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Post by bulldust on Jul 1, 2019 14:48:15 GMT
The Bull is a little paranoid when it comes to sharing information on the internet. At one time, he was less reserved, willing to let his shit hang out all over social media. Then he realized the oncoming trend and reeled it back.
But for that brief time that the Bull was wild and free, he let caution fly to the to the wind, providing all manner of personals to digital bastards behind data collection. He took stupid quizzes to determine his “true age”, Smurf name, Star Trek species and quantify his personality type. (He is an Extroverted Intuitive Asshole according to every quiz, if you want to know.) He even created his own quiz – what kind of turd are you? It wasn’t a big success. People don’t seem to want to associate themselves with excrement, no matter how shitty they are.
So, when “Van Burenfication” came across the desk, the Bullmeister saw potential.
The cap is exactly what it promises, a tale of a man trapped on the social media, quiz treadmill, taking poll after poll to appease his wife. But after taking one to determine which historical president he was, things get odd.
The flow is good, and the Bull didn’t notice and obvious structural problems. It didn’t drag or otherwise bring pain upon reading it.
In fact, the cap amused the Bull. Maybe the Bull has simple needs being that it’s Monday and his mental state is clouded. Perhaps he should be into something more “literary” and deeply significant. Nah, fuck that shit, this gave the Bull a chuckle without any unnecessary drama or painful emotional response.
Sometimes a guy just wants to be entertained without all the emotional baggage.
Rocks may disagree but the Bull digs this cap. So, here is an unapologetic “yes” vote. This doesn’t happen often.
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Post by rockefeller on Jul 4, 2019 22:46:40 GMT
Despite some retarded TV game show blaring in the background, Rocks read this entire cap without once feeling the need to skim. It held his attention so well that now, perhaps half an hour later, he remembers the story well, but only a handful of stupid questions crafted to elicit through transparent double entendre squeals of hilarity in what sounded like an exclusively female audience. Think The Newlywed Game without all the newlyweds or even once using the word, "Whoopie."
Because of issues probably stemming from his early toilet training, Rocks got suckered into taking an online IQ test the other week. Even if he weren't a genius, he probably would've found it Sesame Street easy. But when he went to receive his results, confirming what he already knew, that he'd aced it and was almost certainly in the top 5 or 10 smartest people alive, there turned out to be one final question basically asking if he was dumb enough to enter a credit card number. Happily, he wasn't. (Was anyone?)
Although he did once voluntarily take a survey as part of the divorced control group for some psych study in which one question was "Have you ever seen a car? (A) never, (B) once, (C) twice, (D) more than twice" obviously included to see if test subjects were actually reading the questions and not just checking them off randomly (the way Rocks usually took multiple choice tests), he isn't well versed in the whole cute "Which serial killer are you?" type genre of online survey/scam. And so, never one to shy away from a little research, he just googled, "Can you smell your own farts?" exactly as written, and got no relevant hits. "Do you smell your own farts?" is a completely different, and seemingly more common, query.
Nonetheless, and as stated, it amused Rocks and held his attention despite some serious competition. The writing itself is tight. Clean. Not a single nit. It even reflects a fair amount of research and/or knowledge. Rocks learned shit.
But the ending is weak. It reduces the entire thing to a joke. And not even a proper joke, which would've probably employed the Rule of Three. Rarely if ever has Rocks not liked a piece for ending too soon. But here it's like the VC had this fun idea, ran with it awhile, but then couldn't figure out how to meaningfully incorporate it, and lost interest. Not as bad as characters fainting dead away at The End. But like that.
It's worth crafting as a modern fairy tale. Maybe a third fundamentally different survey that resolves (in some metaphorically interesting way) the first two? As is, though, no. Thank you. Really. But no.
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Post by rorschalk on Jul 6, 2019 19:12:34 GMT
Architext's actin' funny, dun know why.
Could be a while til it breaks this tie!
Oh capital haze, somebody hep me...
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Post by architext on Jul 10, 2019 0:50:14 GMT
Even the Architext--squeezer of planets, penetrator of multiversal vastnesses unparalleled, popper of bubble wraps transdimensionally gratifying--has taken absurd online quizzes from time to time. When I took the "which thirteen-dimensional space deity are you?" test, I was told I was actually Qfwfq from Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics. That seemed especially odd since I myself was one of the possible outcome options on the test. I was not unflattered to be labeled Qfwfq, but it's just wrong. "Let's chalk that up to poor test writing," I decided, so I merely plasmified the universe and let it recongeal for 13 billion Earth-years. No biggie.
The Architext concurs with both of his esteemed maggots above. Van Burenification is well-written on the surface and enjoyable, yet simultaneously flimsy and nonsensical. That "on the surface" business shouldn't be taken as faint praise; it's all too often we see a fine concept shot in the foot by horrible prose. In this case we have the reverse, which is more rare: an iffy concept elevated by talented prose. So, from this Architext's perspective, the writer hasn't quite settled on the right material, or perhaps it's just a few details shy of working. He shouldn't be too discouraged.
The flaws are structural. It's written in the style of one of the more moralistic Twilight Zone episodes, with a focus on a character, but the twist ending isn't an ironic reversal so much as a second bit of randomness. One bit of randomness, early on, kicks off the plot. A second bit of randomness, related but irrelevantly so, concludes it. Unexplained magic can start a good story, but it should never end it, any more than "he woke up and it was all a dream." It's simply unsatisfactory, like if Beethoven's Ninth ended with someone playing the kazoo. The main issue here is that there's no underlying logic. Why does the metamorphosis only happen to Jim and not his wife? Why did it never happen before? And what does Aladdin, specifically, have to do with anything that precedes it?
Speaking of metamorphoses, Kafka's short story makes for a good comparison. Gregor Samsa is transformed into a bug by the end of the first sentence, and is (like van Burenification) not explained. During the story we discover how dependent Gregor's family has been on him, which makes it initially a tragic situation. But his conversion into near-total dependence on them causes the family to grow stronger in the end, once they are forced to take some responsibility--so Gregor's death is basically a happy ending. It isn't just a classic short story but it's actually a serviceable template for all satisfactory ironic twists in absurdist stories. Note that no second metamorphosis is actually necessary for Gregor (other than his decline into death). The important point is that the family is better off once he's dead than they were in the first place, and the story's extremely logical arc makes this point both clear and compelling. Fun fact*: the original title of "Metamorphosis" was "Buggery".
Compare that metamorphosis to the Iago-fication. Like Gregor, Jim's personality is revealed mostly in retrospect through his conversion, but that's where the similarity ends. If something is meant to be revealed by the second conversion, it needs to be made evident through Trudy and/or the office-mates. We never even get to see Trudy come home to find him sharpening his nose on a cuttlefish bone (or whatever), so the effect of his second change on others, and why that might matter to the reader, is dropped altogether. "The worst decision of his life" seems like an attempt to slap an Aesop onto it, and that doesn't really fit either.
There may be a spectrum where Martin van Buren and Iago the evil parrot are the endpoints, but it's hard to imagine what that spectrum would measure precisely and what would lay in-between. Fundamentally there's nothing ironic in this ending, just a wrong turn by the writer. The story might actually benefit from more transformations, somehow, to make the specificty of the current ones less seemingly significant. It would also benefit if some action/behavior/trait of Jim's were the root cause of the transformations, both literally (maybe he clicks on a "double down" button between the test and the result which causes the results to become real, or he just has a haunted laptop) and figuratively (he deserves this because the gods have chosen to teach him a lesson). It's hard to say what to fix in such terms without taking over and doing one's own thing with it. Of course, I have no need to write fiction when I can create entire universes by fluttering an eyelash.
Ultimately praiseworthy but my thumb remains down, for the time being. Remember, though, the Beatles were rejected by Decca because "guitar music is on the way out." Who knows, someday Van Burenification might be its own genre, and I will look quite the fool. Luckily I can always destroy the universe again.
sincerely,
The Architext
* Please note: this fun fact is not true.
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