Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Herremann the Wise" data-source="post: 4226811" data-attributes="member: 11300">Judgment - Match Seven / Rodrigo Istalindir vs. tadkARWINK’S JUDGMENTTadk Report on the Viability of Test Objects and Test SubjectsThe curse of ceramic GM: great ideas for stories don’t get a chance to fully percolate before the timeline. I dig tadk’s idea of story-as-test-report, but given the strong reliance on the test-report side of the genre merge it tends to fall a little flat. I kept going over it, looking for the story (as in, conflict that builds and gets resolved) and the connections between the experiments, but if it’s there then I’m missing it. This feels like a grab-bag of ideas without a strong sense of thematic unity, and without that thematic unity and storyline it all feels a little too easy in its picture use. The questions I want answered: What are these test-designs for? What’s at stake with their success or failure? Once that seeps into the narrative a little, affecting the voice of the narrator and the experience of the reader, I think this would become a very different story that uses its report structure effectively instead of relying on it.Rodrigo Istalindir / The End of the LineIt’s to Rodrigo’s credit that he gives us a familiar set-up and proceeds to make the story his own, quilting together the images into a solid narrative after an opening paragraph that just doesn’t live up to the rest of the story. His set-up’s a tough one to pull off – it’s a familiar trope enough that a well-read genre reader isn’t going to give it an inch – but the story succeeds in creating a believable voice and makes good use of narrative authority to given the events a credibility that far to many science-gone-wrong stories don’t have in early drafts. My quibbles with the piece largely come from a personal dislike of narrative frames that don’t add to the story (and I don’t think the current opening/title does) and the feeling that the canned eel and blue/red genome twins aren’t as strongly woven into the narrative as the girl-in-library and weird-lemur-thing.The JudgmentInteresting round, with both contestants mining the science angle and putting together weird tales of experimentation. I think Rodrigo Istalindir takes this on the strength of both the story and his picture use, though I’ll give props to Tadk for attempting something relatively out-of-the-box as far as form goes. THE JUDGMENT OF HERREMANN THE WISEI’ll start unusually for me by saying that Rodrigo has my vote for this match for a well constructed and written piece that carried my interest from start to finish.The images for this match were what I personally define as dissonant, lacking any obvious cohesion. As such, part of the joy of judging the entries from this perspective was to see how the competitors would pull them together. Rodrigo did a very solid job of unifying them where as tadk laid some excellent groundwork but failed to tie the images together with a golden thread. I was left wondering, if only tadk could have had these four disparate experiments unified by a common goal, with the ironic conclusions leading to a defining truth or moral. It would have been a truly impressive if unorthodox effort. Alas, we were served with four disparate pieces of research and thus a piece that left me unsatisfied. To Rodrigo, your writing always has a solidity and strength to it, making you a formidable contestant in any match-up. This piece certainly maintained that standard so congratulations. The direction you took the pictures in was a little surprising but wonderful none-the-less (in fact both contestants had a scientific foundation which I really didn’t see coming). On a personal note to tadk, I always look forward to reading your entries; I always know I’m going to get something different and I know that one of these times, you are going to really hit the mark. Thank you very much for your efforts and I look forward to seeing that home run!Judgment: Rodrigo IstalindirMALDUR’S JUDGMENTye people of yore will remember I do my judgement short and to the point , so here goes nothing:Odd how pictures push towards a certain idea. Especially if the result is so very different, yet with a similar vibe.tadk, that is a very "different" ... work (cant really call it a story), and a very incoherent one at that. I dont think  the different parts (one for each picture) had anything to do with one another, you could have easily used any other picture.Rodrigo made a decent story, and a pretty sweet, yet tragic, one at that.The science could have used some more elaboration, yet me as an avid "regenesis" viewer could figure it out .Judgement: Rodrigo IstalindirFINAL JUDGMENTRodrigo takes the match with all three judges in agreement.</blockquote>

Verification