Fortnightly writing competition: 10th-22nd January 2009

Started by Trihan, Sat 10/01/2009 22:54:17

Previous topic - Next topic

Trihan

Okay people, the topic for this competition is "Write about anything you like in the style of a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy entry".

For those of you not familiar with the writing of Douglas Adams, WHAT ROCK HAVE YOU BEEN LIVING UNDER? Just kidding. Here's a sample entry for "sleep" by DualNames to give you an idea of what we're talking about.

Sleep:
Sleep is an essential process to all beings. Except from the duradindi people on Viltvodle 5. They're beings that lack of insomnia and therefore they never sleep. A fact that the ruthless marketing division hadn't really taken into mind, but by curious facts managed to sell a very decent amount of alarm clocks.

Basically, it's completely random, and that's what makes it funny.

Get going! (pixel trophies may or may not be doled out at some point)

As with the last one, 12 days for submissions, 2 days for voting.


Stupot

Is it supposed to take the form of an entry in the Hitchhiker's Guide describing something or can we just write a peice of narrative in Adams' style?

Trihan

The former. In the form of an entry in the guide describing something.

Dualnames

You can describe anything even something described by Douglas himself. If it helps, I've always loved towel entries.
Worked on Strangeland, Primordia, Hob's Barrow, The Cat Lady, Mage's Initiation, Until I Have You, Downfall, Hunie Pop, and every game in the Wadjet Eye Games catalogue (porting)

Trihan


lo_res_man

†Å"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.†
The Restroom Wall

Dudeman Thingface


Trihan

I didn't think imposing a length restriction would be necessary since the guide tends to be pretty short and snappy anyway. If you want to write forty pages about why the Xarlfargs of Pollux IV regard earwax as a valuable commodity and worship it as a god, feel free. :P

Dudeman Thingface

#8
You're going to regret not giving a length restriction. ;D
MWAHAHAHAHAAAAA!

EDIT - maybe regret is too harsh a word. Perhaps "feel dismay" is more appropriate.

Trihan

Wow, don't all enter at once, guys, we can't keep up with the sheer level of writing that's flying through the topic! </sarcasm>

Is this just a topic that nobody's interested in?

Eggie

It's a little bit too hard.
Even Douglas Adams had trouble writing anything in Douglas Adam's style.

Trihan

I'll see if I can have a chat with Dualnames about this, since it doesn't seem anyone's going to enter with the current topic.

Aljoho

I'm not too familiar with his writing (I've read the first book and seen the movie but thats about it) but i am working on an entry based more on a semi-sane character in a world of utter randomity suffering from an apocalypse of melons ;) (which pretty much sums it up from what I have seen, the randomity not the melons) - I still think you might get entries under this topic, several people were enthusastic about it when it was suggested

Stupot, Rockchick and lipaoklipa were all interested so assumedly you could get 4 entries (including me) under the current theme unless somebody drops out or is busy. There is still a week to go (though if you guys are willing to offer an extension until the 24th that would be handy because I am busy on weekdays and 24th gives me an extra two days to finish it ;D) Never mind I'm nearly done now
A Tribute to my success -  A wonky ASCII Trophy
                              .__.
                              (|  |)
                               (  )
                              _)(_

OneDollar

Quote from: Aljoho on Fri 16/01/2009 18:15:34
Stupot, Rockchick and lipaoklipa were all interested

Not to put a dampener on all this, but they were expressing interest in a topic defined as
Quote
Write about anything you like in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy style.
Whereas this topic is
Quote
Write about anything you like in the style of a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy entry
Its a small difference, but quite a lot more restrictive in terms of content. I'm not saying its a bad topic, but offering one thing then changing it might explain why people seem to have lost interest. That or because its really hard to write like Douglas Adams did.


*ANYWAY...*


Adventure

Adventure is a much sort after activity, frequently desired by such diverse peoples as hitchhikers, heroes and post office employees. Interestingly enough the definition of adventure differs widely depending on the individual in question. A hitchhiker will often look for adventure involving sleeping rough, spending no money and getting the dirt of 15 different planets under their fingernails, while a hero might expect to strip to their underwear and use an oversized sword to remove themselves from a large animal's digestive tract. Post offices usually satisfy their employees by producing new sheets of commemorative stamps each year.

It is perhaps because of the unclear interpretation of the activity that adventure seekers regularly find themselves in situations that are somewhat different to their expectations. A bag of letters is little comfort should you find yourself having to sleep in the dirty hold of a Arcian interstellar hauler (the Arcians being known throughout the galaxy for their almost constant yodelling), hitchhikers rarely posses a knife and fork, let alone weapons suitable for combating the salivating Gannute of Redientia IV, and burly men and women in undergarments are seldom impressed by the 'Teapots of Yesteryear' collection. The exact reason these mixups occur so frequently is unknown: many blame the vagueness of the small print in adventure holiday advertisements, although there is also a growing belief amongst holiday reps that fate is simply hormonal.

Recent studies into the effects of adventure on postal workers indicate that anything more intense than an encounter with a loud dog and a lunchtime trip to the pub often proves fatal.



Now someone else please enter - I don't have a clue what topic to pick should I win.

Stupot

Aging

Before the invention of wire binding, the Calendar was slow to catch on.  Human women instead would measure the passing of their years using a very simple yet extremely accurate formula. This consisted of first counting the number of wrinkles in the face, multiplying this by the number of lesions covering the subject's body and dividing the total by the distance - in corn-kernal-spans (coks) - between the left breast and the the right knee.

( wrinkles x lesions )
_________________  =  her age

   distance in coks

For men, however, such a system was never devised as Bruce Forsythe just never died, thus destroying any attempt to develop an accurate formula.

In humans, the aging process would usually get to a certain point, and then give up and go home exactly the way it came...

Born in a ward, a dribbling mess with no bowel control.
learns how to walk.
develops speech and shows incredicle gain in memory.
develops semen-producing/menstuation system
Goes though phase of dying hair purple and taking lots of drugs and arguing with family.
Grows up, gets a job.
develops impotance/menopause
Grows up, retires from job
loses speech and shows incredible loss of memory.
Goes though phase of dying hair purple and taking lots of drugs and arguing with family.
forgets how to walk.
Dies in a ward, a dribbling mess with no bowel control.


Meh... was actually not easy to mimic Adams' style so I just anded up going on my own tangent... probably wasn't random enough... a lot of thought went into that formula.  ;)

Oh, well.  Was a fun little exercise, anyway...  :D

Dudeman Thingface

Well, I've failed to live up to my attempt to make you feel dismay at the length of my entry, being as I wrote for an hour, then found I ran out of idea's before even getting to two pages.

So, here's my entry:

Water
Water is a generally liquid substance that is often consumed to satiate thirst by beings in the galaxy, however, many beings find buying bottled water so expensive that they have to resort to dry water substitutes. Dry water being exactly that, a seemingly dust-filled sachet of water that has been dried to remove the liquid components. The original method of making dry water consisted of drenching stars in water and taking away whatever was left, but many species became very cranky at the lack of sun on their planets because it made it impossible to get a good tan. As such, a petition forced them from destroying suns, to just a species.

The Flatart species, to be precise. The Flatarts consist of heated plasma and are grown in pens before themselves being drenched with water, as they do, they make dry water, however, they also exert more energy to their plasmoid exteriors, known as their not-cores by entomologists, making them hotter in natural self-defence. This goes on for several more hours until the Flatart is finally extinguished and, with enough water, becomes dry water itself entirely. Dry waters motto 'The only screaming water' comes from the fact that consuming dry water causes the very dust-like particles to scream in abject horror, most beings enjoy this screaming, particularly as it enters their stomach and intensifies, becoming a massaging vibration on their internal organs.

There are also beings which die from consumption of water or dry water. Similar to the Flatarts, the Promoxy Miscius of Slaptoid X are a fire-based species which consist of exactly that, fire. The only difference is that women are red, and men are blue. Due to the fact that they so closely resemble real fire, many beings have often found prophetic words given from fire, which was actually a Promoxy Miscius screaming out to help them move from getting stuck in the branches of a tree, vine or other flammable substance. This is because the Promoxy Miscius get suck and feed upon anything flammable, 98% of the known universe, 68% of the unknown universe and 34% of the don't-go-there galaxy, and find that they automatically eat whenever they reach something flammable. They are also considered intellectual beings by the rest of the universe as being the only things to have ever expanded on the development of the towel by developing the only ever existing fire-proof towels.

Water itself is procured in large quantities from the Mixyplikts of the Sluhr galaxy. They produce them in large quantities for the universe from their industrial power plants which produces water as a waste product. Water isn't actually a waste product of the power generating process, but is actually the excrement of Mixyplikts. The power generating process merely being very hot, forcing the workers to consume more and excrete more. Although water is a valuable commodity for the universe, Mixyplikts see it as more of a disease infested pile of germs, this is due mostly to them being hypochondriacs who live in thick metallic suits and even have their planets coated in a thick chrome substance. In fact, water is the only waste product they actually produce, which is entirely for their economy, everything else being perfectly self-sustaining. They have not shared this technology with any other species due to them believing anyone that doesn't wear space suits being tribal cannibals, anyone that does as mocking them and anyone with a big nose rather annoying.

Although water is produced in large quantities from the Mixyplikts, that does not restrict planets having their own water supply, in fact, it can be quite abundant, such as in the recently destroyed planet Earth and the Flatart homeworld of Bowelowulf II, which, in the Flatarts case, made them very unhappy. Bowelowulf II actually consisted of only 10% landmass and 90% water, which made the Flatarts consider that no God would do such a thing, and they became atheists. Even when God came down and said "It's a joke, dude." And they replied "But I don't think it's funny." To which God finalized "But it's my vote that counts." And then promptly disappeared only made them more of atheists, considering the entire thing to be a mass hallucination that occurred due to not enough pain from traversing water, and so made them masochists. As such, they haven't, and have no plan, to complain about their currently lifestyle, or even how they die and become slowly consumed by other beings.

Scientists of the universe agreed that water was also a good way to measure the temperature of somewhere, as it changes according to the temperature. They agreed that if water evaporated where you were, than it should be considered rather hot, and if water solidified, then it was rather cold. Through this, they developed a scale of universal temperature according to what happened to water on a particular planet. This was met with criticism from the hippy Gleshumptibumpts from Slimdimmit Prime who argued that "Nature is … people man. You … evil ships … bad." To which the scientists replied "Nick off." To which the Gleshumptibumps promptly did so. It was also met with criticism from other, more radical, scientists, who believed that the only method to truly test the temperature, of a planet or otherwise, is to take a red hot poker and move it toward yourself until you feel your flesh being seared off. The sooner you willfully main off your flesh, the hotter the planet is and vice versa.


(it looked better in word)

Trihan

Dudeman Thingface autowins for having a veiled reference to Mister Mxyzptlk.

uncle-mum

#17
I thought I'd pitch in.  It's not great but I couldn't sleep last night and it gave me something to do...

Socks

Found on  a small number of planetoids and inhabitable meteorites the Sock is an unusual and unfortunate creature.  Born blind but gifted with a remarkable sense of smell the Sock spends its depressingly short life attempting to reach one of it's incredibly scarce breeding grounds, though due to it's misplaced sense of its own importance and ridiculously high standards when it comes to choosing a mate the vast majority are destined to die alone.

Of notable exception among Socks are the Betastrane Sock found only on Nikilio-Parlaeex.  Over the millennia these genetic mutations have developed a complex honor code by which to live they're life â€" a code in fact so complex that a Manikin-Parlaeex Betastrane Sock finds its own existence so abhorrent that has no choice but to end its own life only minutes after birth.

On a number of occasions scientists have attempted to study the Sock but to no avail finding that if the test subjects are left unobserved for even the briefest period of time they will either have managed to escape or expired due to the effort of escaping, if nothing else proving the inexorable draw of the breeding grounds.

Aljoho

Wow its certainly an interesting exercise to see how much random, utter crap you can fit into a body of writing and it is challenging to emulate Douglas Adams style (which I probably did very badly) but heres my (rather long) entry:

‘History of war’

Glockenspien offered his blank eyed stare dully towards the front of the class, where a holo-ed was droning.  The machine was set to history, reciting in a synthesized voice that was meant to sound exciting the boring past of ancient earth

‘2056. World war three. Whilst speculation of looming  war had been spreading between many planets amongst the galactic alliance during tea parties amid scones and little mint chocolates, it was still able to catch the world off guard with its outbreak. It all started in a country called Peru. A mysterious dictator spread his influence almost over night. He refused to answer holo-calls and any government attempts to infiltrate his party ended badly when the radiation emitted from the Tralagor men of Timid VI turned them into pairs of large mute equestrian-molluscs. Due to a sudden sharp increase in the population of large mute equestrian-molluscs Peru was quarantined due to the abysmal body odour that was emitted.

‘Shorty after the incident all members of the United Dodgeball Distinction and Enthusiasm Rights group (Once hunted  for their thick hides but who were at this point  the current dominant political party on earth, known as UDDER for short) sent a representative to convene in England. Over 60 members attended including the United States president Glorb (popular for being the first non human president of any country on Earth). It was at this convention, doubling as a place for science fiction nerds to express their love of Germanic literature, that the Dictator made his first contact.

‘It is a well known fact throughout the galaxy that inanimate objects tend not to become animated unless featuring in an animation, but during the UDDER convention whilst, discussing the future of Peru’s recent Distopian-isation due to a thick fog of body odour that had eliminated all but the most hardy of lima beans, that Harold made his first contact. Harold was neither a man nor an alien, and in a press conference later the British Prime minister described him as “He’s only…. Like a charming pair of sentient barbeque tongs dude…. He only wants some affection…"

‘An unparalleled time of harmony ensued during which the whole galaxy befriended Peru and even the Battle-Axe men of Ruston X stopped their age long war with the Oak men of Venus. Then after a subsequent date in which Harold was dumped by his long time girlfriend, a beautiful Glob named Gena, who would turn up, unemployed and homeless, a week later at a local McBurger who were famous for there yummy Beef-Chicken-Human surprise that they refused to reveal the recipe for.

‘Nobody new how Harold had Been brought to life after his long 3 year servitude to Brian Bryn (who is widely know as the worst chef throughout the galaxy) but it became apparent that it wasn’t a one off as after a severe case of heartbreak he swore that he would not rest until the world suffered with him. Initially the world scorned him, critics called him “a bizarre stand up comedy routine gone wrong.” That was until he began enslaving the watermelons.

'All around the world peoples prized vegetable gardens turned into protestation zones as clans of melons sprung up. Not content with the taxation laws imposed by the Watermelons the cantaloupes went on strike.

‘Then the nukes began.

‘It was the Icelandic Secret watermelon Service that fired first. They were angry with the cantaloupes in support of the Society against prevention of infringement of melon copyright laws, a name meant to confuse opposing organisations as to their standpoint on the topic, who were demanding that Harold come and give a speech about the melting solar ice caps, a bizarre phenomenon that nobody but one  particularly articulate Melon seemed to understand. As London vanished under a hail of nuclear smoke world leaders once more began to speak out. At a conference codenamed ‘Applesauce’ the American president spoke out in a rare moment of genius to declare “that something had to be done… or something bad could possibly happen”

‘The war continued as major parts of the world disappeared to the nukes and the world began to feel the pressure of a recession. Scientists were baffled; however, as the world itself began to recede. As the countries of the world experienced premature balding (which is to say every landmass on earth moved upwards till the southern hemisphere was entirely bald within a decade) wreaking havoc onto the delicate balance of global climate and many feared that the new earth, which was now only one country which had all come together (excluding Madagascar which had stayed resilient the whole time) would experience a cold spell throughout the coming trillion years.

‘ The fighting continued, despite the fact that no humans had actually been involved directly in the battles, until a famous baker named Jonathan decided he fancied some melon bread. A hostage situation ensued when he was kidnapped from his family home by a group of melon terrorists  and a strike team was dispatched to devour the melons before they became a hassle. All around the globe fruit lovers were conscripted into the new age army (Know as the Melon Munching Organisation Recruiting and Propaganda Group or MMORPG for short which confused many geeks into signing up regardless of their disposition towards melons.)

‘The war was bloody and tragic. Melons had become so popular during the years before the war that Melon armies outnumbered the human armies by almost 6 to 1, despite a new government regime that outlawed vegetable growth. It lasted a decade and many battles, such as the battle for what was once Cornwall which had an unbelievable obesity toll that spanned into the billions.

‘It was a further decade before a tired world even began thinking about a treaty. However shortly after the 2082 battle of Yorkshire Pudding an enlightened world leader proposed a truce. In the most famous political speech of all time he declared ‘Melons of the world. Why do we fight? Humans and melons have got on harmoniously for years. Why not play video games and sports? I have been a fan of squash since I was a boy and I propose we play a game of squash.

‘Sure enough this spurned a ceasefire and every melon and every human made their way towards the centre of modern civilization, the headquarters of the world Squash organisation in Khazakstan where much of the country was dominated by a huge complex in which millions of small square rooms were found. A tournament was arranged to be easily the biggest media-covered event in the history of the universe. Then the betrayal happened.

‘Humans were a race  renown for their stubbornness, and having seen the obesity and death Melons had caused they added a different meaning to the word squash. Each squash court was fitted with an auto lock, and once the games began every human being still alive on earth made their move. With a stomp of their foot each human caught his melon opponent by surprise, and before the day was out Khazakstan became the world capital for melon juice sales.

'A reparations treaty later arrested Harold and demanded that melons be declared illegal with a maximum penalty of lifetime naked in outer space. Harold is currently on display at the museum of Natural death. It took the world almost 142 years for the Earth to recover fully. A new proposal was passed and a world size toupee was bought that mimicked old earth, and the nations of old were revived. A number of small melon related incidents sprung up over the years as Melon speakeasies and maniacal melon cultists tried to revive the melon apocalypse, but it wasn’t until the dawn of the 30th century that it finally succeeded. A secret melon society had been building their numbers since the Squash tournament of 2083 and now, confident of their dominance, were able to enslave the Earth in short order.

'Now the melons travel the galaxy in search of new planets and new technology.  Planets they have conquered so far span half of the Milky Way galaxy and include the Bulb men of Sirius, The Chocolate men who are native to every planet in the Milky Way, and even the afore mentioned Battle-Axe men of Ruston X'


Glockenspien stared out the window into the abyss of space. The barren landscape of his planet was renowned for its delicious chocolaty flavour and creamy aftertaste. History was so Boring! Then he looked again. Just on the horizon he could make out a spherical shape. It was high up in the sky and seemed to be getting bigger ‘What space vessels do they use’ He inquired in his native language.

‘Ones shaped like large green melons of course’
A Tribute to my success -  A wonky ASCII Trophy
                              .__.
                              (|  |)
                               (  )
                              _)(_

Mr Flibble

#19
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has this to say on the topic of "Competitions"

"Competitions", it says, "are a form of activity or event in which any number of participants engage in comparative endeavours to determine who is the best at a given task. In practice there are infact a number of ways to win a competition other than simply superceding other competitors and because of this fact most Galactic Lotteries are now in administration. The first, and most obvious way of winning a competition is to simply out-perform anyone else in the competition who had the idea to do better than you did. This is considered an old-fashioned and limited approach to competitions in some of the more advanced sectors in the galaxy, and has long been supplanted by various manners of creative cheating. Cheating is no longer considered underhand and indeed is now the most noble and stylish way of succeeding at anything, as Oolon Coluphid wrote in his blockbuster tabloid exposé, "God's Sexiest Secrets". For more information see Cheating, Winning, Parties and Democracy."

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has this to say on the subject of Cheating:
Cheating is that process by which any individual can obtain any prize or accolade they desire without deserving or earning it, and is thusly the vanguard of all major social, economic, political, sexual or spiritual campaigns. For those handsome enough to use it well, it provides the universe on a platter with absolutely no adverse consequences. Cheating may be performed through manipulation, flattery, bribery, blackmail, corruption, sabotage, sexual intercourse, and murder. As was realised by a small band of hypergalactic students who found themselves hungover on an exam day, with all the deception, sex and murder that goes into cheating, it can often be more worthwhile than it's original intent. As a result of this, nearly all games have been altered to include a meta-game for creative cheating and subterfuge, scandals, deception, sex and murder. For example, the Sikvoids of Sadulon once had a game known as Ultra-chess, which now has allowances for palmed pieces, pieces made of butter and soap, and fake boards which exist in too many, or too few, dimensions. The height of suave cheating is considered to be admitting wrong-doing and turning oneself in to the appropriate authorities for lethal correction. This entry paid for and written by the Committee for the Safe and Immediate Detainment of Criminals. For more information see Success, Winning, Fraud, Entrapment, Appropriate Legal Counsel, Surviving in Prison: A Grass's Guide.
Ah! There is no emoticon for what I'm feeling!

SMF spam blocked by CleanTalk