Event overview | Review spreadsheet

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Oh....

Hey.

What? Already? So soon? Okay

I kind of want to join, but I'm not sure if I want to write outside FIM. Is it frowned upon to write a FIM story for these?

4964220
I guess it is. It was being discussed if writing FIM-related fiction for general fic rounds should be explicitly banned. Roger said the idea was to accept every kind of backdrop, but FIM is definitely frowned upon, since there are already rounds reserved for it.

Yay! Second writeoff I say I'm entering, and first I will leave halfway through for Real Life reasons! I'm looking forward to the first half, at least.

4964220
There's also the chance that someone may rate your story poorly because they may think your FIM story doesn't follow the prompt, as it is general. Not sure if anyone does do this, but there's the possibility.

4964226 4964231
 Thanks for the quick response. One other thing I was just wondering: do you have to submit a prompt to submit a fic?

4964261
Nope!

Well, I tossed in The Gettier Problem.

4964220
It is strongly frowned upon by most people. I wrote a FiM story for the last general round. There were about three others out of fifty or so stories. There was quite a lot of negativity that it was a FiM story. It was all very polite though. Based on that experience I decided not to write FiM stories in general rounds in future.

I might enter if I'm not too tired this weekend. Been sleeping a little late this week.

I feel like a write-off every 3 weeks is too close together.

4964371
On the other hand, BH, you’re not forced to partake in every round.
But I confess that it's heartbreaking to pass.

It's been a while since I've had anything to do with this group (at least a year). Seems like a few things have changed. Am I to understand that contests now alternate between pony fiction and original fiction events and this one is original fiction?

I haven't written anything in quite a while, but maybe I'll give this a shot again if the prompt is good.

4964280 Do you WANT a round of Chirality spin-offs?!

(But actually could be a pretty great prompt. Consider me hyped!)

4964385
Yeah, the schedule is now
Round 1 : general short story (2,000 - 8,000 words);
Round 2 : FiM short story (2,000 - 8,000 words);
Round 3 : general mini-fic (400 - 750 words);
Round 4 : FiM mini-fic (400 - 750 words);

Then back to round 1, etc.

Each round takes place every three weeks.

4964390
I see, thank you.

4964406
You’re most welcome. I know, newfangled things…

4964377 I fear some people won't be able to resist entering each round, and will burn out.

I feel like I'm restricted. Thats not good.

4964740
Could be, yes, but I hope people will self-regulate. Though WriteOffing is addictive. I need practicing so I'm eager to participate in each one. However, for example at the last round, I bungled my stories for lack of time. Net payoff: zero.

I was meandering through the WriteOff archive yesterday and was precisely amazed at the number of contestants who have disappeared little by little.

4964740
This was discussed in an earlier thread. We needed to have some sort of compromise between the people who wanted to do original fiction and the people who only wanted to do pony. We have to risk burnout or else people who only do pony would have to wait over 6 weeks.

4964763

I feel like I'm restricted.

How so?

4964800 Even the pony write-offs are only 3 weeks apart. "Out of Time" started 2 weeks after the previous write-off started. I think people will burn out, or start skipping write-offs. Either will diminish their interest in it.

I'll be skipping this contest:

So I can turn "Flapjacks," my story from the previous contest, into a story that's long enough to qualify for the AppleDash group's currently-running contest.

Ah, Choices!
Mike

4965165
Might be best to open up the conversation again and see what other people think too since we've already seen people skipping writeoffs.

4965165

I think people will burn out, or start skipping write-offs.

Can confirm, this happened to me. I might just have the energy to participate this round, now having skipped one (or two, apparently).

4964390 Yeah I think I'm going wait until the fim contest for this one.

4965165
The schedule has six weeks between original fiction contests, and six weeks between pony fiction contests, with the two offset by three weeks. So Out of Time was November 5th, Things Left Unsaid was December 19th, and the next FIM competition (which will be a short story one) will be January 29th-31st.

The rationale behind this was that some people only wanted to do one or the other, while others wanted to do both, and for the people who only wanted to do one or the other, if it was spaced out further (say, to once every four weeks), you'd only get an event for your "side" once every other month.

It is true that the schedule is pretty intense if you participate every time, and we saw a decline in participation of about 30% in the last minific round from 105-110 to 72 in the FIM minifics.

So, dunno what to say. We could reopen discussion on it if people are going crazy. On the other hand, people skipping writeoffs is only bad if they skip and don't come back, or if we're badly diluting the pool of participants.

Hmm. I'm not super psyched about a lot of these prompts, but there are just one or two that I really really like. I guess we'll see how things shake out...

4965917
4965924
I’m not certain I’ll participate. It will depend if I’ve an idea that sticks to the prompt early on.

4964280 The Gettier problem is easily handled by neatly being made moot with skepticism, since we can never actually have knowledge of anything, only beliefs that we think / hope are in accordance with unknowable objective reality.

I was planning to drop out of the FIM rounds for various reasons, and I never have the proper inspiration to write General fiction.

and then unexpectedly I had a non-FIM idea that could be turned into a story this round. not a great idea, but at least it's an idea. so MAYBE I'll be in this one.

4965165 I kinda saw that skipping thing with myself, but I don't know if it's for the reasons you might have meant. The knowledge that there are writeoffs so often now makes me go "meh, maybe next time" instead of cracking my head open for an idea when I have none, or to push through a rough patch of "this is never gonna work out" in the middle of a WiP. The relative scarcity of events made me feel that there was more at stake, that I'd be losing big time if I didn't get an entry in.

This is a bad weekend for me, so I'm afraid I will have to pass.

4965165
The competition has not begun and that thread already looks listless. Seems like we are on a downslope.

Well, I'll probably give it a whirl, unless the prompt is really stinky. I would still like to see the word count minimum for short rounds dropped from 2000, though. I feel like that would decrease the difficulty of participating, without sacrificing much if anything.

And for those who want to do pony, I figure you may as well go ahead. I'd rather read an interesting pony story than turn people away if that's what they've got.

But then I'm a rebel, baby.

4966717
I don't know if I'd worry overmuch about that at this point. Given the writeoff's roots, Pony rounds are still more popular than General fic rounds, and I think minifics attract more authors than the longer fics, due to the lower bar, so a little dip in activity isn't unnatural.

4966092 Well... technically "unknowable", for the perverse definition of "know" which the Gettier problem requires. Calling reality unknowable is maximally misleading, though. We routinely "know" things about reality with 99% certainty; it's just that that doesn't count as "knowledge" if "knowledge" is supposed to require "truth".

The Gettier problem is puzzling over how to use terms that are useless and misleading, is what I'm saying.

Seems to me that the Gattier problem is one of those paradoxes whose sting is focused on the realm of formal logic, where a proposition is either true or false and no middle ground or qualification is possible. In, say, a Bayesian philosophical framework, where all statements are evaluated probabilistically and supporting evidence merely brings statements arbitrarily close to a truth value of 1.0 without actually reaching it, then the idea of "do you know this or just believe it?" looks like the semantic niggling it is (the answer to "Do you know this fact?" is always formally "I believe it with an extremely high degree of confidence" and the answer to "Are you justified in saying that this is true?" is formally "yes, given that my priors are correct"), and having an incorrect prior point you toward a correct conclusion doesn't shatter the system.

Anyway, though.

4965165

I think people will burn out, or start skipping write-offs. Either will diminish their interest in it.

This is exactly what happened, and if I'm not mistaken was by design (or at least by choice/compromise). The new normal is, identify which Writeoffs interest you the most, and participate in those and ignore the others. For many authors, this means choosing either the pony or the general tracks, and then competing once every six weeks. For me, it's going to look like "participate in the short story contests and ignore the minific contests", and given your complaints last round about the length limits, you may want to join me. That does leave the Writeoffs-of-interest staggered very unevenly, but, eh.

Part of that decision on Roger's part was forward-looking, as the intention was to start Writeoffs for other fanfic fandoms as well, and at some point participation in all of them was going to become impossible anyway. The three-week schedule was a compromise for the short term to allow authors access to both MLP and general rounds without actual overlap.

I expect that participation will be down from the last general short-story round — the general minific round didn't accumulate enough stories for judging to be split into preliminaries and finals — but I'm personally looking forward to this. I want to shake off the queasiness from the problematic output I produced last round and prove to myself I can churn out general fic I like.

**shifts to a form with hands and cracks his knuckles**

Written in the stars. Hum.
Written in the stripes would've been easier
No kidding, 'twas one of the best prompts anyway.
Good luck everyone!

Huh. . . That's an interesting prompt.

/proceeds to go insane from writer's-block

So many great prompts fell a vote or two short.

Alas, I may have to pass on this one.

Well, this prompt suits me down to a T. Better get cracking.

4967838

Seems to me that the Gattier problem is one of those paradoxes whose sting is focused on the realm of formal logic, where a proposition is either true or false and no middle ground or qualification is possible. In, say, a Bayesian philosophical framework, where all statements are evaluated probabilistically and supporting evidence merely brings statements arbitrarily close to a truth value of 1.0 without actually reaching it, then the idea of "do you know this or just believe it?" looks like the semantic niggling it is (the answer to "Do you know this fact?" is always formally "I believe it with an extremely high degree of confidence" and the answer to "Are you justified in saying that this is true?" is formally "yes, given that my priors are correct"), and having an incorrect prior point you toward a correct conclusion doesn't shatter the system.

Yep.

4967838

Seems to me that the Gattier problem is one of those paradoxes whose sting is focused on the realm of formal logic, where a proposition is either true or false and no middle ground or qualification is possible. In, say, a Bayesian philosophical framework, where all statements are evaluated probabilistically and supporting evidence merely brings statements arbitrarily close to a truth value of 1.0 without actually reaching it, then the idea of "do you know this or just believe it?" looks like the semantic niggling it is (the answer to "Do you know this fact?" is always formally "I believe it with an extremely high degree of confidence" and the answer to "Are you justified in saying that this is true?" is formally "yes, given that my priors are correct"), and having an incorrect prior point you toward a correct conclusion doesn't shatter the system.

I think that the Gettier problem is fundamentally a motivation for testing our assumptions, and as such, I think it is an important idea.

For instance; the placebo effect can be seen as an example of this. You might have the justified true belief that taking a medication will make you feel better, but the medication itself is actually irrelevant to the effect.

Another interesting example is the Milwaukee Protocol for treating rabies patients. The core idea behind it is to put rabies patients into a medically induced coma while their body fights off a rabies infection. They applied it to a girl who contracted rabies from a bat and eventually developed symptomatic rabies because she never got prophylactic vaccinations against rabies, and she did indeed recover with only minor brain damage (which is pretty good for a disease with a 100% fatality rate amongst symptomatic patients who never received the vaccine). They have repeated it since then, and it saves about 8% of patients it is administered to.

However, it was later discovered that ketamine [1], a drug used to anesthetize people, apparently has a previously-unknown effect against rabies. The extent to which this was responsible for the protocol working is unknown, but it probably at least contributes.

A lot of the philisophical musing around the Gettier problem is sophistry, but I think that the core of the idea - holding a justified true belief, but doing so for the wrong reasons - is an interesting and important idea, as it means that just because we're right doesn't mean we're correct.

[1] Ketamine is a weirdly multifaceted drug. In addition to being useful for anesthesiology, it also apparently has an effect against rabies and can act as a potent anti-depressant.

4968073

Don't tread on me.

What am I doing, hanging around here making bad puns about Georgian-era flags? I need to be writing...

4968295
Don't worry, I know you're not a doormat!

4964207
Written in the Stars?

...

Eh, I'll pass on this one unless I get an earth-shattering idea.