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In.
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# ? Feb 13, 2025 23:23 |
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Thanks for all the crits! IN
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In.
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In with a ![]() (USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST)
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This is a really stupid idea this week because I'm insanely busy, but IN
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Sitting Here posted:This is a really stupid idea this week because I'm insanely busy, but IN Oh, wah
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Hi. I'll be In.
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Gotta get back on that horse. I'm IN. Round two.
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In
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I haven't used IRC in years and I am feeling very technologically stupid as I try to connect to IRC and thus the server... whose brain may I pick on the matter? Is it still Sitting Here?
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3.141592653 posted:I haven't used IRC in years and I am feeling very technologically stupid as I try to connect to IRC and thus the server... whose brain may I pick on the matter? Is it still Sitting Here? Yes! Many people connect through Mibbit's web client. Go to https://client00.chat.mibbit.com/ Select "synIRC" from the dropdown menu Type in a nickname Type in #Thunderdome where it says "channel" Success! You may now talk about cats, butts, and whether you're eating burgers or pizza.
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That sounds like a much simpler solution than what I was trying to do, haha! I will give that a try and see if my half awake brain can accomplish this. Thank you!
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WEEK 188 CRITS PART 2 Castle Doctrine The one thing that intrigued me about this story was the relationship between the narrator and the cop that used to pick him up for petty crimes, and I think that if you focused a future story on that enhanced relationship you could turn it into something. Beyond that, it was a series of bad decisions, not the least of which was the opening, which landed like a lead balloon. flerp went over it already in his crits, but seriously, assume the reader has better things to do than read your story and don’t waste their time by describing a door with locks on it for the first 100 words of your flash piece. The dialogue in the convenience store scene was ham-handed, where the cop has just the right plot-relevant info to move the story forward. It’s all maddeningly vague, from the characters to the plot to the setting, and the door turns out to have received the most attention from the author. In the future, provide a sharper focus to these things. Giving yourself time to edit (and proofread) certainly helps. Things (Sirens) Nebulous and undefined, but in such a way that I really want to know what’s going on underneath the surface of this story, even though there are some places where I have no clue. Is it general sleeplessness, or a drug trip, or a combination of the two? The world you’re describing is intriguing and captivating, but at the same time your protags are so removed from it they may as well be ghosts, or parasites on the surface of a much larger creature. I’m not sure what this is, but I know that the language and the sentences and the individual moments were very worthwhile, even though they had their issues forming connections. Focus on approaching stories from a more human perspective in the future. Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You) The flipside to writing stories that are based primarily around intriguing and likeable characters is that when your characters turn out to be neither intriguing nor likeable, you’re not left with much else. And beyond that, this story had me stopping and asking questions so many times that I felt like I was being sleep-tortured when I was supposed to be lost in a vivid and continuous dream. Why can a vampire also turn into a wolf puppy? Why is a unlistened-to mixtape the straw that breaks the camel’s back? Why is the main story told in reverse for no reason at all? Why do these ageless vampires sound like twentysomethings? Why is it implied that she kills him—again, over a mixtape—by sunlight at the end of the story? Why is this the only conflict the reader is left to care about? It’s just a weird and impotent direction to take the prompt, and it’s sunk by execution that makes little sense. Dust Dust Dust All Night This reads like a teenage power fantasy, ostensibly from the perspective of a character who’s much older and should know better. He’s this Needful Things-esque Master Manipulator that’s able to whip up an entire room full of people, turn them against each other, dose them with angel dust, and watch the carnage begin—except none of the characters are really defined beyond the surface level or given any sort of likeable qualities, so we’re essentially left watching crash-test-dummies crash into each other. And then it turns out we don’t even get to see it, because Our Relatable Protagonist is hiding up in the bathroom just listening to all this stuff go down from the safety of his hiding place. Even if this didn’t have a lot of issues with polish on a sentence level, there’s nothing here for a reader to hold onto, whatsoever. Please think about the type of person that would read a potential story in the future, because I can’t fathom the reading audience for this one. You Could Be A Winner You already know what I’m going to say, GP. The second half of the story you wrote does not really match up with or resolve the first half. The writing is very vivid and evocative, as always, the scene at the hospital is unsettling, the scene with the mall seems like it will pay off in an interesting way, and then…he has the invisible ants now? And that makes him a winner? It seems like you dove into this story plot-first and ran out of room, because it’s an ending that only hints at something greater rather than putting it on the paper. Maybe if you’d either kept the story in the mall or cut out that scene entirely and limited it to the telephone conversation, you’d have had more room to work. story about a dog who can’t fall asleep A Lost Boy And A Lost Dog Find Each Other. What Happens Next Will Make You Cry! Yeah, based on the title and the story that followed it, I’m going to make an assumption about the amount of effort that went into the story. I mean, it’s still a fairly decent story, it just lacks a lot of character or intrigue. The dog’s lost, the boy’s lost, then they’re both found, happy ending. It’s not the worst member of TD’s Pantheon of Dog Stories, but it’s squarely in the middle, and I end the story feeling heartwarmed but ultimately saying “so what?” Beat I feel like you tried to do something more high-concept and cerebral this week, and ultimately it missed the mark because there’s not a whole lot of room to be cerebral or introspective in a 1000-word story. You take the voice and the description away, and what you’re left with is “A guy falls off a streetlamp in front of a cop, then the cop eats a kebab.” Stuff has to happen in flash fiction. Again, you need to give your reader a reason to read your story and take away all the reasons for them to turn away. I’m betting that if you had a dialogue with your own character, who’s supposedly this cop that’s been on the job for years, he’d have many more interesting stories to tell than this one. Condom wrappers and Woodstock cans This was shorter than a lot of the other efforts this week, but there was a lot more voice and plot packed in. I enjoyed a lot of this, mainly because the character was interesting enough in their own right to carry the story—but not completely. It does end in a sort of clusterfuck with the branch breaking and blowing cover, which is kind of a satisfying ending, but not really. Plus, this isn’t really a narrative over the course of one night, just one moment, and there’s an opportunity to resolve that moment that’s never taken. Not bad enough to DM, not polished enough to HM. Stuck Animation I liked a lot of the ideas that were at play here, but I wished there was more of an interesting framework to hold them up. It’s another one of those stories where not a whole lot happens, and we’re left with the characters monologuing these ideas rather than really…demonstrating them, in an interesting way. They’re sort of caught in the same pantomime that the video game sprites are, which I guess is kind of the point, but in the end it undercuts the story a bit. The moment at the end loses a bit of pathos as a result, because as the reader we’re supposed to infer the depth to their relationship that we can’t quite see. I think, with some more time and more words, this could turn into something more that the sum of the parts that currently create it. Sunset There are lines in here that I really enjoyed, and the situation you create is pleasantly dire. But again, this is another one of those stories where not a whole lot happens. It felt like you got caught up in the language until it became a substitute for depth. What little conflict there was—escaping the sun—seemed far removed from the more interesting events of the story. My advice to you in the future is to work with a plot that moves forward in amore interesting and accessible way. Give me the actual immediacy, don’t start the story years after the fact. September Selves This reads less like a story, and more like a premise. There were parts of it that sounded more like a book jacket, to be honest. I didn’t get the presence of the Terror, which is supposedly the main antagonist, until the last couple paragraphs of the story. This definitely feels unfinished, and I would recommend you start with the characters. Figure out who they are, what they want, how they fit into this world you’ve created, and then go from there. Also, start with a line that’s specific and striking, in order to grab the reader. The way this starts now, it feels more like you’re Bob Ross painting a landscape rather than Julias writing a story. People are more immediately relatable than smoldering ashes or autumn leaves, and you don’t want to waste any more time than you have to when you’re writing a story this short.
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I come back to the channel for one day and now I'm throwing my hat IN. The pain is good.
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Julias posted:First off, my story for Week 188
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Thanks for the crits Ironic Twist and sebmojo.
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Hey, any of you serious thunderdome winners want to help out with this poo poo? I've got this collection of opening or theme-setting statements from some past thunderdome champs and they loving suck. My own writing is garbage too, but who enjoys this?:Author 1 posted:By junior year, we have everything figured out. Graduate top of the class, then off to the University of Tennessee. Summer Latin classes at the Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. We imagine a hundred other kids like us, with cowlicks and library cards and woefully uncool sneakers. This story got rave reviews. The protagonists are planning on going to U of T as adult human beings, at the age of 18, with unmanageable alfalfa cowlicks and sneakers that are so bad that they literally cause 'woe'. #1 story. Author 2 posted:Whenever I pray, my chest starts burning and Joey leans in close and wraps his around my shoulder. Opening sentence for an honorable mention that almost took the week. The story opens with a guy having god-acid reflux and his friend Joey deciding to fix it with a big ol hug. Joey hugs his way all over that story! Author 3 posted:help That last one (per the head judge) won by a very, very wide margin even though it went on in a similar way for another thousand words. It is a story in words that is more boring than the same number of characters in morse code. I've gotten some great crits for my terrible writing, but why does this poo poo win consistently? I've read the judge descriptions for each individual win, but they are vague.
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Carl Killer Miller posted:Hey, any of you serious thunderdome winners want to help out with this poo poo? I've got this collection of opening or theme-setting statements from some past thunderdome champs and they loving suck. My own writing is garbage too, but who enjoys this?: It's because we're all terrible FYI
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I won a week with this:quote:Lizzie had a great smile, a cute rear end, and some really juicy organs. Most people couldn't tell how wet someone's insides were by sight, but Ram could. She had hella internal fluids, and he wanted to get all up in that. Thunderdome Cabal is alive and real and must be stopped.
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Djeser posted:I won a week with this: tbf that's a non-representative example because the good lines are all exclusively in the second half of that story.
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in
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Carl Killer Miller posted:It is a story in words that is more boring than the same number of characters in morse code. thanks for my next blurb serious answer tho: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3495955&pagenumber=170#post457782623 crabrock fucked around with this message at 14:42 on Mar 23, 2016 |
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dear thunderdome, the thing you said was good, is actually bad
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Sitting Here posted:dear thunderdome, the thing you said was good, is actually bad hosed up if true
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Entenzahn posted:tbf that's a non-representative example because the good lines are all exclusively in the second half of that story. that opening is purestrain gold OK, I'm going to make a seriouspost about judging because it's 8 AM and I'm awake for no reason on my day off. Here we go. The majority of Thunderdome stories are first drafts. Even if you've done a few editing passes, most people will not write something of publishable caliber in less than a week (and many of you ingrates don't even start writing until submission day ![]() I'm looking at the three examples Carl Killer Miller posted and I don't see anything egregious. The stories themselves stand on merits beyond the quoted lines. There are definitely some valid critiques to be made in each case, but that's not what's going on here, is it? The best thing to do, if you think a story did something lovely, is take note and don't loving do it yourself.
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crit for grizzled's story reading reactions - intro - boring world building thing that can be summed up as "nerd kids like to LARP." legit if i was reading this just for my own enjoyment I don't think I would continue. second scene - narrator apparently has a brother who's at war, sends him sand (wtf?), shoehorns in prompt for no real reason, and prediction that the brother is going to die. third scene - bad thing happens to Nate but wait, who the gently caress is Nate? I don't know. I don't care. here I would've definitely had stopped reading if I was reading for myself because you bring up Nate, who is apparently important, in the third scene because ?????? and you know what, if he's so important, why is he showing up in the third scene? wasting my time. then they fight. i dont know why. the characters dont know why. i assume you dont know why either. they just do. final scene - ending lands with a splat, where you skip over anything interesting that couldve happened after the fight into "oh well that's over with, time to give some droll exposition about nothing in particular." Crit - I don't see why I should care. Like, I really don't. Kids like to LARP and want to go to college. One kid gets in, another one doesn't, they're mad and they fight for some reason and the end. It's not that this is bad, but it feels very unsure of what it's trying to do. Each scene is disconnected from the rest and they don't lead into the next. Ok, kids like to larp, oh wait now there's brother at war that never comes up again, oh now there's a car accident and the kid cant get in, then they fight and oh wait there's no resolution to that fight because you skip over what would actually be interesting for a reader and would maybe show some nuance to these characters. I don't feel like I know these kids at all. The narrator is just a camera and Nate doesn't say much and only gets mad and punches the narrator but that doesnt give me any depth of character. im going to try and describe them as best as I can. Nate has a mom who gets in a car accident and punches the narrator for some reason. The narrator has a brother and gets punched by Nate for some reason even though he tried being nice. They both like to LARP. That's about the extent of their characters. and jesus man, that ending is so loving stupid. "ok, let me just jump a few years ahead and reflect on this story." you know that thing where we say "hey if you look at a story as if it happened in the past it loses it's impact"? That's what happens here. All that introspection is meaningless because there's no action, there's no impact. It's meaningless because it doesn't do anything for the narrator. He's like "welp, my old friend's gone and i kind of miss him" and that's it. The issue that bothers me is that it meanders about. It just keeps talking about different things and ideas and it's like what the gently caress is your point? What are you trying to do? Because, based off of what I thought was the most interesting, it was the Nate and narrator conflict. So, why is there anything else? Why is there that dull opening paragraph? Why is there that brother? Why is there that poo poo show of an ending? You used about 600 words on poo poo I do not care about. That means you had about 600 words to describe an actual interesting conflict that could've been cool but you just don't have enough time. you don't give me enough character from nate and the narrator to make feel any impact from this. it feels like you just put a different ideas and said "oh dear god reader i cant think of how to use these ideas so im just going to throw these all at you and hope one of them is good." also, if even your characters dont know why things are going on, neither does the reader. also another crit for J.A.B.C Man, this story was so boring. I tried to line crit this first time through and I got about halfway, saw the I had to mousewheel again, and just stopped trying to line crit it. The intro is awful. It is so boring and uninteresting and has like nothing to do with the main story. Maybe if this was like, a super long story, that intro could work if you put something interesting in it (your descriptions were very dull and boring). the big issue is that everything in this is soooooooo cliche. Like, when I think of a knight story, this is just kind of immediately what I think of. Your knight's characterized decently, where has a particular trait w/r/t food, which is cool, but the kind is blank and uninteresting and the assassins are generic. Then the story continues predictably. Knight hears assassin trying to poison king, tells the king the plan, the king says nah i dont believe you, knight then says eat the poisoned food, thus ousting the assassins. That's like, the most obvious assassination plot in the world. Also, man, that ending feels very out of character. "Yes, I am a chivalrous knight upholding honor for my king, let's poison the assassin." I mean, I bet real knights were total assholes irl but were not really talking irl are we? there's no surprises and so if you don't have anything interesting to say, then why are you even saying anything?
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Sitting Here posted:
Well, there's that missing word in the second one that makes the only grammatically sound reading be that Joey is wrapping his chest around the narrator's shoulder. But, in the serious-posting vein, remember that judges have to read the whole story. Theoretically, at least. So stories can overcome opening problems in the dome with better middles and endings that would be fatal in the wild, with non-captive audiences.
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Carl Killer Miller posted:Opening sentence for an honorable mention that almost took the week. The story opens with a guy having god-acid reflux and his friend Joey deciding to fix it with a big ol hug. Joey hugs his way all over that story! also quote by the head judge "you [me, who wrote the story] were very close from dming" and "if i was in a bad mood flerp would've dmed" so no, i wasnt close to taking it unless like four other people died or something stupid. also god that story has so many loving typos im the goddamned worst, ty for reminding me carl.
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this week is not a good example for anything bc it was exceptionally poor and it had a dumb gimmick rule regarding HMs/DMs. flerps story would not even have come close to an HM in another week and possibly even DMed. he only got that on account of being above median quality in my opinion, but by the narrowest of margins.
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Bad openings are lame but a story can be salvageable once the writer stops clearing their throat. By the end of the story you've forgotten about the opening but the ending is the last thing you read. Particularly bad openings still get validly criticized. What you quoted were just bland, which is better than godawful. So lol read more poo poo nerd.
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Sitting Here posted:The best thing to do, if you think a story did something lovely, is rage crit it so hard it leaves marks.
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emptyquote
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in
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In.
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Never has a newbie acting like a sore-losing little poo poo elicited such constructive responses from bitter vets. You're scum, CMK, the enterprising kind of scum who goes to great effort just to argue in bad faith.
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newtestleper posted:Never has a newbie acting like a sore-losing little poo poo elicited such constructive responses from bitter vets. I know my own writing is terrible. Don't see a lot of sore loser in my post. Sounds like your reading is just as lovely as your writing
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I'll judge this, 500 words, 29 march 2359 PST, prompt: beginnings are such delicate times. Toxx up.
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mfw thunderdome cabal can't handle kayfabe ![]()
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# ? Feb 13, 2025 23:23 |
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Is your cabal good?
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