Wherein I finally explain the effect of 447. I'm sorry for making it so explicit.
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This hurt my eyes to read through all the blackboxes. I couldn't really appreciate the content because of how many blackboxes there were
Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you!
I'd change the colour of the boxes to rainbow coloured to fix this but I'm pretty sure that breaks canon. If you highlight the whole page (at least, in my browser) then black boxes become white so it's a lot easier on the eyes.
I don't think changing the color would fix it. You need enough of a hint to where the imagination fills in the blanks; too many black boxes at the end and my imagination just draws a blank instead.
No vote for now, it has a good catch at the beginning but no payoff by the end.
He was joking about changing the colour if you missed that.
(account deleted)Blackboxes plus a Clef and Dmitri reference… I was going to novote until I realized what that Brazil line was referencing. Sorry, dude, I don't like that tale, and the fact that you've referenced it here is a huge detriment.
-1
I think the blackboxes work well as a joke honestly, though it does kinda make the pacing a bit weird for me - it makes me really want to just skip through super fast.
This is pretty weak and definitely isn't your best work Randomini. No vote from me. I can't bring myself to downvote it because it's necessary to continue the cool war series, which I'm loving apart from this entry. I was expecting something better here.
I have to be honest. I upvoted this for one reason. "Anomalous walrus contained".
I would have laughed if that exact joke hadn't already been done on his author page :p
Running gags are offensively unoriginal.
Running anomalous walrus gags are sacred.
I have to agree - with DrNietzsche and the rest. The back boxes were taken to an annoying extreme, but for me, they elevated the anomalous walrus from a smile to a guffaw (I refuse to LOL). Generally poor piece, but the same things that were generally worthy of complaint made that and a few other small goofy bits much, much funnier. If you were going for a quite funny, but quite mediocre, piece of fluff, you succeeded
-that could be taken more harshly than intended. It IS a mediocre piece of fluff, but it is funnier than some pieces of well written humor, IMHO.
Another up-vote for the anomalous walrus.
I feel that some of the blackboxing was just to get out of the thing The Builder was going to do, and not having to explain exactly how The Painter was getting those people to safety. If you were planning to give us those details in a future tale, you could've executed the hints better, or just straight told us. No vote for now because I was liking the series up till this point.
E: This article will survive, no I have no issue downvoting. There are just too many details left up to our imagination. I feel cheated out of all the building with The exhibition, and a lack of actual anomalous details. Again, I feel it was lazy writing.
I think black-boxing was the smart decision, not only because it keeps the speculation alive as to 447-2's effect on dead bodies but it avoids the confrontation that would be caused from defining it. I feel bad because to me, it feels like a lose/lose situation where I personally appreciate this as a bridge between the past tale to the next.
+1 for Anomalous Walrus
Upvoting, not because I particularly like this tale, but because I don't feel it's quite bad enough to get deleted. It'd be a no vote if this wasn't so close to -10.
I'm… a little disappointed. Not really in you, Randomini, though I'll admit that I'm not the biggest fan of this tale- but I feel like what the author tried to do here is being overlooked.
I think it's rather unfair to downvote or criticize on the use of blackboxes here. He's not using them to obfuscate something in particular, or to get out of writing but using them as an artistic tool by illustrating the Foundation's methods regarding one of the best kept secrets. By necessity, the further into a report on 447-2 breaches one goes, the more black boxes would have to be there. Realistically, there'd just be big [DATA EXPUNGED] boxes over those huge chunks, but that doesn't make for a visually interesting piece. He was going for the visual effect of seeing the report gradually consumed by things that couldn't be left in the report, until there was nothing but absurd islands of data with no context floating in a sea of black.
That said, I agree that there's not really much payoff, but the novelty of the attempt is enough to keep me from downvoting. I like that you tried to do something interesting. I recognize the amount of work it'd take to string together those tiny bits of data to make something coherently engaging, but as it is, I just sort of skim through and "meh" my way to the end.
Null vote, chummer.
I wholeheartedly agree with this post. Probably my least favorite tale in The Cool War, but it accomplishes its purpose well enough.
The blackboxing and references didn't bug me much. Weaker entry or not, I was entertained, and upvoted to keep the tale alive.
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page revision: 2, last edited: 15 Jan 2023 15:06
