... where we have to make sure the readers are having fun ... that could be interesting. Probably a failure, though.
Seriously, though, fun is what mattered to me when reading these. I had a fun with a few -- and who didn't have fun with the "calls for midgets" line? -- but it's hard to escape the feeling that some writers were submitting pieces as part of some "oh, deadline approaching; need to submit something ... quick!" mentality. That doesn't scream fun to me, and to me it shows in the writing/texts. I think you'll agree that in the texts I picked out in my first reply to you there is fun happening. Writers who had ideas and who said, "Hey ... what if?"
I loved those vapid 80s HP "What if ..." commercials.
And I hope I didn't give the impression that I considered this a "literary contest" -- but don't think I think formatting, linguistic skills, and copyediting belong to "literary merit." ana gave us a month for this; things had better be, if not polished, at least 'cleaned up.'
As for 'fun,' I would have liked a bit more "creative rule breaking" this time around. And I would have really liked Kellnerin's -- perhaps tongue in cheek -- network and LDAP server story. A lot.
_"The german quoting guy is a little bit out there." (fleece)[ Parent ]
But hey, you're playing the part of the jerk, so I'll play the part of the victim-of-jerk and say: your critiques are not only wrong-headed, but hurt the very nature of "events" like this. Maybe you're reading too much into "challenge" or "fun" or maybe you're just a vile fuck. In which case, I specialize in vile fucks. I have a great repertoire of tools and accessories that are designed and tuned specifically to deal with vile fucks.
Aside from name calling and the occasional urge for violent hyperbole as a venting or coping mechanism, I've never really understood criticism that wasn't technical in nature. Mean spirited crap doesn't help anyone, including the critic. If you are, actually, as serious about our writing ability as you seem to be, maybe something more constructive would serve everyone better.
Not that coddling is entirely necessary, either, but you seem to be one of many intelligent people I've run into in life who consider cruelty and honesty to be one and the same.
So, guy, what'll it be? How can we help you alleviate your boredom, beyond response to the numerous impersonal jabs leveled at our untalented, wastes of disk space?--------------------------------- "You bring the weasel, I'll bring the whiskey." - kellnerin[ Parent ]
... some stories I wanted to print them out, read them again, and write notes in red in the margins. Edit them. Offer suggestions, and send them back. I used to do that for a living, but not for fiction (or intentional fiction, at least). Or just sit down with the author and figure out what was being said or intended (the author is dead! screams Michel).
You know what I look forward to now? The Postmortems. I want all the authors to relate their inspiration for these stories. I want to hear about how "a turn of phrase became an excuse for something else, but dangnabbit purple prose or not, it's my language and I loved it too much to cut it, I had too much fun it it, and I'm glad I took part in the WFC." I've have created more than my share of purple prose and mangled metaphors.
As for mistaking or conflating cruelty and honesty, not only do I not confuse those, I am baffled by the idea that anyone who has read the shit I write could ever conclude that. Perhaps too much is being read into one possibly over-harsh but hardly cruel review of one of the stories.
Take that, victim of the jerk.
You'll get no postmortem from me, jerk.
In re: cruelty, seriously? You don't get any tone off of your original post? That whole thing smacks of someone who wants the authors to be put down, harshly, for even trying to pretend they could write in public. That sort of tone (or stance or whatever the proper term is) does not help anyone except you. Which, I guess, is fine. It's a free country, sort of.--------------------------------- "You bring the weasel, I'll bring the whiskey." - kellnerin[ Parent ]
... Gedvondur said (von Dur, Ged, Citations: Policing net Traffic, 2003), this isn't a cite-the-quote-pissing contest, but it's easy to see lots of things that are, alone or in the larger context, meant not as put-downs but suggestions. Questions and observations. Such as my comment about being confused by the use of "you" in Hello, What's This? as well as a similar issue in Broken Glass (both in WFC the Seventh, Hulver Press, 2007) regarding the mentioning of when the soda bottles were mentioned as bottles. Even my comments on Mother's Bible, which were arguably my harshest, concluded with how I thought the story would work.
And comments about fixing spelling, punctuation -- I recommend you consider the MLA Handbook, 7th Edition, or the Chicago Manual of Style, 16th Edition or later as your point of reference --, and the like were not tied to any sort of "hey idiot, what's wrong with you?" vibe (excepting the 'quotation marks' in Mother's Bible -- we had the same issue in WFC6 [as you're aware, Greenspun and Balmer covered this extensively in Eunuchs and Unicode: Microsoftization and Internationalization, Donutwheel Press, 2002]).
And the harshest and most obnoxious comments (of which there are many, and which any educated reader can see are primarily in a mix of iambs, trochees, and dactyls -- you are educmacated, aren't you?) tend to be meta-comments or asides that are for my own amusement and clearly have nothing to do with the story under consideration, and while this makes such comments extraneous in a 'review' (and I never claimed to write good reviews), there's little evidence that such comments are meant to belittle the crowd, belittle the authors, etc. I think my own self-belittlement is obvious. YMMV.
And "re: cruelty, seriously?" -- "That whole thing smacks of someone who wants the authors to be put down, harshly, for even trying to pretend they could write in public." Oh come on. It doesn't take much to figure out who at least half the authors of given stories are and guess if not the author-work match at least that a certain author entered something for many of the rest, and I know as well as you do who these folks are and that they can write. That information alone makes your suggestion strange; were that to be the tone taken from the post, it could only be understood as a 'pose' or 'affect.'
Jerk-Victim.
Most criticism of my work makes me want to improve my work.
Yours does not.
There! This has actually been a fascinating set of threads, regardless of the jerk-like intent or quality of my posts. Really, in my job I don't get to ponder the nature of criticism. I just get nailed for fucking up. Maybe that's the key here.--------------------------------- "You bring the weasel, I'll bring the whiskey." - kellnerin[ Parent ]
/me pats blixco on the head ...
"You didn't fuck up," says the asshole. "And since you didn't fuck up, you didn't get nailed for it." The asshole is a pedant that way.
"But what about all that criticism -- only from you -- that doesn't make me want to improve my work?"
"You have several ways to approach it," replies the asshole, settling down in his chair for a text box of didactic badness. "Nobody takes this asshole seriously anyway, so why should you? I'm not saying that you do; I'm just covering the bases." At this the asshole held up one finger. "Secondly," he continued, putting up a second, "assuming yours is the one I think it is -- and that will be revealed at the end of voting -- then the constructive criticism (which would have probably come across as condescending and been unwelcome ['I think this would work better,' 'Why does ...?' 'Did you think of ...?']) I had in mind would have been too much for an already bloated series of reviews."
"I object. That's not really a good excuse," points out the injured party.
"You are entirely correct," replies the asshole, putting down his fingers after realizing he won't get to points three and four. "But said 'reviews' were also prefaced with a reference to traditional hatred in similar reviews and the tradition of every $INSERTTHING sucking, such as operating systems or computers, with the addendum that some just suck less than others." The asshole took a breath and considered his considerable verbiage. He then stood, showed out the victim of the jerk, and once the door was closed contemplated the lonely New Diary Entry text box that demanded his attention.
We draw straws to determine the authors...max of three. Those three write out some sort of story..fiction, news, bio, journal, whatever we decide on. Then the stories show up on a web site, and you + any other editor-types can show us how it's supposed to be done!--------------------------------- "You bring the weasel, I'll bring the whiskey." - kellnerin[ Parent ]
... if, as in the regular *FCs -- or at least the WFCs -- cheating is encouraged. Basic proofreading and copyediting would be tedious, but truly twisting and even butchering something, editing as extreme text makeover, translation, that could be fun. And why would it be for "you + any other editor-types"? Unless "editor-types" includes just about anyone here who has an interest in the *FCs.
