mdk

RPGC #7 -- Loyalty/Resistance Voting AND Discussion

back, and finishing up reviews!

marble's mission

@luclovers

So this is a really interesting story with clever, original magical elements. On the creative side you knocked it out of the park, but the writing is a bit sloppy... in like, a somehow-hard-to-diagnose kind of way. I came to the review ready to lay out my simple fix-all solution, thinking 'yeah I totally saw this a hundred times in that story -- fix this one thing and you're golden!' Then I went back up to copy-paste a paragraph in here and couldn't find one single example of what I thought I saw. Ugh. So then I turned to all the other reviews to see if anyone else saw what I thought I saw -- everybody found different things to work on.

The good news -- you've already got tons of feedback. It all seems valid. I won't rehash any of that. The bad news -- maybe this isn't accurate after all, but I'll talk about it anyway.

What I thought I saw when I was reading, the impression I came away with, was that there's a lot of superfluous explanation. Like you might start a paragraph with 'Marble looked tired,' and then spend a whole paragraph talking about how tired he looked. (that never happened). Forget the crappy example.... style-wise, it felt like the first sentence of each paragraph was, in essence, the whole paragraph, and the rest was just extra -- almost like an academic paper, where you have a thesis statement and then the rest is proving how right your thesis was.

I honestly don't know if that was the right impression to come away with on your story. But here's the take-away -- you have incredible creativity and storytelling powers, but you're not presenting them with your own style yet. Compare to "Quests of the Glorious Leader." QUESTS is all about style -- it's a near-flawless style showoff. Even though the creative elements -- the plot, the characters, the action, etc. -- in QUESTS are all sorta insignificant, the story works because it's all tied together in this clever presentation. It's an effective creative voice -- I didn't get any sense of your voice here.

I did get to see your fantasy world. Your fantasy world is amazing. Freaking brilliant. If you can develop your own way of sharing that -- your own style, your own voice -- you're gonna do great things.

this is a whole lot of words and it doesn't feel all that helpful, and I'm very sorry about that! On top of being late.... Sincere apologies. It's an area you have to sort of decide your own path, really -- do you want to be the fast-paced, short-sentence action dude, or the descriptive, poetic detail architect? Something in between? You're ready to start really, REALLY thinking about those big-picture things as you write. Focus on finding your style, I guess? God this is an awful review. I'm so sorry.

retribution

@RomanAria

Girls are mean.

This story is nice and neat and wraps up cleanly, except.... well I don't know quite how Anna died, and the whole 'you ruined yourself to ruin me' theme, and the 'your demise' bits of the letter are therefore confusing, but that doesn't really matter. The encounter with Anna's friend and the police officer feels a little out-of-place, too -- it's sort of setting the stage a little at the crime scene, but it's alone in that regard, and we don't waste much time at the crime scene anyway, so what do we care if there's one particular sad friend there?

That's really the one instance where there's anything at all detracting from a perfect pace. My favorite part is definitely characterization -- everybody here is a nice round character, even that friend we only saw once, even Anna writing the hateful-yet-loving vendetta letter (vendetter?) with tears in her eyes. That is what makes Alex's actions so powerful -- this could've easily been a ho-hum affair about a boy lighting a piece of paper on fire and shrugging at the police, but you made it significant, both with what you actually wrote AND with between-the-lines context. It's very well done!

what's wrong with johnny?

@Dark Wind

Jesus that's strong. I mean.... as expected I guess, but damn though.

Okay. One or two little things to talk about.... First happened first, so let's go with that. "Imagine this place where the road ran straighter than the drawn line in a mathematics textbook." That's a strange image in a story that's really not about mathematics textbooks, or anything remotely close to textbooks for that matter. There are lots of other straight lines that might serve better in this story -- OR, this story needs something else to tie it to (or contrast it from) the schoolbook simplicity, if you prefer it that way. Like maybe Harvey was a bit of a nerd or something, that alone would serve.

The other thing is similar, weird word choices from time to time. "No need for his name in a hat," or "others longer than others." Few and far between -- but hard to process. WHICH IS OKAY, if you choose to make it that way. Writers are allowed to challenge readers, hell I go out of my way sometimes to deliberately make myself harder to get. And this is exactly the subject matter with which to do something like that. It should serve a purpose though, and in this/these cases I'm not sure the confusion is adding anything worthwhile.

There go my nitpicks. Friggin' incredible work. I like the story adaptation, I like the poem, let's be frank I like everything you do, so who am I kidding. Great job.

normies get out

I AM THE COMMUNITY!!!

normies get out

<Snipped quote by mdk>

at least you're still here mdk

@Foxes

implying I could go anywhere else

normies get out

<Snipped quote by ArenaSnow>

what the fuck happened to this community

@Foxes

thanks, Obama.

will you answer the call

no.

Super Tuesday

It's a tad disingenuous to count super delegates quite yet. If Sanders wins more state delegates, the dens would be playing a dangerous game using super delegates to override the popular decision. Not saying they won't do it, but it wouldn't be the smart move, since Clinton is already a controversial figure, and the accusation of gaming the primary would be easier to,stick on her than really any other candidate.

My opinion is that this election has already deviated too far from the script to predict. If I had to place a bet it would be for a Hillary vs Trump general with Trump taking the prize, but it wouldn't be a comfortable bet. It won't surprise me if any of the top five candidates running right now at least make it to the general.

@Vilageidiotx

The reason 'Clinton games the primary process' would stick is because she absolutely will do that regardless of what you think about it, and the press will bow. The Clintons are the Democrat establishment, and the Democrat establishment owns a massive majority of relevant media. So, buckle up, because that's happening.

Though, do polls ever mean anything?

@SleepingSilence

No. Polls are conducted in order to obtain a desired result, and the 'desired result' in this case typically refers to headlines capable of feeding the 24-hour news cycle. Polls mean nothing whatsoever. Exit polls, as in, "You just voted, who did you vote for?" don't even mean anything. Ignore all polls. They have a certain amount of relevance to the campaigns themselves -- but campaigns don't use the gallup or the CNN.com poll or whatever else YOU get to look at. They all have their own, confidential, tailored pollsters. The polls you have access to are shit.

Super Tuesday

@mdk

I wouldn't expect it. She's a major political figure that has money, she'll never be thrown in jail. The worst that could happen to her would be a hit to polling numbers.

@Keyguyperson

She's also a felon, so.... you know....

I mean you're right, she's important and everything, it's just that she got caught red-handed (this time -- not to mention all the sold influence and treason).

You never know. Petreus was winning the Iraq war and we knocked him out over essentially the same thing (though my tinfoil says, that was an effort to sabotage the press out of OIF).

Super Tuesday

plus there's always the outside chance that hil-dawg is in federal prison by the time the general election starts, which I just assume means Bernie in by default.

Super Tuesday

<Snipped quote by mdk>

Personally, I don't think that solves the problem. It isn't the concept of federal government that is corrupt; it isn't even the idea of government itself that is corrupt, but the idea that one group of people are more powerful than another, And you can never get rid of that later thing. You'll still have corrupt officials in a confederated system, and those local governments will still act as the vessel of powerful people to take from powerless people (see the history of political bosses in the United States). But now, having weakened the federal government, we have the bonus of being an indefensible country of city states purposely undercutting each other for individual gain. The American Confederacy was broken out of the gate; the majority of founding fathers noticed that and banded together to create the federal government because they knew how broken the confederation was. Virtually every other government in history that has pretended to be a union of equal or near-equal parts, whether it was the early United States, the early Roman Republic, the Holy Roman Empire, the Greek Leagues, yatta yatta, either fell apart entirely after a short time, got embroiled into civil wars, or was absorbed into a central government. The only one I can think of off the top of my head that didn't fall apart was the Iroquois, but I know they did occasionally fight with each other in wars involving Europeans, so I don't think they can be counted as a functional confederacy either.

So really, harmonious local governments as the seats of national power is just as pie-in-the-sky dreamy as a communist utopia of workers collectives as that seat of power, or anarcho-capitalist idea of the market as being that seat of power. There always has to be even a small shadow of monarchy in a government for it to work.

@Vilageidiotx

I mean I don't for a second believe we can cut the corruption out of any system of government, in a permanent sense.... but as long as the senator from Nevada can generate wealth by selling his influence to New Yorkers, the people in Nevada are worse off. We obviously still need the feds to perform certain functions, and I'm okay with a powerful national republic -- it's the democratically-elected king that I want to abolish. Like.... my goal, if I got a single term as president, would be to deliberately sabotage that specific office, and train the legislature on how to keep presidential authority away from future presidents. We don't need a president who can declare war, unilaterally sign immigration reform, and sue states for enforcing federal laws. These are not building blocks of a healthy republic. It's time to trade one tyrant 2000 miles away for a hundred tyrants 10 miles away. IMO.

You're right though -- pie in the sky, never happening.

Super Tuesday

Let's be frank, voting Trump/other GOP POTUS potentials (including republican front runner HRC) will actually permanently damage our nation.

@The

The problem is, voting democrat will also permanently damage our nation. You just can't win.

We really need to destroy the office of POTUS and kick as much power as possible back to state/local elected bodies. I have no fucking idea what a state comptroller's value is to my daily life -- let's give that some value, and then I'll care about that election enough to cast a vote, and it won't impact all you west coast hippies, AND I won't have to put up with all your weird policies either. Everybody wins. But it'll never happen because it breaks up the consolidated power of the establishments.