Jump to content

ubernym

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    81

  • Joined

  • Last visited

 Content Type 

Posts posted by ubernym

    WCT - The Writing Competition Thread [Short Story Results]

    in Competitions

    Posted

    If you were truly disciplined you'd have been around for the other competitions too! :wink:

    (Or submitted a short story for freeform...)

    I freely admit that I am an undisciplined goofball. I thought about doing a short story for freeform, but it seemed wrong somehow. I also tried writing a couple essays, but I was never satisfied with them and so I didn't submit anything. So I did the CMC competition instead.

    Feel free to slap my undisciplined face, I'm sure I deserve it. :tomatoface:

    PRC119: Embark on a Journey of Re-Orchestration! (Tales of Symphonia)

    in Competitions

    Posted

    I mostly use Logic now (I'm on a mac) but I've used FL in the past and it's definitely a capable app. The problem is that it has a learning curve just like any other app, but FL's learning curve encourages certain bad habits. This is probably because it was originally a glorified drum machine. Underneath its powerful new features, it still bears much of that original framework and if you don't take the time to learn it, all you'll end up creating is cell-based, mechanical quasi-techno.

    That's how I see it anyway.

    WCT - The Writing Competition Thread [Short Story Results]

    in Competitions

    Posted

    Heh, maybe to some people I seem to take this writing stuff too seriously. Like Imagery, I view my writing as craft, and I'm very critical of my own writing. I've been paid to write (nonfiction), so it's not just a hobby for me, and I hope to someday be able to write full-time for a living.

    So that line is important to me, especially because I think a lot of contemporary published poetry is bollocks. That's not a fair thing for me to say, since I don't read much contemporary poetry. My favorites are guys like John Dunne, Walt Whitman and Robert Frost, and maybe a little Shakespeare. Bukowski is pretty good, but damn he was one depressed mug.

    Maybe my poetry standards are too high, and maybe I come off as a literary snob to some. I'm ok with that, because I don't enter these competitions to win or to be the best or to compete with others (how crude). I find in these competitions an excellent framework for challenging myself and forcing me to grow, sometimes in unexpected ways.

    The last competition was a great example. I decided to enter at the very last minute. I didn't have anything written down, and I didn't have a single story idea. I was experiencing writer's block.

    I decided I had to do the competition, no matter how bad my entry was. I started making up titles, stringing words together in my head. I came up with: The Phantom Poet of Zanzibar. I had no idea what it was about, but that was the title. I forced myself to write something based on that half-formed idea. It was revelatory, inspiring. I didn't care if I won or not, I didn't even vote for myself.

    So on the one hand, I take my writing seriously and personally, I don't need to win against someone else. The competition is a great motivation, but it's not the end for me. The end is what I see for myself. When I talk about lines between art and pretense, it's a personal definition.

    And for me, poetry has always been a weakness, where the line wavers and is translucent.

    WCT - The Writing Competition Thread [Short Story Results]

    in Competitions

    Posted

    Yes, they are much appreciated as always, Doulifee! And ubernym, you'll just have to try your best to earn yourself a partner to that thing this go around, won't you? :-D

    Heh, I'll certainly give it the old college try. I've always struggled with the poetry thing, you know? There's a very thin line between art and pretentiousness, and I have a harder time knowing where it is with poetry. :?

    WCT - The Writing Competition Thread [Short Story Results]

    in Competitions

    Posted

    :oops: I really didn't expect to win. I didn't even vote for myself, because I was unsatisfied with my own story.

    But a hearty THANK YOU to those of you who liked my story. It's a big boost for me to see others enjoy my work, and it keeps me motivated.

    More importantly, congratulations are in order to the runners up, but also to everyone who participated.

    I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm happiest when I'm creating something, whether it's a story or a song or a LEGO spaceship. These competitions motivate me to create, and that makes me happy, so thanks for spreading the happiness. And thanks to Imagery for making it possible. I can't wait for the next one!

    Now critiques* are definitely in order. I'd love to hear what you liked or didn't like about my story, and I'll share some of my thoughts about yours:

    Imagery:

    Great tone, interesting concept. The plot arc feels more like a vignette than a story (so does mine, I think). I really like the narrative's restraint, which leaves much to the imagination. It does make it a bit difficult to read, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Again, this feels like part of a larger framework, and that's the only unsatisfying thing about it: at the end I felt like I wanted more context, more information. Perhaps that was your intention, and if so, Bravo.

    just64helpin:

    If there was a beautiful fantasy world where TV stations aired kick ass Saturday-morning cartoon version of the twilight zone, your story would not be out of place there. There's a great Dickian vibe going on here (as in one of my favorite writers, Philip K. Dick). I like that you tried to present the viewpoint of the Stick, but sometimes it was a little hard to get my head around, as in the following sentence: 'Though her eyes could not be seen, the Stick could tell that Shella had closed them.' I just don't get that. I thought you were trying to say that the Stick just doesn't observe people in the same way that we do, but I was never confident in my interpretation of the sentence. It's a troubling sentence to me. Other than that, I think your descriptions are great and you were able to do a lot with the characters in the short space. Great work.

    Barnsalot:

    Interesting story. Dark, obviously. I don't have a lot of complaints about the story as a whole, it just didn't resonate with me. It felt...soulless. This is fitting, to be sure, but also makes it hard to enjoy in my opinion. This is an aesthetics thing, and doesn't reflect on your merits as a writer. I also felt some of your descriptions were a little heavy-handed. For example: 'the slowly methodical, high-pitched beeping of the cardiogram' seems overwrought. Perhaps it could be rendered more simply, and yet still convey the image: 'the slow, high-pitch beep of the cardiogram' works better to me. This is only my opinion, but the the words 'slowly methodical' weight down your description and take to long to get to the point. That's just an example, but a good tip to remember is to look at your story and ask yourself which words are absolutely necessary, and which are not. Kill any word that isn't essential.

    GA Jedi Knight:

    The first paragraph of your story reads like the intro to a space sim. But this is a short story, not a video game. In this case, the background information isn't necessary to plot, and just ends up weighing it down. Remember, your first paragraph introduces the tone of your story. With your original first paragraph, the story seems too juvenile, as if the reader needs help imagining the story. Cut it out and start with opeining line with your dialog. It brings the plot to a faster clip and makes the story more interesting. Beyond that, my critique follows the line in Barnsalots: watch your descriptions.

    Also, this sentence needs help: "The mission was boring, but the subject matter was anything but." Too many buts. Maybe it's just a typo?

    Manic Cinq: I liked your minimalism, but the story was a little confusing too. Too many characters without definition, I got lost easily. I felt like the plot jumped too quickly from point to point. It was like you were trying to write a bedtime story but got caught up in a lot of dialogue that diluted the plot. I felt like you could have spen more time describing the events and less time on the chit-chat of the characters. The story is mainly between Himeko and Rei, the other character don't need so much spotlight. The inclusion of details like 'her robotic sister' and 'testing the conversational abilities of...AI progams' is interesting, but also a little distracting. I think this story has great potential, but needs some tweaking.

    *I present my critiques as food for thought, not the final word. In case it isn't obvious, I subscribe to the Hemingway school of thought, which can be summed up thusly:

    “I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.”

    -Ernest Hemingway

    :nicework: Nice Work Everyone!

    WCT - The Writing Competition Thread [Short Story Results]

    in Competitions

    Posted

    Hello everyone! It's been awhile since I've participated in one of these, but I wanted to do something that forced my creative hand. So I made up a cool-sounding title and then forced myself to come up with a story for it. Here's my result.

    Short Story, Fiction

    The Phantom Poet of Zanzibar

    by J.N. Russell (aka Ubernym)

    Stone Town is gone now. Isn't technology great? The old nukes couldn't hold an irradiated candle to this stuff. 'Bomb' just isn't a big enough word; bombs just blow shit up and lay general waste to their targets.

    But this.

    This was worse, in every possible way. The scientists who came up with it must feel like real assholes now, if they're still alive, and if they still have their minds.

    Me, I'm still alive, but only barely. I still have my mind, too, I think. Maybe I don't? That's the trouble with losing your mind. If it's gone, there's no way you could know that because if you understand that then your mind must not be gone. It's better not to think about it.

    I can't remember how it started, why it started. Doesn't matter now, because pretty much everyone is dead. It's a damned miracle that I'm still around. Dumb luck, you might say.

    It's probably bad luck, considering.

    Considering I seem to be the only one around here. Everything is rubble, or worse. Mush. I have no idea where all the bodies went, which really creeps me out. Where is everyone? I get lonely a lot.

    I'm writing a poem on the only free standing wall around. It's like a pillar of light from heaven, shining down on ground zero. Everything else is dust for miles. Why is this wall still standing? Who cares, it's my canvas now. I'm writing with a thin piece of something black that seems to rub off well, like charcoal. Maybe it's a finger.

    I want to write a poem for the aliens, or the evolved sea-crabs or whatever intelligent life that comes along to replace us. They have to come eventually, and maybe they'll find my poem. Maybe it will tell them something about what happened here.

    But what should I write? I can't write the whole story, not enough room, and not enough charcoal. A poem could work well. I once heard that the German word for poem, gedicht, has roots in the idea of compression, like winding a spring tight.

    This is what I need to do, to wind tight the spring of our undoing. I need to tell my alien successors how we ruined ourselves with our own technology, how we destroyed our entire world because we just couldn't stop building a better mousetrap.

    How should I start? I guess at the beginning. The beginning of what? The end, I guess. That could be awkward, like my survival. It's a non-sequitur, really. Like I said it was dumb luck, how do you explain dumb luck to an alien intelligence?

    I mean, how many people own a hang glider, and how many of them were hang gliding on the last day of our lives? My guess is, not many. Certainly no one I've met, ha ha.

    And even then, how many of them survived the fall? Because I definitely remember being pretty amazed that I had survived. I mean, one minute I'm hang-gliding over this beautiful valley, and in the flash of an instant I'm pummeling to the earth, full-speed. I'm pretty sure I bounced.

    Then I wake up and everything is gone. Gone daddy gone. Rubble or mush or worse. Nothing left, well except for that one wall, way off in the distance.

    I've just realized I don't even know what happened exactly. Just that whatever it was, it must have been really, truly cataclysmic. That's all I have to go on.

    How do I explain it? Would an alien even know what a hang glider is?

    Well, here goes:

    Flying above earth

    I fall

    To ground

    And wake to nothing.

    All is gone, all is destroyed.

    I fall again and sleep

    Forever.

    There's a little charcoal left. Maybe I should draw a picture, a visual aid to help with translation. The aliens are probably smart enough to figure this out, but I'm sure they'll appreciate the tip.

    I think I'll take a nap now.

    "Look over here, Parkinson"

    "What is it?"

    "It's some kind of crude drawing, and an inscription"

    "How old is it?"

    "How the hell should I know? I'm an architect, not an art historian. If this is art."

    "Maybe it's graffiti."

    "It's in Arabic, can you read it?"

    "I know a little, let's see...fly....earth...falling, sleep...I don't know it's probably some religious script."

    "Yeah, look at the drawing: it looks like an angel falling to earth."

    "That makes sense. Maybe it's some proto-Christ archetype or something."

    "Do you even know what you're talking about?"

    "No, not really. Still, we can't risk the chance that it might be a significant find."

    "This could impact the evaluation, better call it in."

    "Hello? Hi yes, it's Parkinson and Levy. We're on assignment in Zanzibar. That's right, we're evaluating the Stone Town file for UNESCO. Yes, it's all wrapping up pretty nicely, the buildings are fantastic. We're pretty confident it's a winner but, well the thing is we found this inscription on the outer wall of the tallest building in the area. It's very interesting and we thought you'd want to know about it. Yes, we've already taken some pictures. We'll put them in the file. Ok, thanks."

    "Well, that's done, let's go have a beer."

    The End.

    Nintendo DS

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    When the DS first came out, I had a strong feeling that there would be a revision, so I waited. Fortunately my suspicions were correct and yesterday I purchased a DS Lite. I love it. I've got New Super Mario Bros., Electroplankton, Brain Age, and Super Mario DS. I'm having a blast. I haven't had this much fun playing handheld since Lumines.

    Electroplankton is such a work of art, by the way.

×
×
  • Create New...