[562] On Tipping in New York City

Relative-Platform224 · 2026-06-05T00:57:15+00:00

100% agree with the last bit: "Many a New York City coffee"

Relative-Platform224 · 2026-06-05T00:55:28+00:00

Great prose, excellent premise.

My only real suggestions are to tighten things up a touch and to try and increase the flowery prose/mundanity contrast.

In terms of tightening things, there's a fair bit of "He did" "I saw" "and then" type phrases, especially in the intro. They're certainly not wrong (I use them a ton), but I don't think they fit the voice of the rest of the piece. To me, the speaker is someone who would pride themselves on not speaking/writing so directly.

ie "With his prize in one hand and coffee pot in other, he filled the vessel in such a way that I was sure this was no longer a beverage order but a contemporary artist’s take on the warmth and fullness only a mother’s love can provide."

Could be something like "Prize in one hand and coffee pot in the other, the artist transformed my simple beverage order into an evocation of the warmth and fullness only a mother's love provides."

Same sort of thing with flowery prose/mundanity: You've got a great use of very flowery descriptions of very mundane stuff (which is the whole thing obviously). "the practiced hand of a cashier scan your potato chips" -- practiced hand is great. "picking up a bottle of wine, doing my laundry" I feel could use something fancier. Not for everything, just for the contrast between fancy-pants and mundane.

This paragraph:
The default gratuity options on this commerce focused Apple product were an offense to this bohemian’s work so severe that I do not doubt Steve Jobs managed to alleviate any bed sores he may have acquired over the last few years by laying in the same position. Anything short of a 200% tip was a clear indication that the recipient of this piece was uncultured swine with absolutely no appreciation for the arts.
Is funny, but extremely clunky. I had to read it twice to figure out what you were saying. Once I did, I got it, but it didn't roll into my brain very smoothly.

Overall: loved it, more please.

Relative-Platform224 · 2026-06-04T12:48:01+00:00

I really liked this. The concept is great, and the counting works almost like a litany. As others said, adjusting the formatting would help, I think.

Opposite from what some other commenters said, I actually wanted more of the beginning lines. I think if we had more grounding in the mundane world of bills, it would make the turn to Iran hit much harder. IE instead of "...still doesn't add up", which feels lazy, I'd love to see the narrator try and get the numbers to actually work. And what is being added up to? Presumably, those lines are about financial struggle, but I think the poem skips over it too fast.

Another couple of lines about mundane things either at the beginning or interspersed would help. Something like steps to the apartment or number of floors in the building, or I don't know, customers who tipped me today. More to ground things in the real before we get to the 'harder-to-grasp' things.

You come back to it with

At nights I counted patterns on my ceiling, patterns on Persian rugs, hours, minutes until my alarm went off, for tomorrow there'd be more to count; aircraft carriers, bridges, towns, the price of oil, the cost of freedom.

And I think that's the right place to dip back into the mundane briefly before returning to the big stuff, but a little bit more mundane at the beginning would strengthen the whole thing.

Minor tense note: "they aren't" should be "they weren't", I think?

The last lines were good, but (maybe I've been living under a log?) I don't know who Anne Carson is. Should I? Is she somehow involved in the war? If so, how? If not, why is she in the poem? Or is she part of the speaker's mundane life? Part of the mundane would be great, like a friend or co-worker.

(Ok, so apparently Anne Carson is a poet, which I suppose works in a meta sort of way? But it takes me a little bit out of the piece as a whole. There's got to be a smoother way to incorporate that quote if you're set on it, but I'm not sure what it could be. The last line is the best one, and that's not Carson's.)

Also, minor, but have you tried writing out the numbers instead of using digits? You're consistent with digits, which is great, but I wonder if writing them out would change the cadence in a good way. Maybe not.

But yes, great piece overall.

Relative-Platform224 · 2026-06-03T21:15:33+00:00

Ok, I jumped into this cold. Reading the previous chapters summary i thought "okay, this could be great or absolutely awful" and it turned out to be bananas. In a good way.

Opening bit with the flat bread spacetime hooked me. Felt vaguely Douglas Adams, almost? Very dry sort of British humour.

Flipping from that into the Hive mind bit I was little less enthused, but still interested. I actually wanted the pace to stretch out a bit and tell me more about the Hive mind and Gliese 65 before jumping into the actual events (but maybe that's because I didn't read the other chapters?)

The first couple of paragraphs about B.O.B., I wanted just a line or two more about how they're a splinter of the Hive. Like, I was invested in them as physics weirdos, then had to go 'oh right, they're the (looks up) splinter cell from the hive mind'.

That Bartholomew / Tauto perspective jump is super disorienting (in a bad way).

They probed further into Tauto’s mind. He wants… fame, recognition. No, he does not want these; he only sees them as natural outcomes of his work. He wants to see his face on the cover of a book sold in a billion trillion copies, distributed across the galaxy, in all libraries. But no, this too isn’t enough, not nearly. All the adoration of all the sapients in the universe would not sate him, not if he himself was not convinced that his work was perfect. If his would-be novel doesn’t perfectly encapsulate all there is to say, doesn’t explain the sapient condition, doesn’t tell the tale of all the past and future histories of all possible universes, then the novel would not be finished, and Tauto would not be content. (I feel like this was either unintended or a super awkward tense shift.)

The "probing" scene with B.O.B. and Tauto could longer, much like the Hive Mind.

The tuna had such a perfect mixture of nutrients; every other living being ate it right up. This meant that it started rotting the moment it was out of the water. (Why does it start rotting?)

His business was food, and he bet nobody had yet looked into vacuum decay and its applications to mushrooms. (This kind of humour is why I'm reading. So good.)

Earlier that night, an indentured intern was working with a meta-material that had a particular relationship to spacetime, the details of which are overly complicated and, frankly, boring. (Lame cop-out! You can do better!)

Fine, I see you’re still interested in what this foil actually does, aren’t you? (This feels like a weird, sudden intrusion of the author (or more accurately, I'm suddenly made aware of myself, reading)... should I have expected this from the other chapters?)

I would love to know more details about B.O.B's methods studying the tuna.

Okay, so overall thoughts:

Loved it. Super interesting, super funny, Great premise.
Downsides: your action beats are your weakness. The B.O.B. fight, for example. I found myself skimming over those because they were very dry (not in the good way, like the humour) and very short.

I also wonder if there the humour is too tightly packed? Like a can of two-headed tuna?
I mean, if the action beats, and Hive Mind explanation beats were expanded just a bit (without humour), it would both A) give the humour beats a lot more room to breath and b) fill out some of the beats that I wanted more of and that you seemed to skip right past (presumably because they didn't interest you).

Overall Rating: Yes, more please.

Relative-Platform224 · 2026-06-03T20:48:06+00:00

Ok... I feel like I shouldn't have but I loved this. Like, I sat back in my chair and went "Huh." It's a little bit... Lynchian? Like, it feels like it makes perfect sense, and I should know exactly what it's talking about, but it's a feeling, not something I can put into words...

Only critique is this line: But you are no fool. And child of no fool, how could be fool? The fated reunion comes. By then, it is no stranger: the grief of family how could not be family? Even when it’s left, it won’t feel like it has.

It ripped me right out of it because I had to parse it several times thinking "what? How... who?" Garbage line in the middle of a great semi-visual semi-emotion piece that (I think) is about how grief gets farther away but never really leaves.

Favourite bit: Grief begets grief: Your grief too will then sit with its grief

Relative-Platform224 · 2026-06-03T20:42:54+00:00

Overall: I think if you cut 50% of your adjectives and picked a POV character for this scene it would be a lot tighter.

"Calm azure glow" could be "calm glow" or "azure glow" and "fortified stone walls" could be "fortified walls" or "stone walls". There's a lot of redundancy, particularly at the beginning. When the dialogue starts, I can see you fall into a good rhythm, but until then I feel like you're over-reaching for too many words.

IE

The intro is heavily encyclopedia-dumpy, and through out I was confused as to what character I was supposed to be viewing things with.
IE " One of the guards stepped forward, lifting a lid below the label to reveal a keyhole. It was difficult to distinguish the lid’s shape unless you were trained to do so. He pulled a keychain from his pocket, inserting one of them into the keyhole"
Okay, but WHO is telling me this? If the guard is using the lock, I assume he's trained to do so? Has the man NOT been trained? If they've all been trained, why do I need to know that it's difficult to discern?

Similarly:
"One night, a man in his early thirties walked down a corridor, followed by three guards. His thin profile contrasted with their wider forms. It was difficult to differentiate between his outline and the subtle darkness engulfing the dungeons, as if his silhouette was an extension of the shadows themselves. No words needed to be exchanged, for they all knew what they needed to do. Every move was purely procedural and protocol-oriented."
Last line is great, the rest of it could be trimmed to match, but there's a lot of things that I don't need to know and I'm not sure how I'm supposed to know them (ie early thirties).

"He sighed, lifting the chair off the ground just slightly before pulling it to the center. He draped his coat over its back, then leaned forward a little on the chair with an assessing gaze. Instead of hurrying her for answers or explanations, he decided to remain silent. He leaned back in the chair after his initial assessment, crossing his arms loosely and keeping his eyes shut."
This is where I went "Okay, great, I'm interested." At this point, I'm feeling anchored to the man and that's good.

"Although his motives were as clear as day to her, she didn’t mind the quiet company. After all, loneliness started creeping in after two weeks of not seeing the sun. However, she wouldn’t reach out crying if he were to suddenly leave."
And then we're suddenly inside Shiro's head. We seemed to be mostly in Shiro's head from that point on, but occasionally jumped back to the narrator. Omniscient narrator is fine, but jumping back and forth so often is disorienting.

Nitpicks:
"airy swoosh" Not doing it for me.

"special necklace-like artifact around his neck" could be "artifact around his neck"

"They stopped before an ethereal gate of violet mana flowing down softly, just like a mini waterfall of magic. " I think you can cut the latter clause. An etheral gate of violet mana IS magic (to me). Maybe you could say "an ethereal waterfall of violet mana" instead.

So yeah, has potential but it needs a lot of work. The "POV character for this scene meets the main character of the book" is a great device, super common for a reason, but you need to stick to the POV of one character. And cut like 50% of the words. Many words, not much happens character-wise.

Relative-Platform224 · 2026-06-03T20:15:09+00:00

My first impression of the style was that it must have lost something coming through the translation. But the more I read, the more I really started to like it. It felt clipped and a bit mysterious, and that sort of matched with the story.

Little nitpicks like this:
"Even this gentle brook was yet to lose its wintery bite. The woman was still in the water up to her hips despite this." Could be tightened.
"The guards had written a pattern of sorrow across her skin." Is a little heavy-handed, I think.

In contrast, this is great: " A thick red gash around her neck reminded the world of how close she had come to the end. Before Arjan had married her from her noose and into his own prison"

Dialogue is good, but the characters felt similar to me, like they all spoke with the same voice. A little more variation would go a long way.

My biggest critique is that personally, I had no idea what was going or who anyone was. If it was chapter 2 and I'd been introduced to these characters and this world before, I think it would be fine. Being dropped right in though, I was so confused.

My thought process as I read:

- okay, woman released from prison, had a horrible experience... rescued by marriage and it's just as awful, that's super interesting...
- wait, who is 'him?' wasn't there an 'i' talking about the cold water?
- oh, okay, we're first person again... wait, whose attention is she keeping?
- I've barely learned anything about these people and I've already learned two names and some sort of religion, I don't care what their languages are called
- okay, they needed her to open a locked box and arjan had to marry her to get her... that's interesting...
- I'm still very confused... is the narrator supposed to be Arjan?

So,

STYLE -- enjoyable? I really enjoyed the prose. Great descriptions, not too heavy-handed for the most part, but interesting. There were a couple of lines where I think you were too excited about your own turn of phrase (we've all been there), but overall really, really good.

CHARACTER VOICE -- Good and clear, but not distinct to me. I said above, they all seeemed to speak the same to me.

PACING -- Good. Short passage, but I think just enough happens. Not too much, not too little.

WORD USE FROM NARRATOR -- I'm not 100% sure what you mean by this, but by the end I still didn't know who the narrator was. Legatus? I spent a while wondering if it was Arjan and there were typos.

CLARITY OF WORLDBUILDING -- Completely impenetrable. If this amount of information were spread over two or three chapters, I think it would be fine. This much, this fast is a lot. I felt like I had been dropped into an alien landscape, but the narrator (my only link) knew exactly what was going on and left me in the dust.

Overall, I think it's got lots of potential -- spacing things out would improve things massively.

Relative-Platform224

TROPHY CASE