Slashdot Mirror
Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest
Soko writes: "Just browsing through the winners of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest on Canada.com, and got a real chuckle. Look for the Sci-Fi winner -- it's a really lame BSOD joke. Any one want to fess up? ;-) Background: Mr. Bulwer-Lytton is famous for starting one of his novels, "Paul Clifford", with the immortal line 'It was a dark and stormy night ...' The contest homepage is here, and the official contest results are here -- but Canada.com can weather a Slashdot generated 'dark and stormy night' better than these two links, I would guess."
I declare this contest pointless. I further declare that, by definition, Jim Theis' The Eye of Argon wins all bad writing contests from here on out. Period. Even ones that are only supposed to judge an opening sentence. End of Discussion.
Secret message to MST3K fans: Do not under any circumstances read the link above. Read this one instead. Friends don't let friends read this thing without Mike and the bots.
My favorite winner was from a few years ago..."Stanley looked quite bored and somewhat detached, but then penguins often do.
/Sean/
--
In his essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature", H.P. Lovecraft wrote of Bulwer-Lytton: "[D]espite the large doses of turgid rhetoric and empty romanticism in his products, his success in the weaving of a certain kind of bizarre charm cannot be denied."
If even Lovecraft thought the guy was too verbose and soppy, well, that's a lot of verbiage and sop.
As for "bizarre charm," read the winning contest entries.
Bulwer-Lytton has a lot of great quotes. My personal favorite is his remarkably conditional statement, "Beneath the rule of men entirely great, the pen is mightier than the sword."
I hope the contest winners gave their permission to have their email addresses and phone numbers posted on the web...
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
My favorite: A friend of mine bought one of those glass drinking birds -- you know, the kind with liquid on the inside that when it gets warm makes the head bob up and down?
Well, the name of the product is written )in big letters) as "Non Toxic Drinking Bird". Then in little letters on the side it says "Warning: contents toxic".
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
...maybe the story should've been filed under "Microsoft." Given the intro that won the science-fiction category, who's to say Kirk's blue-screen woes weren't some sort of Borg plot?
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Suddenly, a smile draped across CmdrTaco's beleagured face. Within mere seconds of contemplation, Rob had formed a deceitful plan of treachery and escape formed in the halls of his mind.
Rob quickly began rambling off numbers and techno babble to the poor Anne in a flurry matched by no other geek in this plane of existance. Anne found herself dazed and barely able to speak.
"Have you spoken a word of this to any other?", CmdrTaco ask suspiciously. Anne still recovering from CmdrTaco's flurry of tech speak barely replied, "no, of course not, you wer..."
Images of evil danced over robs face as he cut Anne off and quickly moved to busy her. Rambling, mumbling, and siting bizarre documentation anomalies, he set Anne dazed into a confused state nearing incapacitation.
Rob set off quickly for the NOC. If he reached Anne in time and with a minor changes to some details, no one would knew he had been alerted to the outage. Rob could then be free to continue his devilish pursuits exploring the many sensal wonders of the new Diablo II expansion pack.
Upon entering the NOC he was greeted by three very large slashdot trolls. "Calm yourselves boys, we have work tonight", Rob calmly stated to the trolls. Within moments he was upon Anne who was still looking over numerous statistical information printouts and continued to be held CmdrTaco's spell of techno babble.
CmdrTaco smiled gravely as he spoke to her softly, "Poor Anne, if you were only a tech, you would have easily fended off my gibberish TEK." In a mere flick of his wrist the trolls were upon Anne, quickly petrifying here and soiling her with hot grits.
Just as quickly as he had entered, CmdrTaco had left the noc, and retired to his small 12 node Beowulf of Diablo II.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
Check out the Lyttle Lytton Contest, where the objective is to produce the worst beginning sentence using a maximum of 25 words. The entries can't use long streams of overblown descriptions and metaphors, so they're terrible in new and creative ways.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
I'm just saying...
(nice try)
No, not witty quips. Purposely bad quips. From the canada.com article: "The tiny dog formed the basis of her winning entry Monday in the 20th annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest - given to the writer who can come up with the worst beginning to an imaginary novel."
It's named after Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, who really did start off a novel (Paul Clifford) with the line "It was a dark and stormy night".
[TMB]
Someone needs to start a contest for bad technical writing. All the crappy books, articles and source code comments should provide a rich source of material. I first heard of the Bulwer-Lytton contest from a review of a book on SQL programming on Amazon.
As others have pointed out, it's looking for really bad first sentences to fictional novels. Their submissions are made up for the contest, by the participants. However, here's the original that inspired it (sorry, but you asked):
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
When I checked out the story on Canada.com, I noticed something very troubling: their partial list completely omitted the "Vile Pun" winners! Is there some Canadian plot against bad puns, or did the writer or editor just have a really bad time as a kid (everyone using wordplays on their name or something)?
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
Reasonable people can disagree on what constitutes "good" writing or "bad" writing, but to say that there is no bad writing...? Sheesh.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Sounds familiar, no?
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Let's not forget such cult favorites as:
"I know I'll get moderated down for this, but..."
and:
"CmdrTaco misspelled words in the story all three times that he posted it."
Doesn't Jon Katz win that one automatically?
With the worst beginnings of a regular slashdot post, or something. Who can forget that instant classic:
First post!
Or the second-most used (or abused) introduction to a post:
IANAL, but... (Followed by 3 pages of weird, stupid and/or self-contradicting legal advice)
Any takers?
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
Learning to fly, Pink Floyd.
It is stormy. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
This sig intentionally left blank.
Leave it to the president of the Mathematics and Actuarial Science's Student Union (http://www.math.utoronto.ca/massu/) of the University of Toronto to win the fantasy category. If you read his entry, it's obvious the guy only thinks of ACT courses. "overthrowing the evil mage's tyranny, he envisioned a progressive tax system based upon income brackets, yet allowing deductions for business expenses, dependents, and charitable donations." It just goes to prove that not all president's of math clubs are uber-geeks.
---- The geek shall inherit the Earth.
It seems like a competition to come up with extremely short and witty quips.
Frankly, I've seen much more clever prose generated much more quickly in the early stages of a new slashdot article.
Did anyone try entering the contest with "FP!" or "Can you imagine..." ?
Slashdotters around the world were putting away their toyz & preparing to surf the mighty internet all night when a giant wordsmith strode amongst them all, wielding an o.e.d. under one mighty thew & a roget's thesaurus under the other, hoping to smite all contenders & thus qualify for the title of world's windiest writer!
by Snoopy
Part 1
It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly, a shot rang out! A door slammed. The maid screamed.
Suddenly, a pirate ship appeared on the horizon!
While millions of people were starving, the king lived in luxury. Meanwhile, on a small farm in Kansas, a boy was growing up.
Part 2
A light snow was falling, and the little girl with the tattered shawl had not sold a violet all day.
At that very moment, a young intern at City Hospital was making an important discovery. The mysterious patient in Room 213 had finally awakened. She moaned softly.
Could it be that she was the sister of the boy in Kansas who loved the girl with the tattered shawl who was the daughter of the maid who had escaped from the pirates? The intern frowned.
"Stampede!" the foreman shouted, and forty thousand head of cattle thundered down on the tiny camp. The two men rolled on the ground grappling beneath the murderous hooves. A left and a right. A left. Another left and right. An uppercut to the jaw. The fight was over. And so the ranch was saved.
The young intern sat by himself in one corner of the coffee shop. He had learned about medicine, but more importantly, he had learned something about life.
The End
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
I remember reading a story about Bulwer-Lytton, someone criticised his novels as lacking the elements that a serious novel required: sex, violence, royalty, and religion. B-L said he could do that in one sentence, and wrote:
"'Get your hand off my knee or I'll kill you,' said the Duchess to the Bishop."
The funny thing is, there is no such thing as "bad writing". Everybody views something good as bad, and bad as good (especially in the New York art sense).
A barrage of incessantly excited electrons, zipping back and forth in an intricate magnetic dance, flowed like the Niagra through the labyrinthine catacombs of Cisco's resistors and capacitors within the muggy, dust-ridden interior of OSDN's overworked, recently repaired router. One in particular tumbled through transistors with impunity, spinning with such decided direction that, as it thought, Schrodinger had better start digging a permanent residence for his furry feline friend. Bereft of passion or conviction, one of a garganutan series, this election lived and died like an Egyption spirit for the data he lugged about like a woker ant. He is Eli Electron -- and this is his story.