Warning: parody post…
Hey all…
Whilst preparing my post in advance for the voluntary feedback thread, I obtained some assistance in wording from my work colleagues to help me avoid sounding so full of sour grapes.
I get the feeling that they didn’t quite understand the remit of what I was aiming for.
Enjoy… (it made me laugh)
Am I disappointed? Of course. Five years of entering and I still have sweet FA to my name, despite honestly thinking I had found my inner game designer. Now that Zen has died, leaving nothing but a shrivelled tree at my heart. You bas***ds.
Previous years, in no particular order – though believe me they’re all chronicled, etched in the dead flesh of that gnarled old tree – I went too far: Too weird, too wacky; poor execution, or simply too overkill.
This year I knuckled down; this year, I said, I would make it my aim to pursue both format and execution. I tried a simpler item, one without the death rays and open bandsaws of before (on this last point, I wish to note, my banning on the grounds of ‘health and safety’ was a bitter and cruel blow for my third year’s entry). No, this year I resisted the urge to spiral down into the Cthulian pits of destruction, summoning up my innermost carnal power to produce an item of untold devastation, hitherto foreruled as breaking new grounds in ‘abusability; both in terms of spirit of the rules, as well as in the nature and playing of the game.’ Instead I aimed for cleanliness, elegance and simplicity in my entry; a tightness overall.
I suspect I swung too far the other way.
No, not that far; you can remove THAT out of your mind RIGHT now.
Besides, I’d only do that sort of work for a fee. (Or free entry through to the next stage? No? Then never mind…)
I have really looked forward to this competition, every year, but now I find myself at a plateau, contemplating. “Where did I go so wrong? Who would miss me if I just jumped, tumbling down to the bottom, my body cast upon the rocks beneath? On second thoughts, who would miss any body I tossed down into the deep crevasse?”
So… I guess I’m not the only one to feel this way, this sense of aching disappointment and loss. So, in a brief moment of benevolence I know I’ll regret later – like that hang over last Wednesday when I found myself surrounded by three cheap hookers and a fell ring crafted of my own vomit – I thought I would share my item and my thoughts upon it. I do so in the hopes that others might learn from it, and thus avoid the multiple bear traps I feel have mauled my face so very savagely.
And don’t worry, I’ll finish documenting the round one template document. Strangely I’m enjoying the process; I find it therapeutic, as I tie each point with the name to which is responsible. I guess that makes me sound a little weird, huh?
My item entry is provided below. Feel free to be brutal, as I have already been dealt as fell a blow as I shall ever receive. I feel like this is my last attempt, like there is no more I can give to this competition, this process; that I have bled my creative last. But they say pain is knowing you’re still alive; perhaps then your collective kicking in of my face – something on which I invested my soul into, 296 of my words – will be just the kick I need to keep crawling, hands and knees, through the mire to the next competition, ready to face all this again.
But there is one happy thing to take away from all this, one small glimmer of hope on which I cling. For the competition review staff, whilst I might have missed my first aim, format, as I look back across my journey thus far I see, with renewed positivity, that my second aim is still within reach: execution. May you sleep soundly, and your dogs lay silent, as I greet you and yours in your sleep, ready to lay down bloody vengeance for all the pain you’ve caused. ===censored===.
Yours faithfully,
Anthony ‘The Axe Murder’ Adam
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