IWT8- The Results!

[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.

[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]

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.