hypericin

I certainly get the pushback against AI. We've all generated or at least read the sort of anodyne fiction AI produces. Many of us know of the authors ...

Hrmm, while I appreciate you felt it was "so perfect", that is still not the kind of feedback one wants to hear. I think/hope it would still be pretty...

But even these examples are not clean. When counting cats in the room, are you counting that wildcat? This cat is pregnant, are you counting its unbor...

Nope, two of us came up with it independently. Come on man, the people have spoken, he's gotta be a priest!

I used AI I think for the first time this round. Research: Mainly around fentanyl, I wanted to get terms and basic things right. Proofreading: This wa...

Oh, oh. I totally missed this. Though maybe the image flashed in my mind when the captain "ground his teeth and spat salt". What a great inspiration! ...

You probably mean declarative speech acts. Commissive acts commit the speaker, declarative acts declare things to be so. But this seems to overemphasi...

Of course, there is ample choice. You can count dogs, mammals, retrievers, brown animals, sick animals, etc. The choice of what counts as a numeric un...

I'm afraid this does not do the work you need it to do, nor can you bat the ball back to my court so easily. How do you respond to my reasons that num...

:grimace: It seems the thread has drifted well away from the main topic. I'm more interested in that. This approach doesn't work, I think for at least...

Even though this is going way overboard, and is an exercise as much for me as for anyone else, I wanted to go through how I responded to each of these...

I struggled with reading this the first time through, and the second. I quit in the middle both times, in the daughter on lap scene. I only made it th...

Happy to provide the service!

I distinctly recall receiving the 'it' as permission to relish the savage beating. I think your intuition was correct: 'her' would have been more unco...

Rats! Oh? I don't think I did. I think I saw the comment disabusing the notion (someone else had it). However by now the priest had reasserted himself...

Among a very strong field two stood out to me: Nightscapes and Dispatch UK-028. Both carried me along with excellent prose. In Nightscapes I enjoyed t...

Cool, thanks for the feedback. I think when you write trickier parts like this, a certain percentage of readers are going to miss it, for a number of ...

Yes, this is where the father of the dream/nightmare morphs into the cop of reality. Several people missed this, because there is no overt indication ...

This doesn't seem to accord with typical uses of 'cause'. Without oxygen in my room, I couldn't write this reply. But oxygen did not cause me to write...

Thanks ND!! No office taken, of course, especially since your excellent story is one of the ones I haven't gotten to yet either. I've been taking my t...

The challenge is to keep the psychology, but also make it clear, without ruining it. In general I think this is really, really hard, to make things cl...

I want to thank @"Amity" again for providing us with what I realized is the closest we can probably ever get to the experience of a reader experiencin...

The idea was to be bittersweet tragic, that he (and poor fudgy) could only find contentment in death. Such things, and endings in general, are tough t...

This was the most personal story I've written for TPF. The camp was real; it was only a few blocks from my house, across from a supermarket. It really...

Maybe not over, but past their creative peak. Precisely because the genre becomes "established", and so creativity becomes much more difficult. Perhap...

True, just because some writing was retrospectively identified as postmodern, even though they were written before postmodernism was a thing. Nowadays...

:up:

I get that. But not only do I know the stereotype, I know that other people know it, I know how prevalent and charged it is. And so gives a strong imp...

Another small bit of feedback: Sophie is not mentioned as a cat until the end. On my first read through, I thought Sophie was Greta's lesbian lover! T...

It's not just that. He says he will alert the police and that he did his duty, but we are never shown him doing that. It feels odd that of those three...

To me, this becomes more interesting with a single topic everyone writes about, i.e. "Imagination". That would differentiate it from the everyday TPF ...

This story really demands a slower reading speed. I think people want to read quickly, and that just doesn't work with this story. The writing is so c...

It is weirdly selective. Sometimes I think I have early onset dementia, with the way I can watch a movie or series, and a few years later it is almost...

Have they? I haven't seen it, but I think most of the authors are pretty well deduced by now.

My list, borrowed from Amity's: "The Unrighted Leotard" - Hanover "The Perfect Match" - Amity "The Lark" - Baden "The Squeal" - Jack Cummins "The Nexu...

I don't think fdrake is bunny bun. I think he is paper houses. Just because he said he wrote a bedtime story. ToothyMaw is Woman in the Portrait. (is ...

I actually thought your original list was pretty on the nose. It might have been right aside from me and whoever wrote the finance one. Though I think...

Wrong! About mine, and many others too no doubt.

The distinction "exists" picks out is that between things that are more than just ideas, vs. ideas. Things that are only ideas do not exist, that is t...

I was a dumbass in my original "obvious" guess, you wrote The Perfect Match.

I suggest putting the stories back on the main page. I know people will complain, but it's only a few weeks a year, and if we prepend entries with "Sh...

This is a pretty damn good facsimile of 19th century adventure fiction. It might have appeared in the pulp magazines of the time. I like how it turned...

I liked the tension between the bubbly prose style and the somewhat dark subject matter. As others noted, it is easy to let yourself be carried along ...

Obvious: The Lark by Baden The Unrighted Leotard by Hanover Bulbs in Pots by javi2541997 (sorry mate) The Squeal by Jack Cummins The Perfect Match by ...

You are a uniquely sympathetic reader. Don't ever change that! Unfortunately I am grumpier. I hope people aren't just piling on. Rather I'd suggest th...

Odd, and original. What I feel happened is that the original conceit was to suggest a sci-fi world, then gradually reveal that these were the delusion...

Read though it again. The narrative is clearer to me now. Now, I'm thinking the main problem is that the author didn't take enough time with it. Both ...

A skateboarding priest fighting a Slavic vampire in 90s Glasgow? SIGN ME THE FUCK UP! This is what I want to be reading! The prose was fluid and smoot...

There's really a lot to like here. An anthropomorphic bunny as a main character is already a big win. Transposing onto this Disneyfied trope an adult ...

Hmm, I think "Tax avoidance" is pretty common as well? To my ears both choices sound right. I think the difference is "avoidance" is legal, "evasion" ...