Fortnightly Writing Competition - 11th-25th June - CLOSED! Winner - Sinitrena

[Atelier]

They're all worth coming first, although I like Akatosh's limerick, so my vote goes to him.

[KrisMacDee]

So far a draw between 4 people, at one vote each  : I'm gonna let voting go on til monday as I won't be at a computer for the next day or two. So final votes should be made on 29th of June at midnight (as in the midnight between 29-30th) 

[Trihan]

Akatosh:

Interesting decision to use a limerick, although as one of the world's biggest limerick fans (see my limerick-o-matic topic of old for proof) I have to say that it was...underwhelming. There's no metre or flow to it at all, and block-heads is one of the most cringeworthy attempts to rhyme with sockets and rockets I've ever seen. That said, the subject matter is topical and it fits the requirements of the competition nicely.

Sinitrena:

I really liked this. My only nitpicks are that it's cogNito ergo sum, and your penultimate paragraph has a typo (They fixed my should have been they fixed me) but all in all this was a very thought-provoking look at the places that artificial intelligence could ultimately lead to. Very rarely has fiction explored the possibility that sentient electronic devices might not WANT to be alive. Computerised suicide via virus was pretty inspired.

Trihan:

Yeah, I'm going to critique my own entry, I'm not going to put myself on a pedestal. Reading over my entry the whole thing seems a little trite. It was intended to be horrific but slightly light-hearted at the same time and to be honest I don't think I pulled it off as well as I could have. I'm proud of the title though, I've really taken a classic childhood feel-good movie and made something terrible out of it.

AtelierGames:

I'm really not sure what exactly to make of this one. If I'm understanding it correctly it appears to be a three-way dialogue between a computer user, someone else who's trying to get the user off of the computer, and the computer itself who doesn't want the user to leave. In the end, though, it comes across as a somewhat clumsy narrative, needlessly cluttered and even with the colouration of the three voices, without which this piece would definitely have degenerated into barely recognisable reams of text, it just seems to be a little bit heavy. And in the end, although I like the concept that the humans in this scenario haven't even realised the computer is aware of itself and its surroundings and is resisting being turned off, it all seems a tad redundant.

passer-by:

This is another one that I couldn't really make up my mind about. The narrative style confuses me and I find that I just don't -get- the message that was being conveyed here. It seems that the narrator is a person who for some reason causes electricity to short out whenever they're nearby. Then when you get further into it, it appears that the narrator is actually some kind of humanoid android or robot, and is not working correctly. But ultimately I honestly couldn't tell and maybe that's just because I wasn't looking for the right message and misinterpreted it.

uncle-mum:

On one hand I like this because, y'know, binary. On the other you appear to have just written a random series of 1s and 0s, and there's a 4 in there somewhere too which shatters the machine code illusion. I'd have been much more impressed with this if you'd actually written a message in binary, or at the very least conformed to the 8-bit convention. Your binary code isn't divisible by 8, so it would be impossible to decode even if it were accurate.

Dualnames:

You've fallen victim to something I used to do and which was referred to by a friend of mine as "flowery prose" using overly complex descriptions of things, some of which are redundant. That aside, there are some pretty glaring flaws here. Firstly the computer names aren't 8 bits long so, like uncle-mum's entry, your binary is inaccurate. There are a couple of typos here and there but nothing major. I'm not really sure how a computer would shrivel with anxiety - I am in fact hard-pressed to imagine how a human would, for that matter - but that's also a minor nitpick. The dialogue between the two computers seems forced and stilted, but since they're machines that could be overlooked. The biggest problem, really, is how utterly anticlimactic the ending is. It seems almost tacked on and was a real letdown after a fairly entertaining start. You had an almost Douglas Adams-esque scene here and the ending just ruined it.

Wyz:

An invention that would change our livers? I thought that was alcohol. On a serious note though, I liked this idea that technology is becoming so advanced that we're actually -regressing-. That said, I can't help but feel that if such a chip were to exist there would be stringent measures in place to prevent something like this from happening and it's this that stops me from really getting into the story. It's a pretty far-fetched scenario and don't take this as a personal slight, it's probably just a personal thing on my end.

Lionmonkey:

Interesting narrative style in the form of diary or journal entries, ruined slightly by the fact that the text itself is stilted and doesn't sound like anything that someone would actually write down. You're sacrificing mystery for realism, by having the writer not directly refer to these "events" that it all hinges on. The thing is, if it were a diary entry then the writer would already know these things and would not write them in such a mysterious way, and if it were a journal entry then the writer would want the reader to have as much information as possible and would not intentionally omit such an important detail. I didn't really get this at all to be honest, until I read entry 7 at which point I went back through it and understood what you were going for.

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My vote this time round goes to Sinitrena.

[Atelier]

Seriously most people just vote and go - but it was helpful anyway for my entry.

[Akatosh]

Five-way tie, huh? That's gotta be a new record... 

There's no metre or flow to it at all, and block-heads is one of the most cringeworthy attempts to rhyme with sockets and rockets I've ever seen.

A dime for every time I heard this in regards to my attempts at poetry... 

[Sinitrena]

Thanks for your vote, Trihan, and for the critic.

My only nitpicks are that it's cogNito ergo sum, and your penultimate paragraph has a typo

You are of course completely right about the typo, but wrong about the latin quote. It is indeed cogito, at least according to wikipedia and my latin dictionary. But that's not really important, is it? 

[Trihan]

Huh, so it is.

Funny how they don't call it cogition then, isn't it? XD

[Babar]

Cogito means "I think", Cognitio means "to study".

[Trihan]

That makes sense I guess, but it's still kinda weird for terms like cognitive and recognition, which tend to apply more to thought than study.

[uncle-mum]

Well this is getting heated, which is always good.

And Trihan, the 4 was included to show that God is in the machine and as we all know he's meant to work in mysterious ways hence not keeping to the "rules" of binary. Well, that's my story and I'm sticking with it...

[passer-by]

uncle-mum because it was the most different.
I enjoyed all entries, though, can I give more than one vote?

[KrisMacDee]

lol this is ridiculous! How does a 6-way tie come about ? :o It must be the high standard among the competition You have roughly 4hrs and 35mins left to vote lets not make this difficult for me to choose eh? 

[Trihan]

Nobody voted for me. ;_; I am FAILURE

[KrisMacDee]

Nobody voted for me. ;_; I am FAILURE

There's still time yet! 

[KrisMacDee]

Okay, voting is officially over! Due to the unbelievable 6-way tie, I have been put in the awkward position of choosing the winner.

I have decided that the winner is Sinitrena! Congrats! You now have the honour of hosting the next Writing competiton and choosing its subject matter!

Thanks to everyone who participated!

[passer-by]

Congratulations, Sinitrena

[Sinitrena]

Thanks a lot. 
I will start the new competition soon.

[Atelier]

Congratulations Sinitrena, your entry was worthy!