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Profane Accessory
Feb 23, 2012



I'll find a spot for you nearby, Mojo.

:toxx:

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sebmojo
Oct 23, 2010


Legit Cyberpunk









Kaishai posted:

Why, hello!

sebmojo vs. Benny Profane: O Christmas Tree

You must write stories set in or on Christmas trees. Your characters may be small humans, normal-size humans in a gargantuan world, ornaments, tinsel, vermin--whatever your three-sizes-too-small hearts desire, but they must be in Christmas trees decked out with colored lights aplenty. Tell me about their holiday adventures in 1,000 words or fewer.

Deadline: Thursday, December 31, 11:59pm USA Central Standard Time. Do not expect mercy.

:toxx:

Fumblemouse
Mar 21, 2013


STANDARD
DEVIANT
Grimey Drawer

Thranguy posted:

So the victory goes to Muffin for actually reading the prompt.

Thanks for the prompt and the judgin'. I have never been more uncomfortable writing anything, so it was probably a good one, regardless of my inability to keep things under the top . But if you consider plagiarism and self-mutilation comedic, I am never coming to your stand up show, matey, let me tell you.

Ceighk
May 27, 2013

No Hospital Gang, boy
You know that shit a case close
Want him dead, bust his head
All I do is say, "Go"
Drop a opp, drop a thot
Eeny-meeny-miny-mo
In.

I'm not gonna attempt the wordbounty since I effectively came last, but if anyone wanted to crit my story you are more than welcome. My new year's resolution is to write something you hacks appreciate, and I'm starting early.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Kaishai
Nov 3, 2010

Scoffing at modernity.

Ceighk posted:

Any advice would be appreciated.

This advice concerns another matter: you requested an archive account, but I can't reach you through forums PMs when you don't have platinum! You'll need to e-mail crabrock or pop onto IRC (https://www.synirc.net will take you to the web chat client, and the channel is #thunderdome) so one of us can send you your access code.

flerp
Feb 25, 2014

Ceighk posted:

In.

I'm not gonna attempt the wordbounty since I effectively came last, but if anyone wanted to crit my story you are more than welcome. My new year's resolution is to write something you hacks appreciate, and I'm starting early.

Any advice would be appreciated.

my advice is that you should crit somebody's anyways, even if you're not at the top. any and all advice, whether it comes from someone inexperienced or experienced is useful, and also reading and critting stories makes you think about stories in a different way that help you in your writing. so crit something. that's an order.

Ceighk
May 27, 2013

No Hospital Gang, boy
You know that shit a case close
Want him dead, bust his head
All I do is say, "Go"
Drop a opp, drop a thot
Eeny-meeny-miny-mo

Broenheim posted:

my advice is that you should crit somebody's anyways, even if you're not at the top. any and all advice, whether it comes from someone inexperienced or experienced is useful, and also reading and critting stories makes you think about stories in a different way that help you in your writing. so crit something. that's an order.

Sure thing. Since you asked so nicely. here's a crit of Jocoserious’ That Furry Son of a Bitch, which I mostly liked but thought was definitely flawed.

The reason I enjoyed reading this story is its strong central image: the idea of a talking dog speeding down the highway while his human passenger pours beer into his mouth is inherently funny, so good job, and the banter at the start is entertaining enough. I like that you don’t straight up say Rex is a dog, but it’s made pretty clear by the fact he has paws, has sharp teeth, and is called Rex. Cool.

The only problem is, if you were trying to set up Rex being a dog as a twist – only using the word “dog” in the second last sentence – you failed. But if you weren’t setting that up, the ending doesn’t have any dramatic resonance or even make sense. In a world where no one is surprised talking dogs exist, why does no one believe the dog was driving? Do dogs generally not drink? Can they drive but prefer not to? Are there talking dogs and non-talking dogs, and Rex was the former pretending to be the latter? There are many questions here.

If we were to be surprised that Rex was a dog at the end it would be a pretty dumb twist, similar to that Goosebumps book in which it turned out all the characters were dogs the whole time, but at least the ending would have some kind of reversal. As it is it’s just: dog drives man to party > man gets dog drunk in car > dog gets pulled over by police > police don’t believe dog was driving… for some reason. Since we know the dog was a dog from the start none of that is a surprise apart from the premise, which isn't a story, and the very end, which doesn’t make sense. This leaves us with an amusing image that doesn’t really go anywhere.

I guess if you were gonna re-do it you could create conflict by either emphasizing Rex's internal conflict over whether or not to take the drink or his reasons for betraying Jessie like that, and how he achieved it. As it happens in the story, the two most interesting conflicts are brushed over or happen 'off screen'.

Hope I helped!

Profane Accessory
Feb 23, 2012

Florida Week Crits / HateBrawl Warmup

Alright, ‘Dome. I’ve got a hatebrawl with ‘mojo to prep for in exchange for not drawing any blood this past week, so consider this my training montage. Here’s Everything I Hated From Florida Week.

***********************************************************************************************************

ZeBourgeoisie - The Alpha Man

What I Hate About This:
Broenheim already covered some of the problems with this story, but in case you don’t want to slog through his barely coherent word diarrhea, here are the big take homes:
  1. the misogyny doesn’t play well
  2. your characterization is schizophrenic
  3. your sex scene, if we’re going to call it that, is Vincent Gallo levels of unsexy
  4. the typos and grammatical errors are so prevalent that it almost seems like you’re doing it intentionally out of contempt for your reader

How to Fix It: I think we both know you’re not going to fix this. It’s a complete teardown. In future work, you probably want to
  1. Actually proofread your work
  2. Learn some grammar (start with Strunk and White)
  3. Edit your work. For each sentence, ask yourself: “Am I A) expanding a character in interesting ways? B) advancing the plot significantly? C) smearing poo poo on the wall?” If the answer is C, take that sentence out.

Had I not (possibly ill-advisedly) gotten caught up in the spirit of the holiday season, this would have been a strong contender for the loss.

Your stocking contains: Five Lumps of Coal

***********************************************************************************************************

klapman - A Day at the Meat Shack

What I Hate About This:
You’re hiding behind a fortress of overwrought similes and metaphors to try and distract your readers from the fact that you don’t actually have a story under all of that. It doesn’t work. When I read a line like: “The morning air bit hard, like a pack of wolves with fangs of sharpened ice”, I don’t think Oh poo poo, that sure does sound cold, I start thinking about how asinine the idea of a wolf with ice teeth is. And I’m not cherry picking here: your entire story is chock-full of this crap. Cut it out. All of it. What are we left with? A guy with obvious rage issues gets some chile in his eye, overreacts, gets into a car accident, then tries to fight the guy in the other car, and gets shot. That’s a lot of ground to cover, but you’re too busy trying to come up with cool sounding lines to actually advance your plot coherently or even bother to establish your characters beyond a lazy caricature.

How to Fix it:
Quit the bullshit “style” stuff and let your stories actually breathe. Your words should act in service to your characters and your plots, not the other way around. And next time you write about a wolf with ice teeth, think to yourself: “That’s dumb, I should take that out.”

Your stocking contains: Four Lumps of Coal

***********************************************************************************************************

Ceighk - The Night of the Goat

What I Hate About This:
This story takes a lot of work to read, and for basically zero pay-off. If I’m going to spend a bunch of time unravelling the relationships between your characters, make it worth my while. I’ve read this story more times than I’d otherwise care to at this point, and here’s what I know: an unlikely candidate for a political position leverages some kind of sexual history with an old classmate to get access to a goat so that she can conduct a blood sacrifice and gain political power. This backfires when her old classmate then conducts a blood sacrifice of his own to gain power over her. Why are there three dead goats at the end? I don’t know, and more importantly, I don’t really care that I don’t know. It’s not a mystery I feel any compulsion to solve. To just get that barebones synopsis out, I had to read this story twice, and pick through a junkyard of irrelevant details to find the few little morsels that actually revealed what was going on, like a lovely Where’s Waldo with words.

How to fix it:
Imagine you are telling your story to a friend, whose time you actually value. Is it important that Jake wears a Megadeth T-shirt? No? Then leave it out. If you want to play with mystery, or do some flashy stuff with a last-minute reveal, then actually do the work and craft a decent set of dead-end threads. Peppering me with bullshit window-dressing isn’t interesting or intriguing, it’s just annoying.

Your stocking contains: Four Lumps of Coal

***********************************************************************************************************

crabrock - Dare to be you

What I Hate About This:
The first half, starting with “I hunger for flesh.”

How to fix it:
The second half, starting with “I hunger for flesh.”

Your stocking contains: Two Lumps of Coal

***********************************************************************************************************

Jocoserious - That Furry Son of a Bitch

What I Hate About This:
It’s a story about a goddamn talking dog. It’s lazy, and it’s dumb. It feels like a cross between that Seth MacFarlane movie with the foul mouthed bear and some latter day Tim Allen movie in which Tim Allen goes on wacky adventures with a CGI dog. That’s not a good combo.

How to fix it:
Next time, when you write “Talking Dog?” into your ideas book, cross it out and put a big “NO” next to it.

Your stocking contains: Three Lumps of Coal

***********************************************************************************************************

Broenheim - What You Learn When You’re Robbing A Store As Darth Vader

What I Hate About This:
The title for starters. That is one lovely, lovely title. Then, you take an inherently awesome concept (robbing a store in a Darth Vader costume) and do precisely nothing with it. Does the Vader costume matter? No? Well, that was a bit of a waste, don’t you think? Furthermore, your dialog sucks, to the extent that it makes me question whether you’ve actually ever listened to how people talk to each other in real life. Oh, and what was that bit in the prompt that I’m forgetting… it was important… oh yeah: characters with clear motivations. Looks like you forgot that too. The only reason this HM’d was that one of my co-judges really liked the stuff about “bits”.

How to fix it:
Learn to use dialog as a narrative tool. The dialog between a scared store clerk and a robber dressed as Darth Vader should be goddamn amazing. Keep rewriting the dialog until it is. Then, if you want to go off on some exploration of “bits”, you should A) think of a better way of describing the concept than “bits”, and B) work it in as part of your now amazing dialog exchange.

Your stocking contains: Three Lumps of Coal

***********************************************************************************************************

Jagermonster - The Florida Man and the Sea

What I Hate About This:
Oh man, with that title this could have been amazing. Like, if you’d actually committed to doing Hemingway with Florida Man, that… that would’ve been something. But it’s worse than that. You not only squandered a great title, you took an inherently awesome headline about a man hellbent on catching and eating the shark that bit him, and the shark appears for the middle act and then disappears. And before you start with the whole Jaws thing, Jaws did not feature a whole poo poo ton of boring dialog before the shark showed up, and then end with a long epilogue in which the characters discussed what they learned today over a joint.

How to Fix It:
Actually write “The Florida Man and the Sea”. Or write “Jaws: Florida-style”. Hell, just write an actual story, instead of “Father and Son Bond Over Rustic Sushi, Joint”. There’s potential all over the place here. Stop faffing about and commit.

Your stocking contains: Three Lumps of Coal

***********************************************************************************************************

Entenzahn - Late Night Pit Stop

What I Hate About This:
You took a concept about a guy who got shot getting dropped off at a Walmart instead of a hospital, and tried to play it grim and dark and oh-so-serious, with a whole bunch of hardboiled prose and drawn-out similes about razor blades and jenga towers. Here’s the obvious question raised by the headline: Why’d the guy get dropped off at a Walmart instead of a hospital? Did your story answer that question? No. It’s going to be hard to pull a satisfying story out of that, no matter how many pretty words you throw at it.

How to Fix It:
This is so close to being good, but you seem to be so distracted by the style you’re aiming for that you lose sight of the story you set out to tell. Work out what motivates your characters and let that drive the plot, then let the style fill in the gaps.

Your stocking contains: Two Lumps of Coal

***********************************************************************************************************

jon joe - Yorick

What I Hate About This:
I came here to read a story about a guy who brings a human skull to the grocery store, and what I get is some paint-by-numbers domestic dispute. The Hamlet stuff is just window dressing that doesn’t have any concrete effect on the story: you could tell this exact same story without the play and without the skull. And the story that’s left over is pretty bog-standard, which is disappointing. Also, the dialog is pretty stale.

How to Fix It:
Next time you get a prompt like this, weave and adapt your plot to fit it, instead of writing some other story you felt like writing and chucking the prompt materials in to meet the basic requirements. Also, pick an author who writes dialog that you like, and study them. Emulate until you’re comfortable, then branch out.

Your Stocking contains: Three Lumps of Coal

***********************************************************************************************************

WeLandedOnTheMoon! - Labels and Liars

What I Hate About This:
The labels. Don’t do the strikethrough crap, it’s stylistically clumsy and completely breaks the narrative flow. The violent ending is a cop-out, and isn’t really believable given the characters you’ve established. Also, it feels like you couldn’t decide if you wanted to do a Trading Places fish-out-of-water story or a Doppelgänger style horror story, and landed somewhat awkwardly in the middle. Finally, the characters themselves are all two-dimensional cardboard cutouts.

How to Fix It:
What would help the most here would be to flesh out your characters a little more, and then, once you have actual interesting characters, let the reader inside their heads. And also, establishing motivation is key: for example, why is Ullrich so into being the mayor? That’d be good territory to explore, don’t you think?

Your stocking contains: Three Lumps of Coal

***********************************************************************************************************

Grizzled Patriarch - Every Rising Tide

What I Hate About This:
The fact that there’s almost nothing you could call “action” in a story about a literal flood of tigers.

How to Fix It:
Just a sprinkling of conflict would help sell the terror of a malevolent tiger flood a little better.

Your stocking contains: One Lump of Coal

***********************************************************************************************************

C7TY1 - The Proper Care and Feeding of Your Bobcat

What I Hate About This:
There’s a fair bit here: you didn’t proofread, your characters are paper-thin, your dialog is stilted and incoherent, the plot stumbled about drunkenly and without purpose, and, most damning of all, for a story about a man who almost gets mauled by a bobcat, there’s essentially no conflict. At all.

How To Fix It:
Start by proofreading your submissions. Seriously, when I have to read a line about a “horse powered car” several times, and then go back to try and work out if I missed something important about a literal horse powered car, and then finally realize it’s an easily caught typo, that’s just annoying. Next, think about what makes your characters interesting, and actually make the effort to generate some conflict between them.

Your stocking contains: Four Lumps of Coal

***********************************************************************************************************

kurona bright - Moist Cotton Hands

What I Hate About This:
You effectively took your prompt headline and made it longer and kind of boring. When you get some gold like “Florida Man With Socks on Hands Denies Burglarizing Home, Says He Was Invited in For Gatorade” and you turn in a story about a burglar who uses socks for gloves and finds a bottle of Gatorade during his misadventures, you’re giving us the least interesting interpretation of the prompt that you possibly could.

How To Fix It:
Next time, when you’re planning a story, write out all the obvious ideas first and cross them out. Use the next one that comes to mind.

Your stocking contains: Four Lumps of Coal

***********************************************************************************************************

Mercedes - Marching to the beat of your own drum

What I Hate About This:
I feel like you’re delighting in making the plot completely inscrutable by burying it in hyperbolic dialog delivered by unreliable narrators. I mean, I bet it was fun to write, but poo poo was it hard to read.

How To Fix It:
Throw your reader a bone every once in awhile. Also, submit before the deadline.

Your stocking contains: Two Lumps of Coal

Sitting Here
Dec 31, 2007
Meanwhile, in the southern hemisphere...

Jocoserious
Jun 9, 2014

LOOK OVER HERE!!

Ceighk posted:

here's a crit of Jocoserious’ That Furry Son of a Bitch

Thanks for the crit!

Phobia
Apr 25, 2011

I'm a suave detective with a heart of gold in hot pursuit of the malevolent, manipulative
MIAMI MUTILATOR
and the deranged degenerates who only want their
15 MINUTES OF FAME.


OCK.
I'm home for the holidays.



And I know this was last week but I'm just gonna add this headline to the pile:

Florida Man Hellbent on Catching, Eating Shark That Bit Him

Also a shocking amount of these florida stories seem to occur during oral sex. This is information you did not need to know.

flerp
Feb 25, 2014

Broenheim posted:

Child's Play Brawl

Your story will have someone playing a game children play. It can be children playing, it can be adults, it can be dogs, it can be anything really, but somebody has to be playing a children's game. Similarly the game can be real or fake, but it should still be obvious the game is for kids. You don't have to write a children's story, mind you. Do whatever genre or style you want, but MAKE THIS STORY MATTER. I want to read something that has a god drat point, alright?

1269 words
Due at 23 December 11:57 PM PST
NO BUTTERMEN

due in about 9 hours djeser

Djeser
Mar 22, 2013


it's crow time again

Broenheim posted:

due in about 9 hours djeser

excellent fact-stating

POOL IS CLOSED
Jul 14, 2011

I'm just exploding with mackerel. This is the aji wo kutta of my discontent.
Pillbug
Part Whatever of Pilgrim's Progress, the Honest-to-Dog Finale, No More Prolonging the Magic

Hit the Bricks

Another story I really enjoyed. We had some back and forth in judgechat about the significance of the broken millstone and whether the protagonist was being punished for breaking it, or if part of his penance was taking a chunk of a millstone all engraved with holy whatnots along on his journey. Echo and I decided on the latter interpretation, but I'm interested in knowing what you intended. You had an ending and managed to make a one-character, mostly introspective piece quite engaging. Either way, the broken millstone is a good piece of symbolism as well as a literal, back-breaking burden. It makes for an interesting rite of penance. We also weren't certain if the road were literally made of broken millstones or what that was about. I choose to think the road is actually paved with millstones and to hell with everyone else, I like it better that way. The penance let the pilgrim escape from his regular troubles for a while all under a veneer of holiness. But then he realizes for himself that it's escapism and that he needs to forgive himself and move on with making amends and living. As a moral, I quite like it. The execution manages not to taste like bland, feel-good, Deepak Chopra-style pabulum.

Thrown

On the opposite end of religious pilgrimages was this hot mess. The first line made misled me into thinking some ecumenical dialogue was coming; it wasn't. Very little happens. The internal conflict is poorly articulated. While we're all often terrible at articulating our real internal conflicts, that poo poo does not make for a good story in the same way the way people actually speaks does not make for good dialogue -- no one wants to wade through mumbling, whiny, meandering prose to get to the good stuff. Just write the good stuff. Unlike my fellow judges, I can see where you were going with the protagonist's final outburst (the hug, the crying), but it was all fumbled. I had no emotional connection with the character. I don't know what he was looking for. What was he trying to escape? What troubled him? Why did he think India would magically resolve his issues? That lack of connection robbed the conclusion of resonance.

The Hackney Comet

The title card thing just looks like you made a mistake by posting without using preview. You had me with the first half of the story, when it was father-son telescope bonding time, but lost me in part two. I thought the archive had shat itself and the text of another story had overwritten the second half of Comet. That went off the rails. Also, I thought this was gonna be about a drat comet. I re-read this twice and still feel like I missed something critical that would make part two make sense. It seems that the protagonist had, without mission control's
knowledge, basically jury-rigged his own landing capsule to drop onto this planet and dick around with robots. Is that right? That's dumb. And dad disappeared from the story. That made me sad. Dad was the best part of this story and you let him down.

You get 2/10 :gary:s

Chairchucker
Nov 14, 2006

to ride eternal, shiny and chrome

THUNDERDOME LOSER 2022




I'm in with a Kai appointed Merman.

Kaishai
Nov 3, 2010

Scoffing at modernity.

Chairchucker posted:

I'm in with a Kai appointed Merman.

Merry Christmas, Chairchucker!



If anyone can explain a merman pilot, it is you.

Djeser
Mar 22, 2013


it's crow time again

Broenheim posted:

due in about 9 hours djeser

Playing WIth Your Food

Djeser fucked around with this message at 16:53 on Jan 1, 2016

flerp
Feb 25, 2014
Children's Play Brawl Results

Surprising almost no one, Djeser wins with a tight plot and a good handle of tension, but let it be known that Zeb was not too far off, and with some more work, could've gone higher up and perhaps could've won. Of course, could have doesn't mean did.

Crits

Djeser - Definitely the tighter plot here. You set up intrigue in the beginning, set up the conflict shortly after, then we got the guy trying to hide and then conclusion. Simple, straight forward, and a lot of tension in such a short piece. The internal monologue of the character moved the plot along in it's own regard while giving us a decent look into the character. While there's hardly any fat on this story, there's also a lack of meat. The guy hides, the creature finds him, and says he has another month. This seems like a good jumping off point for a longer short story, taking this as your beginning and exploring your character as he wrestles with the fear of knowing that in a month, he'll be killed by this werewolf. As stands, while this is a tight piece, it doesn't do much else. Your prose works very well, the right amount of description to paint me a clear picture while also not letting it flood the story with too much. Just the right little details to bring me in. I'm just left wanting more, which, of course, isn't the worst thing in the world. It does what it does, and doesn't ask for much else. That's cool by me. I just feel like it can be more.

Zeb - This has some issues. First of all, like I've seen a lot of times in TD this feels like two different stories. There's one story that's about someone tending to their family in some kind of weird stasis (that's later explained), and then there's another about her being taken away by a demon. Neither are quite expanded upon quite properly. I really feel like you can take this beginning and move it to somewhere much more interesting. A person having to watch their family be trapped in some weird stasis while she's an attendant can be quite arresting. I want to feel that. Your character really feels like she does not give a poo poo whatsoever. You chose first person, which is excellent for this type of story, but you don't do anything with it. We're not given an insight into her character, and I don't learn much about her. You should be able to bring me into the story because of the personal relationship I'm given with the narrator, but I don't feel like the narrator is anything more but a blank set of eyes to see things through. Think about how you tell stories that happen to you. You describe in a specific way that only you describe it, and by doing that, you show how you feel about a situation and how you are as a person. That's what a first person narration should be doing. I'm left feeling blank about this story because your narrator feels bored and listless that it's like, if you don't give a poo poo about your parent's being trapped in a game, then why should I? There's potential in this story if you tighten it up and you bring me into your character, make me really care about her, make me care about her plight, because right now, you're not doing that. But this isn't awful, and with some elbow grease, tightening up your prose, and a little more practice, this can be a good story. As should be obvious by my crit, your ending was not good, and me suddenly having to care about Samuel in the last quarter of the story did not work whatsoever. Also you seem to have a weird aversion to contractions and idk why.

mistaya
Oct 18, 2006

Cat of Wealth and Taste

EchoCian has been badgering me into trying Thunderdome for a while and I finally had free time due to the holidays. I wonder what the prompt is this-

Well. That's certainly interesting. :stare:

In



(I had an idea.)

---

Crit from last week's! (I really need those extra words. Also I genuinely liked this story.)

Late Night Pit Stop

The imagery is really good in this at the beginning. I liked 'panicked mouse at the wheel', the repetition of the sirens. I had a good clear picture of everything that happened. Going with present tense adds to the urgency which was a good choice. His reaction of being scared of the wal-mart greeter showed what a bad state he was in.

I'm surprised that the pill colors (red white blue white) weren't likened to the police sirens/lights, it seems like an easy correlation to make. And then it stops without ending, so there's no real resolution to the story. I think cutting the first paragraph and just opening with 'Take me to a hospital' would have given you more space to give it a real ending, or maybe shortening the 'get the gently caress up' paragraph or the 'walmarts in florida are all the same' paragraph, which doesn't really do much in context.

I did like it, I just wish it told us what happened to the guy after he couldn't run anymore. Did the cops get him? Did he bleed out? Did his buddy have a change of heart and come back for him? Lot of possibilities but no answers.

a new study bible!
Feb 2, 2009



BIG DICK NICK
A Philadelphia Legend
Fly Eagles Fly


WeLandedOnTheMoon! posted:

Doming with the Devil Brawl

Okay, so I really like Faustian type stories, so that's what you three are going to write. Let me be clear. I want stories about dealing with the literal devil. Not a mother-in-law, or an arch rival, or some other sort of necessary evil, the literal loving devil.

You must include two things:

1) Meaningful decisions driven by motivation
2) Consequences

2000 word maximum, due on or before Saturday night, 11:59 PM, December 26th

Broenheim, Ent, Jon Joe.

Here's a reminder.

BoldFrankensteinMir
Jul 28, 2006


Thank you for the crit, RedTonic.

Edit- I am a fool who does not yet understand Thunderdome Law.

BoldFrankensteinMir fucked around with this message at 12:02 on Dec 25, 2015

newtestleper
Oct 30, 2003

BoldFrankensteinMir posted:

Thank you for the crit, RedTonic. I'll PM you some notes on the story to answer your questions.

Edit- I guess I can't. The broken millstone was intended to be taken literally as his conflict, but the reality of a "road of broken millstones" was left intentionally ambiguous. That is all.

Any explanations not contained within the story itself are worthless and you shouldn't even try.

You're scum of the earth for responding to redtonic's crit with this crap. You should apologize.

BoldFrankensteinMir
Jul 28, 2006


newtestleper posted:

Any explanations not contained within the story itself are worthless and you shouldn't even try.

You're scum of the earth for responding to redtonic's crit with this crap. You should apologize.

Duly noted. Forgive my error, and I shall return to shameful silence.

BoldFrankensteinMir fucked around with this message at 11:50 on Dec 25, 2015

take the moon
Feb 13, 2011

by sebmojo

newtestleper posted:

Any explanations not contained within the story itself are worthless and you shouldn't even try.

You're scum of the earth for responding to redtonic's crit with this crap. You should apologize.

nice jimmy corrigan av

crabrock
Aug 2, 2002

I

AM

MAGNIFICENT






You respond to a crit with "thank you" and you answer the questions by thinking about them next time you write so that you don't repeat your mistakes.

sebmojo
Oct 23, 2010


Legit Cyberpunk









BoldFrankensteinMir posted:

Duly noted. Forgive my error, and I shall return to shameful silence.

Lol no ntl is a notorious weakling who covers up his failings with cheap bravado. Brawl him and eat his liver.

Sitting Here
Dec 31, 2007

newtestleper posted:

Any explanations not contained within the story itself are worthless and you shouldn't even try.

You're scum of the earth for responding to redtonic's crit with this crap. You should apologize.

Nuts to you

crabrock posted:

You respond to a crit with "thank you" and you answer the questions by thinking about them next time you write so that you don't repeat your mistakes.



figs to you

suck my chestnuts thunderdome

flerp
Feb 25, 2014

sebmojo posted:

Lol no ntl is a notorious weakling who covers up his failings with cheap bravado. Brawl him and eat his liver.

emptyquote

also

^ lol @ this little baby trying to act all big and tough

newtestleper
Oct 30, 2003
Nuts and figs sound like delicious Christmas treats!

Poison and sandpaper undies to you, sh!

Entenzahn
Nov 15, 2012

erm... quack-ward

thanks for the bonus crit

also in

also sh flashruled me to write a heartfelt story, no snark

Fumblemouse
Mar 21, 2013


STANDARD
DEVIANT
Grimey Drawer
In but on phone. Could someone please send me a merman?

Emmideer
Oct 20, 2011

Lovely night, no?
Grimey Drawer

Fumblemouse posted:

In but on phone. Could someone please send me a merman?

It's your lucky day, you found a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow!

Grizzled Patriarch
Mar 27, 2014

These dentures won't stop me from tearing out jugulars in Thunderdome.



:siren: Couple hours left for you degenerates to sign up! :siren:

Also I am still looking for two more judges, my connection is really crappy so I will try to be on irc, but feel free to volunteer via PM or in the thread or whatever. Should be a fun week to judge!

Djeser
Mar 22, 2013


it's crow time again



in

Ironic Twist
Aug 3, 2008

I'm bokeh, you're bokeh
Merry Christmas, TD.

WEEK 136 REDEMPTION

Flow State, or Carl “Twista” Mitchell’s Last Day On Earth

It was the year 64, anno Kool Moe Dee, and everyone hoped the Power 105.1 FM Tower of Babel Wars would finally come to an end.

Twista could see his arch-nemesis waiting off in the distance as he and his army of lyrical disciples marched down the empty streets of St. Louis, clad in red and black, Chicago colors. Tech N9ne stood alone under the St. Louis Arch, his blue-and-gold followers at the edge of the park, hollering and chanting. A hooded figure waited next to him, his head bent low.

This was the first time Twista had seen Tech in years. Not since the disaster. Not since everything changed.

The official report was: at some point during that ill-fated morning broadcast of The Breakfast Club with Angela Yee and Charlamagne Tha God, the radio station’s transmitter was hijacked by a third-party signal. No one had ever figured out where the signal came from or who was behind it. But once the signal was live, it spread to every other audio-transmitting device in America. Every telephone, every television, every radio, every iPod, every automated drive-thru menu.

Then it struck. Infected millions of ear-possessing souls with a brain disorder that future scientists classified as “Muh.” They were attempting to say “Monosyllabia,” but they could only get out “Muh,” because the characteristics of the disorder were as such—the human brain was unable to process words with more than one syllable.

Everyone was afflicted, save for the cadre of survivors inside the Power 105.1 studio that day, who consisted of Angela, Charlamagne, two interns named David and Cotrice—and both Twista and Tech N9ne, there to promote an upcoming show at the Barclays Arena.

Once word got out that the six of them were uninfected, everything escalated.



Twista looked out at the waters of The Mississippi River as his army advanced, and thought about how much had changed. Angela Yee, David, and Cotrice were either dead—mauled by a mob of New Yorkers whose fists spoke faster than their tongues—or they had made it to asylum in South America. Charlamagne bought a white suit and commandeered half of the public access TV stations on the East Coast. Broadcasting from a private location, promoting himself as a “linguivangelist” and peddling quack remedies for elocution to the uninformed masses. Twista hated accidentally coming across his grinning face as he flipped through the remaining TV channels back at his compound in Chicago, but he supposed he couldn’t blame him. When power came along, you either grabbed it, or it grabbed you.

Which was why him and N9ne were not only still alive, but in the eyes of their followers, immortal.

As they reached the edge of the park, Twista held up his hand to his disciples, halting them, and walked ahead on his own, towards Tech and the hooded figure.

“A rap bat tull to end a war,” said the hooded figure as Twista stopped under the arch, in front of them. Twista recognized him as the emissary from Tech N9ne’s camp, the one who had brought the two of them together. “No more death. No more kill. One man win. One man lose. One true God.”

The hooded figure stepped back, leaving Twista and Tech N9ne staring at each other. The crowd fell silent.

The hooded man continued: “Eight bars each. Take turns. First one to half-spit or half-step lose.”

He coughed. Twista looked across at N9ne. His eyes were cold steel.

The hooded man held his hand out to Twista. “Go,” he said.

The sun rose, and fell, and rose again. Countless whispers sank below the waters of the Mississippi and rose again, bursting through the surface like undiscovered mixtapes. Red Bull and vodka flowed freely, and clouds of pungent smoke enshrouded the armies in chronic fog,

Neither rapper would back down. As their respective armies watched, their rhymes only became more complex, more intricate, even as their throats grew hoarse.

Even during the afternoon of the third day, with chapped lips, dry mouths, and sweat pouring from under their caps, they kept going. Mellifluous and methodical, Tech continued:

Everybody got the memo, Michael Myers man I'm mental
Messy murder monumental mixed my mind
Metamorphosis made it mainly my many maneuvers
Missin' my malice malevolent mister N9ne!
Mediocre motherfuckers my motive makin' minimum
Maniacal makin' me mash my line
MONSTER! Musical massacre
Metaphysical minion may never match my grind


Twista returned fire:

But Tech, me and you could speak on the evil type of terminology
Em heard our music but didn’t know we were an odyssey or an oddity
It’s a murder probably, if not then I bet you we cause a verbal lobotomy
Tell them niggas to make a move that when they move I will abuse
I’ll show em they finna lose and I refuse to be a fool
I kill em, I keep em cool but I'mma do what I'mma do
Because I’m breaking the rules, let’s go
Bust you under lyrics, that’s how I shoot this—


The words hung heavy in Twista’s mind as silence flitted in and out of the air. Before Tech could open his mouth. Twista held up his hand.

“Why?” shouted Twista.

The crowd immediately hushed. It was a word they could say, a word they knew all too well, a word that had been spoken many times since the start of the Monosyllabia epidemic, spoken in fear, in anger, in despair.

“Why are we doing this, Tech?” said Twista.

Tech stared at Twista. Twista could see the strain in his eyes, the sleepless circles, the red veins agitated by the dankest, Reggie Miller-est weed fit for the leader of an empire of entourages, an empire-tourage even, if anyone could pronounce that word, which most people couldn’t.

“Why turn our sick rhymes against each other?” said Twista, hands outstretched in surrender, walking towards Tech. “We should be bringing the world together, standing tall as—“

—he shouted to the sky—

“—inimitable lyrical criminals!—”

Both armies roared in agreement, coughed lustily and attempted to chant Twista’s words around the Swisher Sweets in their mouths. Of course, they were still afflicted, so they failed miserably, but to Tech, their remedial grunts sounded like…hope.

Twista extended his hand. Tech hesitated.

“Come on, N9ne,” said Twista, pronouncing it “n-nine-nuh”, because he could. “From one Chopper to another.”

Without a word, Tech took his hand and grasped it firmly, then raised it to the sky in an expression of shared victory. The St. Louis Arch shook with the roaring of the crowd as Tech and Twista both stood, united, bringing the world together with the power of saying rhyming words really fast over fresh beats.

Suddenly, Tech groaned in agony and fell to the ground.

Twista looked down to see blood pooling around Tech. The hooded man stood behind him, holding a long sword, dripping with blood the color of Air Jordans right out of the box.

Tech’s followers howled in anger and ran towards the hooded man—and at once flew back in a wave of sonic energy, fruity loops of concentric sound flying from the hooded man’s fingertips. As the techno-pop beat pumped, the man removed his hood to reveal the wifebeater-and-chain wearing form of—

Flo Rida,” seethed Twista. “The Pimp-postor.”

“That’s right,” said Flo Rida, smirking evilly. “It’s time for rap to transcend. All the way to the top of the pop charts.”

“Your wack rhymes are the death of everything right about rap music!” shouted Twista, advancing towards the false prophet. “You’re dumbing-down and decriminalizing our entire hip-hopracy! This is not what the Sugarhill Gang fought for!

“Yeah? Then do something about it, wanksta,” said Flo Rida.

Without warning, he launched into his chart-topping hit single, “Uhh.”

Twista staggered, the sub-par Scott Storch-esque production and wack rhymes immediately draining his will to live. He didn’t think, he just started spitting.
Nonsense and glossolalia at first, brought on by the mania of the moment, slowly crystallizing into diamond-edged syllables that had the power to cut all bustas and scrubs to the core.

A circle of red light formed around Twista as his flow stayed on point. Those in the crowd maintained that he grew a second tongue that extended from his forehead in order to spit bars at twice the speed. Others swore that actual flames escaped his mouth with every cold-blooded diss. One thing was for certain, though—Twista was an anomaly, able to give a lobotomy, to any motherfucker challengin’ his astronomy.

The red circle of light advanced, licking up against Flo Rida’s dancing form. He screamed in pain as the true spirit of hip-hop burned his flesh, jumping back from the border made of pure baller-ness.

THAT’S ENOUGH,” boomed Flo Rida. “IT IS TIME TO REVEAL MY FINAL FORM.

Twista stopped and watched in horror as Flo Rida laughed maniacally and began to…change. His form morphed, shrunk, shriveled, wrinkled, became the concentrated force of cultural appropriation, the bespectacled idol to out-of-touch granddads everywhere, the flesh avatar of wackness given voice by every scared white parent who heard Little Richard and thought it was “the devil’s music.”

Grinning, Pat Boone stood before Twista, enclosed in a beam of beige light.

Twista stood, speechless and disgusted.

Pat Boone ripped open his dress shirt to reveal a parasitic twin growing from his abdomen. Twista watched in horror as the abomination growing from Pat’s stomach opened its gruesome facsimile of a mouth and began to…oh dear god, it was singing

“Yooooooou, light up my liiiiiiife, you make me whooooole…”

A howl erupted from Twista’s mouth that shattered the solid ground, sending a beam of red light into the sky in a burst of deadly energy that engulfed the entire square in fire, with smoke that smelled faintly of bubblegum.




Those who survived what came to be known as the Chopper Massacre had no recollection of what happened after both army leaders stood arm-in-arm, both hands raised. There was doubt, and sadness, and bitterness sown in the aftermath, but many held on to that vision of Worldwide Choppers standing together, as one, against the forces of geriatric rhymes.

Meanwhile, a satellite of red amber orbited the Earth. Twista lay at the center, enclosed and protected from the coldness of deep space, his heart racing and glowing with unspit game, inchoate rhymes shining behind his eyes.

One day, he would make his return. A Dark Horse, a Perfect Storm, a human Adrenaline Rush, flying towards an unsuspecting Earth like a Kamikaze.

The faintest hint of a smile crept across his face, as he awaited his Resurrection.

Ironic Twist fucked around with this message at 04:25 on Dec 26, 2015

crabrock
Aug 2, 2002

I

AM

MAGNIFICENT






In and somebody throw a merman at me

Kaishai
Nov 3, 2010

Scoffing at modernity.

crabrock posted:

In and somebody throw a merman at me



Merry Christmas, crabrock!

Screaming Idiot
Nov 26, 2007

JUST POSTING WHILE JERKIN' MY GHERKIN SITTIN' IN A PERKINS!

BEATS SELLING MERKINS.
In! My first non-poo poo TD story was about a Christmas merman and I wanna see if I can make lightning strike twice.

a new study bible!
Feb 2, 2009



BIG DICK NICK
A Philadelphia Legend
Fly Eagles Fly


WeLandedOnTheMoon! posted:

Doming with the Devil Brawl

Okay, so I really like Faustian type stories, so that's what you three are going to write. Let me be clear. I want stories about dealing with the literal devil. Not a mother-in-law, or an arch rival, or some other sort of necessary evil, the literal loving devil.

You must include two things:

1) Meaningful decisions driven by motivation
2) Consequences

2000 word maximum, due on or before Saturday night, 11:59 PM, December 26th

jon joe posted:

gently caress it, I'm in for my first brawl.

:toxx: to submit, as well.



:siren: I am unexpectedly going out of town for a few days, so you people can have until Wednesday, Dec 30th, to write and submit these stories. 11:59 PM PST. :siren:

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Grizzled Patriarch
Mar 27, 2014

These dentures won't stop me from tearing out jugulars in Thunderdome.



Alright I got drunk and overslept so I guess sign-ups are closed now.


edit:

Also spectres of autism has graciously volunteered to help judge this year's merman-inspired word effluvium! There's still another spot open at the judgin' table for anyone else who wants to get in on the action.

Grizzled Patriarch fucked around with this message at 01:32 on Dec 27, 2015

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