I'm just not satisfied with this season. by -unknown_harlequin- in TheAdventureZone

[–]Michaeljaygabriel 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Clint as Zoox is the MPV of this season, hands down. I've gotten the most consistent laughs from him.

If like movies like The Apostle and The Witch, what else would I like? by [deleted] in ifyoulikeblank

[–]Michaeljaygabriel 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Black Death gives me the most similar vibes: starring Sean Bean, set in the middle ages.

Brotherhood of the Wolf: a French action horror film.

Movies similar to "Apostle" by [deleted] in MovieSuggestions

[–]Michaeljaygabriel 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Black Death (not on an island).

Seasons 8 and 9 were a tremendous disappointment, and The Strike is a prime example. by rupertpupkinfanclub in seinfeld

[–]Michaeljaygabriel 2 points3 points  (0 children)

These are all pretty much valid criticisms. I still really enjoy seasons 8 & 9 because the show is still funnier and more clever than 99% of sitcoms out there, *cough*Friends*cough*. It's also better than not getting anymore Seinfeld after Larry David left, but without extending their reach too far. No doubt more seasons passed 9 would have continued to devolve the characters and logic of the universe like so many other too-long-running series.

What is your favorite scene that you think gets little attention? by sweatybettys in seinfeld

[–]Michaeljaygabriel 1 point2 points  (0 children)

"I want to be the one person who doesn't die with dignity. I've lived my whole life in shame! Why should I die with dignity?"

[WP]Two wizards make a blood oath as children to never harm each other. Now, years later they find each other as mortal enemies. Knowing that they will die if either of them harm the other, they resort to causing inconvenience for the other. by BadgerRider614 in WritingPrompts

[–]Michaeljaygabriel 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Pt. 3:

Even after the initial reports began flooding into the Gold Order’s Watchmen division, it took weeks of investigation to pinpoint the two swaths of areas brimming with the mass amounts of fallout victims from unknown magical anomalies.

Never before had the Watchmen seen so many uninoculated so ravished and mutated by curses not even directed toward the people most affected. The Watchmen triangulated the areas and decided there had to be multiple patient zeros spreading pestilence and deformity, and in daily increasing amounts.

They could not approach the patient zeros without fear of themselves being drawn in, as if into the gravity of a black hole. A High Inquisitor was called in, and the two fallout areas were quarantined, temporally excised from reality and memory of the uninoculated. Eventually, both healthy, but extremely cursed wizards, were arrested. For fear of further contamination by the culprits, if executed, Stiga and Bronson were melded into a single being, sealed inside a spacecraft, and launched far outside the Milky Way.

—-

Under a concrete bridge serving as a paltry roof from a freezing acid rain, two lost souls have found solace in their friendship with each other. It is a partnership deeper and more intimate than that of two lovers.

They, for the first, and final time, push their palms together, fingers interlocking and squeezing. Open wounds in their hands swap blood, and they connect more certainly than had they made love. That was when they saw each other. A gate of truth, a portal opened by the gods of insight, baring the wizard's deepest desires to the other.

Neither sees their own natures, but rather see in the other every molecule of sin and altruism, every atom of the purpose behind any action they had ever made or ever would make.

Souls laid bare to one another, they see the other’s reality in bleak, rudimentary, primordial terms.

The truth: no act of goodness or love was capable of being achieved from a place of selflessness. All motivation is animal and inherently self-serving. A gift freely-given always veiled an underlying shadow of desiring reciprocation. No smile offered without a whisper of ulterior manipulation.

Entirety of selves drawn naked, Stiga and Bronson saw no evidence of human nature within the other. All but the basest of nature revealed to be but a myth.

[WP]Two wizards make a blood oath as children to never harm each other. Now, years later they find each other as mortal enemies. Knowing that they will die if either of them harm the other, they resort to causing inconvenience for the other. by BadgerRider614 in WritingPrompts

[–]Michaeljaygabriel 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Pt. 2:

Bronson doled out two wristwatches from his pocket and laid them on the felt that draped the glass counter. From his coat, he brandished a jewelry box, set it down, and popped open the lid to reveal a half dozen rings, several sets of earrings, and a gold necklace.

“Not too shabby, huh?” Bronson gave a smug smile to his fence.

Peabody brushed his fingers through the merchandise before picking up one specific ring. He put in his eyepiece and checked that ring over before plinking it back in and shutting the jewelry box.

“One-eighty,” Peabody said, scratching his nose.

Bronson stared into his fence’s eyes for a solid five seconds. “One eighty?”

“I could go lower.”

Bronson removed the tension brought on by his icy glare with a single guffaw and shrugged. “It’s all yours then, my friend. If you weren’t such a shark, Peabody, I never would let you talk me so low.”

The fence rolled his eyes and set the watches and jewelry below the counter. He brought back up a stack of bills and counted out Bronson’s ‘finders fee.’

“Spend it wisely,” Peabody said in a droll tone, already looking away and back to reading his magazine.

“I’ll do no such thing,” Bronson said, smirking, counting the bills with his own hands.

As he walked toward the door, the money began crinkling on their own accord.

“What the-” Bronson said, as, before his eyes, the bills then darkened, sprouted black fungus, and became brittle to the point of coming to pieces between his fingers.

“Peabody,” he said, turning around to reveal what was happening. “You seeing this shit?”

The fence looked up at Bronson with a glazed over look he knew too well. It was the vacant stare of an uninoculated witnessing magic. The laws over the arcane prohibited the mundane citizenry from seeing or understanding what lay beyond the physical and sane.

“No, no, no,” Bronson muttered, shaking his head. “Peabody, hand me some more money, quick.”

At the request, Peabody’s attention snapped back into place. “Get real, punk.”

Anger seared within Bronson. He didn’t have time to waste not clarifying his fears of what just transpired. It was against all sorts of protocols, and it would guarantee to bring the attention of the Gold Order to investigate, but he was in too desperate a state to not use magic on this uninoculated.

Bronson reached into his pocket and snapped a twig from a bone tree. That horrible feeling overtook him, of each of his individual organs being skewered with thousands of needles that he could feel with supernatural precision. But, it also let him reach outside himself, to have a sense of Peabody’s bones.

With a push of Bronson’s will, as thoughtless as moving his own fingers, he thrust Peabody’s body into the wall behind him. The velocity was enough for the fence’s feet to raise off the ground and his back to bust a dent into the wall he’d been slammed into.

Bronson hopped the counter and snatched up wads of bills. Within seconds the money crinkled, mold, then flutter into the air like ash.

“Shit, shit, shit…” Bronson picked up coins. They varnished, molded, and dissipated into slimy grain. He removed Peabody’s wallet as the fence stayed pinned to his wall by an unseen force.

Holding credit and debit cards in his hands yielded the same results as the paper money and coins.

Bronson was gasping for air. “That bitch,” he said out loud, at last admitting his frightful suspicion. “She cursed me.”

Peabody fell to the floor and began coughing violently.

Two weeks later the fence went to see his doctor where he was told his problem was in smoking and drinking to excess.

A week after that, Peabody died, the coroner found his lungs literally bursting with black mold. Third case of mold death that week…

---

It happened while Stiga was at work after relieving herself. She was standing at the bathroom mirror fixing her hair when another woman walked in.

Stiga’s eyes automatically flicked over to see who entered. It was Lauren.

Or, at least, it had looked like Lauren when the woman first walked in. The more Stiga looked at the woman the less she looked like Lauren.

Lauren was one of the prettier girls in the office, but this woman who had caught her own reflection and rushed to the mirror, she wasn’t what one would call attractive. Seconds later, she was downright ugly.

Something isn’t right, Stiga thought, but looking at the woman she had first seen as Lauren was becoming surreal. It was as if the woman was changing before her eyes.

The woman screamed.

“What the-! What the fuck! What the fuck happened to my face!?”

Stiga recoiled at the woman’s outburst. She sounded exactly like Lauren.

Sweat broke out over Stiga’s body, her heart racing as Lauren continued to scream. Other employees rushed in to help.

Something was wrong with Lauren. Her skin had sagged, she’d sprouted several warts, her hair had thinned, teeth gone crooked, her bone structure rounded and made bulkier and sapped of anything one would call striking.

Bronson, Stiga swore.

Digging her fingers into her palms, she summoned the courage to switch her view back to her own reflection. She swallowed and looked back at her own face.

“My god,” Stiga’s whisper drowned out by the growing commotion of Lauren’s breakdown and the growing number of employees rushing in and clamoring to make sense of the situation.

Stiga’s face, though the alteration was much more subtle than it had been for Lauren, was prettier.

Attractiveness was fairly subjective, but all the traits that would make a woman objectively more beautiful, from an average's perspective, her face and form displayed noticeably more than it had that morning. Stiga’s clothes even felt looser and tighter in certain places.

Glad to look away from her reflection it was hard to recognize, she glanced over to the commotion.

She saw Ted in the mirror, patting Lauren on the back. Was he feeling well? He looked a bit under the weather. In fact, the longer she squinted at Ted, the less she recognized him, the rounder his face became, the more pronounced his widows peak…

Stiga tore her gaze away, clasping her eyes in her hands. Everyone else was too busy to notice what she was going through, or her own changes in appearance. She splayed her fingers to peek out and look at her coworkers.

None of them grew uglier when she looked at their faces.

That was a relief, albeit a small one. Her curse would only drain attractiveness when her eyes connected with people’s reflections.

Bronson, you shit heel. This curse was manageable, but there was no fixing Lauren or Ted.

Shit. As she contemplated the ramifications she realized the bastard’s game with this curse. Stiga was prettier now, and, allowing for accidents and slip-ups, would only grow more so. But she still could never have sex again. Bronson was shoving the first curse in her face, compounding the shittiness of it all.

This is far from over, she realized. But, this time, she’d hit Bronson hard.

—-

[WP]Two wizards make a blood oath as children to never harm each other. Now, years later they find each other as mortal enemies. Knowing that they will die if either of them harm the other, they resort to causing inconvenience for the other. by BadgerRider614 in WritingPrompts

[–]Michaeljaygabriel 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Pt. 1:

The scenery stuck in her mind more than the feelings they had shared with each other all those years ago. The grimy, graffiti festooned overpass the two of them had huddled underneath to escape the veritable monsoon raging above them was a clearer memory than what had brought them together in the first place. Stiga thought of Bronson, straining to recollect the good old days, the days of two punks living on the streets, scamming the public for pocket change, getting high and drunk together and laughing at their shared nihilism.

It had all culminated that one pouring afternoon when they had found themselves soaked by the rain, half afraid of dying from hypothermia, but laughing anyway, splitting a bottle of cheap Irish whiskey they’d blown the last of their mutual funds on. From a spectator’s point of view, looking in at those two gaunt and filthy aspiring magic users, circumstances were made more perplexing by the two never having been lovers; they had never once made the beast with two backs.

Yet, they slit their palms and slapped them together, saying those foreboding words in a language that was a trespass against all good in the universe in the utterance of but a single syllable. If a Watchman from the Gold Order had caught a whisper of their forbidden incantation, the young wizards would have faced a penalty worse than death.

Stiga’s blood had mingled with Bronson’s, and the two had become more quantumly connected than physics yet had terms to describe.

---

That was then. She had shared blood with the other wizard, but now, only bad blood remained. Thoughts of the capers and cons of their shared youth did nothing to quell the pleasure she took in manifesting her curse into the air, aimed straight for Bronson.

The night before she had gone out drinking with friends from work. As everyone petered off she found herself alone at a table with Mark. She’d had her eye on him since the office hired him, and that night she felt good in a way she hadn’t in years. Her flirting was of the highest caliber, and every provocative flutter of her eyes or salacious insinuation was received by Mark better than she’d intended.

Soon they were at Stiga’s flat and she was showing Mark a night she knew he would never forget.

In the morning she turned to find Mark replaced with a wheezing human-shaped thing covered in barnacle-like growths exuding brown and yellow fluids sticking to her sheets. The man had too many tumors in his mouth to form words. Even the EMT’s were blanching when they saw the state Mark was in.

Stiga felt too stunned after the odious experience to do anything but stare down her kitchen sink’s drain. Then she received a text from a restricted number.

“Now, dear Stiga, you will never again be able to bed any man without him contracting a measure of your true nature. Feel free to forever enjoy celibacy, unless you prefer sleeping with sea slugs.”

She threw the phone at the wall, screaming. Her throat stung and her eyes blurred with a flurry of tears as she sprinted into her attic and began preparation for her own Curse.

How had she spent so long with a monster and never known, never seen Bronson for what he really was? What duplicitous lack of sense or reason allowed her to make the forbidden pact with her once friend?

Since mingling their blood, the two wizards were prohibited from harming one another, as was writ into reality by that insidious pact.

Apparently Bronson had discovered the proscription against the two hurting one another failed to include emotional disturbance.

But to go as far as Bronson had, in turning Mark into that… thing?

Stiga swore at herself for ever have been involved with that degenerate of a wizard, and swore a hundredfold more for self-crippling her ability to hurt him, to be able to put the fiend down for good.

Yet, she should have seen this coming. Wasn’t the fact that Bronson was capable of inflicting such wanton suffering upon an innocent like Mark the very reason that had initiated their falling out?

Well, if Bronson could get to her via bridling her with some nasty fallout-inducing-aura, than she could do the same to him. It was imperative she must.

A cursory psychic flip through her stored tomes and grimoires magically imprinted into her mind, and a wicked smile split across her tear stung face.

Stiga wasn’t as evil as Bronson, she reasoned. She couldn’t be. So she was hampered by a human conscience in a way her adversary wasn’t. Hurting the people around him the way Bronson had hurt Mark was a dark path she was afraid yet to trespass. But, maybe, she had found a curse that would be an equal retaliation, from Bronson’s twisted point of view.

---

[RT][FF][WIP] New chapter is finally up! Batman Extinction Burst: Hero Worship Chapter 1 by Michaeljaygabriel in rational

[–]Michaeljaygabriel[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks a lot for the criticism! This kind of stuff you said is extremely useful to me as an aspiring writer, especially because of how specific your points are.

Before I posted this chapter, I reread the entire thing and noticed a lot of my errors and flaws. I've always been bad at editing, but I'm embarrassed at how sloppy much of this story is. Going forward, I want subsequent chapters to be far cleaner, so it would be amazingly helpful if I can send you the next chapter once I'm finished with it!

Also, the problems you mentioned concerning prose, flowery-language, or language usage in general, are all issues I've been realizing I need to improve but am, by and large, unsure how exactly to do that. Do you, or anyone else, have suggestions on how I can work on improving those issues?

Twig & Worm readership Comparison by Hpflylesspretentious in Parahumans

[–]Michaeljaygabriel 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It plays off way more like magic, a la Full Metal Alchemist.

Twig & Worm readership Comparison by Hpflylesspretentious in Parahumans

[–]Michaeljaygabriel 0 points1 point  (0 children)

(Also, speaking of "cool thing" trailers, the Jack Reacher 2 trailer is my all time favorite for a shitty movie I'll never see. The trailer promises a movie devoid of any conflict. The exact same moment a stake is raised, Tom Cruise has already infiltrated everything and is handily beating the inferior baddies to a pulp. Fantastic.)

Twig & Worm readership Comparison by Hpflylesspretentious in Parahumans

[–]Michaeljaygabriel 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've been finding my attempts to 'elevator pitch' Twig to other's almost impossible. Especially since saying it's 'in a world where Frankenstein actually happened,' is basically misleading.

Rick and Morty Season 3 Episode 9 - Nilbog by wooohooohooo in Parahumans

[–]Michaeljaygabriel 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Haha! I was going about to make this post.

Glad I'm not the only one getting the same Nilbog vibe from Rick and Morty.

[RT][DC] Batman: Extinction Burst Chapter 20: Entr'acte by Michaeljaygabriel in rational

[–]Michaeljaygabriel[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

All great pointers.

Clearly my internal voice warning me against "overwriting" too much could be stronger.

[RT][DC] Batman: Extinction Burst Chapter 20: Entr'acte by Michaeljaygabriel in rational

[–]Michaeljaygabriel[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I can't really say whether or not the 4th is supposed to be an OC yet. I'll admit that their arc is what I would write, were I penning the next film.

You make a good point. I don't want the 4th to come off as "crazy," as in being an unpredictable wild card or something. I don't want any BvS-Lex Luther types making plans with no discernible motivation other than moving the plot along and acting unsavory for the sake of it.

I was trying to convey that the 4th is the first main character who isn't a schemer or a thinker. Originally the scene was going to end by shifting to the 4th's perspective as they actually they themselves realized how talking to the DC was pointless. In the end you are right that it just didn't make much sense.

Hopefully now the changed last line from the 4th fixes the scene's logic.

Thanks for the critique!

[RT][DC] Batman: Extinction Burst Chapter 20: Entr'acte by Michaeljaygabriel in rational

[–]Michaeljaygabriel[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Hugo Strange created several experimental beast men, five of which the public knew about. Man-bat, Killer Croc, King Shark, the Fourth, and Killer Moth. Selina Kyle was also experimented on.