**Bsh1's DART Race: Round 1**

Author: bsh1

Posts

Total: 98
oromagi
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Debates: 117
Posts: 8,696
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RationalMadman
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Debates: 574
Posts: 19,931
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@bsh1
Deadline is in 2 hours and like 5 minutes yeah?
RationalMadman
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Debates: 574
Posts: 19,931
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@bsh1
Oromagi failed to meet the first deadline.

Only K_Michael and myself have met both. Please strongly take this into consideration in your end ranking of this Round.
oromagi
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Debates: 117
Posts: 8,696
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@RationalMadman
if only u & Mike met the deadline y single me out as failing?  u must have like my pics, I think.
RationalMadman
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@oromagi
I singled you out as succeeding at meeting the latter deadline. Everyone other than us 3 is unworthy to even mention. ;)
oromagi
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i considered making a short, classic Dungeons & Dragons dungeon called "Ramshutu's Tomb." 

I also thought about doing poems but since both of you went poetry (I am not complaining, mind you) I thought I'd go elsewhere.  Here is a poem of mine (not for consideration), written in the Summer of '15 when the New Horizons craft drove past Pluto:

Plutonic

We sensed you before we saw you 
circling cool and dim asunder. We called you 
X and postulated apogees 
from shivers of Neptune,
seizures of Venus.

And when we found you 
finally beyond the marble circus;
we made you one of us and 
king of hell and 
ninth.

Erratic before we knew better, 
exotic as zero,
xerotic, antarctic.

And then you weren't and
so it goes: the kinks unbraid,
the gimmicks fade and now you
are merely unworthy, unworldly;
another berg crowding oblivion, 
another dwarf scorned from our circle.

Today when Tombaugh's ashes
passed you in the velvet void,
perhaps we should confess,
perhaps you'd like to know
we missed you when we missed you
and cast one wistful look abaft,
just pretended not to notice 
your pale heart turning for us.

RationalMadman
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Debates: 574
Posts: 19,931
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@oromagi
Erratic before we knew better, 
exotic as zero,
xerotic, antarctic.
This has so much potential to be like the first part of an epic rap verse... The rest, not my style.

bsh1
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Debates: 14
Posts: 2,589
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@David
@Vader
@Speedrace
The deadline has elapsed. Please submit your entries for adjudication within the next 12 hours.

If anyone else fails to submit or drops out, the competition will be cancelled.

Speedrace
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Debates: 63
Posts: 6,283
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Regret (poem):

Lost, In a maze of realities
Drowning, In the depths of fantasy, the water blue as the sky
Clawing for air
Yet dreading the moment
When skin breaks the surface

How I would love
To be apart of that world
Full of smiles
Laughter
Reverberating off the walls
Worries of the future
Left in the dust
Without a thought
Given to to the past

But instead, I
Am here, floating
In my world of could-have-beens
Suffocating
In a pile 
of regrets
Screaming
begging
pleading for help
Yet refusing
to grab hold

There they stand
A unit
One
Withstanding
Anything
Calling me out

But I ignore
Cowering in
The hole that I dug
And as the calls start to fade
I continue to dig
And dig
And dig
Until the day
That I am ready to come out
And the day I realize
It is too late

RationalMadman
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Posts: 19,931
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@bsh1
Cancelling because you know deep down I would take the title; it is my destiny.
RationalMadman
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Posts: 19,931
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I want to spar with these boys in that gladiator pit, no cancellation!

Warpaint on my face, heart racing. All or nothing, DARTer of all time or the fuckboy who thought he was! 
RationalMadman
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Debates: 574
Posts: 19,931
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^ warning violence
Barney
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Debates: 53
Posts: 3,467
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@oromagi
Could you clarify if your main entry is 61 or 66
RationalMadman
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i considered making a short, classic Dungeons & Dragons dungeon called "Ramshutu's Tomb."

I also thought about doing poems but since both of you went poetry (I am not complaining, mind you) I thought I'd go elsewhere.  Here is a poem of mine (not for consideration),

oromagi
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Debates: 117
Posts: 8,696
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@Barney
yes- #61 - the photos are my talent show
Barney
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@David
@Vader
@Ramshutu
Are your entries coming? (If I missed them, just point me to the post #)
Ramshutu
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@Barney
I’ve withdrawn due to RL time constraints.
oromagi
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@Ramshutu
And to think I was going to make you my  demilich

Ramshutu
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@oromagi
ill always be your demilich 
Barney
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@Vader
@Ramshutu
@oromagi
@K_Michael
@Speedrace
I've graded the mini's on a loose 1-10 scale. To be clear, the score modifiers are already accounted for in in the grade, they were to help me grade more fairly (I also moved everything into a word file without names, and waited a couple days before reading).

Entry10
460 words.
Initial reaction: Wall of text.
Story: 7 (didn’t bore me...)
Style 4 (-1 for site instead of sight)
So the horse race. Not a bad time to pull the present tense. I sadly never got invested in the characters, it felt a given that the million to one chance of a pony in a horse race would win. A better ending might have been no miracle (or if there was, mention of doping), or even the loser beating the odds by coming in second or third place, but not caring because it's playing the game that it enjoys.

Entry11
227 words.
Initial reaction: The quote sets a high standard for it to live up to.
Story: 8 (held my attention, made good use of first person, but that ending wasjust so cliché)
Style: 8 (+1 from quote)
The fencing training. Not much to be said. I enjoyed the way the battle was written, felt the fluid motion and determination of the first person narrator... But again, that ending was so cliche. Yeah it's awesome to once get the upper hand, but the shock and awe from everyone... It made it feel like the guy was outright retiring, due to 1 out of a 1000 duels to this person he'd lose, never mind the remaining 999 times.

 
Entry12
142 words.
Initial reaction: Very short.
Story: 5 (nothing progressed)
Style: 5 (wall of text)
Man brushes teeth and strokes his ego.

Entry16
460 words
Initial reaction: Nice formatting.
Story: 9 (outright entertained me, and a +1 from the switch)
Style: 8 (-1 from line break between simply and stood, +1 for use of cretinous, -1 for peace instead of piece of paper)
Boring debate discussions... holy shit they're criminal gladiators about to die! I once got forced to watch Meet The Spartans, and this was already better (that's not meant as an insult, that movie was actually sent to theaters).

Entry17
434words.
Initialreaction: Second best formatting.
Story: 6 (I did not come to care about the characters, and the over emphasis onexplaining details of what the guy did wrong felt incredibly inorganic.)
Style: 6 (-1 from “realizing their grave mistake their grave mistake,” and -1from double quotations inside an ongoing quote (there are single quotationmarks for that, and/or italics)).
Kid manipulates parents, and they instantly change their ways. I feel this wanted to be big and important, but for that to work the audience has to have some reason to care. Maybe were it first person from the kid, and in the end he doesn't get his way?

Entry 26
347words
Initialreaction: Am I seeing references to debaters and maybe the FSM?
Story: 8 (+1 for making me laugh).
Style: 6 (-0.5 from non-capital name of Richter scale (it was named for aperson, it gets the cap.), -1 for repeatedly starting sentences with And.
This was not high art, but it did not want to be. It's like The Predator, it knows what it is, and makes no apologies ('yeehaw! We're going to put on this armor and shoot global warming!').
RationalMadman
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My story actually had a lot of depth to it and was very ironic/funny if you read it deeper and the perspective it forced you to take (the losers he leaves behind).

I used brevity to my advantage.

RationalMadman
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But if you're the guest judge so be it.
RationalMadman
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My story had 152 words or so I thought... Whatever.
bsh1
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@RationalMadman
@David
@Vader
@Ramshutu
@Speedrace
Unfortunately, since neither Virt nor Supa posted their entries, and since Ram dropped out, I am cancelling this event. Having four participants is not enough to run this kind of thing.
bsh1
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@oromagi
@K_Michael
See above.
K_Michael
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I won the most challenges lol. Victory is mine.

Barney
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Debates: 53
Posts: 3,467
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@oromagi
@K_Michael
@Speedrace
In case anyone is curious, here's the base scores I recorded for the air-MAXI.
They were graded a 1-5 scale, which could have been multiplied to match any other scale, but they were intended mainly for me to record first impressions to use when conferring with the main judge Bsh1.

K_Michael:
4.5, deeply enjoyable

Speedrace:
4.5, solid (+1 for relevance)

oromagi:
3.5, I enjoyed the photos (-0.5 for accessibility, next time please put them into an album).

RationalMadman:
3.5, kept pulling me out of any flow with the eye rolling (+1 for relevance)

With grades from the mini applied for tie-breaking, this gives an order of K_Michael, Speedrace, oromagi, and RationalMadman.

Of course this does not account for Bsh1's scoring, which to my understanding was to be done strictly holistically. Were he to have come to the same order conclusion, that likely would have been the outcome, but such is not known.
Vader
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@Barney
I've done my entry for round 1
Vader
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@bsh1
Noo i was gonna write poems reee


I was away on holiday

Barney
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@Vader
No biggie, the contest is canceled anyway.