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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/
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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.
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.
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.
It is stormy. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
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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.