Lead out in cuffs posted:

my story

the wildest turkey posted:

You guys have gotten soft so I gotta assert my TD dominance.

Loser-tar here I come

Anathema Device posted:

Could I please get a crit? I want to know if the interactions between the characters made sense.

Djeser posted:

I don't know a whole lot about the abstract construction of humor beyond that, so I'm going to link you to two things. First, this is from a tumblr about learning from the errors of webcomics, but the humor aspects are still applicable in fiction in general. Second, something that I think has generally good humor, Welcome To Night Vale, which is a podcast styled like X-Files community radio.

AaronMFK posted:

My thanks seemed inauthentic with a period and overly enthusiastic with an exclamation point.

Number 36 posted:

Just stop using punctuation altogether and let God sort em out


I challenge the next person who posts to a brawl

Number 36 posted:

I challenge the next person who posts to a brawl

Ironic Twist posted:

Challenge accepted.

sebmojo posted:

I will do crits for two newbies from last week.

sebmojo posted:

No-one wants a crit? Tsk.

sebmojo posted:

No-one wants a crit? Tsk.

Meinberg posted:

I'd take a crit, but I don't think I qualify as a newbie.

Seriously new writers, crits are the best. Take this man up on his offer.

Duke of the Bump posted:

After School Programs (1108 words)

Valerie Greene sat slumped in front of the principal's desk, the heel of her shoe tapping soundlessly on the carpeted floor. Principal O'Reilly drummed her fingers rhythmically on the desk. if you're gonna have ongoing blocking like this, it needs to occupy a space - i.e. they were doing these things after 'x' happened and before 'y' happened. At the beginning of the story, it's just muddling."I suppose you know why I called you to my office, Ms. Greene?"

"Nuh-uh."

"So you don't know anything about this?" She turned the monitor on her desk to face Valerie. It showed the principal's bio page on the school website, but the staff photo had been altered. Where her pale, freckled face should have been were two round butt cheeks.

Valerie looked at her handiwork and smirked. "It's a pretty good likeness."

"Oh Valerie," the principal sighed. She picked up a porcelain unicorn figurine from her desk and absentmindedly turned it over in her hands. i was gonna ping this for pointless blocking, but you do a fairly clever call back at the end (plus lol blade runner) so i shall not "You do understand the penalty for hacking is expulsion, right?"

"Search my computer!" Valerie cried, holding her laptop bag out at arm's length. "Check your IP logs!"

"And we won't find anything, I know." She set the unicorn down. "Ms. Greene, you're going to slip up one of these days, and it won't be me you'll have to deal with, it'll be the DHS."

"I ain't afraid of the feds," Valerie muttered.

"Valerie. You're a smart young woman. I don't understand why you want to throw away your future like this."

She met Principal O'Reilly's eyes for the first time. "What future?" that was competent but blah. you spend a lot of words to not say much, and even though they're not terrible words I still want more propulsion particularly since you're about to launch us into 1980s style hypergibson. I think you could have conveyed this with half the words.

---

Valerie pulled back her short violet hair and peeled off a circular bandage above her ear, revealing a data jack, and plugged in a thin metallic connector. She opened the laptop, and a few keystrokes later, her bedroom melted away to a field of trillions of stars. "Call Percival," she said, and a comm window popped into her field of vision. After a moment her partner's avatar appeared, a knight in black armor wearing a horned helmet that obscured his face.

"Hey Val, what's the plan?"

"I'm gonna use a bot to launch a phony attack on their financial sector. Hopefully that'll distract the ice long enough for me to raid R&D."

"How much time you think it'll buy you?"

Her avatar, a crystalline humanoid, shrugged. "Enough."

"Okay. I'll be watching your back. If things start to go south, pull the plug and run. Don't push your luck." if you are doing hardboiled then do it, don't have people waffling back and forth at each other. Particularly if you've just come from a bland naturalist opening like you have.

"Connect to CymatiTech." The starfield shimmered and distorted, and she was suddenly hovering near a massive glowing blue sphere covered with about a hundred round doors. All were labeled with a number except one, which had floating beside it a large glowing sign that said "CLIENT LOGIN." don't care. punch me harder.

"Run decoy," she murmured, and a blue will-o'-the-wisp appeared floating in the air above her, pulsing like a plasma globe. what is a plasma globe plz It shot towards the sphere and disappeared through door 17.

"Good luck, lil' bot."

She flew to door 99 and hovered in front of it. She waited, eyes on the door, counting the seconds. dum de doo Half a minute later, a klaxon started blaring, the sphere turned bright red, and a yellow X appeared on each of the doors. The instant the server locked down, she pointed to door 99 with two fingers. A bolt of lightning leapt from her fingertips with a loud crack. There was a bright white flash, and it bounced off the door and flew back towards Valerie. She shrieked and ducked her head.

"Val! You okay? What the hell was that?"

"This node isn't supposed to have a firewall! I ran a sniffer before we came in, it didn't find poo poo!"

"Think you tipped them off?"

"I hope not." She snapped her fingers to activate bot-cam, and was now seeing through the wisp's eyes. It was zipping from terminal to terminal, leading the ice on a mad chase at a nauseating velocity. "Manual override," she said. Her view jerked down and back up abruptly, and she was in control of the bot. She guided it between the tetrahedrons and cylinders trying to consume the intruder like antibodies attacking a virus.

"Are you nuts?" Percival shouted. "You're going to lead them right to you, get the hell out of there!"

She zigged and zagged between the platonic solids, scanning the internal doors as she flew past. Finally, at the end of a long narrow passage, she saw a door labeled "99: Research and Development."

"YES!" she yelled, shooting her fist into the air. "I'm in, Percy!"

"Holy poo poo, Val, check your visual!" She snapped with both hands. She saw through her avatar's eyes for a split second, then was back in the bot. It was enough time to see a jet black icosahedron in the distance, flying towards her at an alarming speed. these are terrible words. don't tell us the velocity of the icosahedron was disconcerting, make us feel it. also, why are we supposed to care about this run? stakes, little writer. give us some.

The bot flew through door 99 and whizzed past thousands of silver cubes. Val guided the bot through the endless rows of archives, frantically scanning the metadata for each one. File names appeared faster than she could hope to read them. She dared not blink. i thought you said she wasn't reading them?

"Val! It's on you! Jack the gently caress out! NOW!"

The bot came to a dead stop in front of one of the archives. The words floating in front of her stopped flickering. They read "project_blueshift_SEC_LV_999_TS.tar." WHOA THAT FILENAME IS EXACTLY WHAT I WAS HOPING FOR MY EXPECTATIONS ARE TOTES SATISFIED

Valerie blinked.

"I GOT IT!" she screamed. "Download!" The archive shrank to the size of a sugar cube and disappeared inside the wisp. "Recall!" The bot switched to autopilot and did a 180, zooming back towards Valerie. She snapped her fingers, and the black 20-sided polyhedron loomed huge in front of her, crackling with a dark, chaotic ugh energy.

"poo poo!" She flew in the opposite direction, but it had a bead on her. She zigzagged wildly, it mirrored her moves. The bot emerged from the server, a blue speck against the gigantic red sphere.

"The bot made it out! Gonna intercept it and get the gently caress out of here!" She turned sharply, flying in a wide arc on a collision course with the wisp.

She blinked. huh?

Her world went black. Dark energy crackled all around her. She was inside the black ice.

"No!" she screamed. do people actually do this either in real life or in this sort of story? The crackling grew louder, and then there was a blinding flash of light. ploddy, dull and cliche are not words I should be typing at this climactic stage of your story fyi

She blinked.

She saw the starfield again, the server sphere in the distance, the wisp obediently floating beside her. Ice nowhere to be seen. Raising her arms above her head, she laughed triumphantly.

"Percy? How the hell did you pull that off?" The comm window was black. She heard a voice behind her.

"Valerie."

She turned and saw an avatar she'd never seen before - A lady knight with long wavy red hair, sitting atop an armored unicorn and pointing a broadsword Dam: 2d4/1d6+1 at her.

"I'll see you in my office first thing tomorrow morning, young lady."

Valerie looked at her feet. "Yes, ma'am." oooooookay. so this flirts with being a trick ending, but I think you basically get away with it because you don't cheat too much and yeah, the unicorn is clever. But as with nearly all trick endings, it bounces the cheque for the emotional payload. so school hacker is also cyber k-rad hacker, so what?

there are also a bunch of other probs with your cyber hack run, namely (1) your protag's offsider is completely pointless apart from being someone to yell WHAT TH' and LET'S GET OUTTA HERE! (2) your ultra nano cyber metaspace heist is unmotivated and thus unmoving; it means nothing to us apart from being the Sort of Thing People in These Sorts of Stories Do, and so we care naught (3) the language is often fatally flibbily, mostly lacking punch or heft. Read how Gibson write action sequences, he doesn't have people proceeding in wide arcs away from the threatening device that was following them. the mechanics of the heist were tolerably well imagined, but next time choose the right details to describe vividly rather than narrating what the camera sees.

sebmojo posted:

Duke of the Bump posted:

Thanks so much! Could you explain what you mean by "blocking"? I don't think I've seen the term used this way before and can't find anything about it. Like, how is it different from normal narration?

BTW a plasma globe is one of these

Echo Cian posted:

A bunch of crits, including mine:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1n0VYg_98uUm0ef0tcuyL_twKrey9ADyRADgnQljt1vQ/edit

sebmojo posted:

No-one wants a crit? Tsk.

SurreptitiousMuffin posted:

That's Friday night! Let this be a vague indication of when 'Monday morning' is. Of course, the best way to not be late is to be early, instead of all waiting until the last five minutes and trying to run under the wire at the same time.



SIGN UPS CLOSED

Anathema Device posted:

I will do some crits for last week if anyone is interested.

God Over Djinn posted:

Your Friday afternoon/evening happened while I was asleep. Can I still get in? I started writing a thing and everything.

Grizzled Patriarch posted:

I'll take one. I wasn't really happy with my entry but I'm not entirely sure where it went wrong.

Grizzled Patriarch posted:

The Windigo (804 words)

Arnason was dreaming about the smell of fresh-baked bread when the boatswain shook him awake.

“Pardon, sir, but you must get up,” he said. “Evans is gone.”

Arnason sat up with his stinking blankets swaddled around him, blinking until his eyes adjusted to the darkness. He could not tell how late it was.
“Evans is dead.”

The boatswain didn’t answer right away. Around them the ship’s hull creaked and groaned, protesting the weight of the ice. Arnason guessed they had another month at best before the timbers gave way.

“Yes, sir,” the boatswain said at last. “But he’s gone.”

***

The engineer’s storeroom was empty. They’d put Evans there in the engineer's storeroom when the pneumonia took him, wrapped him in canvas to keep the rats away. Someone had pried the door open and taken the body. Arnason shifted from one foot to the other, trying to keep warm.

“What do you make of that?”

The boatswain shrugged, but he wouldn’t meet Arnason’s gaze. He was a large man, big enough that he had to stoop to keep from hitting his head belowdecks. He’d spent two and a half years on the Hudson with the Inuits, had once disappeared onto the ice for an entire day and come back dragging a jar seal pup when the ship’s larder first ran low. This was the first time Arnason could remember seeing him scared.

“Search the ship. Every room, every locker.”

Before the boatswain could say anything, the muffled crack of a musket rang out above.

Arnason wheeled around. “Who in bloody hell is on the night watch?”

“Baycroft, sir.”

They hurried through the passageways and into the main hold, Arnason barking orders to the men still grumbling in their hammocks. A few of the officers followed behind with sabers drawn, already bundled in their wool coats. Arnason checked his pistol’s primer, then led the way above deck.

Freezing cold hit him like a fist, the howling wind scouring his cheeks and forehead with powdered ice. Already frost was gathering in his eyelashes and the thatch of his beard. Arnason tucked his chin and walked with the pistol held out in front of him.

“Baycoft!”

He doubted the man could hear him, even from so close a distance, but he called out all the same. Behind him, the boatswain swung his lantern back and forth.
Near the lookout post, they found Baycroft’s scarf tangled in the rigging, snapping in the wind like a flag. His musket lay on the deck—there hadn’t been time to reload.

“Where the hell has he gone?”

The boatswain was leaning over the railing with a strange look on his face. Arnason stood next to him and followed his eyes. A dark smear on the ice, like a lazy brushstroke. It glistened in the lantern light. There was no other sign of Baycroft.

“Windigo.” The boatswain whispered. “Man-eater.”

Ghost stories. Arnason wanted to tell the man he’d spent too many nights drinking with the Inuits, that it was a bear that killed him and nothing more. Instead he grabbed the boatswain by the shoulders. “You don’t breathe a word of this, you understand?”

***

Belowdecks Arnason breathed into his gloves and tried to rub the feeling back into his fingers. He unwrapped his scarf and winced as a small patch of his beard tore away with it. The crew was up now, fidgeting and waiting for the news.

Aranson cleared his throat. “We’ve found no sign of Private Baycroft.”

One of the crew piped up, a new sailor whose name Aranson hadn’t learned yet. White blotches covered the lower part of his jaw: early signs of frostbite. “Is he dead?”

“I don’t know. We think it may have been a bear.” Windigo. Man-eater. “Carpenters will batten the doors for the night. Until they’ve finished, no one is to go above deck without my permission. I want muskets loaded and ready.”

It was a callous order,why? and Arnason knew it. He could not afford for the ship to fall to chaos.

***

Arnason lay in his hammock, listening to the snoring of the men around him, the incessant grinding of the ice. A single tallow candle guttered on a saucer in the middle of the floor. He couldn’t sleep; hunger gnawed at him, tunneling through his insides like a worm. He turned over onto his side and stared at the port window. He imagined something out there in all that darkness, beyond that feeble sphere of candlelight. Something creeping among the jagged ridges of ice.

Windigo. He rolled the word around in his mouth until it lost all meaning. He brought his palms together and folded his fingers into a loose gesture of prayer. “Please,” he whispered into the dark. “God, please.”

There was no answer except for the groan of ice against the ship’s hull.

Anathema Device posted:

I will do some crits for last week if anyone is interested.

God Over Djinn posted:

Your Friday afternoon/evening happened while I was asleep. Can I still get in? I started writing a thing and everything.

Tyrannosaurus posted:

I, too, would like to be in.

Number 36 posted:

Like at least post a time zone, "Friday night" covers an entire 24 hour period without a time zone

Anathema Device posted:

May I get a flash rule?

Number 36 posted:

Like at least post a time zone, "Friday night" covers an entire 24 hour period without a time zone

sebmojo posted:

lol get hosed

Flash me muffin

docbeard posted:

And sadly, Phobia escaped the headsman's axe only to fall in -