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crabrock
Aug 2, 2002

I

AM

MAGNIFICENT






:synpa:

crabrock fucked around with this message at 22:16 on Jul 25, 2017

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Bad Seafood
Dec 10, 2010


If you must blink, do it now.
Thunderdome Week CCLX: Empty Spaces



There's a story behind everything.

I have a certain fondness for derelict, abandoned spaces - still and sterile, or reclaimed by nature. Here's an album of forty such places. Pick one (or ask for an assignment) and write me a story about it. You can write about whatever you want (you know, so long as it falls within standard Dome operating procedure - no fanfiction, erotica), but your picture should determine the central elements of your story and setting. Don't tell me about something that could happen anywhere but just so happens to take place here; tie it all together. Similarly, don't feel bound by extraneous particulars. This Japanese amusement park closed in 2006 due to low ticket sales, but your story needn't involve struggling finances or Japan or anything not suggested by the picture itself.



Once you've claimed your picture, that picture is yours. First-come, first-served. No repeats. A few places have multiple photographs, though never more than two. You may claim only one, and no one gets the other one. Your word count is a cool 800. Flashrules available upon request.

You have until Friday night, midnight (PST), to sign up with submissions due Sunday at noon. Normally I'd give you guys a little more time but my Monday's gonna be swamped since I'm packing for a trip.



The Thunderdome Archaeological Society Board of Directors
Bad Seafood
DMBoogie
Jitzu

People Who Belong In A Museum
Big Scary Monsters - Church steeple sticking out of a frozen lake
SurreptitiousMuffin - Lake house between red trees
ThirdEmperor - Obsolete power station; a man's home is his castle, but it shouldn't have to be a fortress
Jay W. Friks - Kaishai's house after an earthquake
Agent355 - Dusty garage
Super Sweet Best Pal - Stairs to nowhere
Crabrock - Tiger root canal
A New Study Bible! - Piano tree
Chairchucker - Sinking streets; the neighbors were terrifyingly human
Sebmojo - Pier pressure; your story must be presented as a palindrome and your protagonist is an organ grinder with a decrepit monkey which can only speak in German proverbs
Uranium Phoenix - Overgrown chapel
Djeser - Train track flower garden
Electric Owl - Doll factory; TOXX
Fumblemouse - Spiral stair in azure; the girl in the mirror knew everything
Thranguy - Forest of cars; they flourished in the forgotten places
Solitair - Shredded theater; it wasn't illegal, not back then
Magnificent7 - Sunken submarine shipyard; the Yelp review was terrible
Chili - Floating forest
Hawklad - Footprints in the reactor
Wizgot - Flooded mall
BeefSupreme - Remote island fortress sans island
Fleta Mcgurn - Rickety coaster in the woods; it began when the thieves stole fire from Heaven; TOXX
MysticalHaberdasher - Empty theater lobby
Sparksbloom - Dirty waterslide; TOXX
Mrenda - Red house on the lake
RandomPaul - Conga line of ships; she kept her memories in jars
Obliterati - Parish full of statues
Flerp - Asylum island
Kaishai - Bus in the woods

Bad Seafood fucked around with this message at 19:08 on Jul 29, 2017

Bad Seafood
Dec 10, 2010


If you must blink, do it now.
Please read the whole prompt post and not just the bold parts, you know who you are. :argh:

big scary monsters
Sep 2, 2011

-~Skullwave~-


I'll take this one I guess.

SurreptitiousMuffin
Mar 21, 2010
In with

ThirdEmperor
Aug 7, 2013

BEHOLD MY GLORY

AND THEN

BRAWL ME
In.

Assign me a photo and a dumb flash rule plz.

Bad Seafood
Dec 10, 2010


If you must blink, do it now.

ThirdEmperor posted:

In.

Assign me a photo and a dumb flash rule plz.


A man's home is his castle, but it shouldn't have to be a fortress.

Jay W. Friks
Oct 4, 2016


Got Out.
Grimey Drawer


In

Agent355
Jul 26, 2011



In for the first time.

super sweet best pal
Nov 18, 2009



Are there stairs in your beach?

crabrock
Aug 2, 2002

I

AM

MAGNIFICENT






i'm in, but give me a pic because im too lazy to go through and make sure i don't snag a repeat.

a new study bible!
Feb 2, 2009



BIG DICK NICK
A Philadelphia Legend
Fly Eagles Fly


Chairchucker
Nov 14, 2006

to ride eternal, shiny and chrome

THUNDERDOME LOSER 2022




Gimme a picture.

sebmojo
Oct 23, 2010


Legit Cyberpunk









in, pic me up

Uranium Phoenix
Jun 20, 2007

Boom.



In.

Djeser
Mar 22, 2013


it's crow time again



In with the Chemin de fer de Petite Ceinture

Bad Seafood
Dec 10, 2010


If you must blink, do it now.

crabrock posted:

i'm in, but give me a pic because im too lazy to go through and make sure i don't snag a repeat.

Chairchucker posted:

Gimme a picture.

sebmojo posted:

in, pic me up

almost there
Sep 13, 2016

in, with:



Question, do the locations have to be derelict in the story?

Also :toxx: b/c i'm a bad boy

(USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST)

Fumblemouse
Mar 21, 2013


STANDARD
DEVIANT
Grimey Drawer
Can I be in too? Please your Enthroned Seafoodship, can I pick this one?



If you gotta flash rule me for my inexcusable presumption, that'd be OK, I guess.

Thranguy
Apr 21, 2010


Deceitful and black-hearted, perhaps we are. But we would never go against the Code. Well, perhaps for good reasons. But mostly never.
In with


And a flash rule please.

Solitair
Feb 18, 2014

TODAY'S GONNA BE A GOOD MOTHERFUCKIN' DAY!!!
In with

and a flash rule.

magnificent7
Sep 22, 2005

THUNDERDOME LOSER
I'm in. GIve me a picture of pure emptiness and poo poo. I love the empty.

And gently caress it. Flash me a rule as well. I work best under the confines of restrictions and poo poo. IF I work at all.

Chili
Jan 23, 2004

college kids ain't shit


Fun Shoe
Dig the prompt. I'm in with:



Floating forest, Sydney, Australia

Hawklad
May 3, 2003


Who wants to live
forever?


DIVE!

College Slice
I'm IN with the footprints in the nuclear reactor:

Sitting Here
Dec 31, 2007
week 259 crits

these are all gonna be pretty short because I need to get back to procrastinating on my wizard week crits.

Gorda

I think this is relatively successful. The centerpiece is the chair contraption that was specifically designed to chuck dead bodies into the ocean. It's a weird but salient detail that says a lot about how bleak the situation in Gorda is. If I were giving this a line crit, I'd correct some awkward wording, but I'm not so I won't. Probably my personal favorite of the week.


No Time

Hmm. I liked this one until the end. I am not entirely sure why reversing a few seconds would invoke this old car crash. In that sense, it has the same message that most time travel stories have: if you gently caress with time, it'll gently caress you with you. The turnaround from "haHA we are gods" to "oh poo poo we're not gods and never will be" felt too forced. Not bad overall, I just didn't get any sense of the logic behind the consequences of the protagonist's time fuckery.


Another Life That Mattered

And that boy was Albert Einstein. This is kind of neat, but ultimately too on the nose for me to say I actually enjoyed it. I don't like the apparent point of view of the story, which is that if only this kid hadn't been senselessly killed, he would've become some figure of great importance. Not that there's anything wrong with that point of view, per se, I just wish the story had given me more to feel than "boy this sure is a shame, huh?" Like, instead of mourning this one kid's lost chance, the story could pull back and give the reader something more to chew on. FWIW my co-judges liked this a bit more than I did, I think, so do with that what you will.

Violation

I like the first line aside from the repetition of 'body', which felt awkward. This story is similar to the previous story in that it's a pretty bald look at an atrocity (in this case, hacking as rape), but I feel a stronger connection to this character in spite of the tiny word count. Once again, there's not much here beyond the horrible thing happening to the protagonist, but I found it tolerable. I think the reason is because the language in this story is kind of doing triple duty; it's letting me know this world is firmly sci-fi, tells me about the character, and still manages to create a mini-arc while doing those things.


Strobe

Hmm. Not much to say here. It reads like you took a moment and chopped it up a bit. When I put the sequence of events together in my head, it amounts to "Someone is looking for a girl in a bar, gets punched out in front of her, girl is not impressed". When you're playing with time, it's not enough to just chop it up into bits. It reads like style for the sake of style (even though I know in this case it's because of the prompt) because the jumps in time don't challenge my expectations or change the flow of events in any way.


The Man Who Screams at the Sun

I like this. It could be about man's eternal dissatisfaction with life. It could be about art. It could just be about a man standing on a mountain and screaming at the sun. I like that the screaming man is both kind of pathetic but also elevated and possibly beautiful. Regardless of the intention of this piece, I enjoy the image, so it had high marks from me.


Slowdown

This is less "time out of joint" than Steeltoedsneakers' "Strobe". This is quite literally a moment, just slowed down. There's nothing salient about the image. That said, these are actually some of the better words I've seen from you. I was sad to give this a loss because I think you were pretty clear and concise with this piece, which IMO is marked improvement over some of your other works. "Her mouth bellowed" is a really awkward phrase. The transitions between each moment of the story felt too matter of fact: "The sound came first.."; "Next, his body..."; "A new sound reached his ears..." When I read this story, it's in the same voice as someone describing a cake recipe.


Cursed spite

So I guess there's something to this, because my co-judges both liked it a lot. For the life of me, I can't wrap my head around the gimmick with the tense fuckery. Best as I can tell, this betrayal is unfolding across the past, present, and future. Maybe? I was too embarrassed to ask djeser to explain it to me.


Unformed

There were a bunch of stories this week that basically used the narrative to describe recent topical issues. In this case, you use a fantasy setting to illustrate the experience of dysphoria because of the body one is born into. I was certainly happy when Gracchus escaped the form that was making him miserable. The story works best as a kind of wish fulfillment, I think. It's nice to imagine a world where you could be one magical procedure away from the body you belong in. I know a lot of people who would kill for that reality. If that was the goal of this story, great. If it was meant to convey more than that, it needed to have done a little bit more work.


Unfumbling

I like this better than your other story, though I think I have a higher tolerance for nonsense than I do for time gimmicks. And this is pure nonsense. It's fun and cute and cheeky in how meta it was. I wanted to be mad at it, I really did. I think you could lose "adorkable" because it doesn't fit. It sounds like you, the narrator, are showing through and don't trust that your scene is implicitly amusing.


Eternity in an Hour

Hmm. I like this piece in theory. It shows the wearing down of a relationship through repetition. What didn't work for me so much was how Rebecca took eons to notice a sesame seed In Janet's teeth. I feel like you could have pushed the horror of the situation even harder. It's kind of blasé right now; I'd be more interested in reading about how someone learns to cope when all they have is this one moment and their imagination. You touch on it, but then the last paragraph is all kind of editorializing.


One Last Kiss

"Halfway through his latest punch" has an odd ring to it. Doesn't immediately tell me much about the situation. In fact, the physicality of that whole first para feels off to me. Otherwise this is...hmm. I feel like the couple, frozen in that moment of bliss, are supposed to contrast the other bits of scenery. Also, "A nod could let it go" made me wonder if the narrator is the cause of this. It would certainly explain why he's still moving around. But the beginning makes it seem like it just...happens?


Homecoming

This wasn't originally one of my high picks, but I came around to it. It does everything with such an expertly light touch that I kind of missed some of the nuance on my first read. Full disclosure, I'm kind of spoiled from seeing you talk about this story with dockloc. But your confirmation that the ambiguity is intentional helped me appreciate how subtly done that was. I like that you establish in few words that the narrator ultimately does what's right for his community (letting them have their hero) than what is "right" in more nebulous terms. Like, in a perfect world, people who committed evil acts wouldn't be carried home like heroes, but sometimes a family or a community needs any hero they can get. The narrator knows this, and makes the difficult choice to protect them from the truth. While, as I said, it took me a little while to come around to this, I am glad I did because it's a really good and tight little piece.

Motorola 68000
Apr 25, 2014

"Don't be nice. Be good."
I'm IN with the flooded mall

BeefSupreme
Sep 14, 2007

to ride eternal, shiny and chrome

THUNDERDOME LOSER 2022
I'm in. How can I pass up a creepy derelict Russian naval testing facility?

Bad Seafood
Dec 10, 2010


If you must blink, do it now.

Fumblemouse posted:

If you gotta flash rule me for my inexcusable presumption, that'd be OK, I guess.
The girl in the mirror knew everything.

Thranguy posted:

And a flash rule please.
They flourished in the forgotten places.

Solitair posted:

and a flash rule.
It wasn't illegal, not back then.

magnificent7 posted:

I'm in. GIve me a picture of pure emptiness and poo poo. I love the empty.

And gently caress it. Flash me a rule as well. I work best under the confines of restrictions and poo poo. IF I work at all.


The Yelp review was terrible.

Fleta Mcgurn
Oct 5, 2003

Porpoise noise continues.
In, :toxx:, please give me a pic and a flash rule.

MysticalHaberdasher
Oct 27, 2006
I'm in. Pic, please.

sparksbloom
Apr 30, 2006
In. :toxx:

Bad Seafood
Dec 10, 2010


If you must blink, do it now.

Fleta Mcgurn posted:

In, :toxx:, please give me a pic and a flash rule.


It began when the thieves stole fire from Heaven.

MysticalHaberdasher posted:

I'm in. Pic, please.

sebmojo
Oct 23, 2010


Legit Cyberpunk









Flash me up doof, as fucky as u like, i believe we have uh history in that respect

sebmojo fucked around with this message at 10:41 on Jul 27, 2017

Mrenda
Mar 14, 2012
Edit: Cannae be waiting for timezone shenanigans. I'm impatient and want to get my drinking write on.

Gonna go with this.



Mrenda fucked around with this message at 14:24 on Jul 27, 2017

Chairchucker
Nov 14, 2006

to ride eternal, shiny and chrome

THUNDERDOME LOSER 2022




flashruleme

RandomPauI
Nov 24, 2006


Grimey Drawer
in with the boats image, and a flashrule please. Just 800 words right? I think I'm anxious and tense enough to get that much out tonight.

Edit:

RandomPauI fucked around with this message at 07:28 on Jul 28, 2017

Bad Seafood
Dec 10, 2010


If you must blink, do it now.

sebmojo posted:

Flash me up doof, as fucky as u like, i believe we have uh history in that respect
Your story must be presented as a palindrome, meaning I can read it from the first paragraph forward or the last paragraph backwards and get basically the same story.

Also, your protagonist is an organ grinder with a decrepit monkey which speaks only in German proverbs. The neighbors were terrifyingly human.

RandomPauI posted:

in with the boats image, and a flashrule please. Just 800 words right? I think I'm anxious and tense enough to get that much out tonight.
She kept her memories in jars.

Bad Seafood
Dec 10, 2010


If you must blink, do it now.

Electric Owl posted:

Question, do the locations have to be derelict in the story?
Completely forgot to answer this question, sorry!

Your location should preferably be derelict at the time of your story, yes, but I will accept locations in pristine condition if the story is about how they came to be abandoned.

Bad Seafood
Dec 10, 2010


If you must blink, do it now.
To reiterate, you are only beholden to the previous post if you deliberately try to eschew the abandoned, decaying setting part of the prompt.

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Obliterati
Nov 13, 2012

Pain is inevitable.
Suffering is optional.
Thunderdome is forever.
In. Picture, please.

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