Impper posted:
no you're not, you're posting nonsense that is so unspecific that i honestly can't tell which character you find problematic. i'm sorry man but it's Bullshit, and this is you acting superior instead of trying to help somebody out or whatever. your comments don't make sense in the context of the post you quoted either

i would like to submit to the board that the type of criticism one gets about their work is always rooted in the work itself. if you think people arent making any sense when they criticize your stuff, its very likely the cause is that your stuff isnt making sense either. honestly, i still dont know what the point of the scene is, why its there, what it accomplished, what it meant and a part of the confusion stems from not having read the rest of the story but a llot of it is just well, incoherent writing. if i had to come up with a title for the scene i couldn't do it cause i dont really know what the major thing was. maybe it was the soviet story? but i dont know why the dude decided to tell the story then and there, i dont know what the girl thought of it, i dont know how hearing that story changed her perceptions of the dudes, i dont know if thats the first time milos has heard the guy talk about stuff like that, i dont know how milos' perception of the dude changed after the story. i dont know if the dude regretted telling the story or not, i dont know if the dude told the story to the girl or both the girl and milos, i dont know if this is how milos and the dude always chat.

like she hears that huge rambling mess of a monologue and comments 'i like you guys' that just doesnt follow at all. we need more. descriptions of her face after hearing the thing, descriptions of narrators take on her reaction, something way more natural as the answer and if that story is indeed the major thing in the scene, then you must must must must must explain to the reader what the effect of the major thing was, what it accomplished. if you dont, then im left with a thing happening but having no idea how it affected the characters. and thats incredibly confusing and frustrating and it makes the whole thing feel like a huge waste of time. so have the plot be as rambling as you like, thats your prerogative, and its not any worse of an approach than any other. but every scene needs closure. just a simple line or two at the end.

"what a pair of grade a weirdoes", she thought.
or
milos pulled over. he looked at her and knew that during the short ride they had lost her with their gay ramblings. she was texting someone. he was certain it was either the police or her boyfriend.
or
he couldnt have been happier. she felt like a natural addition to the group. god knows it was rare enough for guys like them to find a girl willing to listen to their banter, much rarer to find one who enjoyed it. milos shut the engine and the simple fact that she hadnt fled out the car before it had even stopped like they always do, made him think of the future. and how right now, it felt like he had one.
or
anything really that shows that the scene had an effect, that it was worth having that it moved the characters in some direction.

AmericanNazbro posted:

deadken posted:
heres the third chapter from a thing i just started. please let me know exactly how bad & gay it is

Imagine you could see the world as it really is.
To do this you need to strip away every illusion. First there are all the conceptual entities that don’t really exist: a country has no physical reality, its flag is just a strip of cloth, its borders are, however historically justified, arbitrary. Neither is there really any such thing as the family, the state, the church, the judicial system, the literary canon, the working class, ethnicity, religion, ideology; get rid of them all, forget them, they’re not real. There are other, more fundamental fictions. We can start with the most obvious. There are no colours; colour is invented by our minds in response to different wavelengths of light. The real world is monochrome. There is no sound, only vibrations in the air. There is no light, only a ceaseless torrent of subatomic particles.
Everything we have a name for is false as well. A rose isn’t a rose, it’s carbon and hydrogen and oxygen arranged in various combinations. A mountain isn’t a mountain, it’s a protuberance in the Earth’s crust. Your mother isn’t your mother, she’s an ape; once you were the same ape, but the past is not real. Your emotions, your opinions, your desires, your soul: they’re just sparks and secretions in your brain.
You can’t really talk of discrete objects any more either. Everything is made of atoms, and atoms are made mostly of empty space in which a few pinpricks of energy shine. They’re never still; individually they dance in jittering little orbits, in their multitudes they flow in great sweeping arcs. The hand that holds the pen is a loose mass of these quivering particles, so is the pen itself, so is the wall to one side, so is the air that surrounds everything, they all fade into a single oscillation. An inanimate object is visible only as a point of intensity; reacting constantly with the matter that surrounds it, its edges are hard to discern. A living being is almost invisible: matter and energy is always flowing in and out, it’s not so much a thing as a gyre in the field of specks that surrounds it.
Life and death have no meaning either. When an organism dies, its vibrations and radiations don’t cease, they just become more diffuse. The heat pours out, the saprophages scurry in. Just as before, its particles are constantly being exchanged with its surroundings. It never really stops, its flows spread out across the world, there was no ‘it’ to begin with.
This is the real world. Everything else is a fiction. You are now standing in a vast, dark space, dotted with countless tiny points of light that swirl and swarm, constantly, with no cause or reason beyond the purely physical. It’s cold and stark and infinite. You squint at the buzzing particles, trying to see them as something other than what they are, trying to get them to coalesce back into recognisable objects so you can once again feel the sunshine on your face and the grass beneath your feet. Too late. It’s impossible now. You have abandoned all illusions.

how do people write those squiggly lines over posts, so i can help you edit this.

i think the direction would have been better if you opened with "strip away every bacon strip" and then segued that into the fact that beggin' strips are the Real, while canadian bacon, and so forth, are merely a simulacrum. but i dunno, that's just me and my food centered thought process might be due to the fact the hyper-exaggerated Tom character t-pain writes about is written with my real life in mind

i hope this heelps. i'm going to go poach some eggs.

<Ask> Me about Poaching Eggs

babyfinland posted:
haha thats pretty good, you have a good voice for the character. hes eminently despicable and familiar (i.e. people will read it and be like oh man i know someone just like this, or if they are that person they will totally get it)

i know youre being ironic but thats basically the case, this bit comes from the point of view of a character whos basically an overblown caricature of the worst aspects of myself

deadken posted:
heres the third chapter from a thing i just started. please let me know exactly how bad & gay it is

Imagine you could see the world as it really is.
To do this you need to strip away every illusion. First there are all the conceptual entities that don’t really exist: a country has no physical reality, its flag is just a strip of cloth, its borders are, however historically justified, arbitrary. Neither is there really any such thing as the family, the state, the church, the judicial system, the literary canon, the working class, ethnicity, religion, ideology; get rid of them all, forget them, they’re not real. There are other, more fundamental fictions. We can start with the most obvious. There are no colours; colour is invented by our minds in response to different wavelengths of light. The real world is monochrome. There is no sound, only vibrations in the air. There is no light, only a ceaseless torrent of subatomic particles.
Everything we have a name for is false as well. A rose isn’t a rose, it’s carbon and hydrogen and oxygen arranged in various combinations. A mountain isn’t a mountain, it’s a protuberance in the Earth’s crust. Your mother isn’t your mother, she’s an ape; once you were the same ape, but the past is not real. Your emotions, your opinions, your desires, your soul: they’re just sparks and secretions in your brain.
You can’t really talk of discrete objects any more either. Everything is made of atoms, and atoms are made mostly of empty space in which a few pinpricks of energy shine. They’re never still; individually they dance in jittering little orbits, in their multitudes they flow in great sweeping arcs. The hand that holds the pen is a loose mass of these quivering particles, so is the pen itself, so is the wall to one side, so is the air that surrounds everything, they all fade into a single oscillation. An inanimate object is visible only as a point of intensity; reacting constantly with the matter that surrounds it, its edges are hard to discern. A living being is almost invisible: matter and energy is always flowing in and out, it’s not so much a thing as a gyre in the field of specks that surrounds it.
Life and death have no meaning either. When an organism dies, its vibrations and radiations don’t cease, they just become more diffuse. The heat pours out, the saprophages scurry in. Just as before, its particles are constantly being exchanged with its surroundings. It never really stops, its flows spread out across the world, there was no ‘it’ to begin with.
This is the real world. Everything else is a fiction. You are now standing in a vast, dark space, dotted with countless tiny points of light that swirl and swarm, constantly, with no cause or reason beyond the purely physical. It’s cold and stark and infinite. You squint at the buzzing particles, trying to see them as something other than what they are, trying to get them to coalesce back into recognisable objects so you can once again feel the sunshine on your face and the grass beneath your feet. Too late. It’s impossible now. You have abandoned all illusions.

ehh, it's good on a basic level, reading sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph. it's thought out, i certainly wouldnt put it down. but its also well-tread territory, said more or less in every work that addresses the mind and what have you. part of me also resists it, sweeping "illusions" and brain-thoughts and stuff over what you're trying to say, acknowledging my being in the form of the weight i'm exerting and the aches in my back even as i read what you wrote. also at the end it's really not too late, since idk what was trying to happen or w.e

Impper posted:
ehh, it's good on a basic level, reading sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph. it's thought out, i certainly wouldnt put it down. but its also well-tread territory, said more or less in every work that addresses the mind and what have you. part of me also resists it, sweeping "illusions" and brain-thoughts and stuff over what you're trying to say, acknowledging my being in the form of the weight i'm exerting and the aches in my back even as i read what you wrote. also at the end it's really not too late, since idk what was trying to happen or w.e

well youre kinda meant to resist it a bit.... youre right that its hardly new ground tho, people been making this point since, like, kant..... im trying to think of ways to make it more novel, maybe directly describing the process by which illusions be gettin swept away, make dat shit more visceral, whatever....

in other news ~~~I JUST WROTE A SEX SCENE~~~ in which the man fakes orgasm.... though the amphetamines are starting to wear off so i dont know if its any good