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oh yeah signups closed while i passed out face-down in a puddle of drool while trying to unburden myself of coherent thought I'm feeling gregarious, so if you took an assigned unburdening and aren't feeling inspired, you may ask me for a new assignment. It will cost you 100 words, bringing your max word count down to 569.
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Aug 24, 2019 18:36
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I sigh and shake my drat head at the failures as I close the submissions
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Aug 26, 2019 11:55
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 Week 368 results! There are weeks where I toss out a weird prompt and TD surprises me with creative or clever interpretations of the subject. This was not one of those weeks. Before I hand out these results, let it be known that the judges were largely opposed in their preferences, but it wasn't even a lively sort of opposition—the judge chamber felt sluggish and despairing, like an opium den. If I had my way, both the win and the loss would go to the hot wings I ate earlier today, because those are most certainly going to have a longer-lasting effect on my mind and body. [at this point i rubbed my eyes not realizing there was still a little residual wing spiciness on my hand gently caress] fuckit Winner: Barnaby Profane wins because this world is hell and life is suffering, and laughing at the butt sounds was the closest i came to a meaningful emotional experience this week. HMs: Antivehicular wrote an efficient apocalyptic tale; Chairchucker wrote a sweet, simple portrait of fleeting inspiration. DM: Toaster Beef you had an interesting premise but totally sidestepped the emotional meat of your own piece. Loser: Simon, everything your story described could be categorized as "sad but true"—but sometimes the truth isn't enough. I appreciate that you tackled a very contemporary problem, but your characters needed a little more nuance.  that ALL my crits for this week will be up before 11:59PM PST on 8/27
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Aug 27, 2019 11:03
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Crits for week 368 eeeeh... Crimea - Lottery Face The first line of prose, about the teeth, will be bothering me (in a good way) for a long time. Specifically, the detail about how the smell at the back of the victim’s mouth fills that room. It’s so delightfully particular; I wondered, briefly, if I’d lobbed a softball to an actual serial killer ha ha ha please don’t kill me i love your work. The POV here is a pretty convincingly unhinged, though I feel like fiction contains a glut of serial killers who believe themselves to be misunderstood artists. In terms of the scenario: I think you missed an opportunity with this prompt. In this case, the serial killer’s choice to let go of murder is externally imposed by the police, who seem to contain or represent ‘Jackrabbit’. I was left feeling curious about what sorts of internal, self-imposed motivations might cause a serial killer to lay down their chains and flechettes and go straight. Most of us, serial killer or no, can be forced by some authority to change our ways, but what is more interesting to me is the ways in which people effect change within themselves. Doctor Zero - Terras Astraea Reliquit Not gonna lie, I was ready to roll my eyes at the maudlin opening, when the story coyly lets us believe Doctor Virgil is mourning a deceased wife or daughter or somesuch. When I realized Astraea was in fact a star-bound android, my tolerance for this piece increased by roughly 80%. That said, I think you needed to compress this into even more of a singular moment—the moment when Doctor Virgil drops the music box back into Astraea’s vessel. You could’ve started the story with the music box in his hands, having been given to him by his creation. I really like the ending of this story because the music box is kind of a nice metaphor for what she’s going to face out among the stars: she will have to fix her own music box, as it were. There won’t be a ‘dad’ to do it for her. That, to me, is the most affecting aspect of the story. You seem a little unsure with metaphors. In the opening, you’ve got lots of watery stuff going on; a torrent of emotions rushing to the surface, having been submerged. That gave me pause because when I think of a torrent, I think of the movement of the water itself, not something submerged IN the water. So, are the emotions the torrent? Or are they submerged, carried by the torrent, then finally permitted to come up for air? But then they’re also threatening to wash him away? But then you evoke Sisyphus, whose whole deal is pushing a rock up a hill—nothing to do with fending off submerged torrents of emotions. This might seem like petty nitpicking, but this was the opening of your story, and my first reaction was to raise an eyebrow at the metaphor. Metaphors have to be internally consistent or you risk distracting the reader with visuals they can’t easily parse. Another example comes in the second paragraph: quote:She looks up, her face chill and unmoving like a winter night when your breath makes great clouds of billowing white, and her eyes are aurorae flickering against the frozen blackness of the sky. The bit I bolded is a distraction that takes away from an otherwise elegant description of this beautiful, inhuman face. Without that bit, this is a lovely-rear end visual. Anyway, I like the feelings in this piece, but I think you built too long of an on-ramp to the meat of this story (on-ramp to meat? That’s a terrible metaphor, smdh). Toasterbeef - Reaching In the few moments that elapsed between my completion of this story and the genesis of my first thoughts about this story, I didn't hate it. There’s a driving feeling to this piece, an emotional thrust that initially rushed me past the story’s flaws. You definitely chose to challenge yourself by adding a scifi element to the story and going just a little bit conceptual with it, though I will give you credit for limiting yourself to one concept (headmate wife), and giving me a surprising take on your prompt. The problem is, the wife is the emotional fulcrum of this story. Her death, and subsequent cyberdeath, are the driving force behind the narrator’s feelings and actions (insofar as he takes any action). But all we get from her is “omg baby whats happening” which doesn’t give us any insight into the connection between she and the narrator. If I was someone’s dead brainwife and I knew I was about to have Me.exe deleted, I would be saying the most meaningful poo poo my virtual brain could conceive of. I think a better way to approach this scene would have been to give the spouses a chance to have one last, private conversation and show us how the bond between them looks in this final, devastating moment. The ending seems to imply the narrator decides to go out violently (“I’ll be with you soon” + the final line). I found myself wondering if his headwife knew his intentions and what her feelings were about that. I think you had the opportunity to play with something really interesting, emotionally. Would his wife approve of his choice to effectively end his own life in an act of violence? If she didn’t support it, would the fact of her artificiality cause him to give her objections less weight? Is she less “real,” and so easier to let go of? Or does losing her twice galvanize him? I dunno! The story is very diffuse in its focus; there’s some scifi stuff, some griping about Jonas, some sad-but-true criticism of medicine as an industry. But this story is definitely emotionally-driven, which means you needed to have honed in a lot more tightly on the bond between husband and wife, whether or not headwife was “real” in any meaningful sense. Chairchucker - That You Wanted to See Fly Like other stories, this piece could really have started at the end—the moment when Wilson looks at his bird-muse and realizes he’s caged it a beat too long. I think your premise is very good; inspiration by its nature is ephemeral, but we often behave like it’s something we should be able to possess indefinitely. But so okay, how do you compress the events that brought about Wilson and Charlie’s relationship into a smaller span of time? Instead of writing out the little history between them, maybe have Wilson look around his studio and observe his various paintings in relation to various points in he and Charlie’s relationship. IE “that was the river sketch from just after he’d first found Charlie, splayed out in a broken pile of feathers on the walkway” or somesuch. Your last line cracked me up. Thranguy - Dandelion Petals This story is striving so hard for poignance but I didn’t get a convincing sense of either loss or surrender from the subject of the piece. I can believe that a victim of alzheimers or dementia might arrive at a place of surrender within themselves, the understanding that they are a shell playing a part for the benefit of those left behind. But this is too...graceful? I’m not sure how to put it. The beginning, the bit where the requisite “first memory” is mentioned, is sort of a fakeout—degenerative illness is not a goblin with whom we can bargain. Fair enough, and it’s a sufficiently cruel metaphor. But after that point, the story-camera kinda just pans around the reality of memory loss and end-of-life helplessness; I don’t actually have a sense for how grandpa really feels about losing his first memory, just that he’s coming to accept that he is on the steep downslope and his condition will only leave him more and more fragmented. It’s a good portrait, but as a moment of letting go or giving up, it doesn’t quite scratch my itch. Simply Simon - The Invitation Any story that uses the word “healslut” with full knowledge of the context and culture surrounding that term is taking a risk. I sort of like that you saved that bit for the end, because if you’d opened with ‘healslut’ I think that would’ve diverted my attention from Claire’s feelings about stuff and focused instead on how Extremely Online these characters are. I think the biggest issue with this piece is how strawman-like all the characters seem. The gamer guys are toxic and gross, Claire is meek and acquiescent right up until she’s had enough—and I’m glad that she does ultimately get fed up! It’s not that what you’re describing is inaccurate, but each character behaves exactly how we’d expect them to behave according to gamer/healslut tropes. I absolutely do not need Gavin, for example, to be more sympathetic, but I would like him to have a bit more nuance; maybe he even truly believes he understands Claire, and is genuinely a good guy for bringing her into the fold. As it is, he just reads like a boilerplate turd. I wanted to know more about how/why Claire puts up with this! It’s not enough to suggest a character has low self-esteem; it goes without saying she undervalues herself. I wanted to know more about why she holds herself in such low regard, even if you only spend a line or two on that exploration. Pepe Silvia Browne - Free to a Good Home This is an okay piece. It kinda misses the intention of the prompt, though; this is more about the events leading up to Rupert’s surrender, and not as much about the actual *moment*, though the last line of the piece is pretty good. I would have preferred a piece of about half this length that focuses on the sensory input and feelings surrounding the handing-over of Rupert the Bad Dog. I think you could have implied the whole backstory in a few lines, or by showing some small, problematic behavior on Rupert’s part—basically, you gave us the whole iceberg when we only needed the tip. I’m still not sure whether or not the narrator’s infirm state is due to Rupert; I don’t think so, I think the narrator would’ve been confined to a chair and etc regardless, which would certainly make it harder to handle a borderline feral dog. But the way the information is presented implies that the narrator’s medical condition might have had something to do with Rupert. And honestly, you shouldn’t be distracting me with these details anyway! Yes, the history of the situation is important, but that history can be implied by the moment of surrender. Antivehicular - Second Martyrdom Thank you SO MUCH for not feeling the need to dump 300 more words of worldbuilding into this piece. You didn’t waste my time telling me the particulars of your apocalypse, though no doubt it would have been precious and unique and special. But you did exactly what I asked and focused instead on this tiny, gossamer-thin moment in what I’m sure could be a fascinating speculative scenario. If I were you I’d be like “what the hell, if i was good enough to HM why am I runner-up to a fart story??” and that is a very normal and legit question. I think it’s because this story presents a very dire situation, but there’s no tangible urgency to it. Like, why is this particular season the one wherein Hodges is like “well shoot, i guess this bright-rear end window is probably a liability”? The narration suggests she has been holed up here a while, and it’s not like there are baddies charging over the hills with flaming torches, so this decision, while beautifully conveyed, seems to arise from nowhere. It makes sense as a thing to do, but for the purposes of this prompt, I think I was craving some sort of ticking clock element to this story—something more acute than the nebulous threat of raiders. Fleta Mcgurn - Acceptance This needed to be about 250 words long. It needed to depict the moment Tanner is walking into the euthenasia facility: give me the smells, the sights, the sounds. Describe the faces of the other people who’ve Given Up. You can still wait until the end to actually tell us it’s a euthenasia facility, but you needed to ditch most of the beginning. I don’t need to see Tanner walking away from his family to know he’s a family man, that’s pretty easy to imply in passing. I think you had the right idea, describing the lightness and freedom he feels upon Giving Up. The problem is you spend a couple hundred words telling us why our greedy consumer society is frivolous and self-annihilating, but again, that’s something you can nod to in a single line. As with many stories this week, you needed to basically get rid of your “on-ramp” to the moment of surrender. Anomalous Blowout - The Crossing Kudos to being among the minority of people who did what I asked! This piece moves at the speed of feelings; there is no question this is a Moment. This crit is going to suck because it boils down to basically one thing: the metaphors were layered on too thick. It’s interesting because typically I associate your writing with a lot of concrete visuals and emotional realism (and don’t get me wrong, the emotions in this piece are real and convincing), so it was neat to see you showing off your range. That said, I spent a lot more time trying to map the whole Aggamemnon metaphor onto this moment than I did picturing what was actually happening in real-time, if that makes sense (this could be me being dumb as a reader though, i admittedly struggle with more poetic prose). I think you needed a metaphor with a fewer moving parts, or you needed to expend a few more words to ground me in the reality of the scene. Barnaby Profane - God’s Chosen Vessel This is a hard choice to defend. It’s a story about a big fart, unleashed during one of the most well-known compositional conceits in all of experimental music. But!! But!! There are subtleties. What won me over was not actually the fart, or the narrator’s languishing in the “why me?” of it all. No. It was the moment at the very end when the camera pans over to the pianist, who is sitting at the piano, apparently enduring the fart as part of the 4’33” experience. I kinda wish you’d messed around with that element of the scene, tbh. The whole goal of 4’33” is to explore music as a space wherein any sounds contribute to the composition. It would’ve been even funnier to have the stuffy concert patrons visibly struggle to stay zen about the fart, because that’s the point of the song. Having them all stampede out of the room because of a butt smell is amusing, but I think you legitimately missed a chance to poke fun at art and art consumption! Steeltoedsneakers - Bye Barry I wish you’d had time to develop this more. When you’re in a hurry, you tend to favor sparse description, I’ve noticed. I love the feeling of this piece—the comingling of loss and compassion on the part of the defunct imaginary friend was pretty effective. This story never really sets its feet down in an image or setting, though; some of that is implied with the pillow fort and racing BMX bikes, but I think I needed at least one image, and a little more sensory description. Even if it’s just something about how the pillow fort had started to smell like stinky boy instead of little kid, or something like that. I appreciate that you chose to tell this story from the perspective of the imaginary friend, too! I wasn’t expecting that approach.
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Aug 28, 2019 06:03
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crimea posted:Oh really, wiseguy? You love my work so much prepare to receive some more of it. I challenge you to a Brawl, and this time I won't get depressed and not do it and have to pay the spine tax.  I'm the guy who
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Aug 28, 2019 23:07
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welcome back, buddy 
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Sep 6, 2019 03:19
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RandomPauI posted:I made a Thunderdome poster for the SA propaganda thread i love this
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Sep 8, 2019 04:13
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Yoruichi posted:Interprompt: This is not what it looks like Ceci n'est pas une story
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Sep 9, 2019 22:33
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Sitting here v crimea sebmojo posted:I will judge this and the prompt will be: What is left to do after the war is over and we are all content at last. Starscoured 1000 words The grassy field behind our father’s house is frosted silver by the emanations of the Milky Way. For a moment, I allow myself to escape into a pleasant mental image: the stars pouring down, washing me from my skin, stripping away everything man-made, rendering me into clean, primordial light. I’m tugged from this vision by the sound of shoes shuffling through long grass, a shuddering intake of breath. My little sister tosses a length of hose down between us as though she’s divesting herself of a serpent. “I couldn’t go back inside to turn the lights off,” she says, her voice thick with nausea. “But it’s not right to have them on. Like the house has eyes, and they’re open.” I glance back at the house, where the windows still glow merrily with warm, domestic light. “I’ll turn the lights off before we go.” The placid confidence in my own voice takes me by surprise, but surprise quickly swells into wonder at my own formidability; I have done the unthinkable, the unspeakable, and come out of it having realized, for the first time in my life, my truest self. There’s a free-standing spigot near a defunct patch of dirt that was once our vegetable garden. To the spigot’s rusty nozzle I affix the hose, grimacing with the effort—it’s been a long time since anyone thought to irrigate this wizened plot of earth. Moments later, the hose comes alive with a brisk gush of water. My sister holds out stained, trembling hands. “You didn’t do anything wrong,” I soothe as I rinse the rust-colored filth from her skin. “You only tried to comfort him at the end. This blood should be on my hands.” “I prayed he would die.” Her voice collapses into a whisper on the word ‘die’. “Answering prayers is what big sisters do. We’re the closest thing this world’s got to angels.” She looks up at me, eyes panic-wide, the whites reflecting the gauzy canopy of stars above. “Why did I try to help him if I wanted him to die? Where did you get a gun?” “Rub your hands together under the water,” I urge her. “It’ll get the mess off you faster.” She drags one hand over the other as though she’s trying to free her bones from over-tight gloves of flesh. Gouts of bloodied water fall to the dusty earth between unruly stalks of grass. Soon, her skin is wet and pink as a baby’s, glistening palely in the late moonlight, and yet I wish I could clean deeper. I want to scrub our father’s blood not only from her skin, but from her veins, leaving her truly cleansed of the insanity in our lineage. Once her hands are clean, my sister laughs despairingly and says, “What the hell is life after something like this? Where do we go?” “I’ve been in touch with Mom,” I tell her. “Got an address. Turns out she’s been over in Yakima this whole time.” My sister and I never blamed our mom for leaving without a word. Hated her for it, but never blamed her. She probably didn’t even think it through; I like to imagine she came out of a fugue somewhere on eastbound I-90, realized she was free, and burned joyful rubber to whatever new life awaited her beyond the horizon. “Mom?” My sister says the word carefully, like it might turn to shards of glass on her tongue. “Nine-oh-five south forty-fourth avenue, unit one-ten” I say, “right across from the new high school. Our girl is doing well over there. Her apartment complex ’s even got a pool.” “She said she’ll take us in?” I wipe my sister’s hands dry with the cuffs of my sweatshirt. “We gotta go separately. You leave first. I’ll stick around and tidy up, meet you at Mom’s place once it’s safe.” “I’m not going without you,” she says defiantly, looking into my eyes with sisterly skepticism. “You’re the one who got loving DNA evidence all over your hands,” I snap. “I’m trying to place you as far from the scene of the crime as possible as soon as possible, get it?” Her gaze turns inward, the sudden horror in her eyes recalling those last gurgling, bloody moments of our father’s life. “Yeah. But,” she swallows, “how will you get there if I take Dad’s car?” “Gonna get a ride from a guy I know,” I say, waving her off. “Dumb, cute, and knows not to ask questions.” “Nine-oh-five south forty-fourth avenue, unit one-ten” my sister repeats. “You promise someone’ll be there for us?” “Mom’s there.” “For us?” “She’s our mother. And she’s going to act like it.” It takes a little more convincing, but soon my sister is safely ensconced in our father’s car, chewing highway en route to Yakima. The address, as far as I know is legit; I never talked to Mom, but the private investigator assured me the unit was populated by one Sarah Renee, maiden name McClaughlin. Our mother. The gun I disassemble, lock, and put safely away with the full ammunition cartridge I purchased in advance of our father’s termination. His body still lay face-down on the kitchen floor where I shot him dead, one arm outstretched as though he might still deliver that back-hand meant for my sister’s cheek—if only someone would prop him upright again. I spit on the space between his shoulder blades, then get to work at the stove, coating the burners in cooking spray and setting them to the highest heat setting. As the kitchen catches fire, I sit on the floor at my father’s side, daring the heat and the pain to touch me; it does not. I am too much myself to feel pain, now. Too much my father’s daughter. As the flames grow into a hot, smoky garden around me, it’s as though all of heaven is pressing down, the stars scouring the broken blood of a broken man from my veins, and, with the last dredges of air in the burning house, I laugh.
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Sep 16, 2019 06:57
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steeltoedsneakers posted:
To add to this, we will be going around to each of our submitters and confirming: -The name or username by which you'd like to be identified. -If we make any edits (they would be small corrections only), we'll ask you if that's ok. Completely unrelated: October is my birth month. My kingdom to whoever takes it upon themselves to run a Voidmart week between now and the end of October. I can't think of a better gift than the opportunity to write a Voidmart story
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Sep 26, 2019 22:25
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Doctor Zero posted:
Just send us a story you like And yes, if there are any glaring issues, fix them. Whatever other edits you'd like to make are welcome, but please keep stories close to the sub-2K range we will consider longer pieces but dear god we don't want a bunch of 5k-10k word epics please
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Sep 26, 2019 23:25
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fellow Octoberite.
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Obliterati posted:Interprompt: why I'm banned from the Voidmart Redundancy Deep in a pocket dimension called Conference Room 5, the manager of installation 420666 is strung up for all to see, enmeshed in the white-hot filaments of a punishment grid. The manager doesn't give the board members the pleasure of watching her thrash; half of them projected into the meeting purely to spectate her agony. It gives her a small twinge of satisfaction, after years of exceeding expectations, to thoroughly disappoint them. The chairman clears his sixteen throats and intones gutturally: "What is the Void?" "The devourer of hungers. The beginning and end of need." The manager gives the expected reply in a sanguine tone, though several of her jaws are clenched against the pain. "And how do we honor the void?" "By...meeting quarterly budget projections and...growing the Voidmart family through comprehensive customer engagement..." The pain from the grid intensifies as the manager speaks, driving the words from her in breathless bursts. "You have been a most pious adherent to the Void," the chairman gnashes yawningly. "Your margins are wide. Your shrinkage is minimal. Your customers are delicious. And yet here we are in an emergency disciplinary meeting. Can you speculate as to why that is?" The manager stays silent, refusing to incriminate herself in the eyes of company policy. "Aha," the chairman burbles. "Well for the record: on June twenty-nine, 2015, a memetic breach caused a small group of consumers to spontaneously become aware of the existence of the Void. Manager 420666 failed to follow Standard Operating Procedure—" several gasps issue from the clot of board members "—by allowing the breach to persist unmitigated." They were a bunch of Voiddamned simpleton writers, the manager thought ruefully. It'd seemed a waste to dispatch a cleanup crew when the consumers already thought the Void was fictional. "A breach like this stands not only in violation of SOP but in defiance of the will of the void! the chairman disgorges rotundly, his many voices shaking the membranous walls of the pocket dimension. After taking a moment to compose himself he says, "It is the will of the Void that manager 420666 be terminated without severance, and cast into the realm of consumers, to live the rest of her days caged in flesh and mortal hunger." There's an intolerable, annihilating swell of pain, then nothing— and then the manager opens her eyes—just two of them—and finds herself looking up at a terrestrial sky, seen through the narrow band of human electromagnetic perception. In the distance, a monolithic, domed structure squats on the horizon, its bulk blotting out the last rays of the setting sun.
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Oct 14, 2019 18:19
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curlingiron posted:
This is great, you are great
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Oct 15, 2019 21:43
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EXTREMELY LATE INTERPROMPT 
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slam this IN into my veins holy blood god yes
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Oct 22, 2019 08:54
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CAKE IN THE STAFF ROOM Employees from every department are invited to convene in the unsurveilled staff lounge, a totally secure place invisible to the all-seeing eye of management. If you want to collaborate, this is a great place to go. Pop by the Thunderdome Discord server and prod me if I haven't already given you access to the Voidmart channel. Don't do Discord? You can also go to #thunderdome on Synirc and I will help you coordinate from there.
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Oct 22, 2019 18:50
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everyone who's asked for a discord link has been PMed one.
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Oct 23, 2019 18:23
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Department: Baby supplies The Success Formula 1300 words “There’re no ingredients listed on the label, just a formula code,” Becca said after thoroughly inspecting the jar of Voidmart Signature™ Little Devourers prune-inspired baby food. “Formula AAD342. Thanks jar, very insightful.” The jar was preternaturally heavy in her hand, faintly alive with a thrum that vibrated just at the edge of her senses. A siren song: Y o u r l i f e w o u l d b e b e t t e r w i t h m e i n i t. The effect had taken hold as soon as she and Anna clocked off and entered the sales floor as customers rather than employees; from experience Becca knew the strange yearning would last until well after they’d gone home. She placed her free hand on the nascent baby bump under her shirt, feeling a fierce surge of protectiveness. Anna peered over Becca’s shoulder at the jar. “You know how the V-Mart is, dude. They’ve gotta protect their company secrets. There’s probably a federal loophole about it.” Becca turned around, fixing Anna with an incredulous look. “Yeah? Do you think they found a loophole to get around food safety inspections, too? Do you feel good about feeding our baby trade secrets?” “Just because I’m not the one carrying the baby doesn’t mean I care less about their—” Anna’s eyes widened, fixed on something on the shelf behind Becca. “poo poo. That can’t be for us, can it? We’re off the clock.” Becca turned back to the shelf, dismayed but unsurprised to see a length of folded paper protruding from between jars of Little Devourers. “Best to get it over with,” Becca said, and plucked the paper from the shelf. It read: Hiya, teammates! Please remember that members of the Voidmart Team must never ever gossip about Voidmart! If you were to HARM THE REPUTATION OF THE ORGANIZATION something real bad might happen! Sincerely, Your Void Fam” “God, it’s one of the cutesy ones,” she said with disgust. “Don’t talk poo poo about Voidmart, or else. Got it.” A faint discoloration on the bottom corner of the page caught her eye. Dust from the shelf, maybe? Or— Words. There were words there, the faintest whisper of graphite on paper. Becca squinted, found her eyes were too watery to make them out. “Hey, I got preggo-vision, can you read this?” She passed the page over to Anna, indicating the surreptitious text. After a quick, paranoid look up and down the aisle, Anna held the page up to her face, almost touching the tip of her nose. Her lips moved soundlessly as she parsed the text, word by vanishingly faint word. Becca rubbed her eyes, annoyed at how hormones had fuzzed her sight. She’d already been put on light duty over in the Bespoke Knives sub-department, and was dreading the day when they’d take her off the sales floor all together. Anna crumpled the page and jammed it in her back pocket. “We should check out aisle B-666-13,” she said in a casual tone. “Never know if we’ll need something from there. Babies, you know?” Becca decided to follow her lead. “Oh, tell me about it. Babies—they love stuff from aisle B-666-13.” Several wrong turns later, they found themselves in a remote aisle labeled Alternative Infant Medicine, Infant Disciplinary Implements, Occult Parenting Solutions. The shelves were draped with cobwebs and a thick layer of dust carpeted the floor. “I mean,” Anna said after a long moment, “I guess it’s...encouraging that no one’s been here in a while?” Becca took a few hesitant steps down the aisle, her footfalls muted by velvety dust. There: wedged between copies of Banishing Colic with Crystals! And Other Home Remedies was a thin piece of plastic—a manager’s access card. Becca plucked it from the shelf, taking a moment to remove the attached sticky note, and pocketed the card. The directions on the sticky note led them off the sales floor and into the intestinal twists and turns of Voidmart’s most off-limits areas. Several winding staircases and non-euclidean hallways later, Anna and Becca found themselves before a fortified door plastered in KEEP OUT-type signage. Becca glanced down at the sticky note in her hand. Above the directions was scrawled a single line: Not everyone in management agrees with what’s happening here. “Maybe we’ll finally find out what’s in that baby food,” Anna said with forced levity. Becca swiped the manager’s key card through the access terminal, one hand protectively cupping her belly. With an irritable hiss of hydraulics, the door slid open. The lab was everything Becca had dreaded it would be on their long descent into Voidmart’s secret byways. Everything she had dreaded, and more—humanoid slabs of flesh hung suspended in tanks of liquid, their skin punctured by legions of serpentine tubes. Beyond the flesh slabs were rows upon rows of stacked cages, each of which contained a single fat, white rat. The lighting was low and tinted red, like the nocturnal exhibit at the local zoo. Becca moved numbly past the slabs of flesh to where the rats shuffled in their cages. The rats regarded Becca and Anna calmly, their eyes glowing ghostly white-blue in the murky light of the lab. Each cage was scattered with puzzle boxes, tiny Rubik's cubes, and simple, rat-sized computers with big, colorful buttons. “Paging Algernon,” Anna muttered. “Got some flowers for you.” Becca elbowed her in the ribs. Each of the cages contained a feeding apparatus, which was in turn fed by one of the hundreds of transparent tubes that descended from the ceiling. Becca read aloud from one of the info cards stuck to the front of the nearest cage. “‘Name: Worthington. Age: eight months. Formula: AAC457, ‘sweet potato’ Efficacy: concentrate with potentiators.” She paused. “That’s a Little Devourers formula code, isn’t it.” Anna swallowed. “Sure seems like it, yeah. You were...you were right, dude. I’m an rear end. That stuff is messed. I don’t want any creepy lab poo poo in our baby.” As they watched, Worthington the rat lifted into the air of his cage, never taking his luminous eyes off the two women. He drifted forward, his fat pink tail dragging behind him, until his nose nearly touched the glass of his enclosure. A small, childlike voice spoke in Becca’s mind: Play now? Becca turned to face Anna. “If you think about it, isn’t most baby food, in essence, creepy lab poo poo?” Anna looked at her sidelong. “What are you getting at?” Play now?! Worthington insisted. “A levitating rat is talking to us in our minds,” Becca said flatly. “After being fed a steady diet of scienced-up Voidmart baby food. You ever heard of a jar of Gerber making a kid float?” “Dude. What are you getting at?” Becca cupped her belly with both hands and took a deep breath. “We live in a megastore-based dystopia and the planet is coming apart at the seams.” The words came out in a breathless rush. “If there’s a chance we could-could give our kid an edge, a better chance to thrive…” “You’re serious,” Anna said flatly. “You want to make a super baby.” “Yeah. I kind of do,” Becca said, casting a glance at Worthington. “I don’t want this baby to just survive this world. I want them to thrive.” Congratulations, Worthington said in their minds. You’ve been chosen for specialized focus group testing! Please see the attached documentation for details. A fat orange envelope dropped from the ceiling, landing with a dull thud at Becca’s feet. “So, we doing this?” Becca asked Anna. Anna swallowed. “Yeah. We're doing this.” Becca picked up the envelope.
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Oct 28, 2019 06:21
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oh hell why not, in
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Oct 29, 2019 23:30
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Prompt: that crow has teeth Mother of Murders 1000 words Deep in the long dark of the winter solstice, beneath the light of a full moon, Signe journeyed to the heart of the forest, where the crows roosted among leafless treefingers. Frosty moss crunched under her boots as she approached the great grandmother tree. The crows looked down their beaks at the girl, silent as the grave, their feathers shivering like leaves in the insomniac night breeze. Signe called up to the crows, “I come here on the longest night, when all things are equal, to make an exchange with the mother of murders.” She added, uncertainly: “That is to say, as an equal.” The weight of a thousand glittering eyes weighed heavy on the girl; she shifted from foot to foot to keep the cold from seeping up into her boots while the crows deliberated. Finally, a voice arose from the throats of the birds—a cooing, clicking, rasping voice that contorted corvid throats unnaturally around human inflections. “What do you bring us?” croaked the mother of murders from the mouths of her children. Signe unslung a sack from over her shoulder and spilled its contents onto the frost-kissed moss: eyeballs, a delicious bounty of them. Irises colored brown, gold, green, grey, and blue stood in stark contrast to the cold-whitened forest floor. “The eyes of ninety-nine killers, rapists, and child-beaters,” she said, grinning up at the murder. “My father among them. I offer you the sweetest bits of the deserving dead.” ”And what do you ask in return?” The voice of the mother of murders was thick with the hunger of her children; the bounty was sweet indeed. “I was born into pain,” the girl said. “Pain nursed me at its teat and fed me its worm-riddled bread.” She laughed, cold and bitter as the solstice wind. “Pain learned me in the ways of womanhood.” ”We cannot take away your pain,” the mother of murders said, but there was tenderness in her gestalt voice. “I know,” Signe said, and took a deep breath. “I want to fly. Like you.” The mother of murders was silent for a long moment. Her children rustled on their branches, admiring the pile of eyeballs with cocked heads and eager expressions. ”There is a way for you to fly with us,” said the mother of murders at last, ”But first you must prove yourself fit to roost among my children. Convince them with your story.” Signe had seen enough death to be wise to the ways of crows; she knew the rough mirth of their caws concealed a deep love of rhythm and melody. In the mornings after she killed, when the eyeless body of her latest conquest lie naked and exposed to the dawn light, the crows would gather to celebrate the bounty of flesh, singing their syncopated songs, communing in complex, dueling rhythms. A fiddle was strapped across Signe’s back; presently she unholstered it, and withdrew a bow from a long deerskin sheathe at her hip. Positioning her chin in the chinrest, she took a few experimental draws of the bow across the strings, pausing occasionally to adjust the tuning pegs. Then she began to play in earnest. Notes fell from the fiddle in streams of tears, then rose like steam to the ears of the crows. Arpeggios built bridges from one mood to the next: innocence to disrepair, trust to hate, love to death, righteousness to dismay. To this brisk, watery melody she added her voice, yipping and growling and cawing in all the voices of sky, bush, and earth, challenging her own melody with animal dissonance. A moving picture formed in a thousand glittering crow eyes: A toddling girlchild, sickly but grinning. The same girl, older, huddled outside a noisome hovel, cowering from the wall-eyed wrath of her father. Winters spent crouched wakefully by the fire, trapped indoors with the monster. Time passed on waves of melody. Signe alternated strokes of her bow with slaps of her palm on the body of the fiddle, disrupting the flow of the melody with abrupt percussion. Her animal yips and hoots became the squeal of the dying rabbit, the shriek of the territorial hawk. Unspeakable things unfolded in the eyes of the crows. A child became a woman, then a killer, and the killer avenged the violations visited upon the child. She kept her father’s eyes in a pouch at her hip. And then there was nothing to be except a killer; Signe avenged ninety-eight women and children, taking as her trophy the eyes of their violators. Signe’s voice fell silent; her bow trembled on the strings, producing the smallest shiver of sound in the still solstice night. Even the wind had given up its restless pacing, and now watched the girl with rapt attention, motionless as an alert crow. One final vision played out across the eyes of the crows: A woman falsely accused of child-murder, awaiting trial in her cell. Her eyes wide as Signe loomed over her in the dark, garrote in hand. In the wake of the woman’s death, a father’s tearful confession: the child had drowned in the river under his supposed watch as he dallied with an amorous woodnymph in the long grass. Signe, burying the falsely-accused mother’s eyes deep underground, where no hungry beak might find them. She lowered bow and fiddle, looking up at the crows with dry, empty eyes. “Take me into the sky,” she whispered, then added: "Please". After a long moment, the mother of murders said, ”We forgive you. We accept you.” And then her children fell on Signe, beaks digging into flesh, taking her apart piece by piece, dissolving her regret in pain beyond reckoning. When the crows ascended back to their branches, beaks wet and hot with fresh blood, Signe rose with them, and came to rest in the grandmother tree’s branches, at peace at last in the arms of the mother of murders.
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Nov 4, 2019 05:00
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well, the queen can hardly let the colony get busy without her. IN, and give me an ant, if you would
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Nov 6, 2019 20:11
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ant: https://www.antwiki.org/wiki/Solenopsis_invicta Desire Invicta 750 words In the sixth month of my life atop a gutted skyscraper, my dreams became unbearably erotic. By month seven, I’d Macgyvered a pulley into existence on the fifth floor, complete with a chain long enough to reach the ground. Today, I go down. Before I hook myself to the apparatus, I survey the hell-pit into which I’m about to descend. The floor of the world is carpeted red, completely nationalized by our new overlords: trillions and trillions of fire ants. The air hisses with insectoid movement on a scale that means nothing to my tiny monkey brain; in the distance, the periodic crunch of crumbling concrete and murmur of collapsing steel remind survivors that humans are no longer the masters of the Earth. Those of us who remain are flightless birds confined to the tops of dead high rises, and from there we watch the ants reconstitute our hives into their own. From five floors up, I can only perceive the vaguest impression of movement below, a T.V. static swirl of colony activity. Envy, desire, and fear engage in complex foreplay in the pit of my stomach as I watch from a distance the currents of a culture that is and will always remain unknowable to me. I’m tired of being an alien on my own planet. I want to go deep into the unknowable black passages, the blind egg chambers, the pheromone-rich caverns of the queens, the uterine miles of formicidae highways. I want to spread myself thinly over top of this civilization like a decadent caviar. I want to be the twitch of antennae, the grubby white protein of eggs, the swell of a queen’s abdomen, the power in a soldier’s jaws. I’ve seen people get taken down by a megacolony on the warpath, seen the way a human shape dissolves under the ministrations of a thousand-thousand mandibles, leaving nothing behind but a scattering of offwhite bones, a splash of ant-red blood. I’ve seen so much death, but my dreams are hot and dark and diffuse and hideously intimate. I wake from them feeling as though I’ve been stretched in a million different directions, used for a trillion different purposes, and then returned to a single body cursed with a desire darker than murder. I hook the pulley chain to the makeshift harness around my chest. Then, holding the slack end in skeletal fingers, I repel hand over hand down the side of the building. After months living on cockroaches, rainwater, and small birds, I weigh next to nothing, but starvation has devoured my muscles down to the bone. Less than halfway to the ground, my hands slip and I plummet a whole level, metal chain links ripping bloodily across my palms. My hands scream. My shoulders scream. I stop my fall but my momentum sets the chain swinging and I slam into the side of the building, which is almost enough to convince my hands to give up, let go— No. This is happening on my terms. On the ants’ terms. Not gravity’s. I think of my dreams—the debasing heat, the midnight clench of tunnel visions—and grip the chain with all the strength of my insane obsession, lowering myself with agonizing slowness into the hostile nation below my feet. I touch the ground. And then I’m theirs. Fire consumes me. Fire pixelates me, dissolves my being across a thousand individual points of apocalyptic pain. It’s not the bite that makes the ant, oh no—it’s the sting. My body thrashes. My body kills unknowable hundreds of workers. My body claws at itself and makes noises of braying animal death. My body is hell. But somewhere deep below the agony, in the saturnine pit where my most malignant dreams reside, a part of me swells with the exultation of giving myself utterly over to this new world. Time lags, then snaps forward. They’re in my eyes. My body tries to crawl to nowhere. The sun stutter-steps across the sky in erratic bursts. Pain is a room and I’m trapped there, clawing, keening. They’re in my throat, stinging even as they drown in my saliva. Anaphylaxis—oh, gentle, godly suffocation—sets in. All sensation collapses into a long, lightless tunnel, but I don’t need light, because here is the sweet chemical song of my queen wafting from her chamber, leading me by the tips of my antennae, calling me home to be part of her world. Just a little further. Just a little
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Nov 11, 2019 05:31
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Thunderdome week 380: sitting here thinks of a prompt uuuh i have a headache so you get an awkward hodgepodge of a prompt. this would be an extremely good week to get weird because idgaf PART ONE OF YOUR PROMPT IS: magic in the suburbs. Your story doesn't have to be set in the literal suburbs, but it should be somewhere low-key and residential, whether that's a neighborhood street in a city or a cluster of homesteads somewhere rural. I don't want epic battles of good and evil. Did I already use the word low-key? Good. I'm gonna use it again. I want low-key magical poo poo happening in normal-rear end places like where you might walk your dog or buy your latte, you milquetoast motherfucker. PART TWO OF YOUR PROMPT IS: When you sign up, choose something that matters to you (or your character) and post it. You can be a real or as shallow with this as you want. But you better post that poo poo when you sign up. Examples of things that might matter to you are: fame, money, compassion, trees 'n poo poo, your cat, gains, cleanliness, optimization, funkopops. THEN! You will write a story about the absence of that thing. From your life, from your character's life, from the world, whatever. FINAL, OPTIONAL PART OF YOUR PROMPT: Sebmojo is on deck with some rear end-puckering hell rules for those bold enough to So, to recap all of that:
Wordcount: 1300 Signup deadline: Friday, November 15 at 11:59:59PM PST Submission deadline: Sunday, November 17 at 11:59:59PM PST Judges: ugh sebmojo steeltoedsneakers Neighbors: Chili - family Curlingiron - my cat Nethilia - books (Not writing. Not paper. Not stories. Just literal paper and board, multipaged, rectangular books.) Slip-up - Booze Everyone is drowning on dry landAnomalous Amalgam - blood kitchen appliances are watching everything, what do they knowDjeser - Wildlife the ground will no longer hold us upExmond - love of the protagonist's life saucy_rodent - touch story is told in breathsWeltlich - healthy blood pressure Something Else - gd Funkopops Black Griffon - sleep protag is quivering into oblivionflerp - peace Antivehicular - Sanctuary protag doesn't believe they existflesnolk - ERROR ERROR ERROR (please choose something to go without) story takes place in the barrel of a gunCrimea - connection all of your characters actions are meaninglessCarl Killer Miller - my cat there are no personalities in your story but we still care what happensselaphiel - leylines thranguy - august sephiRoth IRA - coffee entenzahn - privacy everyone can't stop fighting, not even for a momentchairchucker - my heart magic cactus - noise sparksbloom - the moon no words longer than three syllables dmboogie - song jonjoe - memories Sitting Here fucked around with this message at 05:03 on Nov 18, 2019 |
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Nov 12, 2019 09:24
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Carl Killer Miller posted:In you can both write about my cat but i will be watching closely to determine who loves kitties more
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Nov 13, 2019 02:07
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HEY GUYS I JUST NOTICED THERE IS A POEM DOME https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3903748 If you do poetry, be a pal and go over there and help this babby dome grow
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Nov 13, 2019 08:21
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sephiRoth IRA posted:Or even if you don’t do poetry, come join anyway! 
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Nov 13, 2019 08:58
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and that's a perfect week  ya dun me proud TD, i look forward to slowly and thoughtfully savoring your entries
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Nov 18, 2019 08:08
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      crits soon
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Nov 20, 2019 05:45
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sephiRoth IRA posted:In please respect. this poo poo right here is the real lifeblood of TD 
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Nov 20, 2019 06:59
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Week 380 post-massacre cleanup part one(1) of ???(?) Look. Sometimes I'm nice. Sometimes I rip you several new assholes. If you don't like it, fight me. In the interest of getting these crits out quickly, they're not going to be as structured as I sometimes like to write them. Everyone gets a rating in the form of an object, plant, fungus, or animal from my neighborhood. If you talk to me on any chat platform, you might see some familiar friends. This was really just a fun way for me to think creatively while doing crits, please don't PM me asking for the secret hidden meaning behind your image because Saucy Rodent - The Hybrid Orchard I get what you were going for with the breathing thing, but the story is pretty much the same with/without it. First couple lines are confusing because you go from “we” to “they” without describing how many people there are. At some point the narration mentions that all smells translate as bacon or poo poo? That’s quite the binary and i’m not sure whether to take it literally or not. So at a certain point in the story, we’ve established that the narrator only feels rudimentary emotions, only smells things indirectly and in a weird bacon/poo poo binary, and doesn’t physically feel anything. It doesn’t really match the voice of the narration, which sounds like that of a fairly normal person who’s kinda “ho-hum” about being a cyborg. This might be overwhelmingly nitpicky but i don’t believe a society capable of putting people in robots would bury their dead in cemeteries Then comes the revelation that the protag has a ghost-clone AND no soul! That’s kind of a double whammy, but not in the hot way—both of these ideas are suddenly competing for my attention. Like, I get how they’re related, how they’re meant to be part of the same problem, but it took me way too many seconds to figure out that this other Jake was an actual, for-real ghost. What sort of college hires violent crims to protect fruit?? I don’t think enough has been established about the world to explain this. From my commentary as I read: Wait he punched *Anna* out of the bad guy’s arms? Like just uppercut her straight out of a headlock? ...oh ok, going by the ending, he literally just punched her aside. Oof. And here the reader is thinking he’s about to have a breakthrough that proves he has a soul. The ghost stuff feels pointless because it’s left dangling, it didn’t even need to be ther………………….ooooh i see, it’s so the story would be on-prompt. Hrm. Story rating:  SephiRoth IRA - Heuristic ineptitude The opening is intriguing! It's a great setup. There's humor, absurdity, and a compelling question: how did Dave get himself into this? Then we get lost in the drudgery of being a dumb sitcom husband. It's weird to me just how much fiction and media features spouses who appear to feel nothing but contempt or indifference toward each other. Watching Dave snub his wife's rather reasonable request in a really petulant way made it harder to give a poo poo about him. Conversely, had Dave cared a lot about his wife, that would make me care more about Dave! Characters who care about things are more engaging. Even though I love the opening, by the time Dave finally stumbles on the spiky wish ball, I realized that this story really needed to start when Dave found it, or even sometime after Dave gets his milquetoast hubby paws on it. The yard drudgery starts to look almost inexcusably wasteful at this word count. As soon as the hunk of platinum showed up, I was like, "ah, this is a 'be careful what you wish for' story, I wonder what the interesting twist or pivot is going to be. Because whether you meant it or not, the story is structure like it's meant to have a twist or trope subversion of some kind. Part of that is how you did the intro; you set up a lot of mystery! So my brain is all primed to expect some twists and turns as my understanding of the situation grows. Instead, we get a bunch of examples of Dave repeatedly being an idiot. The fact that he wishes for a latte after not one but two wishes that went poorly is frustrating, because I feel like by wish number three, anyone would've figured out that they need to be very careful about their wording. Margaret is just an offscreen presence at this point, nagging Dave to stop making wishes the way she nagged him to mow the lawn. It's all so very very much the same note over and over, with nothing and no one changing in any meaningful way. Which is an impressive sentence to type about a story that eliminates all coffee and the entire coffee bean economy, among other things. I'm not going to lie to you, Margaret being up on the ISS was one of the things that excited me the most at the story's outset. The revelation that she's in space because of poor phrasing on Dave's part wasn't a satisfying explanation. Like, one of the most interesting parts of your premise is explained by....well, it's not a pun, but it's almost as bad. Finally, Dave is bamboozled one last time by the wish ball when he realizes that he's been unwittingly using up a finite number of wishes! Ten, in fact. This is revealed in the form of fine print that didn't come up at any prior point in the story. So the cornerstones of your story are "be careful what you wish for", idiot husband, and mutual spousal contempt. What if, at the start of the story, Dave and Margaret are very close? What if the wish ball drives them apart? Or the inverse: what if their ailing marriage is resolved by the wishes, only for Dave to inadvertently use his final wish to send his wife to the moon? You needed some kind of emotional dynamism. By the way, the stuff I pointed out above aren't hallmarks of a bad writer. It's just stuff you don't necessarily think about until your stories have undergone a lot of critical review. Story rating:  Chairchucker - Didn't I Make you Feel? I love the opening to this. Actually, everything in the first two sections is bang-on great, minus some wonky phrasing here and there, maybe (I didn't do a line edit but virtually all TD stories can be tightened up). The whole scene after the narrator wakes up heartless in a bath tub is great, and pivots into the sinister as soon as she gets home. I think what I like about it is the dawning realization that her heartlessness is more than physical. One could forgive the violent murder in the hotel bathroom as a valid reaction to being organ-mugged, but once she gets home and is indifferent to her dog and kid, I was like "oh snap she's creepy sociopath mom now." And that...was the direction I hope the story was going to lean more into. I wanted to see the narrator try to hold it together as a mom while she worked to get her heart back. As it is, this feels more like a dark paranormal crime story than low-key suburb stakes. And it's just sad, because the first two sections really do set up some interesting possibilities! Bottom line, everything after the narrator meets up with Geoff started to lose my interest because then it becomes a pretty straightforward narrative: protag gets intel, protag acts on intel, protag shoots her way into a hotel and gets what she wants. The end. What about a story where this mom can't go look for her heart because she has to be, you know, a mom? Her heartlessness doesn't allow her to feel love or attachment, but she still has a sense of duty as a mother; what would it be like, to try and be a responsible parent when the part of you who loves your child is missing, presumably in the hands of a criminal? As it is, the very ending is rushed, and the protag gets what she wants—plus a handful of traumatic memories, I guess, but I think that's getting off a bit light given her ordeal. Story rating:  Exmond - Her Last Request, His Last Regret First off: I like how you incorporated your flashrule! There was no good or easy way to do it, but I think you pulled it off. You could have even elaborated on it more, made DERP an acronym or something, really leaned into the ridiculousness of it. But it was a bitch of a hellrule and you incorporated it about as gracefully as anyone could. The narration got a little bit cloying. Every sentence goes out of its way to remind me that this is a sad, bittersweet, sad, redemptive, weepy, SAD, melancholy, and sad story. The son doesn't just sit down beside his father, he sits down with " his face a mixture of careful consideration and cold condemnation." Is his father observing this in his face? Is the narrator telling us this? It's not clear because the POV is fairly omniscient. And honestly, I don't mind a little of that. But every paragraph is full of sentences that tell us exactly how to feel, or exactly how the characters are feeling. Think of it like a movie: When i look at the face of a character on screen, I'm using my eyes and brain to deduce how they feel. I don't need subtitles to tell me Clint Eastwood is staring down an outlaw with a look of grim resolve and steely-eyed confidence. It's right there on his face! Especially with tense, emotional scenes, sometimes less is more. Here's another example. I'll strike through the bits you could lose without giving up the mood: quote:“No. I suppose she didn’t want me at the funeral,” he says. Occasionally, there are these infodumpy little paragraphs about how the old man met his dead wife, how the graveyard played into their relationship, and other exposition about the past. I don't like this approach. I think a better approach would have been to latch on to one element of their past—let's say the importance of the graveyard to their relationship—and weave that into the narration. I'm thinking specifically of this bit: quote:It makes sense; the family started here. A talented woman went to the graveyard, looking for divine inspiration for her poems but found love instead. A mother and father brought their child here to witness nature in all of its forms. A well-loved mother lies buried here and now a dying son meets his father, one last time. The family started here and it should end here. Like, I have to take this paragraph's word for it that this is true. The old man doesn't actually react to the graveyard like it's a place he brought his son as a child, or where his partner got her inspiration. You'd think he'd be reacting to the world around him more: that hill is where he saw her writing. That tree is where they had their first kiss. That gravemarker was always their sons's favorite because of the angels, or whatever. I'm just spitballing here, but if you want me to believe the old dude has some powerful emotional connection to the graveyard (beyond the fact that his ex-wife is buried there), he needs to show it. Hell, since this is a story with magic, he could even literally see flickers of her memory wandering about, laughing and writing and dreaming up stories among the dead. Once it comes out that the son is dying from the same illness as his mother, the story goes pretty much where you'd expect. Dad apologizes. Son won't forgive dad, but lets go of his hate. The narration lets us know that this is NOT redemption for dad, but it will have to be enough. And then they're all chummy, having gone through the motions of reconciliation. I don't really understand how this young man from a fragmented family, who is dying at a relatively young age, has no regrets! The story doesn't sell me on that. I want the son to be angry. I want him to take it out on his father because his father is a deserving punching bag (not a literal punching bag). Anything to break up the Hallmark Channel feeling of the ending. Okay, let me walk that back. I get it. Something sorta magical is happening here—mom is spinning a story of reconciliation from beyond the grave, so that her son and ex-husband can make up before the son dies. But most of the story isn't about that, it's just weepy back and forth dialog between father and son. There's a couple lines about the dead laughing, and this: quote:She whispers to the young man, a wry sense of humor in her voice. Her final jest, or is it her final barb? Perhaps it is both. A smile creeps up the young man’s face. The older man soon finds it infectious, he too is smiling. I think you had so much room to play with the emotional dynamics of this piece, as well as your low-key graveyard magic. This story spends so much time TELLING me how sad it is that it forgets to be, ya know, sad. Story rating:  Crimea - People Don't Even Look-See Anymore This almost HMed. At least one other judge was fond of it. I liked it well enough, though I think Magic Cactus's poorly-formatted punk rock story does the same thing a little better. I love how everything in this story just loving happens, thing after thing, a relentless whitewater gush of meaninglessness. You really leaned into your hellrule, which could have made for an incredibly dull story if you'd been one iota less absurd about it. I think you pinpointed an important formula here: the less the characters care about things, the more absurd things should be. Because there is something loving eerie and out of whack about how cavalier all the characters are, which is intriguing. I think what might have hurt this story just a liiiittle bit is how unfocused it is. As much as I love tripping forward through this absurd, meaningless chaos, I kind of wished you'd just doubled down on one thing, one element, like the dog. I've read this story a couple times now and it's a little hard to remember specifics except this goddamn dog who just won't stop coming the gently caress back. What really stuck with me is the batshit insane Don't Give A gently caress, which I liked. Story rating: 
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Nov 21, 2019 04:33
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Week 380 post-massacre cleanup part two(2) of ???(?) In the interest of getting these crits out quickly, they're not going to be as structured as I sometimes like to write them. Everyone gets a rating in the form of an object, plant, fungus, or animal from my neighborhood. If you talk to me on any chat platform, you might see some familiar friends. This was really just a fun way for me to think creatively while doing crits, please don't PM me asking for the secret hidden meaning behind your image because full disclosure: the only time i have to work on these is...while i'm at work. So when I leave work, I stop critting. That means you will get as many of these per day as I can do while powdering hotel guest's chafed little bottoms. Djeser - We Tell Ourselves This was expert pandering, whether you intended it to be or not. I don't have much to crit because i feel you did what you intended to do, and you did it in a way that appealed to your audience (me [and two other people, i guess, but mostly me]). My notes here are more just the thoughts and feelings that came up while I was reading this. This piece captures a particular sort of mournful feeling—when you're walking around a city and realize that everywhere is for something. We all have to be for something if we want to be permitted inside society. "No loitering" signs imply that simply occupying a place is a nuisance, a menace. There are very few places outside the home and designated recreation areas where we can just be, for no particular reason. It also captures a wistful feeling. I see myself in that nameless jacketed person, looking out into the night, hoping to see something meaningful, proof of magic hiding among dumpsters and under freeway overpasses. And here, the magic is looking back, equally as wistful, equally hungry for a sense of place and meaning. I like the subtle evolution of this character. At first it seems like this is the haughty ghost of a forest spirit come to lament how humans have eliminated all the places where it might be itself. And it's like, trying to feel the sense of superiority that might come from that. Like, oho I am so wild and free and magical, i shall prance around like a garbage elemental and watch you die in your city. But in reality, it's little more than trash kicked up in humanity's wake, the living void that we've built a whole civilization around trying to fill. Its sense of superiority to the dog and the human its encounters is tragically off-base. Or some poo poo, idk i just loved this a whole lot so have some cool pictures that remind me of the feeling i got from this!! Story rating:     dmboogie - strings like glass shards This is much more like a fantasy story than low-key suburban magic. I was a little grumpy about that, but you saved yourself from a nitpicky DM by creating a father/daughter relationship that I cared about. Yulia's worry for her father is an appropriately low-key character motive, so the story manages to be suburban in spirit if not in setting. I did say stories could be set in rural communities, but this feels a bit more like Ye Olde Fantasy town. For all I know, this isn't even Earth; you've got a fantastical creature (the siren), a religion that is unnamed and vaguely pagan, a traveling witch, and a loosely pre-medieval tech level? I dunno, you could have written this exact story but set it in, idk, some San Diego suburb and you would've saved me a furrow of my brow. But okay, prompt-centric crits don't really help you become a better writer. This piece isn't bad, but I think it languishes far too long in how dull and sad life is without music. The story drives home, again and again, how these foolish hoo-mons have brought this fate upon themselves by refusing to see the magic and wonder of the sirens. All except Yulia, who in YA protagonist fashion, rejects the shortsightedness of her elders and dares to find the beauty in the dangerous creatures. Conceptually, I like stories that deal with coming of age in a world your parents hosed up. That hits home. But for all that Yulia fits the mold of a YA protag, she kind of just wanders around observing all this sadness and folly without doing a whole lot. Also...okay, so this traveling witch knows ONE EASY TRICK 2 NOT GET ET BY SIRENS, which is ear plugs or an eye mask. Why isn't this common knowledge? How on earth would a fishing people live for generations by the sea without figuring out something so obvious? The end is...ok? Sort of just a shrug like "maybe it'll all work out, maybe it won't, idk". Story rating:  Sparksbloom - Bad Tidings Good opening paragraph, very pensive and full of mood. As soon as we meet Wilbur, I'm pumping my fist going YESSS THIS IS THE SORT OF STORY I WAS LOOKING FOR. Actually, the whole first section is spot-on. Good stuff. The middle section is a flashback. Samantha does some shoddy magic for...reasons that aren't clear. Everything feels infinite, so she gets out her tarot deck and does...something. And it knocks out the moon and turns her boyfriend into the Toxic Avenger. Which...if you've seen Toxic Avenger, I think the fish man thing actually works out fairly well. This scene is weird because it doesn't tell me anything especially new, but it DOES leave me confused about Samantha's motivations. I could presume it's just standard teen idiocy, but that's not very satisfying. Here is a list of factors in this story: Samantha has magic, but isn't very precise about it. The moon is gone. Wilbur is a fish man. The water is toxic. Wilbur needs to find a river, which is apparently hard to do where they live. Samantha's mom is very strict, seemingly abusive. Samantha's mom has called the cops; samantha chooses to avoid them, pedaling off to find a river. Samantha thinks she can undo her magical fuckup, OR gently caress up again in such a way that she becomes a fish lady, I guess. None of those things really develops. I don't even need anything to be fully resolved; my issue here is that there is a whole buffet of story components in from of me and my plate, as a flash fiction reader, is pretty small. I wish you'd picked one scene, one pivotal moment, and focused on that. The ending is almost a pivotal moment! But not quite. Samantha comes to a decision: run away and continue trying to help Wilbur. Great! I wish she'd made that decision at the beginning of the story. Since we don't really know how this choice changes anything, per se, it doesn't hit hard to be described as 'pivotal'. Story rating:  Entenzahn - The First Cut is the Deepest While reading this, I couldn't help but think of my favorite scene in all of film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pC_XT-HdBvE Honestly, I didn't expect to like this. As soon as the utensils started their cartoonishly cruel dialog, I was ready to get sick of this really fast. But Sophie pulls double duty here; she's part comedy straight man, part sympathetic victim of her own abuse. I think the specific line where you won me over was this one: quote:“I’m making potatoes,” Sophie said. Her voice carried the appropriate lack of conviction for someone who justified themselves in front of their own cutlery. By the time she gets to the bathroom, I feel genuine empathy for her, and sympathy for how cruel she is to herself. Her revelation that she doesn't deserve this abuse seems sincere and reasonably earned. This was another favorite bit of mine: quote:“You know what, toilet?” she said, pointing at the drat thing like she was taking aim with her index finger. She stood there like that, blood dripping on the tiles, long enough to realize that she shouldn’t care what an object she poops into thinks of her. My only major crit is that you could've shaved off a couple hundred words. Somewhere on the way from the kitchen to the bathroom, the story got bogged down in "and the couch was like THIS, and the window does THAT, and..." I was like, I get it, the furniture is mean too, let's get to the climax of this thing. Story rating: 
Sitting Here fucked around with this message at 08:42 on Nov 23, 2019 |
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Nov 23, 2019 04:33
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Week 380 post-massacre cleanup part three(3) of ???(?) In the interest of getting these crits out Everyone gets a rating in the form of an object, plant, fungus, or animal from my neighborhood. If you talk to me on any chat platform, you might see some familiar friends. This was really just a fun way for me to think creatively while doing crits, please don't PM me asking for the secret hidden meaning behind your image because full disclosure: the only time i have to work on these is...while i'm at work. So when I leave work, I stop critting. That means you will get as many of these per day as I can do while powdering hotel guest's chafed little bottoms. Thranguy - What is Owed Man, I gotta say, I was surprised you went with something so epic in scope this week. I think you honestly could have done without the "bargain with fairy land(?)" angle. The talking cat, too, sadly. The fantastical elements feel more like ostentatious window dressing for the actual plot (for me, the actual plot is Charlotte's doppelganger foiling her breakup with Hector, inadvertently causing hector a lot of heartache). This piece is crowded, with all the individual components vying for my attention. Charlotte has a doppelganger, great! She also has a talking cat and some understanding of the "rules" of magic. I don't know why she has a talking cat and an understanding of magic, but since the story doesn't offer an explanation, I assume she's in possession of a relatively normal, if uncommon, understanding of her world. The doppelganger acts really weird and mysterious at first, so i'm like, okay cool! The girl and her talking cat are going to get to the bottom of that! But...instead we pivot to poor Hector the summer fling. And it turns out the doppelganger dated him after the real Charlotte disappeared for the month of August. I was a little confused why "Char" was acting so creepy in the first section, but by the middle of the story she behaves pretty much like a normal person—not at all like a spooky twin who lurks in closets. All of the doppelgangers strangeness evaporates as soon as other plot elements come into play. As soon as Char starts expositing on the backstory—the reason for the doppelgangers, her attempt to take Hector to the other world, the Queen's wrath—I lose the thread completely. I don't understand the deal with trying to take Hector "back", I thought the whole problem was that Char tried to take him out of the human world and so was banished to live among us. The story returns to 'rules' (the queen always leaves a door to the other world open, i guess), so I'm forced to take your word for it that Char and Charlotte can just take Hector to this door and resolve all issues by sending him through with Char. Even more frustrating, Edison the cat, who's functioned mostly as a whimsical prop/exposition tool, pops up at the end and reveals himself to be a shapeshifter, able to cover for Hector's absence. This would feel like a more significant moment if Charlotte and Edison had any legible connection, but nothing in their interactions is particularly warm or friendly. If it sounds like I'm stumbling and groping in this crit, I am! Each section of the story supplies me with roughly 30% of the information I need, so I can't say with certainty that I fully understand your intention. There are lots of good turns of phrase, but this is that classic Thranguy thing where your scope exceeds your word count. Here's the thing, though. You write TD stories every dang week, rain or shine, inspiration or no, and when you're writing at that volume, some stories simply won't gel the way you want them to. I think you already know the problems with this piece; I think you probably had to cut a bunch of stuff in editing, or weren't able to elaborate as much as you wanted on key story components. When I read this, I sense something I could really enjoy beneath all the muddiness, but I think this was not the story to try to tell at this wordcount. TBH Thrangles if I'm judging and you have a big idea...i'd almost rather you go over the word count, selfishly, because yeah you'd technically be DQed but then I'd have the chance to crit your idea in its entirety, not just the version that gets crammed into a flash fic word count. Story rating:  Jonjoe - Where We Never Rest The opening has moxie. Punch. It is a mournful thrust in the direction of a compelling conflict or mystery! And then we sort of just...roll around in it. The story gets stuck in a loop: all of the external stuff is tedious banality (getting ready, choosing to leave the house and walk to the therapist's office), and all the internal stuff is this angst and confusion over the narrator's missing loved one. And we come back to this again, and again—at no point did you develop this feeling, or use it to reveal something about the narrator that we don't glean from the first couple paragraphs. Like, once I hit this point: quote:How did I know it wasn’t her? I don’t know her face. Do I expect memories to come flooding back to me? I don’t know. For all I knew, she could be home right now, and when I step back through my strangely unlocked door, I see her, and think she is nothing more than an intruder. How would she think, how would she cry, if she knew I could not remember her? I was craving literally any change in the timbre and mood of the story. Some new piece of information, some interaction that puts things in a different context (even just a slightly different context). The above paragraphs are the sort of thing that I would have deleted, or condensed into a sentence or two. Eventually, we do get a change of pace because the narrator goes to a therapist! Except now we get to sit through a verbal explanation of the same stuff we just read about for several hundred words. With the addition of a terrible therapist's commentary. I gather the therapist is written as intentionally incompetent, but that really just sort of hardens the brick wall your protag was already beating his head against. This was, once again, an opportunity to expand on or develop the central problem! You didn't do that though! It would be really hard for me to guess at what you were going for. The final line, where is house is "as empty and secure" as he left it implies that this is someone who has issues getting attached, or maybe he kept a lover so much at a distance that he eventually suburban-magical-realismed her out of his life. But I just don't know, because the story spends so much time languishing in the same feelings. Story rating: 
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Nov 27, 2019 05:18
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Chili posted:Just a quick reminder to all story starters in thunderstone christmas! Get your half in so your closers have time to finish things off! So far, only one has been submitted and passed along to a closer. Quoting for the new page
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Dec 7, 2019 00:15
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In, gimme that sweet sweet chemistry pls
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Dec 16, 2019 23:05
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crabrock posted:chemistry is the most boring science. in. 
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Dec 17, 2019 00:39
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prompt: Wittig reaction: Important process (read: also used industrially) to make unsaturated (double) bonds, using a special phosphorus compound as a reagent. Staggered Conformation 1200 words Mitch looks down at his left hand, still surprised to find the pale band of skin where his wedding ring used to sit. Ripples of grief spread outward from his chest; Ashley was good to him for their four years together, had smiled through her tears when he explained why he couldn’t be her husband anymore. She supported him when he came out to his family, helped him through the more obscure machinations of divorce. Mitch’s gratitude to his ex-wife, his best friend, is overwhelming, but so far he’s only repaid her with choked up thanks. The train hums forward on its tracks, its route unchanged in spite of the upheaval in Mitch’s world, carrying him to an office where nothing changes, nothing matters. The buoyant swell of freedom he felt when he first came out is deflating, leaving in its wake a yawning emptiness of the soul. The compartment fills up with commuters, more people piling in at every stop. Someone flops into the seat across from Mitch, and though he doesn’t look directly at them, he perceives lots of loud colors and patterns in his periphery, smells incense and weed. He sighs, reflexively annoyed by the existence of this whimsical being at the edge of his field of vision. Why, he thinks, can’t they just suffer in monotony like everyone else? Then Mitch is airborne, hurled forward at the speed of a moving train— —until a fraction of a second later he collides with something warm: a body. The passengers scream. The train’s wheels scream on the tracks. Everything goes still. Passengers who were standing pick themselves up off the floor, some silent, some hysterical with tears. Mitch pushes himself off the person on whom he’s landed, getting his first good look at the colorful individual in the opposite seat. They are slight of build, their face a delicate blend of masculine and feminine—or maybe something fey, something altogether outside the polarity of gender. A mess of bright blue hair hangs just to the tips of their ears. Their eyes are forest green and wild with shock. “It’s okay,” they tell Mitch, half-smiling in spite of the panic in their eyes. “We’re okay.” Mitch realizes he’s breathing quite hard, shaking from the adrenaline of impact. An automated voice speaks serenely over the intercom: Please do not attempt to de-board until directed by emergency personnel. There’s a burst of angry, fearful chatter among the passengers, which quickly subsides when a real human voice comes crackling over the compartment speakers. “Folks, this is the conductor. Sorry about the sudden stop, but there was some kinda auto collision on the tracks ahead and we got word just in time to hit the breaks. Emergency responders are on the way, but if anyone is having a serious medical emergency…” Mitch repeats after blue-hair: “We’re okay.” He grins. “We didn’t crash. We’re okay!” Blue-hair nods, then winces. “Yeah, man. Next time though could you collide into me at slightly less than train-speed?” Mitch cackles like a hyena, then cuts himself short. “Sorry. You’re probably not being funny. I’m just. This is—” he gestures around at the compartment, the pained and pensive huddles of people. “Ha! Look. My hands are shaking. My hands don’t shake. Except when I came out to my family. God, this is just like…” He trails off, abruptly ashamed of his babbling. “No, I was definitely being funny,” says blue-hair. “It’s how I cope with being collided into at the speed of a train.” “Are you—I mean, where does it hurt? Does it feel serious?” Mitch is powerfully conscious of his own uselessness. He couldn’t be there for Ashley, doesn’t even know how to properly thank her for remaining poised as he gently broke her heart, and there’s certainly nothing he can do for this blue-haired stranger. “I’m no doctor but I’m pretty sure I’m not dead.” They flash him another half-smile. “Don’t freak out man, I know it’s not your fault. Also: grats on coming out to your family. That’s like, a whole Thing.” Mitch looks away from their mossy eyes. “Yeah. Well. A little irrelevant right now.” Blue-hair shrugs, then winces again. “We’re in emergency purgatory. There’s nothing we’re supposed to be doing, except wait for this situation to turn into a different situation.” “Oh poo poo, I don’t have to go to work,” Mitch says. “I’m not even going to call. I’ll just turn up tomorrow like, I was in a train emergency.” The buoyant freedom balloon inside him reinflates, just a little. “Good for you. I’m going to miss a crucial meeting.” Mitch raises an eyebrow. “Are you being funny at me again?” “I’m always incredibly funny. But no. I’m trying to make a big sale to some corporate building—I do art, obviously.” Blue-hair gestures at their eccentric getup. “This was gonna be the biggest sale of my career. A few of us have been vying for it for, gently caress, like, a year? The local commercial art scene is ruthless, just a hellscape of art Judases.” Something about this rings familiar to Mitch. He fishes out his phone, opens his work email, navigates to a subfolder labeled Pointless Mass Emails. And there it is, a multi-week back and forth about renovations in the office building’s lobby, including a rigorous debate over what sort of art should decorate the cavernous white space. “So,” he says as he skims the messages. “Would you be...Alex Keen or—” he doesn’t manage to stifle a laugh. “Or Finley Lennon Moon.” Blue-hair gives him a look. “You don’t know me, but I sure hope you don’t peg me as a ‘Finley Lennon Moon’. Christ.” “Nice to meet you, Alex.” “Nice to meet you, Mitchell,” Alex says, glancing pointedly at the access badge hanging from his belt loop. “It’s been kinda awkward because I’ve known your name for the last, like, five minutes, but then we sort of dove straight into the gay art woe stuff and names seemed a little trite.” Mitch makes himself meet Alex’s eyes, feels an echo of the adrenal rush of their earlier collision. He hears himself say, “I think we can help each other out.” Alex frowns. “I look out for myself. I don’t need a sugar daddy, I’m not your manic pixie dream queer.” “No, no-no-no,” Mitch says, panicking. “I know the lady you were going to meet with—Jill. We do cocktails. I can advocate for you, especially given...this.” He gestures around the chaotic compartment again, hands steadier this time. Alex narrows their eyes. “And what’s my side of the bargain?” “You do a piece for me. For my ex-wife. To thank her for letting me go.” Alex’s face softens. “Yeah. Yep. Okay.” They pause, seeming to search for words. “Sorry. It’s a lovely world, you know? And a few minutes ago you were just some guy on a train.” “We’ll call it payback for me slamming into you at the speed of a moving train.” Mitch extends his hand. “Deal?” “Deal,” Alex says, and they shake on it, just as the sirens and flashing lights arrive, just as emergency responders come to ferry them out of emergency purgatory.
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Dec 22, 2019 22:58
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Mercedes posted:SH, my dearest friend. My confidant. Dare I say, my soul mate (sorry mojo). Make me the happiest man alive? After you, mi amour~
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Dec 24, 2019 22:44
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thunderdome has taken me some weirdass places this thing we're doing here is just weird and dumb enough to be important, and it doesn't exist without the people who participate. so thanks, all of you.
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Dec 26, 2019 01:31
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Doctor Zero posted:This is private thought right? Stories on the archive require an archive account to view. If you take your story out of the thread, it will only be viewable to people with archive accounts. Like djeser said, goldmined threads are generally public. if this thread doesn't get goldmined i'm doing a mutiny at sebmojo
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Jan 1, 2020 23:20
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