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I'm in. Flash rule is: must feature a non-Western funerary ritual. Edit: for the sake of clarification, let's say that 'non-Western' means any region not coloured dark blue on this map Fanky Malloons fucked around with this message at 04:58 on Jan 10, 2013 |
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Jan 10, 2013 04:55
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Noah posted:A little concerned about not being able to edit my posts in the thread anymore. I feel wanting to send stories out, you would want to remove it from here avoid any publishing rights drama. That's true to some extent, but the only one of mine from the old thread I might seriously think about trying to publish is the last one I posted, and really, if I'm a true Thunderdomer, I should just say "gently caress it" and write something else that's better 
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Jan 10, 2013 05:33
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HiddenGecko posted:Ahh poo poo I completely forgot you were off doing military stuff, my bad. I'll see if Fanky Malloons is up to dealing with this slapfight. Motherfucker, I saw your PM before I saw this - I can't believe I was your sloppy second choice, you bastard. ALSO SurreptitiousMuffin posted:Bitches, I'm on a roll this week. Here's a thing: Crit the poem I so generously posted in your new thread, and MAYBE I'll take you up on that 
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Jan 11, 2013 02:38
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HiddenGecko posted:Hate the game not the player. TOO LATE.  THUNDERBRAWL: Iorel vs HiddenGecko  This is Cape Breton Highlands National Park. It's pretty much one of my favourite places on Earth. I want you to capture its majesty in 750 words or less. Your submission must be prose, and must have some sort of narrative/story arc. The use of Canadian stereotypes or cliches will cause you to lose instantly. You have 24 hours as of RIGHT NOW.
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Jan 11, 2013 03:10
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HiddenGecko posted:Geckobrawl On the one hand, I hate butterflies because they creep me the gently caress out. On the other, Iorel only has like 40 minutes to post something.
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Jan 12, 2013 02:39
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God, Hidden Gecko, Iorel post your wordcounts, you amateurs.
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Jan 12, 2013 03:19
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Iroel posted:I haven't gotten home all day (i'm still out after having been to work) so i did the edits on the phone. I'm not sure about the final word count. It should be around 750. 762, you buttlord  However, I will reserve my judgement until the morning, because I am drinking right now and don't want to read words.
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Jan 12, 2013 05:57
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Iroel posted:I know, I know. It's one of those slips like constantly misspelling my username Touche. It's in my head like that forever now though, so you'll just have to deal with it. PS: Judgement of your Thunderbrawl will commence imminently.
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Jan 12, 2013 17:56
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THUNDERBRAWL JUDGEMENT: HiddenGecko vs IroelHiddenGecko posted:
I like the quiet appreciation of the landscape that you worked into this. Even though I hate butterflies, the narrator’s awe of the horrible bug can easily be a metaphor for my intense lust for the wilderness of Cape Breton. However, your incorrect use of “it’s” and a random tense change at the end do not work in your favour, so let’s see what Iroel (spelled correctly, WHAT) has to offer, hm? Iroel posted:
Your descriptions sound very technical and cold, lovely as they are. I feel like you just googled up some pictures and described them to me, and that you may or may not have ever actually been in a forest. Also, you went over the word limit and that last line is the worst thing, because I loving hate it when people pull that random, non-sequitur, I can't-think-of-a-real ending poo poo. I'm going to toss a coin. Heads, Gecko wins, tails, you both lose. I'll report back shortly. Edit: I flipped two coins at the same time (one for each story) and they both came up tails, so I guess the universe agrees with me that you both lose. I guess this thunderbrawl is going to have to go to ROUND TWO. Fanky Malloons fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Jan 12, 2013 |
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Jan 12, 2013 18:29
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Iroel posted:I think you don't like the last line because the message of the story is "gently caress you nature, you are not beautiful and you suck, art is where it's at". And the last line is essential to drive home this point. Actually, the point is that you suck. But so does Hidden Gecko, per my above edit.
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Jan 12, 2013 19:34
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Iroel posted:Anyway I wanted to make a proposal: what if the contestants of a thunderbrawl had to analyze in depth the other challenger's writings after the fight is settled, in the same way we have to do with the pairings for the regular contest? I'm going to suggest that if brawlers want to give in-depth critiques to one another that they do so via PM, only because between Thunderbrawls and Thunderdome submissions and critiques, the thread might get clogged and hard to follow. That would make it both a pain the balls, and (more) intimidating for newbies. Besides, I'm tired of you crying about how nobody understood your piece already. If people don't uderstand what you're trying to do, it's because you're doing it wrong. FACT. Re: HiddenGecko vs Iroel THUNDERBRAWL 2.0 the prompt is this: Tell me a story about what's outside my window. 150 words. By the time I wake up tomorrow morning, which gives you 14-16 hours.
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Jan 13, 2013 00:03
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:
No, it's not best of three, you guys just both made horrible errors last time, so I'm making you do it again. Tip: be better this time
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Jan 13, 2013 00:28
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:I'm talking to sebmojo, not you nerdlinger. Oh right. For some strange reason I sometimes think you and HiddenGecko are the same person.
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Jan 13, 2013 00:35
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So, I don't know if my entry will get up to the 350 word minimum, but I can promise that it will be really loving sad (but not morbid). That counts, right? 
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Jan 13, 2013 06:41
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Etherwind posted:I could have sworn the lower limit was 300. Did it get upped after the post was first made? I went back to the OP to check the limit just before I posted, and it says 350 min/1,000 max. I thought it was 300 too, but apparently it was wishful thinking. Didn't you just post like, 900 words of Iambic Pentameter anyway? I doubt getting to 350 will be a problem for you.
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Jan 13, 2013 06:47
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HiddenGecko posted:GeckoBrawl Round II Iroel I'm awake now, so you basically have until I get tired of trying to get my TD submission to 350 words to get in here and post your Thunderbrawl response.
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Jan 13, 2013 17:35
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Alright, this poem is bumming me the gently caress out, so I'm posting it now even though it's only 267 words. Eat it, Benagain, you monster. 267 words - Flash Rule: can't use the word "death" Every Day After I was drunk at your funeral strung out at half-mast while your brother administered the eulogy, as dry and creased as the maple leaves that hung, limp around the memorial garden. After the service the others wouldn’t look at me, their eyes fluttering away from mine like frightened sparrows as if the loss were contagious, a widowhood of the soul and your urn a strange trophy of my survival. At home in the bed I don’t sleep in I press my body into your outline pretending I can still smell your scent on the sheets,searching out every last particle and pressing them into my skin for safekeeping. And now the phone bring brings an anniversary every time someone calls up; the memory of that Monday and the measured tones pouring bad news down the line followed by the steady drip drip of condolences, like an icepick between the eyes. I didn’t cancel your newspaper subscription, kept your name next to mine on the mailbox as if the entity called you and me still exists. I only keep the crosswords though, filled in and folded into paper cranes that roost with ghosts of your cup on the coffee table. The last note that you wrote me lives in my wallet, folded like stray DNA your essence pressed into the paper so that as I stand on the shoreline and watch yesterday’s sand sink back in, and even as the wind separates your ashes from my hands and the last strands of you unwind and disappear into the substrate I can still pretend that I’ll see you again in the morning.
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Jan 13, 2013 18:20
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Welp, Iroel didn't post anything yet, and it's like 20 hours after I said you guys had 14-16 to get it done, so I'm awarding HiddenGecko the sweetest victory of all, a win by default. Hooray for you! 
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Jan 13, 2013 22:31
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Thanks for the crit, Symptomless Coma (and also twinkle cave). I'm working on yours and will try and post it later tonight. Not in this week because even though it's totally my kind of prompt, I have to work on something else for my irl creative writing class, which sucks because the people in that class are pussies and probably won't even critique it properly
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Jan 17, 2013 01:05
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Sorry this is late, I have been a bad girl these past couple of days. Symptomless Coma posted:
Considering you had to do the whole thing in haiku, I think you did a really good job of carrying the narrative through in a way that made sense and was easy to follow. Some of your haiku are better than others, as you might expect when you end up having to write like 50 at once. I like the meat of this poem, and I think it would probably be pretty awesome if you re-wrote it in a different format that would give you more freedom to play up certain images and make the narrative more coherent. As someone who grew up in the Norf of England, I would love to see more of that landscape worked in to the background of the poem - there's a good opportunity to contrast that windswept desolate-ness with an (as there are multiple) African landscape when the bird migrates, which you only spend one haiku/stanza on here, but which I think would make the poem much richer in terms of imagery and setting, especially when you come back to the dog stuck on the Moors at the end. Hmm, I feel like this isn't the greatest critique -- especially realtive to the one you gave me -- but I don't really know what to do with all these haiku. If you have any specific questions or want me to comment on something in particular, feel free to PM me about it!
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Jan 17, 2013 17:01
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Because I missed hanging out in the Dome this week ( ), I am going to follow twinkle cave's lead and choose one, or perhaps even two, of you at random later and critique the poo poo out of your stories. Hooray for you!
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Jan 21, 2013 16:42
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In!
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Jan 22, 2013 07:30
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Erik Shawn-Bohner posted:Forthcoming, forthwith, will be the fourth (divided by two) TD goonrush details. Well, I hope whoever we're goonrushing likes weird stuff, because there are some pretty strange things happening in my word processing program right now.
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Jan 27, 2013 19:14
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Well, I certainly went to an odd place when interpreting the prompt on a week where we're supposed to send out what we produce, herp derp  Sermon - 777 words I have a confession to make. I'm tired. I'm so tired of being your secret keeper. You can't even begin to imagine how it feels. Day after day after day, these confessions, all of your secret sins - they fill me up with darkness, clouding all my empty spaces, making me impure while I absolve you, forgive you, fill you with light so that you can go about your day. You pick away at me, at my skin, stripping me raw and pouring all your anger, your hate - your evil - onto the wounds as you purge yourselves as if you can just make good with the Lord and take your tabula rasa away with you to refill with a new crop of transgressions for me to wipe clean next time. It doesn't work like that. And why don't I tell you a secret? I don't believe you when you say that you're sorry. You come clean about your lies, your blasphemy, your adultery, violence - your most unspeakable actions - you come clean in painful, microscopic detail and yet you lie. You lie when you say you're sorry, when you repent and beg for forgiveness. You think that only the Lord can judge you as you close your eyes and ask for His blessings and your faces glow with relief that you've staved off the inevetability of hell for one more week. But I judge you. I judge you and I find you wanting and this is my true confession, my heart laid bare for judgement: I lie when I say that you are forgiven. I lie about your absolution and I lie about you being saved and I lie about how the Lord loves you because in the deepest recesses of my heart, I don't believe. I don't believe in a God that would allow people like you to continue to exist and do the things that you confess to day after week after month after year. I don't believe that God made you in his image because if he did then God is small and petty and broken, as ugly on the outside as He is on the inside. I don't believe that He sent His son to die for our sins, because in his almighty power He would have seen what a waste it would turn out to be. He would have known you're not worth saving. You look at me as if I hold the keys to a heaven that you would never consider doesn't exist,but who do I confess to? If I truly believed, I would have a direct line to the Lord in my head, like Joan of Arc but I don't, I just pray into a void and hope for answers that never materialize, because there's no-one home to pick up the call. You would think if there was a God He would have mastered the art of voicemail by now, because working in mysterious ways doesn't really work at all. Not for me, not for you, not for anyone. And if God isn't listening, then who is? Who can I confess to if not the Lord? This bottle, this gun, this paper, this ink? You? It becomes quite a conundrum. If I don't believe in heaven, is there still a Hell for me to go to when I leave here? If there is or if there isn't that's where I'm going anyway because the absence of hell would be a kind of hell in itself, funny how that works. Perhaps I'm already there and this life is just some exquisite punishment for a past sin, and that's why I can't stand to live in a world so swollen with malice and pain and selfishness that it I wish it would just burst and end itself. But it never will, it will just keep growing and swelling and crushing me with the weight of its pestilence, choking me until I can't breathe and my skin turns black and it compresses me into ash. And so it comes down to me. You won't become martyrs or angels or saints. You won't see any bright lights or smiling faces. Today you will all get what's coming to you, today you will find out if there is a hell or if there isn't or if it's here and it will make the world a brighter, less impure place for the rest of them to live in, it will ease the suffering you insist on inflicting above anything else and it will cleanse me of your sin and it will be nothing less than you deserve. And I will see you there.
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Jan 28, 2013 01:05
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CancerCakes posted:This sounds good to me. A question about the submission which I am doing now: their guidelines say no name in the manuscript. So following the formatting guideline posted we should keep the names in the headers but not the pseudo below the title? I just took my name out completely, was that wrong? Herp derp. 
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Jan 28, 2013 15:00
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Canadian Surf Club posted:These sound fine but I'd take issue with the second point. Anybody should be able to win the contest they enter. A rule like that would probably work towards discouraging new entrees who just want to test the waters and see how they stack up, and not have to worry about looking like a genius in the next round, or who may simply not have the time to commit to back to back rounds. I agree on the issue of singling people out for not being able to judge, it seems unfair. Some weeks I would have time to judge if I won, other weeks I wouldn't, but that doesn't mean that I shouldn't be eligible to win or get critiques, especially not if everyone else who entered does. As an aside, I'm happy to critique people at random whenever, I'm just awful at remembering to actually do it.
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Jan 28, 2013 20:11
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budgieinspector posted:Well, now that I think about it, there have been weeks where I haven't entered because I knew I wouldn't have had time to judge if I won, so you're probably right. I'd actually be more likely to enter in busy weeks if I knew there was no chance of having to judge the next round. We should still be able to get critiques though
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Jan 28, 2013 21:57
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Erik Shawn-Bohner posted:Funny fact: twinkle Cavagina and SyrupMuff and I are hanging out and talking writing shop. You are all weaklings because you're too scared to actually dig in. Is this an invitation to hang out with you 
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Feb 2, 2013 06:00
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Well, this sounds like a lark, I'm in.
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Feb 12, 2013 21:59
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LJHalfbreed posted:Story I see you and SaddestRhino attend the same school of tense-continuity
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Feb 14, 2013 01:18
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SkySteak posted:(Sorry to keep the derail but I'm undecided now. If I do post a story though you'll probably know my answer) This wishy washy humming and hawing is much more shameful and pathetic to watch, fyi. Sack up and post something you giant vagina.
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Feb 16, 2013 15:19
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Travelled to a different timezone and then had no internet access, so I'm a deadbeat jerk this week. MY BAD.
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Feb 18, 2013 18:11
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Capntastic posted:"Writers" who don't produce don't get to conjure flash rules. Unless they're mentioned in the OP, like me. HereticMIND posted:
Way to blame others for your own failure. I demand that you and Martello engage in a thunderbrawl Since you're probably a bitch who will cry about it if I don't, I hereby request that an impartial bystander volunteer to be the judge. Anyone have any prompts they've been dying to inflict on the 'dome?
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Feb 18, 2013 23:55
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DivisionPost posted:Well...I mean, since you didn't produce, you have no ground to stand on, right? So it sounds like you can't make that request. Don't question me, you turd DivisionPost posted:But I did produce. Assuming experience isn't a factor (it might be a benefit in this case since I'm unaware of any history between these two), and also assuming my submission didn't completely suck rear end, I'd be game to make the same request and also volunteer as the impartial judge. Just somebody else let me know if this is cool, and I'll start thinking of a prompt. This is cool though, but you should totally use Sitting Here's prompt EDIT: HereticMIND posted:seeing as I kinda am involved, may I humbly request that the prompt not include sex? No, that's not how Thunderbrawls work. May I humbly request that you shut the gently caress up? Fanky Malloons fucked around with this message at 00:10 on Feb 19, 2013 |
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Feb 19, 2013 00:06
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DivisionPost posted:This, but I'm backing out of judging. Y'all can get your post-human freak on without me. drat your hide! Did Nubile Hillock also volunteer to judge? S/He can always team up with Sitting Here if she wants a co-judge.
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Feb 19, 2013 00:44
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budgieinspector posted:Looks like the Rejection Fairy's starting to make her rounds, then. She sure is, rejection high five everybody! 
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Feb 20, 2013 01:23
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sebmojo posted:A magical realist world works on the physics of emotion. Magical realism is hard, and that's why I pussied out this week (also I was busy with like, my actual life and poo poo). NEVERTHELESS, I think I'm going to read everyone's submissions and any critiques, figure out what not to do, and then give this prompt a shot on my own time. Or maybe I'll just finally finish reading 100 Years of Solitude and continue to be lazy, who knows. 
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Mar 4, 2013 16:56
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Has the signup deadline passed? I don't actually care, I'm in anyway, try and stop me
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Mar 16, 2013 04:38
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The Saddest Rhino posted:No, produce or death awaits. I'm choosing to interpret this as meaning we will either get killed, or be given groceries. Maybe even both.
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Mar 17, 2013 15:52
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Some Strange Flea posted:We're at just a little less than 12 hours remaining, and we still need stories from 13 of you. Hot drat, that is like 6 hours more time than I thought. Sweet.
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Mar 17, 2013 23:34
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