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Claven666, Schneider Heim, and Grizzled Patriarch you have all been blessed by the RNG gods and have earned crits! Also, hubris.height as the resident newbie you also get a super special line crit (that will be up in a couple of days because I have finals)!!!!!!!!!!! https://docs.google.com/document/d/12gKhz_78GieaGKvwCsTgX3mBdSrzAXZMO7fSGDQ96HA/edit?usp=sharing e: also quoting these in case people don't notice for some reason Sitting Here posted:I will do 5 crits this week. First come, first served. Quote this post if you want one. I'll try to have them done by the end of the day tomorrow. (this is not a request for a crit SH btw) Kaishai posted:The call for crits from all corners was so successful in Wizard Week that I'm going to try it too. The real fun of Eurovision is dishing about the performances! Why not read a few stories and share a few thoughts while you wait for results? flerp fucked around with this message at 07:45 on May 11, 2015 |
# ? May 11, 2015 07:33 |
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# ? Mar 29, 2024 16:56 |
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Interprompt Your interprompt is whatever the hell is going on in this official recruitment ad for the Austrian armed forces. 350 words max, there will be crits (eventually (maybe))
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# ? May 11, 2015 09:29 |
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Sitting Here posted:I will do 5 crits this week. First come, first served. Quote this post if you want one. I'll try to have them done by the end of the day tomorrow. I'd like a crit down the line, I'm still reading through/brushing up on thread rules but definitely plan on hopping in on this interprompt/next prompt, and will be cranking that poo poo out tomorrow. Currently popping in to say I'm in on whatever the next prompt is and get it tracking in my Control Panel. Looking forward to cranking out wordsnot.
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# ? May 11, 2015 09:55 |
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Broenheim posted:Also, hubris.height as the resident newbie you also get a super special line crit (that will be up in a couple of days because I have finals)!!!!!!!!!!! I really appreciate it. Good luck with finals, I've got my fair share this week with finals, work, and school, too.
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# ? May 11, 2015 12:16 |
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Sitting Here posted:I will do 5 crits this week. First come, first served. Quote this post if you want one. I'll try to have them done by the end of the day tomorrow. I'll trade you a crit! I'll try and do a few this week since I slacked on Wizard Week
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# ? May 11, 2015 13:57 |
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I must eat Hit me with it, I planned very badly and the $10 sting may motivate me to do better in future. (USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST)
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# ? May 11, 2015 14:00 |
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Broenheim posted:crits Thanks brother!
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# ? May 11, 2015 14:36 |
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Aaaaaand here's that barbarian story I promised. Free crit. I mean, if you want. ... OH GOD SOMEBODY CRIT ME Surrogate WC: 300 Melthrop slams a hand on the trunk of the tree beside him and pulls his leg from beneath the bloody lioness pinning him. She still paws weakly towards his shin, claws aching to tear flesh. He kicks her paw away, and puts a hand on top of her head. "For your death, for your meat, for your bones and teeth, I thank you," he chants in the clucking tongue of his mother tribe. He removes the stone knife from his predator's side and brings it hard through her eye socket. She stops pawing. Melthrop leaves his blade for a moment- he will need it for skinning. For now, he replaces the wicker basket on his back and looks for the kittens. "Ha-tchi tchiiiih, ha-tchi chiiiih," he coos to them, like he is calling his own child in the camp. He hears soft mew, and tracks it on bent legs. The lion kittens are freshly born, and he touches each on the forehead with the pad of his finger, names them, and spits gently in their eyes, like they are his own freshly born children. "Karfid. Tcheka. Poschus." He pauses on the last, a runt. He remembers the many births he has watched. He remembers his son's, and the sound of his son's weak lungs sputtering to silence after his few days of life. His voice, low, breaks as he says, "Groth," and spits gently in the little one's eyes. Groth gives a mew of surprise, and Melthrop laughs. He goes about skinning the lioness and collecting as much of her as he can carry. Once finished, he puts Groth on his shoulder. "The hunt was good today," Melthrop tells him. "Let's return." And with a mewling bag of kittens, and a basket full of their mother, he makes for camp.
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# ? May 11, 2015 15:00 |
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I'll take SH's crit if it's free. As for me criting... well, there's a reason I have this avatar.
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# ? May 11, 2015 17:54 |
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JcDent posted:As for me criting... well, there's a reason I have this avatar. Is it because you refuse to critically examine other written works? You don't need a qualification to have an opinion, let alone a reaction.
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# ? May 11, 2015 18:10 |
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JcDent posted:I'll take SH's crit if it's free. As for me criting... well, there's a reason I have this avatar. critting people worse and better than you is a good way to learn what doesn't work, and what does. Read a story, crit it, give your opinions. "This story sucks" is a valid opinion whether you're Hemingway or Sitting Here. edit: crabrock fucked around with this message at 19:59 on May 11, 2015 |
# ? May 11, 2015 18:58 |
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In light of recent events I will be giving a crit in return for SH crit. So, you know, line up, start begging and groveling, etc.
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# ? May 11, 2015 20:10 |
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JcDent posted:In light of recent events I will be giving a crit in return for SH crit. So, you know, line up, start begging and groveling, etc. CRIT ME GODDAMMIT
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# ? May 11, 2015 20:26 |
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Sitting Here posted:Full Circle I enjoyed reading this. It feels like one of those tales of lost love from the fifties, only you've taken it just slightly into the future so that it's a character I could see myself being in a few decades. Even better, you set the time with fairly concise world-building and with just a few observations from the character. There were a couple of grammar fuckups, so tiny that I didn't even bother quoting them, but I just attributed that to the fact that you posted even after my constantly late rear end. It was sweet, straightforward, and I enjoyed your main character. And you didn't contrive it to be anything more than a story of a delayed last chance. I really can't wait to see what the judges think. edit: Just watched your video and realized I think I must have picked the lamest one in the competition. I mean seriously, that dude's outfit. And where the gently caress is he running to all the time? Like is that how he looks chasing the bus? Does he wear those ears to work? And who stuck that loving chick in an hourglass with her violin and a snake? Clearly I have made poor choices. skwidmonster fucked around with this message at 22:05 on May 11, 2015 |
# ? May 11, 2015 21:54 |
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Crit for skwidmonster:quote:Coming back for the night shift, Tiff was escorted to her usual place in the hall by the bodyguard on duty. Her employer sat in his chromed easy chair in the living room I thought they were in different rooms at first, but reading on, that doesn't seem to be the case?, feet tangled Are his feet made rope or fishing line?? on top of the ottoman, boots still on. The spotlights outside the window cast shadows from the hairs on his chest What an odd detail. Is he shirtless? and produced the illusion of thick fur. The smell of the room pressed itself into her mouth and nostrils, thick like pudding, pungent like old soil. A pipe rested in his You keep jumping back and forth between characters using only "him" and "her". Like, if you haven't talked about a character for a couple lines, it's a good idea to reintroduce them by name. It's not too bad when there's only a guy and a girl, but when you introduce more people, all the hims and hers get confusing. hand on the arm of the chair, just about to drop. Around the corner, against a wall Tiff couldn't see, the pianist was finishing his last piece for the night. For example, now there's piano guy in the mix So, best as I can tell, a dude is sitting around with his pianist and some ladies who warm up his milk with their bodies? but Nora is a secret agent out to nab the boss because??? As you can see from my line crit, I couldn't make a whole lot of sense out of this story. I feel like you saw the scene in your head, but couldn't hone in on the important details. You had way, way too many characters for a story this short, and most of them didn't do anything! I'm not even sure what Tiff's role in all this was. I thought maybe it would make more sense if I watched the video, but honestly, I'm not seeing the connection there. Next time, you should focus in on two or three characters, and make sure everything you're describing has something to do with the story. Mood and ambiance can come later. Right now you need to work on getting those details to work for your plot, not against it.
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# ? May 12, 2015 00:51 |
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Sitting Here posted:Crit for skwidmonster: Thanks for the crit, yo!
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# ? May 12, 2015 01:57 |
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I feel like there is a surprising lack of crits, so I turned to my handy RNG machine, and it has declared PoshAlligator as the worthy soul of a crit! -First line feels a bit too long-winded for me. I know what you were trying to there stylistically but I feel like it went on for a little too long -I'm really not a fan of vague pronouns. names are really nice. I also feel like it's a mistake to do two long run-on sentences twice in the row. I know it's a stylistic choice, but I don't like it that much -setting feels a little vague to me. she was sitting below a rusty grater, right? but she's in a forest, so what's holding it up? -i do like the descriptions and contrast between the rusty metal and nature -motivation is vague, i wish I knew why she was out in the forest, why she was waiting for the bell, and why she is moving. also why did the bell ring at the beginning? -is this post-apocalyptic? there's a bunch of broken down buildings in the forest, but I'm still not clear on the setting -"She found it where she expected, in the grey, unassuming building with the wide warehouse shutters right at the foot of the black mountain." what is it? please, just tell me. don't hide things so much from your readers because it'll start to frustrate them -what the gently caress is this thing and why do I care? -god drat it feels like your intentionally hiding the details, which is super loving annoying -your object makes no sense because it feels like it operates on some rules that i don't know so i cant even guess what it really is -oh wait, it's a power box or something of the sort. WHY THE gently caress DIDNT YOU TELL US THAT????? -"There was a grinding sound, metal on metal, a few metres away. Something in the mist seemed to move. Metal rods sliding up and down, blowing the mist this way and that." - good use of creating tension -im not sure what this black stone is supposed to be? is it supposed to be darkness or a literal, tangible object? -ok i think the black rock is coal, but the way you use it some cases makes it seem like it's darkness -the action scene is pretty decent, but hampered by the vagueness of what exactly she's fighting. i know it's a thing in horror to not give loving detail to the monster because what the reader will come up with will be 100 times scarier then anything you could ever write, but it still doesn't change the fact that I need to know what is fighting her and why. the monsters just kinda feel there for no particular reason. -this story is just really, really vague. I'm not quite sure what exactly happened. So this character is in a forest and hears a bell, runs through a forest which also has buildings in, turns on the power, then ends in a cavern so she can ring a bell for some reason, but something invisible (i think? or did she just not see it) attacks her, but she's able to ring the bell, which shatters, but then she gets knocked out and wakes up again but the stuff before was a dream? or not a dream but she thought it was a dream? or some weird paradox cycle thing? clearly i'm not really sure at all. -even though the plot itself is vague, the motivations, which are more important, are just as vague, or even more so. Why does this girl want to do these things. what the hell is the whole point of this. i don't understand the stakes at play. what are these monsters are why do they not want her to ring the bell. wtf is the point of the bell anyway? -some decent descriptions, but just really, really vague in some of the details, plot, and characters.
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# ? May 12, 2015 02:43 |
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Crit for JcDent:quote:Boom! Explosions! Action! That was the life of Shamus' father! Great with a gun, bad with social grace, he was the hero of his days! Boom! The smell of liquid propellant! The flying bloody shards of bone! Shamus killed, but, unlike his father, he never had to kill men. Times were different, men were different, but the beasts remained! Boom! The beast convulses! The hunter wins! But will Shamus ever be recognized the way his father was? I really am not enjoying the overabundance of exclamations points here, no sir! So, there were some good ideas here. Shamus's father fought for a world where it's not necessary to be exceptional. Contentedness is taken for granted. Heroism isn't really valued. But things are good, and happy, and easy, and Shamus DOES make a difference to the Eloy, whether he gets hero worship or not. That was cool. I felt like, aside from running the simulation and thinking a lot, Shamus didn't DO a whole lot. His situation at the end of the story is mostly the same as his situation at the beginning of the story. The language is rough in places. You switch between present and past tense a bit, too. I've read a few of your stories, and so far, this is the one I like the best. I think you have some good thoughts behind your work, and this is the first time I felt like I got what you were going for. Tone it down on the exclamation points, though.
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# ? May 12, 2015 02:51 |
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Sunstroke 1329 words The sun is the ugliest thing that was ever created, and yet my ex-girlfriend wanted to gently caress it. Seriously, have you ever seen any pictures of it? Like actual, high-resolution, Hubble Telescope pictures? It looks like the loving Spaghetti Incident. Just this giant ball of curled up red and orange flames, knotting in and out of itself. It looks either infected or overcooked, probably both. That’s what turned my ex-girlfriend on: a flaming rubber-band ball from outer space. But she wasn’t just my ex-girlfriend, she was my first girlfriend, and I had just turned 18. And I didn’t know any of the stuff my friends knew about love or girls or relationships when they turned 18. It was my first month of art school in New York City, I had just said goodbye to my Everquest addiction, and I was as pale, thin, and Catholic as a communion wafer. When I sat down on the campus square bench next to the tall blonde senior named Sharyn I recognized from mixed media class, I half expected the wrought-iron to just reject me, for that half of the bench to flip over into the library wall behind me like a Scooby-Doo cartoon. But instead, we started talking about Paul Klee, and then the Bauhaus Movement, and how the new Freedom Tower looked like rear end, and then she invited me for Korean food in Midtown, and I felt like I’d used the edge of my communion-wafer body to scratch off a winning lottery ticket. And that was before the third date, when she asked me if I wanted to stay in her townhouse. I never knew a human being could want another human being so much. Sharyn was my sun, and I couldn’t stop staring directly at her, blinding myself to everything but her. When she showed me her the closed doors of her “art studio” and told me they were off-limits at all hours to anyone but her? Didn’t care, blind. When she showed me her bedroom, complete with seventeen dreamcatchers hanging over the headboard of a bed propped up by pillars of different interpretations of Pagan for Dummies, my eyes kept bouncing off them and clinging to her. When I saw the giant Seasonal Affective Disorder lamp in the corner, I asked, “Where’d you get that from?” She said, “I borrowed it from my last roommate. I’ll send it back when it starts snowing again.” Good enough for me. That wasn’t the last time I saw that lamp, either—whenever we had sex, Sharyn always insisted that nothing would go down unless it was shining directly on us. It felt like we were two ants loving under a magnifying glass, and I couldn’t have cared less, because I was in love. So the year went on, and the first layer of scales over my eyes started to fall away, and I started to see some things happening around me. Sharyn started spending less time with me and more time in her downstairs studio. I suddenly realized she was the one making the larger share of conversation when we started talking less and less. One of the last things she said to me was “I’m getting bored with you.” As she was walking away. And being the smacked rear end that I was, I called after her: “Why am I boring?” “I don’t know,” she said, “maybe I just thought you were more romantic.” That night, I scrawled up a list of all the reasons why I wasn’t a romantic on the back of a takeout menu: 1. I grew up in Wisconsin. No romance novel covers were set in Wisconsin. 2. I’m Irish. As far as I know, none of the Romantic poets were Irish, plus there were no love poems detailing the beauty of pale skin and freckles. 3. I’m a computer nerd. (probably the best reason) I used to show emotions with emoticons. 4. I didn’t know what “the missionary position” meant when she asked me (Kama Sutra?) When I looked at the list, I felt doomed. About two weeks before freshman year ended, I had just finished my fourth shot of espresso and my fifth shot of vodka, and I was lying awake in bed, feeling like both my feet were jammed down on the gas and the brake at the same time. Eventually I left the townhouse and just started walking around the block, wondering what I could say to her to prove that I was worth something, that I wasn’t just a bright spot floating in her peripheral vision. When I came back to the townhouse, the sun was rising, and I had a plan. I looked upstairs, in her bedroom, my bedroom, the kitchen. As I walked past the studio, I heard something. I staggered towards the thick door, still reeking and sweating, and wrenched it open. It was like standing inside a kaleidoscope. The sun shined into the room through a large skylight at one end of the room. Scattered across the ceiling were dozens of mobiles, with jagged shards of glass hanging down from them like candy icicles, shimmering in the sunlight as it reflected through them and down onto the hard wooden floor. The mobiles twirled around and around in the sunlight, covering the floor in bright strands of color, like someone had eviscerated a rainbow and dumped its entrails all over the ground. And Sharyn was in the middle of it, laying on her back, writhing, chanting some Aramaic poo poo that sounded sexy as hell to my broken ears. The light covered her bare skin in glowing ribbons that swiveled and spun. I was speechless. I could only stare at her. Her eyes rolled back towards the door, and she noticed me. She sat up with a jolt, covering herself. Without giving it a second of thought, I gave it my best shot. I started to sing: You are my sunshine, my only sunshine You make me happy, when skies are gray… Never mind that my throat was like thrown tire tread and I had hardly sung a note in my life—I was sure, while drunk off my rear end on vodka and schmaltz, that baring myself like this would show her how I felt about her. I couldn’t remember the second verse, so I just leaned to the side and started the first verse over again. Then I heard her laughing. That all happened about two years ago. Now, I’m living back on campus, finishing up my junior year, and I’m dating—maybe—this girl in my graduating class who does a lot of typography work, graphic design, that sort of thing. I say maybe because we’ve never really called it “dating”, we just sort of end up at places together—comedy clubs, bars, movie theaters. We’re just having fun together, and there’s just some part of me that’s reluctant to put a stamp on it, to drop that giant Philadelphia L.O.V.E. statue on both of our shoulders. We’re both seeing where it goes. She finally let me start paying for dinner, so that’s good. I think back on that first relationship and laugh, the same kind of laugh that comes out when you trip over a crack on the sidewalk and just manage to catch yourself. I did run into Sharyn a couple days ago, though. She was coming up out of the Penn Station escalator the same time I was walking by, and it just happened like that. She showed me this ugly sunburn on her shoulder, with this giant pus-filled blister that she swore was shaped like a heart. I thought: Shaped like an upside-down heart? Shaped like the pulsing fist in my chest? But I just nodded, and then the conversation ended, and I walked up the avenue, my face locked in something that I hoped was a smile but felt like a cringe, for so long that for a second I thought it might stay that way.
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# ? May 12, 2015 03:21 |
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crit crat Killer-of-Lawyers posted:The Star and The Skull This is pretty short, but you managed to pack most of a story in there. The only thing is the the main char lacks a sort of agency. Stuff happens TO him, but he doesn't do much beside what it feels like are his only options. If you want to make an actual conflict, you have to have a period where he actually tries to fight the nurse or run away. Without it, it's exactly how you described it: a shrug. It's boring, it's "what else have I got to do?" A story shouldn't feel like it's on rails. It should be offroad, tumbling through virgin earth and trailblazing. Who cares if there's a loving cliff, we'll deal with that when we go over it.
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# ? May 12, 2015 03:43 |
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Here are a bunch of short crits for everyone this week. I read these in judgemode, but ended up doing a fair bit of skimming. No More Hunting Stars You’ve got a good eye for small details that flesh scenes out well, but your characterization needs some work. You’re fleshing out your characters mostly by way of dialogue, but your dialogue tends towards the heavily saturated and soap-opera-esque, and they switch emotions so quickly that they end up feeling cartoonish, which I don’t think is what you were going for. I had to read this twice to actually work out what was going on, but given that it ended up being a fairly standard con-man-comes-clean kind of narrative, I didn’t feel all that rewarded when I put the pieces together. Mother’s Violin This one’s pretty rough. Your dialogue is stilted and thoroughly unbelievable; there wasn’t one line out of the entire piece where I thought, “yeah, that sounds like something an actual person would say”. The mother’s ghost singing through the violin was not so much Eurovision-tastic-so-cheesy-it’s-awesome as much as just plain bad. There’s a lot of exposition and detail here that doesn’t actually go anywhere towards establishing your characters or your world, but just fills space. Dragon I like the idea of a guy in a mascot suit in not-Disneyland trying to do crowd control around a botched marriage proposal while staying in character, but the story itself is a bit of a teardown. I couldn’t work out if you actually wanted the reader to care about the couple at the center of this whole thing, but either way the whole plot of [man proposes to woman, gets shot down in an embarrassing way, woman reconsiders, man gathers pride and moves on] is uninteresting. The Black Mountain’s Bell This is really just one long action piece, but it’s hard to feel invested in the action in the absence of any characterization. You’ve probably got a very clear idea of what this all looked like in your head, but it’s not translating well to the page. My natural inclination is to skim over descriptive passages to look for some character to latch onto, but this story doesn’t have one. Saccharine and Gasoline This is not good. Every piece of dialogue is weird and expository, the characters are factory standard off-the-shelf models, the story is dumb but not fun dumb, there are a lot of book-saidisms, and there’s a metric poo poo ton of exposition for a fairly bog-standard sci-fi death race kind of setup. Shame of Shamus Wow are there a lot of exclamation points in this one. The first half of this thing reads like a kid describing a movie he half remembers, and then we switch out to tedious fantasy-scifi land overburdened with dry infodump. It all sums to a pastiche of bad genre fiction. One Last Breath This is a trainwreck. There is zero evidence of even cursory proofreading, punctuation is all over the map, dialogue is completely laughable, what little plotline exists is asinine. That said, I did get a chuckle out of the sheer bugfuckery of the line “She saw me, and she came alive with a gleaming chest.” -- I tried for a solid minute to work out what the hell you were going for here before giving up. Danes Odhajam I read this first without having watched the video for the song, and came away completely confused. Then I watched the video, and got a solid chuckle out of it. So, the takeaway is that your story works well as a Rifftrax commentary for the music video, but doesn’t have much standalone value. A Million Things I Wish I Had Done For a while I was hoping that your protagonist was going to end up being the 27b/6 guy, but alas, he started out as a boring paint-by-numbers tragic warrior boxer and stayed that way. Love You While I’m Gone I had a pretty good time coming up with new definitions for your typos. Rubinesque: having a giant beard and a golden touch with a mixing desk. Boxom: cardboard box boobs. Curvacous: when macaroni and couscous get together. As for the story itself, there wasn’t a whole lot there; the woven timelines were cute, but my general feeling for these kinds of cute devices is that they only work well if, when you assemble all the bits in linear order, it’s still an interesting story. The Final Siege of the Black Steel Castle! Man, for a story full of action I sure had a hard time maintaining any interest whatsoever in what was going on. It’s a bad sign when your story opens with battle scientists and jetpacks and still manages to be boring. It’s Not Always A Serpent That Makes You Sin Despite being quite nicely written, and having a nice simple story structure with room to stretch out, this story didn’t resonate with me. Part of the problem is the title: it’s a pretty lazy one. But the main problem, at least from my perspective, is how straight-down-the-line archetypal your characters are: you’ve got a strong but easily deceived bull, an excitable, dumb and friendly dog, and a conniving sociopathic cat. I kept waiting for some kind of twist or reversal or slight change to the formula, but it never came. Tiny Edible Things This, this I liked a lot. Economical and razor sharp prose, perfect little details throughout, and wonderfully dark and weird. This is my favourite so far. The Star and The Skull As the story ends, Yegor’s questions are unanswered. I feel for him, for I too had many questions that were left unanswered. For example, who is Yegor? How did he get here? What’s a nurse doing with some weird sacrificial dagger? Did she fix his leg? Reading this story felt like watching a music video where nothing made any sense; possibly this was intentional? Mr. War Criminal You’ve got some nice details in here, but you’ve got to pick the best ones that actually move your plot forward and omit the unnecessary ones -- the story has an interesting flow at its core, but the pacing is bogged down by the language throughout. Edit harder. A Probabilistic Route to Happiness I may just be getting burnt out on reading these, but this story didn’t click with me despite being well written. I like the setup, and the idea of a prison romance between guard and inmate where one is a robot has some wheels, but the character of Emmelie has to shoulder the human side of the equation and she’s a pretty flat character. Also, the whole “robot learns to love and sacrifices its happiness for the happiness of the human it loves” thing is a little well-worn and saccharine for my palate. Full Circle The writing here is lovely, and the detailing throughout is excellent, but it’s all in service of a set of characters and a plotline that I can’t bring myself to care much about. Boy meets girl, girl moves on, boy carries a torch (in the form of prosthetic elven ears), boy gets some catharsis as girl is literally loaded onto a stretcher. This story is asking me to buy a protagonist that has been nursing a crush for forty years (and as far as the reader knows, that’s all he’s been up to as no other details are provided), and when he finally gets to present his weird little physical manifestation of said crush to the girl from high school that he’s been hiding from this whole time, her reaction isn’t complete revulsion (granted she’s suffering from a recent injury, possibly to the head, but still).
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# ? May 12, 2015 03:52 |
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Per IRC request, a crit for Blue Wher:quote:I awoke on a Saturday morning to the sound of goats bleating from the barn, begging to be fed. “Who needs alarms when you have hungry goats?” I mused Gee golly! I dont' think anyone actually exclaims this sort of thing when they wake up, especially if they live on a goat farm and are accustomed to the sound of goats as I rolled out of bed. I changed into an old shirt and jeans before I went to the barn. It was rather early; the sky was still a dark purple with merely the faintest light peeking over the mountains. The words "rather" and "merely" give the prose a purple, overwrought feeling So, there's a sincerity in this that I like. But the dialog is pretty cheesy. Almost cartoonish in places. I think you need to think more about what your characters' actual feelings would be, and how they would express those feelings. I pointed out a couple spots where you could use details and description to show how your narrator feels. Right now it's almost like she's addressing the reader directly and telling us exactly what's going on. The other problem is like, the central conflict of the story isn't really a conflict at all. Initially, she's grieving her mother and the townspeople don't like her. But at the end, it turns out everything is actually fine. She can chill with her new violin mom, and it turns out her neighbors all really like her and are confused that she would think otherwise. A good basic formula for plotting is: What does the character want? Why don't they have it? How can they get around that obstacle? Sadly, as much as we want things to always be OK in real life, stories are much more interesting if you put your character at odds with things, let them make mistakes, and challenge their wants/desires.
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# ? May 12, 2015 04:56 |
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Thanks for the crits! I think I'm learning a lot even though this is only my second TD.
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# ? May 12, 2015 05:09 |
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I was really at a loss for what to write, and with the busy weekend I figured it would be better to post the only idea I had than to shamefully withdraw. Even if I lose I think this is great practice. I think will muster up the courage to do a crit in the morning so if anyone wants one from me let me know or I will pick one at random.
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# ? May 12, 2015 05:31 |
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Thunderdome Week CXLIV Results: Doming Lasha Tumbai Pictured: Judges in fierce and fabulous debate. Most of you gave us only teardrops, Thunderdome. I expect sitting through every last ballad in the semi-finals to be a breeze compared to judging these stories. As for my co-judges, well... let's just go ahead and assume that harsh words will be said. Have you invested in fire insurance? Maybe you should. It still so happened that a couple of stories inspired protracted argument over the results, although one side of the spectrum was easier to agree on than the other: THE WINNER, after much contention, is crabrock! The judges did not love this story equally. For me it was the star performance of the evening, the one that held the most heart and resonance. I loved its treatment of its themes enough to forgive flaws that didn't cripple the whole. The sole HONORABLE MENTION goes to the man he beat by only a fraction of a point: Tyrannosaurus. Technical merit was on your side, and you were kept from the crown more by crabrock's virtues than by any fault of your own. This initially lighthearted piece pulled off its darker turns with skill. THE LOSER is PoshAlligator. We argued about this too, which says a lot about the week, because when someone turns in an entry with an unnamed nonentity of a main character, no plot, no sense, and little connection to the prompt, the results ought to be a foregone conclusion. DISHONORABLE MENTIONS: TheGreekOwl, your escape was nearly as narrow as crabrock's victory. Your grammar and syntax were too poor to ignore. I couldn't make out your ending: who would outlast the village? What would they do with the corrupted ones? Who were the corrupted ones, the villagers or outsiders who came in to raise hell? Why did you keep reminding us that woman was topless? I see a hint of a story structure under the bad prose, but if PoshAlligator's entry hadn't been... whatever it was, you'd have been toast. JcDent, in a better world you would have gotten the loss! Your exclamation points were numerous! So were your tenses! Your prose reminded me of "Eye of Argon"! Your SF jargon did not improve matters! Nothing much happened! It was a decent use of your video, though! hubris.height, welcome to Thunderdome. Don't take this DM or the flensing critiques as signs you should stop fighting. It's through striving that we improve! That said, this story that was 80% car race, 15% leaden exposition from Schrödinger's Wife, and maybe 5% interesting theme was rather less than divine. skwidmonster, your weird insomniac and his weird lifestyle could have been cool, but the lack of clarity in your entry irritated us far more than it pleased. bigperm, I laughed, but this flopped completely for the judges who didn't know Slovenia's 2014 video backward and forward. It didn't stand alone even a little bitty bit. Contestants, as is always the case with Eurovision, I find I've enjoyed the crazy ride despite its flat notes and disappointments. I'm glad each of you took the stage. Maybe we'll all sing along with the Europop again someday, who knows? In the meanwhile, crabrock, start the next show!
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# ? May 12, 2015 06:11 |
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TD CXLV: "You gonna finish that?" This week is a little different. Ok a lot different. Your signup doesn’t matter this week. You may announce your intention to participate, but your real signup comes with a price of admission. You submit a 400-500 word1 opening of a story by THURSDAY, 11:59pm EST. Establish, BUT DO NOT RESOLVE, a conflict.2 Title it “Untitled Opening” and post the wordcount with it. I will then randomly assign everybody who has submitted a story beginning, and your job will be to FINISH that story by Sunday, 11:59pm EST with another 500 words. You title the piece when you post it. Post the ENTIRE story, for the sake of the judges. You may not edit the beginning of the story except to fix typos and minor grammatical errors. This means no changing sentences, words, names, descriptions, etc. So to recap. You submit a story beginning by Thursday. You get assigned somebody else’s story, and you write the ending. Each story submitted will in effect have 2 authors. Good things happen to both authors. Bad things happen to the last author. So Win/HMs happen to both contributors to the story, and Loss/DMs only affect whoever had it last.3 The prompt: No emotional crap. I’m just too stressed to deal with it! I want something light and fun, something that’s easy to read and after I’m done I think “that was nice.” That doesn’t mean it needs to be a big joke, a brainless action piece, or a meaningless meandering, but keep it lighthearted. No topics are off limits. Have fun, real characters. Let the bitching/confusion begin. Word limit: 400-500 & 500. 1000 total. (if your starting person uses only 450 words, you may write 550.) Submit first half by: May 14, 11:59pm EST Submit second half by: May 17, 11:59pm EST Judges: crabrock, SexySeafood, SexyBroenheim 1 If you submit fewer than 400 words for the first part YOU WILL BE DQed THE SAME AS IF YOU WENT OVER 500. 2 A conflict involves a character wanting something, but not being able to have it. The things they want can be physical (money, cars, a lover) or less tangible (power, acceptance, love). 3 On submitting purposely lovely beginnings so somebody has to deal with it: You’re a dick. If I suspect you did this, or I catch wind of it, then you will get stuck with whatever fate you’ve dragged the second author into, i.e. you’ll lose along with them. Pairings: beginning: dmboogie, ending: RedTonic beginning: Grizzled Patriarch, ending: spectres of autism beginning: Chairchucker, ending: dmboogie beginning: sebmojo, ending: Fuschia tude beginning: spectres of autism, ending: Thranguy beginning: Jitzu_the_Monk, ending: Something Else beginning: Benny Profane, ending: Ironic Twist beginning: simplefish, ending: blue squares beginning: PoshAlligator, ending: Chairchucker beginning: Sitting Here, ending: Grizzled Patriarch beginning: skwidmonster, ending: PoshAlligator beginning: Djeser, ending: Sitting Here beginning: Fuschia tude, ending: Jitzu_the_Monk beginning: JcDent, ending: Jonked beginning: Ironic Twist, ending: Blue Wher beginning: Schneider Heim, ending: sebmojo beginning: Pham Nuwen, ending: Benny Profane beginning: RedTonic, ending: Pham Nuwen beginning: newtestleper, ending: Jay O beginning: Something Else, ending: newtestleper beginning: Blue Wher, ending: beginning: Jonked, ending: simplefish beginning: Jay O, ending: Schneider Heim beginning: blue squares, ending: skwidmonster beginning: Thranguy, ending: JcDent beginning: Tyrannosaurus, ending: Djeser crabrock fucked around with this message at 04:03 on May 18, 2015 |
# ? May 12, 2015 06:34 |
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Badass idea for my week back. In
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# ? May 12, 2015 06:46 |
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crabrock posted:Judges: crabrock, SexySeafood, sexything2
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# ? May 12, 2015 06:55 |
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I'm in for clusterfuck what the poo poo week.
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# ? May 12, 2015 06:56 |
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im willing to judge this sure to be cluster gently caress
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# ? May 12, 2015 07:10 |
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Broenheim posted:im willing to judge this sure to be cluster gently caress it will be glorious.
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# ? May 12, 2015 07:14 |
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posting to
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# ? May 12, 2015 07:37 |
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Thanks for the crits! I graciously accept my failure, and as usual will enter back in immediately. Expect my untitled opening.
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# ? May 12, 2015 07:53 |
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I’ll have to do a bunch of bonus crits before I get to these ones. Here’s some quick thoughts. Claven666 - no more hunting stars It took us exactly one Eurovision story to get to the gay sex. Blue Wher - Mother’s Violin For a story containing violin ghosts this was kinda placid. spectres of autism - Dragon Hmmm yes I too have fever dreams occasionally. Posh Alligator - The Black Mountain's Bell “The ringing began to stop.” => *hits you on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper* hubris.heigh - Saccharine and Gasoline Shifting POVs harder than the gears on an Italian sports car. JcDent - Shame of Shamus Local emo plays Monster Hunter, vows to kill all posers, hornbulls. ThreGreekOwl - One Last Breath I can see why you wouldn’t bother reading through this mess often enough to do a proofreading pass. bigperm - Danes Odhajam Dear bigperm, noone cares. Broenheim - A Million Things I Wish I Had Done Not gonna lie, that was kinda sad. Especially the part where I died. Jonked - Love You While I'm Gone. Good: creepy twist ending. Bad: I saw it coming (heh). Schneider Heim - The Final Siege of the Black Steel Castle! Man that Power Rangers novel was an odd marketing decision. Tyrannosaurus - It’s Not Always A Serpent That Makes You Sin jacknicholsonnodding.gif Benny Profane - The Saunier Mausoleum Oh drat I completely forgot this story exists. So. Uh.. Bye. Grizzled Patriarch - Tiny Edible Things Turn this into a full story and Ill crit it you lazy gently caress. Killer-of-Lawyers - The Star and The Skull It’s like that standoff in Kill Bill only instead of a cool fight scene everyone is being friends. (Still better than your fairy story.) skwidmonster - Mr. War Criminal It’s good that all these people have code- and nicknames otherwise this would be confusing as poo poo. crabrock - A Probabilistic Route to Happiness That’s so cute… she's his 1 in 11110100001001000000 Sitting Here - Full Circle Hello Lucy.... I've been waiting for you… all these years *creepy smile* Now finally we can be together… *smile intensifies* as soon as I can get out of this chair. P.S. This week sucked. Cya
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# ? May 12, 2015 08:04 |
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I think I understand the prompt now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdKa9bXVinE
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# ? May 12, 2015 08:13 |
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In. (the end, it doesn't even matter.)
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# ? May 12, 2015 09:22 |
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In like a Turkish sailor on shore leave
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# ? May 12, 2015 09:38 |
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LET THE GREAT EXPERIMENT BEGIN gently caress everything, I regret it already
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# ? May 12, 2015 10:18 |
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Well.... atleast I didn't fail completely. Im doing this again. In.
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# ? May 12, 2015 10:51 |
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# ? Mar 29, 2024 16:56 |
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Benny Profane posted:Here are a bunch of short crits for everyone this week. I read these in judgemode, but ended up doing a fair bit of skimming. Thanks man! I appreciate it.
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# ? May 12, 2015 13:46 |