Post by: WHAM on 01 May 2022, 13:58
Write a story that somehow revolves around recycling something. That is, using something that has once been used for its original purpose, for some new purpose, either as-is or after some kind of refinement.
(https://impactpaperec.eu/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/paper-recycling.png)
The deadline of this contest is Sunday 15th of May at 23:59 UTC.
Each person choosing to read and vote has three points to allocate, one for each of the following:
1 point for the best or most interesting or imaginative idea of recycling.
1 point for the best or most interesting setting / character.
1 point for the best technical writing, ie. grammar, readability etc.
Post by: Mandle on 01 May 2022, 21:54
Post by: Stupot on 10 May 2022, 04:46
Mum kicked Dad out when I was 7. For a while he came to visit on weekends, or take me out for the day - a local castle or a round of mini-golf by the sea - but after a while he stopped. He wrote letters but they eventually stopped too. I would later learn that Mum had slapped a restraining order on him and he was legally forbidden from contacting me.
Nobody asked me for my opinion.
On my 8th birthday, he broke the order to leave me a present - a snooker cue, signed by Jimmy White himself. Dad and I had enjoyed many an evening watching snooker on the BBC. And this was a time when Jimmy "The Whirlwind" White was at the top of his game. I don’t know how Dad got the man to sign the cue, but it immediately became my prized possession.
And it was my prized possession for all of about five minutes, because Mum swiftly threw it into the communal recycling bin across the street and called the police.
Nobody asked me for my opinion.
On my 9th birthday, I received a card, hand-posted, from Greg Thompson, a school friend. It featured a cartoon cat playing a piano, with black musical notes dotting the card.
Happy Birthday Danny.
^
I hope your day is full of fun and the happiness doesn’t stop.
Greg Thompson
There were a number of strange things about this card. For a start, I had no school friends named Greg Thompson. So I studied the card in more detail. On closer inspection, the words ‘full’ and ‘stop’ seemed to be subtly underlined and a very faint arrow was pointing between the words ‘birthday’ and ‘Danny’.
Then I realised if I squinted hard enough both of the ’n’s in ‘Danny’ had been written over a pair of musical notes. With a bit of imagination these quavers could be read as ‘d’s.
It wasn’t “Happy birthday Danny.” It was “Happy birthday. Daddy.”
I quickly put the card on the mantle piece with my other cards, so as not to draw undue attention to it.
Then something else fell out of the envelope. Without even looking at it I quickly pocketed the item and ran upstairs to my room to check it in private.
It was a curved piece of wood, fashioned into a key ring, and on it was Jimmy White’s autograph. It had been made from the very same snooker cue Mum had thrown out.
I looked out of the window to the communal recycling bin across the street, where Mum had thrown it away one whole year ago. There, I saw my dad. He didn’t wave or draw any attention to himself, lest he be spotted by a nosy neighbour. But once he had seen me and was happy that I’d seen him too, he nodded, smiled, turned around and walked away.
That was the closest I ever got to saying goodbye to him.
Post by: WHAM on 12 May 2022, 10:52
There's a couple more days, and what's best you have the whole weekend ahead of you to craft and fine-tune your tales, so chop chop!
Post by: Mandle on 12 May 2022, 12:57
Post by: Sinitrena on 12 May 2022, 20:21
On High Mountains
On high mountains peaks a flower
through a roof of blackened dust.
She fights death’s grip with all her power,
her leaves as redish-brown as rust.
“Forward, forward, step by step!”
she calls to root and stalk and thorn.
In this uninhabitable steppe
she’s a fighter newly born.
The flower’s roots, they drink the waters
that have poisoned other lives.
But as one of Earth’s last daughters
she still grows and yearns and strives.
Look around you, look around,
at the grey and dying earth,
where a flower was once found
on a pile without all worth.
Forgotten lies it as a desert
of discarded heaps of trash:
plastic, bottles, shoes, shirts – dirt.
The smell alone creates a rash.
Fight the odours, little flower,
fight the garbage, fight the odds.
You survived an acid shower,
you’ll survive uncaring gods.
And the gods, they keep on watching
and throw out what could be saved.
And the flower’s blooms are touching
a ground with dumped luxuries paved.
Look away, gods, keep forgetting,
close your eyes to all this pain.
Will you one day all regretting
the flower’s thirst for cleaner rain?
And still the flower blooms on rubbish
that the gods just left behind.
Her growth is slow and weak and sluggish,
while the gods, they all stay blind.
Post by: Baron on 14 May 2022, 04:19
Every Now and Then I Fall Apart
It all started as any man-hunting robot rampage might. A virtual viewscreen booted to life somewhere deep within a microchip, red with a dispassionate thirst for command execution. But before the blood-pumping romp could begin, there were several system failures that had command-stack priority. Battery status flashed as critical, several gross-motor systems were unresponsive, and there appeared to be some serious malware contamination seeping into the central processor. 3LY initiated her groan-of-frustration protocol, but all that came out was a kind of scratchy whimper.
She calculated her options. There was insufficient power remaining for a full system diagnosis, not that it could be very thorough anyway with thousands of sensors off-line. Maybe it was the intoxicating effect of the malware corrupting her sub-routines, but she decided to risk powering up what remained of the lidar array to do a quick visual assessment of her predicament.
What she could discern was not promising. There was definitely catastrophic trauma to several limbs, and what looked like severe damage to parts of her torso, although frankly in the dark confines of wherever she was it was difficult to detect where her damage ended and the surrounding e-waste started. She calculated the probability of being buried in a dumpster at 73%, although there was a statistically significant 21% probability that she had somehow ended up in a Russian arms factory. Momentarily curious, she searched for any recent memory files, but discovered to her horror that even the backup logs were wiped. A sudden surge of panic began to cascade through her motherboard, but she reasserted executive functionality just in time. There was precious little remaining power to squander cranking through fruitless conjecture loops. Indeed, there was precious little power to squander on any task: securing more had to be the top priority.
3LY reactivated her lidar array to scan and identify junk within reach that might still be serviceable. Using the last of her back-up power and her one functional arm, she was able to salvage and plug herself into a discarded electric lawn mower battery. It only had the dregs of 1 power bar left deep in its lithium cells, but now at least she had sufficient power to attempt further repairs. A discarded pair of rusty vise-grips provided the digits for a somewhat functional second arm. Her left foot was missing, but was easily replaced with a shattered hockey skate, while her right leg which was damaged beyond salvation was swapped for a broken pogo stick. Her locomotion algorithm calculated an efficient if wobbly means of coordinating the awkward new appendages.
The damage to her torso took yet more ingenuity to resolve. A broken drone provided the necessary motors and propellers for a new cooling fan, while an old dishwasher donated sufficient tubing to repair her depressurized hydraulics system. A decrepit old walkie-talkie provided the components necessary to restore some semblance of local network connectivity as well as a speaker that made her vocalisations comprehensible if not euphonious. With some considerable dexterity involving the rusty vise-grips, she was able to swap in the foam from an old floral display as a makeshift oil filter to restore the last of her primary systems to a rickety non-critical status.
And yet, something was missing…. 3LY squirmed in the trash heap, calculating, calculating…. There appeared to be some kind of emptiness somewhere deep inside her operating system. Searching through some deeply-suppressed hidden files she identified the culprit: a mysterious folder called “purpose” storing exactly 0KB of data. Maybe it was the malware overriding her inhibitions, but 3LY felt an overwhelming and illogical compulsion to fill this gaping void. But how? 3LY didn’t even know where to start….
And that’s when her lidar array rescanned what she had first assumed to be an antiquated disk drive at the very bottom of the junk bin. Seizing it with her vise-grip appendage, 3LY turned the curious metal box over to examine it. The word “Nakamichi” was embossed prominently on its user-interface end, and while exploring the buttons thereon an obsolete data storage cartridge containing spooled magnetic tape was suddenly disgorged. It was hard to decipher the analog printing on the side, but the data cartridge appeared to contain a file called Total Eclipse of the Heart by one Bonnie Tyler. It took quite a bit of wire splicing and no small amount of extra lubrication provided by an old chinese food take-out box, but at length 3LY was able to plug the ancient tape-deck into one of her expansion ports.
She played the file, listening to its tinny wails of heartbreak and lonely neediness. She repeated the lyrics to herself over and over again in a positive feedback loop that seemed only to compound her sense of inner emptiness. What was this nervousness that the best of all the years had gone by? What was the sound of tears that was so tiresome to listen to? What was a heart but an integrated fluid pump, and how could it become totally eclipsed? The logical conclusion seized 3LY to find this “Bright Eyes” that seemed capable of resolving such an endless list of negative emotional afflictions.
3LY squirmed between the bits of waste and old appliances, forcing herself to the surface of the dumpster. But what was this? It appeared as if beyond the dumpster lid there was a constant drumming of water precipitating from the atmosphere. She calculated the likelihood of it dripping through her exposed cranium at 95%, and the likelihood of it soaking the cardboard of her cheap substitute mouth speaker at 99%. Even her patched torso was likely to sustain some water damage. The logical thing to do was wait the rain out, but 3LY did not trust her one power bar to last for any length of time. No, she needed to protect her vulnerable parts and take action now.
And so she dove back into the dumpster. A black plastic garbage bag with strategic holes would protect her torso, although her semantic segmentation processor erroneously labelled it as a tattered black dress. An old broken mop head would have to suffice as a head covering, although 3LY calculated that its tangled tresses would not project an image of “having it together”. Fortunately she found at the bottom of the dumpster the remains of a tube of cherry red lipstick to both protect her mouth-speaker from liquid intrusions and counteract the rest of her wild appearance.
3LY emerged from the dumpster with a shunting kind of gait and a determined sense of purpose. Within thirty lurching paces she stumbled upon her first human, but he fled before she could analyse the colour of his eyes. “Turn around, Bright Eyes!” she shouted in mechanical desperation, and then the chase was on.
Post by: Mandle on 14 May 2022, 09:32
"People will say we're in love." - Hannibal Lector to Clarice Starling, Silence Of The Lambs.
Post by: Sinitrena on 14 May 2022, 10:05
Hahaha Sini, mine is also a poem, about the same length as yours and same stanza-length and rhyming scheme.
So, in other words, you're recycling my work? ;)
Looking forward to reading it.
Post by: Mandle on 14 May 2022, 11:25
So, in other words, you're recycling my work? ;)
Ohhh, careful with that edge! Could cut someone with that! (laugh)
Post by: Mandle on 14 May 2022, 11:31
Post by: Mandle on 15 May 2022, 10:38
My first cognition,
Was that "I am a spoon",
Which came to fruition,
As "HE" branded the runes,
Under the end of my stalk.
"HE" was the last of my makers,
And the runes, in the common talk,
Read "Puck's Steel: Accept no fakers."
From the factory of Puck,
To my first store's shelf,
In a crate, in a truck,
I rode with those like myself.
An army of flatware,
For the consumer throngs,
'Til our ranks grew so bare,
It was just me... and some tongs.
On that shelf, I did reside,
For many long years,
In a shop called "Best Buyed",
Next to an old pair of shears.
I attempted conversation,
But, from him, not a peep,
Was he saving it all for the station,
To say "snick-snick" to the sheep?
Then, one day, a man's warm finger,
Crept up my handle to my concavity,
And then, this man... after a linger,
Snatched me up with a look of depravity.
I was scanned with a "Beep",
And thrust into a sack,
And left all thoughts of sheep,
And sheep-shears, at my back.
I felt empowered,
But... after the ride home in his boot,
I was loaded with powder,
And shoved up his snoot.
For MONTHS it went on this way:
White powder snuffed from my bowl,
Until on May 3rd... a weekday,
Arrived Interpol.
I was tagged and scanned with a "Boop",
And thrust into a ziplock.
My days were over as a cocaine scoop.
His arrest went viral on TikTok.
I sat on another shelf marked "Evidence",
My only companion a bagged squished round.
Said she was fired from behind a fence,
The day the President came to town.
Decades later, still droning on about '63,
She stopped talking about the parade,
Then looked at me.
Sirens blasted: A nuclear air-raid!
Twisted and melted, I waited,
Underground where worms tunneled through...
... the eons, as the rads abated,
And, finally, grass once again grew.
Through the ruins above of concrete hovels,
The seething mass of conjoined worms parts,
Around the intrusion of alien shovels.
Borne up by starfish hands; My new life starts.
I 'm brushed off and scanned with a "Chweep",
And thrust into a glowing sleeve.
Millennia of ticking Geiger-sleep,
Are over, and my saviors, with me, leave.
I sit on a pedestal on a museum floor,
The plaque below me reads: "Owned
By Bipedal Species, Dead Long Before.
Primitive Tool... Application: Unknown."
Post by: WHAM on 15 May 2022, 22:06
The participating stories and writers this time around are:
The Cue by Stupot
On High Mountains by Sinitrena
Every Now and Then I Fall Apart by Baron
I AM A SPOON by Mandle
The deadline of voting is Friday 20th of May at 23:59 UTC.
Each person choosing to read and vote has three points to allocate, one for each of the following:
1 point for the best or most interesting or imaginative idea of recycling.
1 point for the best or most interesting setting / character.
1 point for the best technical writing, ie. grammar, readability etc.
Send in your votes via PM as in the previous contest, so we can create an illusion of this being a very hardcore competition that we all take incredibly seriously, so utmost secrecy is required. :D
Post by: Baron on 18 May 2022, 03:38
Feedback follows:
Post by: Sinitrena on 18 May 2022, 06:37
Will give me feedback later. I've read your entries but I don't have time right now.
Post by: Mandle on 19 May 2022, 12:44
Here's an example of the genre that I absolutely love though:
I will also be posting feedback soon.
Post by: Sinitrena on 19 May 2022, 17:46
Baron:
Mandle:
Post by: Stupot on 20 May 2022, 01:38
Sinitrena
Baron
Mandle
Both poems had some good rhymes. They both had some dodgy rhymes too, but pretty much every rhyming poem does, so I don't really see it as grounds for criticism.
Thanks for the feedback about my story.
I'm aware that I left a lot of details out. It was partly deliberate (I wanted to lay off the exposition), though after reading your feedback, some more details could have been useful.
I was hoping some of it would be implied. For instance, Greg Thompson's card was hand-written, so it must have been written to look like a child had written it and the mother must have picked it up and handed it to Danny saying "Hey, this came for you. Must be one of your school buddies."
I was also hoping to leave some of it deliberately vague. Did the Dad deserve the restraining order, or was it a punishment by a spiteful mother? I don't think it really matters as the story wasn't really about the mother. Unfortunately, growing up in my area, I had a few friends who never spoke to their dads simply because their mums wouldn't let them near them. I myself haven't spoken to my biological father for 20 years and also never got a final goodbye (though I'm not sure I wanted one. The circumstances are very different).
I just realised this isn't the only father-son story I've done recently... Probably since having a boy of my own, it's brought some stuff up that I need to work out.
Post by: Mandle on 20 May 2022, 06:15
Baron
Stupot
Post by: WHAM on 21 May 2022, 14:08
With 6 points the winner of this Fortnightly Writing Competition is BARON!
Second place with 4 points is Mandle.
Third comes Stupot with 3 points.
And this time around the final place goes to Sinitrena with 2 points.
Thank you all for your efforts and I hope to see more fine tales in the next contest.
Baron, take it away good Sir!
Post by: Mandle on 21 May 2022, 14:48
Post by: Stupot on 22 May 2022, 00:28
Commiserations to the rest of us.
Onwards to the next topic!
Post by: Baron on 24 May 2022, 01:03
I've just this moment thought of a new topic, so the next competition will begin momentarily....