You should've taken the bribe. Cryptic for $5!
But yeah ... exchanges like that are highly unethical and prohibited by DCI rules.
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- echoe
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Member for 19 years, 3 months, and 13 days
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You can actually look it up! [For the record, I'm not going to since I'm lazy and am not writing a current article for ... anywhere, but I think it's happened twice. Twice ever. That's just what I remember offhand.]
Things like this:
I'm confused as to what you're saying here. Is the futile fight that will never be won the fight for LGBT rights? (I would say that's clearly wrong, personally.) Is the oppression LGBT people feel somehow more real to you than the oppression that other minorities currently feel???
And this:
... I'm not sure what this sentence is supposed to do, really. In general, things like these just make it feel like a lot of the article was written off of the top of your head. As you said to Talore, the deadline was short. It looks like it had the desired effect anyways on your readers, though, so that's good.
i suppose, in some ways, talking out what i've been going through has helped. poem-bound or not. i don't know if i've been writing poems, the last two, three years, as much as i've been narrating my life, as it blossoms and expands. but one would assume that in some ways that's a good thing.
i went through being a mod for the site! and then being demodded because i told people that digital river has windows 7 downloads if you have a valid cd key. ... still utterly ridiculous, but whatever.
i haven't played magic seriously since ... maybe 2008? the game is old now, withered. the rooms that people play in are crowded with the musk of odor and disgust. the people i used to play with, who i at one time considered friends, have generally revealed themselves to be shallow caricatures of people, and the majority of the people i've seen in game stores are similar. mtgo is safer, more fun; oddly it's more acceptable to be worse there, so people are generally nicer. i'm not sure how that works, but i haven't been to a magic game in real life in forever, and i'm pretty sure that the small joy i'd get from playing the game for ~30 minutes out of the hour would, as always, be outweighed by the odd feeling of being different. being unable to talk to people, because they want to talk, weirdly enough, about star wars. losing interest in the grizzly-bear-of-the-month and why it's slightly better than the ten other grizzly bears that have existed.
of course, it's always felt that way, but i used to pretend, before. pretending's pretty terrible. i suppose that again, if you create enough silver-tongued lies, you stab aimlessly into the darkness enough that you arrive at some variant of the truth. thank god i'm there, at least. i'm so self-focused right now that i haven't the foggiest if any of you are there, but i hope that you are, regardless of what it would mean for you.
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you probably are. i have weird issues.
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i think i'll still get pm's if people send them. i would be up for a sort of writer's email list or something (though in my experience this sort of thing never works). this contest has been in many ways my only writing for the last two years, as my job took my thought and then, as i retrieved it back, my life opened up its gaping maw and decided, evermore, to swallow.
i've written a lot of poems during this contest. (don't i have the most wins? a function of showing up the most.) i never really got a feeling that people were on my wavelength, poems floating past people as a sort of divine miscommunication. probably ten of them were good. on the other hand, if none of them were really understood, which is likely the case ... then they were all terrible. because what is the purpose of art, if not to express something?
the one that people 'liked the most', from what i saw, was not one of them. opinions are always so fickle.
i was even accused of plagiarism, once. (! how DARE you write something not exactly like what you've written before !)
it's been a strange ride. we lost other people, too, and, like most of you, odds are high that i'll never talk to them again.
not /lost/, just gone. but, having experienced both ... i wonder, sometimes, what the difference is.
blippy, you can't vote for /all/ the poems.
nothing really grabbed me but I suppose zelderex did the most.
rub that sun into the soil,
toil makes the fertile grow
and though the ground was alabaster,
faster, faster!, went the boughs
and cracking ground and failing warnings
augured morning's blinding sun,
it's done, the ground has metamorphized
into what it was -
a prized meadow with ugly flowers ...
but though they glower,
the clouds are having fun
From what I understand the Thinkpad Edge doesn't share build quality with Lenovo's normal Thinkpad line. They can be fairly shoddy.
I'm just a bit tired of constantly voting for you because I think your poem's the best, hehe. Don't worry about it.
tell me how you are - wait. why does anybody care? why should they?
why are you intruding on other people?
your very presence ruins theirs, makes them less special --
and if only you weren't yourself other people could be themselves more fully,
or could stop feeling sorry and disgusted for you.
at you.
eventually you learn that you don't control others.
some of us learn it early,
some of us learn it late.
but when you don't control everybody you also can't be controlled by them --
and
it is a selfish thing
but selfish things are also good.
i wonder if i will be social,
if i will stop hiding my face like it is a dead, diseased thing,
if i will go out at all,
if i will talk to people, or
if i will hide further.
i wonder who will read this.
i wonder who cares.
all it is is solipcism.
give me your eyeballs,
give them all to me,
and i will give you crap
A/N: I wrote this as a capstone to a game of sorts three years ago. I think it works better without a title during reading, but if i had to title it i would title it 'solipcism', have an entry in the TOC, and then no title on the page.
it's really just a bit of scifi. I put primary colors in each of the paragraphs as loose themes. green/gray/red/gold, the idea is that the whole thing kind of moves with you, it's in waves. sort of a cyclical world story, only tied up in this idea of a "treasure revealed" every time this happens and a large group of people killing each other to get it.
if you'd like, you can draw allusions to the gold rush, i suppose. very strong connection. but that wasn't intentional
green waves of grass and high tides of outlaws roiled in the desert sun,
specks of orange foiling the poseur's statement that they'd conquered nature,
as they all waited for the humidity to get to that specific point
where it was so hot the water boiled up from the sea like steam,
and the Fog covered the town like a blanket smothered in its coziness.
there is a saying that a watched pot never boils,
but the water bubbled, being contained instead by a large crater approximately four hundred feet wide and moving like a pack of animals,
ancient hot springs taking the form of volcanoes,
and all was gray;
we paint in primary colors when we cannot see,
and the emptiness inherent in it caused emptiness
in the people who were out,
emptiness only filled with terrible things,
those who were new to it flailing aimlessly at nothing
while those who knew held their breath
and moved cautiously,
tracing long, swooping paths around the inside of the perimeter of the void
and with a hair trigger
snapping -
it was a long time before the smoke started to clear,
moving outwards in a ring of wildfire,
but even then the red of struggle was visible everywhere;
it'd painted faces and chins,
sometimes arms but never legs (on account of the protective clothing),
and more than a couple eyes bloodshot with sickness
far beyond what even wealth could cure;
they gathered, the ten of them,
and as the crimson ocher faded as it spread,
eyes variously gleamed.
for the gold of the center was upon them,
gleaming like the sun itself (and twice as large again, from this vantage);
the overseers could view them again,
so nothing was evermore allowed,
aside from bathing in the gold and letting it fill you with what some might call knowledge,
and what feeling is ever better than that of a person who has everything they could never get?
To be honest, though ... I guess that's the only one I'm voting for this week. I couldn't get into much.
@Zelderex: It's not particularly deep, and that was partially the point. It's light, the dawn after a storm, you could say?