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It's a Long Way Down · Original Short Story ·
Organised by RogerDodger
Word limit 2000–8000
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Fresh Ink
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#1 · 1
· · >>wYvern
Is this supposed to be blood writing? If so, I think you should have done more to put some sheen on the red stuff down on the right, and I think it gets a little too light in color; blood is pretty dark.
#2 ·
· · >>TitaniumDragon
J'ai dans l'idée qu'un certaine valorisation de son propre travail passe par la réinterprétation de son moi corporel, au sein même d'un cheminement expérimental, transcendantal et méditatif. Si l'élévation de son esprit passe par une introspection systématique et systémique de chacun de nos choix, alors l’irréel clarté de nos pensées iconoclastes et désoxydées nous apparaîtrait plus clairement.

(Text is from a French speaker, but feel free to improvise with the review - no one speaks French anyway)

This is a good idea, fitting nicely into the prompt. My problem is how much text there is. You can tell us to dismiss it but it still grabs the eye and I just can't forget it.

I think it gets a little too light in color; blood is pretty dark

I'll disagree here. A representation of reality doesn't need to be accurate (I immediately understood that it was blood and I think it's clear enough here). In fact, any depiction of reality isn't reality. See this:
http://imagesanalyses.univ-paris1.fr/v4/wp-content/uploads/magritte_ceci_n_est_pas_une_pipe.jpg
#3 · 3
· · >>TitaniumDragon >>TitaniumDragon
>>TitaniumDragon
Actually, the representation is very, very accurate. Blood is about this color when it's fresh from an aterial wound, since there's oxidized heme in the blood. You can't compare it to the stuff they take from your arm for blood testing, because that's from veins and has reduced heme. Even non-aterial blood will turn this color if it's exposed to air for a while, because the heme in it will take up the oxygen as it would usually in the lungs.

The 'dark blood' is acutally one of the main immersion breakers for me in movies. Someone gets their throat slit, or shot, and out comes dark cherry juice... it always makes me laugh.

It turns dark when it coagulates, which is accurately represented here by the text gradually shifting from dark to bright red.

Edit: If you're curious, here's a nice comparison between aterial and venous blood color.
#4 ·
· · >>TitaniumDragon
This is one of my top favorites due to, well, everything. My only problem is how much text there is and how I can't read any of it.
#5 ·
·
>>wYvern
Huh. Well, then, I guess I withdraw my comment.
#6 ·
· · >>TitaniumDragon
I think, unfortunately, this ended up another piece that I want to like more than I actually do. It tells its story at a glance, and is great at that holistic level, but I find the actual details of the piece mostly frustrating. The fine lines of the calligraphic font combine with the smudge-black nature of the page background to render the text unreadable without serious effort; I understand that by putting the work in Latin you're going for a deliberately unreadable lorem-ipsum effect, but there's a difference between discerning the letters/not interpreting them and being unable to discern the letters in the first place.

I've kind of got the opposite color complaint about the blood as above readers. The red-to-brown of the text as it dries sat perfectly fine with me; my issue was that the left-hand page appears to be basically black. I understand that old dried blood can get very dark indeed, but that's old dried blood -- if the book was being written in real time and interrupted recently enough that the drops on the right are still arterial-fresh, I'm having a lot of trouble picturing the script on the left as having been written that long ago.

I also can't help but wish that the lorem ipsum itself had more of the flavor of some forbidden magical text. It looks sort of ... journal-y, like the author was interrupted writing a novel. I realize the caption identifies it as spellbook text, but that's not typically how spellbooks actually look in practice (at least in the era of modern book-bindings). Some sort of mystical diagram, or even just a list of instructions or bullet points, would have gone a long way for me in communicating the flavor of what led to the bloody ending.

Excellent concept, however, and a good implied story. Thank you for sharing.
#7 · 1
· · >>MLPmatthewl419
>>horizon
>>MLPmatthewl419
>>wYvern
>>Fenton
So, uh, yeah, this was actually mine. Go figure. :V

I was originally intending on this being more journalish, but then I came across the text of a Latin spellbook and decided to use that instead (that, plus I felt like writing a mini-story as an art piece was kind of cheating, and would be less inspiring).

The fact that it is illegible is a casualty of site limitations; I made it at a higher resolution, but it ended up being 8 MB at any sort of readable size. So I shrank it down to make it so that it would fit on Roger's site, but it made the text nigh illegible.

As for the blood thing - yeah, I actually used references to actual blood writing and actual blood to get the colors right, so I was more or less complaining over nothing. That being said, I feel like the text down on the bottom-right isn't quite fresh enough looking; it looks red, but it lacks the shininess of fresh ink/blood.

I'm glad someone actually used it as a prompt for a story.
#8 ·
·
>>TitaniumDragon
Some of the best people I know are the ones who can fake anonymity by critiquing their own work without going overboard on the issues.