IWT8- The Results!

[Usoki]

And the winner is... me! Yes, really. No, I didn't cheat. Seriously, go and see the numbers yourself. Look, if you really had an issue with this, you should have thought of this before you put me in charge of the votes.

But, seriously, though- there were some great stories this year, and the top two places were neck and neck until the final few votes. KazeYami submitted a great story, and he should be proud of his score. Should I follow the fate of all previous scorekeepers and wind up dead in EndMaster's basement, the contest will be in great hands with our runner up. And that's not to say that all of the other stories were horrible, either. A solid half of the entrants had scores within a two point range. There's nothing to be ashamed of, even if you did end up in the bottom half.

Here's the breakdown. Remember, there were a total of 50 points possible.

43.7- Reality Shift
41.1- Catharsis of Cthulhu
39.0- Coitus Machina (adjusted)
37.5- Worlds Apart
36.0- The Galactic Adventures of Pierce Darkblade
35.7- Coitus Machina (actual)
35.5- The Machinist Child
31.5- Following the Walking Call
19.8- Jedi or Sith

The really observant people may have noticed that DEP's story appears twice. This is because his story was attacked by a ravaging prude, who deducted some 20 or so points for reasons that make no sense beyond "this offends me therefore I hate it". So, he has two scores- one with the true value, and one where the idiot damage has been repaired. If DEP had been in the running for one of the higher spots, I would have considered throwing all of those votes out- these votes followed a complete opposite trend of which stories were great and which ones were mediocre, not to mention all of the values where the numerical score and the reason given for the score were entirely contradictory, or just plain wrong. I considered calling sabotage, but I just don't want to give them enough credit for coming up with such an idea. I'm not going to tell you who or which vote, but I get the feeling you'll be able to figure it out pretty easily.

As for next year's contest... I'm still mulling it over. I'm open to suggestions, but I'm not putting it to a vote- I have the final say, dammit. I am curious as to what you guys thought of the grab-bag style of themes. Did it work well, or was it awful? I'm considering using it again.

[Usoki]

In related news, critiques are coming really, really soon. I'm running into a snag- the forum messages have a character limit that I keep tripping, but the main site has awful formatting on how interprets line spaces. Just... you're all smart people. They'll be in one or the other. Figure it out.

Edit: They'll be going out over the main site's mailbox. The copy/paste formatting ugliness goes away when I turn off word wrap. You'll just have to figure out where each vote begins and ends on your own. Again, you're all smart people. I'm sure you'll figure it out.

[Usoki]

Remember, it's good form to post your ratings, discuss your reaction to them, and then try and guess who wrote which critique. Last year this all happened in this thread, but in years past each author made his own thread for this purpose. To each their own. If you're going to be verbose, I recommend making a new thread. If you just want to make a few comments and be done with it, then go ahead and post here. I'm rather indifferent.

[Vesnic]

Finally!

Congratulations, Usoki!

Lucky for you you won this one, or I'd have coined the perfect new nickname for you: Bridesmaid!

Ahahahaha!

BADDA BING BADDA BOOM!

Congratulations, Usoki!

And good show, everyone. You sure did make my eyeballs sore, but it was worth it.

[End Master]

I knew it would be Usoki's year. Just didn't want to jinx it by saying it like I did a couple of other times I said it!

I will also say as someone who regularly gets story complaints about "too much swearing" over at CYS (Though happily the positive ratings still overwhelm the idiots) I can sympathize with DEP's "morals" rating ravaged story.

[donteatpoop]

Congratulations, Usucky.

I don't mind the score with the actual results; some fuck heads just don't like moments of hard core porn. Besides, it's entirely possible that they typed their critique with only one hand, and that can be a daunting task.

Anyway, it's all good in the neighborhood, with all the glaring fuck ups in my story there's no way it diserved to win. If only I'd been inspired enough to hammer the story out early. Katzryummy did a hella-good job blending horror and sci-fi. And Cat2K definately diserves the bronze; so drop me for shizzle. I think those were all better than mine anywhoo.

Great top 3 stories.

Really extra-cool story suckysucky, well diserved win.

[Cat2000]

Congratulations on winning ^^. (And I'm not surprised, either. When I read your story, I figured it would be the winning entry).

I think the grab-bag style of themes was a good idea, personally. It required a lot of creativity with coming up with ways of linking the themes together and it was different to having just one theme.

[Usoki]

Hah, you're all too kind. (I'm lying- I'm pretty awesome and I totally deserve all of this praise.) Really, though, you guys are great. I appreciate it. I wasn't too sure how well I'd do for awhile.

I can't decide if the idea of being an IWT Bridesmaid is awesome or depressing. I guess it depends which is better- getting first place once, or getting second place multiple times. That really is a nice, snippy remark. It must have been torture not to blurt that one out.

Well, mostly I just wanted to use that to point out how close the results were. That, and it boggles the mind how someone could decide that your story has no SciFi themes. And since one of those scores was asterisked, their stupidity cost you up to 27 points. Even by giving 20 (out of 300) of them back, you jumped up two places. Pretty crazy. You guys were all super close. It was hard to tell who was going to end up where, because even something as simple as who hadn't voted yet would skew things. Cat spent most of the time in the rear, simply because she voted first.

[Vesnic]

Katzryummy

Ahahahaha!!! Brilliant.

[End Master]

Despite her SCORN badge, it looks like Mizal's concerns about getting really crappy ratings were a slight overreaction. She did somewhat okay for literally just slapping a story together at the last minute.

As for Zac...wow. That's a pretty far last place ranking. I think the Mudkip story is the only one that placed very far behind before. Maybe Serial Rapist.

[donteatpoop]

I hope everyone posts their ratings. I was drunk when I wrote most of them and can't remember all that I said, but I recall marveling at how clever I was.

[donteatpoop]

For the record, I just want to say how awesome it is that we have two relatively new members putting forward decent stories.

[BatCountry]

I don't know if Usoki plans to announce the next contest theme in this thread, but this is probably the best place to make suggestions to him.


The grab bag idea with the various themes is great and should stay for the next contest. I don't know if it should be a broad theme again or more confined. Sci-Fi was pretty broad, but the themes narrowed it down. We could either stay the course or get even more condensed.


Not sure why, but I'm feeling a Jungle Adventure would be a nice idea to play around with. Dark jungles with dangerous flora and fauna, mysterious temples containing treasures of unspeakable evil, tribal natives who have been cut off from civilization for thousands of years, psychotic man eating super apes. Not sure if everyone feels me on this one, but I think it would be fun.



Other suggestions for Usoki to think about, hmmm....The super hero genre may be interesting to delve into. Loads of tropes concerning super heroes. You could have the grab bag consist of certain powers, settings or character archetypes. The semi-erotic adventures of Captain Insectoid, the wielder of the bee hive bazooka! Tempting Usoki?


If neither idea tickles your testes I would recommend going with a broad theme again like Horror or Adventure.

[Vesnic]

As for me, I would like something distinctly non-tropey. I am really tired of reading the same old shit over and over and over. It's like the leftovers that never end. Each time you reheat them in the microwave, they get a little less appetizing.

Please make a total departure from the sci-fi/fantasy/adventure geek realm. I'm really tired of it.

People seem to do better with a little guidance. Spare the rod, spoil the child. This means you should probably go with either the grab-bag option to narrow down a broad topic, or just make a more specific topic. I'm sure there are plenty of ways to do this without people complaining that your choice is too arcane--damned if I know what these ways are.

But yes: departure is the word for the IWT 9. This must be a bullet-train zippity doo-da removed from the usual faff.

[Dragavan]

I liked the way this years was done for the most part, being the choices of things part... but I would like to see fewer choices, but no overall theme. This would be similar to the way the "Game Chef" contest has been done before (which is a game design thing based on the idea of "Iron Chef", but would still work for stories).

Put up like six or eight varied ingredients (words or phrases) that are not all tied to the same style or theme (like all the stuff this year was obviously sci-fi themed) and require every author to choose at least three of them to strongly integrate into their story. They can't be single page passing references or just in the name or something. They have to be important parts of the story (clearly) and that will be part of judging them in the end.

This way you would get a wide variety of stories in several genres that use the ingredients in different ways. And with fewer ingredients to choose from you'd really see the different ways people use the same things. That's why it's important to choose very different ingredients, so there are no obvious connections between them that everyone would choose to ease of use.

Like: Memories, Log Cabin, Brotherly Love, Golem, Sunken Ship, and Debutante Ball.
Choose at least 3.

So someone who did Debutante Ball, Memories, and Brotherly Love would have a very different story from the person who chose Log Cabin, Brotherly Love, and Memories, even though they shared two of the three words.

They have also done other (more complex) variations of this, but I like the simple one the best. Choose three of these diverse ingredients and go... but then I don't enter these things, so what do I have to say on the matter?