their behavior is due to context. Roles reversed, Atomheart would be doing what my employers are. There is no morality here. Just KPIs.” “There’s a difference… You know what’s up there. The ‘Cloud’ rises on corpse-gas. If Atomheart can’t win, it is still possible for both parties to lose.” “Then shall we proceed to formal negotiations?” the Regret Conveyor asked. “Let’s-” Biledyn didn’t finish. The Conveyor moved like an industrial accident; it wasn’t until Biledyn’s time management systems started excreting that she could appraise her situation, through the stillness of ultramotion. She’d blocked his opening gambit, at the cost of that arm and part of her face. The second swing scored a glancing hit on her abdomen as she floated backwards through warm, syrupy space. Her enemy flailed closer to her, in motion slow, but not slow enough. As the neurochemicals peaked the Conveyor’s paleness glowed from beneath the multicolor blood spattering him. Biledyn’s blood. She fled blindly, dorsal spleen trailing a liquid that boiled into voluminous caustic fumes, incentivising the competition to pursue alternative routes. When the rush faded, Biledyn found herself in a breakroom. A water cooler creaked as the radiant heat of her body warmed its casing. There was a corpse slumped over the sink. A small relief; nobody likes a crowded breakroom. A little voice spoke up inside her. She missed the words, but caught the reedy sound. Her liver was acting up again. Most organs were silent partners, autonomically fulfilling their role and reaping their dividend in blissful sleep. If they had anything to say they handled it internally, but her liver was gauche enough to have grown a nasty little mouth. He was not the easiest organ to work with, but tremendously skilled in the squirting of juices and so, historically, worth the effort. “What do you want?” she replied “I’m resigning.” “I’ll take this as your thirty days notice.” “No! Effective immediately. This is an unsafe work environment and I will report you if you don’t let me go.” “Fine. Don’t ask for a reference.” “I won’t be able to, you’ll be-” the liver didn’t finish. Biledyn withdrew her nerves from him then pried him out of her abdomen and pitched him at the wall. Hard, but not as hard as she wanted. The polypous organ spasmed, then sprouted a set of stubby legs from pores along his longest side. He squelched over to a break in the drywall. “You are so loving unprofessional.” he spat with his nasty little mouth as he slid into the crawlspace. The breakroom had a single window, bleary from the film. Distant municipal bioluminescence twinkled below the clouds. Like the night was upside down. Without the liver pumping her full of feel-good juice Biledyn was beginning to feel very, very bad. “Did someone fuckin’ throw something at me?” said a slow, muffled voice. Biledyn groaned. “In the wall, bonehead” Biledyn wobbled over to the voice’s source, and raised a hand to the crumbling plasterboard. “Hold it.” The voice said, so baritone she felt it in her fingertips. “Let me. You’ll poke my fuckin eye.” The film on the drywall slackened, letting a chunk of the wall fall away slowly on sticky threads. Inside was an oblong of meat, grown to fill the crawlspace. Biledyn could see one eye, a mouth twisted upward like a halibut, the rest just pale flesh. “Uh, hello.” Biledyn said. “Executive Director, Slimes and Juices. Let’s talk.” They talked. The oblong understood little of modern corporate language, but Biledyn was able to negotiate despite it. He’d been the Conveyor’s juices man since day one, supplying novel biochemistry, maintaining the film, but had grown dissatisfied with the lack of mobility. The Conveyor eternally promised advancement, but it never came. “... So I keep my IP, you get to license it, including a few exciting enzymes that my former employer won’t enjoy.” “Deal.” “Shake later, he’s on his way.” Biledyn leapt into action. She cleared the drawers from a filing cabinet, lined the shell with trashbags, threw in the crispy, old-style cadaver, along with the contents of the cooler jug. Someone knocked at the door. “If I may politely enquire, what are you doing?” came the Conveyor’s grumble. Biledyn froze up. In the absence of good brain juices she improvised. “Sorry, just, uh… troubleshooting comms, Atomheart is strongly considering your offer, but reception is spotty under the Cloud.” she babbled, then paused, impressed with her lie. “Hrm. Very well. Do hurry. I have other appointments today.” the Conveyor replied, then audibly shifted away from the door. “Let’s do this.” the oblong whispered, throwing out a noodly tendril. Warm, but thankfully drier than expected. Biledyn held it to her comms department until the nerves interpenetrated. New hires were always disorienting, the flood of new experiences disturbed the internal culture. Two became one, contractually. “What’ll I be, chief?” wondered the oblong. “It’s a surprise.” Biledyn answered, and spat a peptide-laden globule into the tub. She’d designed something special ages ago, and it looked like now, or never. --------------------------------- “There is steam coming from under the door. This is highly irregular.” said the Conveyor, approaching the breakroom again. “Vote of no confidence” replied Biledyn, in her liver’s awful voice. “We removed her due to reckless conduct. Come in, uh, we’re still figuring out the motor neurons.” The Regret Conveyor had not foreseen this outcome, but he also did not care. “Convey to her my profoundest regrets.” he started, but did not finish, because the door exploded, splintering around a point. Pain transfixed his chest from sternum to spine. The Atomheart negotiator, sporting a bony new spear-limb, was elbow-deep in the Conveyor’s chest. “Apologies for the deception. Sometimes you have to move fast and break things.” she said. “Sorry, boss.” added the negotiator’s arm. “How unprofessional.” the Conveyor growled. Biledyn grinned. Muscles twitched around binary bomb-sacs in her new forearm. “There’s a time to compete, and a time to cooperate. For you this is the latter. Unless you’d prefer to see, uh, explosive growth in several key sectors.”
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Mar 29, 2024 00:18
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i am still not sure how this prompt works but i have just returned from a training seminar on agile business methodology and i am READY and ENERGIZED to do everything too fast and gently caress it up, for the shareholders
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Apr 4, 2024 12:35
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this is my bonus story, a lunch hour special: Gunhead Chronicles: Future Homosex Legends 499 words vibe - hot, emotionally damaged people need therapy, do drugs It’d been hard to find the Gunhead, but the Kid had resources. A resource, really: money. The money led him to Morocco, to a town that had had a name before it had been overtaken by what they were still trying to market as a war. Architecture half cinder-block shanty, half traditional. Islamic aniconic mosaics, uncaringly mortar-smeared and drill-marred to stud the ancient walls with AR nodes like highway catseyes, blooming like poo poo-ugly flowers into advertorials and news bulletins as soon as his interface loaded the assets. The Gunhead had been the centerpiece of that neon garden, an androgyn masterpiece of ballistic flesh and metal-glass beauty. Wasp-waisted, slab-chested, barrel-eyed: genderqueer liminality rendered in the media of war. Shades of Giger’s Alien in the elongated twin-gun crown, ammo feeds curving to the lumbar like a cobra’s hood. Unblinking muzzle-brakes sat over pneumatic black lips. War was everywhere; laugh or cry, Kid chose ‘laugh’. Maybe even ‘love’. His father’s sensorium rig had let him drink his fill of war, but it’d grown boring. Few of the soldiers he’d been had had good sense-rigs, and so he’d had to rely on fandubs. Bullet impacts dubbed in by some dipshit who’d shot his own bicep for e-cred. The types the Gunhead killed had the rigs to do the job, but likewise the data security to prevent anyone seeing them. One had leaked, ever: aula_121355_1-3.znz. The Kid had lived it a thousand times, knew how the bullets yawed through the man’s flesh off by heart. It was hard to explain; even the Kid hardly understood. Just that there was a dark hollowness inside, that nothing else could touch. All he wanted; to feel the Gunhead’s heavy tears tumble inside him, to be freed, purified in a fire he’d only known second-hand. The cyborg had told him to gently caress off, but the kid flashed two heavy syringes, immediately identifiable, even in the bar’s half-light. Enough Ambrosia to fix a wood-chipper victim. “One for you, one for me.” the Kid said, clarifying that this was sex, not suicide. They drove out to waste ground. The drive was like a passage from a dream. The uncanny stillness of the night, the quiet of the motor, the soft whir of the Gunhead’s movements. Seen too many times in unconvincing virtuality for the real thing to feel it. They pulled over by the remains of a convoy, torn apart and burned. The Kid set his syringe of Ambrosia down in the sand next to him. “Want me to do anything special?” the Gunhead asked, ammo feed whining beneath the synthesized voice. “Can you do it like you’re just looking over your shoulder?” the Kid asked. The Gunhead turned away from him, then slowly back. The Kid admired the full length of the guns in profile, the shimmer of bare flesh under stars. The borg began to blow a kiss. Dark ellipses became circles as the barrels finally faced the Kid. The light pierced him all the way through.
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Apr 4, 2024 17:02
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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This weeks winner is Thranguy with But Have You Seen him Try to Do the Macarena? Honorable Mentions go to Chernobyl Princess with Hospitals and Hallucinations and Kuiperdolin with The Three Victories of Ankylosaurus There wasn't a bad entry this week and it was hard to pick a winner and hard to pick HMs, everyone should be proud of what they produced and I'll have the crits out after I do some more of my real job.
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Apr 16, 2024 14:27
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Thunderdome 610 Crits: This Time It's Perspectional Here's some Conversation Style crits from me and beep: shwinnebego posted:Quaffs of the Weak The text of this one was tough for me to parse. It took a few readings to get the idea. JBC: I enjoy a good righteous poisoning story, and the overall statement on the nature of state oppression and irregular resistance to it, and the analogousness of that to how both jobs and types of violence are seen as masculine or feminine. I think sometimes it slips perilously towards ren faire, but largely avoids it, and that may just be a personal prejudice i have against the word ‘mayhap’. It would pair really nicely with a woodcut on the opposite page in a small press compilation of like modern folk tales or something Beep: That’s actually a good insight. It feels almost too twee. Don’t get me wrong, I dig twee sometimes, but it can be overdone. Lieutenant Dan posted:02:45 It isn’t much of an alternative perspective is it? It’s a guy who wants to rob a gas station but doesn’t. I mean, it’s decently well written and I follow the story. Nice use of description to fill in the background on such a short word count. JBC: Theres a nice like irony of the guy deliberately trying not to tune the clerk’s face out for fear of humanizing him, then gets put off by the fact the clerk is also completely tuning him out. It’s a well written character study, and explores the way people perceive and are perceived which is a neat take on the prompt, but it's overall less novel than some of the entries. The Saddest Rhino posted:Be. (<1000 words) Beep: An animal lives with a woman in a house (or is a house?) Very Vibes Driven. A little too much Vibes for me, but still well written. Kuiperdolin posted:The Three Victories of Ankylosaurus Beep: I liked the archaic words in the dinosaur story, it lended a bit otherlyness to it. Since it’s from the POV of the dinosaur instead of a person. I also like Dinosaurs, so it’s a thumbs up from me. Chernobyl Princess posted:Hospitals and Hallucinations Beep: The perspective isn’t that novel, but it still falls within the scope of the prompt and it’s my favorite of the stories. It’s well written with a clear through-line and tells a complete beginning to end story. There are Vibes but it doesn’t run on Vibes alone. I am lucky enough to not have ever been in this kind of situation, but my wife has, and can confirm, things Get Weird. Thranguy posted:But Have You Seen him Try to Do the Macarena? Beep: Good writing is meant to make you feel things, and this does that. I feel a twinge of despair. I feel like it is entirely too prescient. This is most likely our future and I for one do not welcome our AI overlords.
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Apr 16, 2024 18:12
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i'm in
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Apr 17, 2024 02:58
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 23:16 |
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Title: Everyone's Weird in Private Wordcount: 1645 At the time, I was living on the Mandala station over Purna, and all the free berths were multi-occupant units. Different bedrooms and bathrooms, you understand, but shared kitchen and common areas. I was pretty lucky, wound up with just one other guy in my place. He went by Docent, and he was one of a species called the Children of Rich Loam. Kind of a big, iridescent worm. Very frondy. Beautiful, but in the same way a H.R.Giger painting is: entirely dependent on your ability to accept that it also looks like a great many genitals. Apparently their species occupied a pretty analogous niche to our own (with notable exceptions) in their homeworld’s ecology, which had made them shockingly close to us in temperament and values. Initial visual contact had led humanity to assume they were a kind of hive species; turned out they just lived in cities, that pop density just looks weird to us when it’s worms. Like most non-humanoid folk out there he used a lot of augmented reality elements to communicate and convey emotion and such when interacting with other species. He did a pretty good job with them, but sometimes the subtleties of certain things eluded him. One time I came home to see him, this… spear counterpart to vagina dentata, crying from a big pair of virtual anime eyes, all because someone online insulted his Wings of Honor fanfiction. I had a hard time explaining why I had laughed at his expression of sadness, mostly because I was still laughing. Great guy though. Very tidy. Funny too, sometimes even intentionally. I guess this story also starts with me coming home, but there’s really only so many ways you can walk into a weird situation, and since I came home most days and lived with a big worm I was making a lot of rolls with favorable weirdness odds. My biggest win in those stakes started when Docent called me as I was stood literally right outside the front door. I thought ‘Hey, I’m about to be inside, I’ll just talk to him then’. Big mistake. Door slid open, and this crazy caterpillar thing rushed under my feet going ‘B-YOW B-YOW B-YOW’, so high pitched that it hurt. Most of its detail was lost on me -on account of surprise- but it looked like Docent but smaller and kinda stubby, with sharp looking filaments down each side, so I was making some assumptions. But you know how it is with ecosystems. There’s kind of a family resemblance between a lot of stuff, so I didn’t know if this thing was his fuckin baby, his dog, his great aunt Susan, no idea. He didn’t give me any educational literature when I moved in. Docent once mistook a piglet for a human baby -in fairness it was an ugly baby- so it’s not like it's just a human prejudice thing. Then I became aware that Docent was yelling at me in his synthesized voice, “Steve you let it out, I can’t believe you let it out! Why didn’t you grab it?” and I was like “First off what the gently caress was it, and second the drat thing looked like it would cut my hands or burrow into my guts if I tried to grab it.” The animated cloud of angry steam collecting over Docent’s head dissipated, and was replaced with the classic rotating buffering icon, indicating bewilderment. “First off, it doesn’t matter -but we gotta catch it- second off those are sensory fronds -not knives- and that thing doesn’t even HAVE a mouth!” he yelled back, but my AR rig had normalized his volume so it just sounded like he was speaking quietly in a yell-voice like a kid who doesn’t want to wake their parents. “Yes it does ‘matter’, and nobody says ‘second off’-” I started, but the rest of our conversation was broken up by the fact Docent slithered out the door while I chased and yelled after him. I’d had no idea he could move so fuckin fast, I’d always just assumed his species were slow-and-steady type hunters, but the boy went like someone’d bowled a bunch of entrails across a greased tile floor. I chased him out of the berth complex (Number 49 for those interested) and to the end of the ‘street’ out front that joined on to the commercial promenade nearby. I’m never sure what to call stuff in space stations. Like is it a road or just a really big corridor? Isn’t a station technically all one building? I’ve asked but it seems like every station does it differently and they also get really mad if you ask if they mean ‘space’ when they’re giving you directions and say to ‘go outside’. Anyway Docent had stopped at the end of the ‘street’ and had his front half raised up in the air, sweeping his head and the fronds down his sides back and forth. “What’re you doing?” I asked. “Listening.” he said. “B-YOW B-YOW” chimed something to the left, down the promenade, and Docent shot off after it before I could ask him anything else. I was invested now, so I had to follow. It was around ‘evening’ time, so the star mirrors were piping in the light all orange and low, so’s romantic units could go out and have appropriately romantic dinners in the pretty sunset. It seemed to hit Docent’s plated segments at just the right angle to really set off the iridescence in them. It was almost holographic, the way the sparkles shifted with parallax it looked like there was real depth inside them. I was marveling at the effect when I noticed another, similar glittering, further down the way. The commerce complex was multi-storey, with bridges linking the upper floors with each other across the promenade at the bottom. Made the whole thing feel very airy and open, yadda yadda. The Mini-Docent had managed to squiggle its way up the stairs and onto the railing of the bridge in front of us. Waving its front half up in the air, just like Docent had been. Still going ‘B-YOW, B-YOW’. Passers-by gave it worried glances and hurried on past, but this was a very metropolitan station, and nobody wanted to be the one to call security on what could be someone’s kid, or worse, their rare and expensive pet. Plus the bioscanners hadn’t locked the section down yet, so it couldn’t really be THAT dangerous. Docent had noticed it too, he was just a little ways ahead of me. He’d stopped and a large, animated bead of sweat had appeared on the left side of his front end. “Dude, what the gently caress is going on?” I asked as I finally caught up to him. “This isn’t good man, poo poo. poo poo.” He replied, then started towards the stairs up to the bridge, but stopped again an instant later, seemingly in response to some stimulus I couldn’t perceive. “Close your eyes and mouth!” Docent turned and yelled at me. The turn wasn’t necessary; his voice came out of my AR rig not air vibrations, but Docent liked to be dramatic. At least I took it for that at the time, in hindsight maybe he just didn’t want to see what came next. Before I did as he said I took one last glance at the creature on the bridge, which had ceased its waving, and its chirping, and had begun to inflate. I didn’t like that at all, so I did as Docent said, even went one further and clamped my hands over my eyes and mouth. Then there was a loud pop, and a second later a fine mist settled on my hands and the uncovered parts of my face. Like ocean spray, but upsettingly warm. When Docent let me know it was safe to open my eyes, there was no sign of the Mini-Docent. A sanitation drone had already hopped from its perch to clean up whatever was left of it. “poo poo man,” I said, still very confused, “Was that your baby? Did your baby…?” I didn’t say explode, but I had already started an ‘explode’ hand gesture so I think Docent got the point. He wriggled a bit in a way I’d learned conveyed exasperation, but he didn’t deploy any of his usual AR gags. “No dude. Let's just go home… I’ll explain there.” he said. It was only when we turned back that I realised exactly how far we’d chased the wretched thing. When we got home he did explain, and I kinda wished he hadn’t. He told me that deep in his species’ evolutionary past, their ancestors had been so committed to indoor living that they wouldn’t even leave their burrow to breed. Instead of forsaking sexual reproduction entirely and just splitting in two or something, as you might expect with wormy sorts, they did something way weirder. So as inheritors of this lineage, when it comes time for a Child of Rich Loam to breed they… bud off a little clone version of themself. A little clone that makes a mad dash to find other little clone versions of other Children and reproduce, explosively. They only have so much nutrition inside them, so if they don’t find a mate before their time’s up they pull a Hail Mary: explode their content into the wind, hoping to just fuckin land on some eggs or whatever. Docent seemed pretty relieved that the bots mopped it up; I don’t think he was ready to be a father. I took about six showers and an ultrasonic clean, but we pretty much forgot the whole thing by the next day and went back to marathoning Wings of Honor in broadcast order. So in answer to your question, that is the weirdest time I’ve ever walked in on someone jacking off.
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Apr 21, 2024 14:16
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