It's the Season for Graves Cracking: The 2006 Quest for Fear

(event) by Bitriot Mon Sep 25 2006 at 23:29:56

The 2006 Quest for Fear is now closed.



Many, many thanks to all who participated. Quality of submissions this year has been phenomenal. Your XP prizes are on their way.

Update: Send your thanks to wertperch for graciously volunteering to hand out the XP prizes.

Determining the winner required manipulating droves of hideous numbers — the hapless digits were pulled apart, crunched, smashed back together again. And the results are beautiful.

Send your congratulations and most grovelling praise to the winners ...



henry flower gleefully excised the organs from the contest for homenode image privileges. His entry What gets us out of bed in the morning, with 13C!s and a reputation of 43, raked in 173 points.

Evil Catullus feverishly pickaxed to death the contest for mailed prize. His mind-boggling thirteen entries earned him a grand total of 683 points.



Other things worth mentioning

Special recognition goes to Jet-Poop, whose entry Requiem Aeternam was the highest-rated writeup of the entire contest. He also deserves thanks for helping fish potential entries out of the New Writeups list and coercing reluctant users into allowing their erstwhile unintended entries to be imported.

The contest accepted 83 entries from 36 different authors. I remember an obituary for the site being of some prominence a short time ago; while the idea is appropriately ghoulish, I'm afraid it's incorrect.

I'm proud to say that not a single user took advantage of the big huge-assed loophole I let into the rules without realizing until things were well underway! See if you can guess what it is!


Thanks again, and Happy Halloween!


It's getting dark.

It's the season for graves cracking. Laugh at the kitsch of Romero zombies all you want. Part of you will always scan the October horizon for corpses, moving in a wall.

It's the season for Ether. Feel the brush of cold wind, cold like Autumn, and remind yourself that spirits can be debunked with thermodynamics. But some nights, when the sun is most distant, Newton and ghosts fight a grave match.

Forget fairy costumes. Forget hitting up the party store in July for novelty cobweb. Forget finding a pushup bra for your Lara Croft getup. Forget everything that Halloween doesn't mean. Halloween is a celebration of death. Part of us will always need to die.

We're too far apart to tell our stories around a bonfire. But we'll light the wires, and give each other fear.



2006 Quest for Fear

Beginning October 1, 2006 00:00:00 UTC
Ending November 1, 2006 00:00:00 UTC



Wordmongers' Masque demonstrated that low-level users are capable of producing quality fiction. Now we'll see how they do morbid.

Submissions may be of any "genre." We will accept fact — naturally, of the most macabre subject matter — fiction, movie reviews, anything. We want fear.

But in particular, we want fiction, and more than anything we want quality.

There will be XP rewards, and there is no limit on number of submissions. At minimum, you1 will receive:

  • 200 experience points for each piece of fiction submitted.
  • 100 experience points for each piece of fact, review, etc. submitted.

In addition, each writeup you submit will earn an additional XP bonus based on its reputation and number of Chings. You will receive:

  • 1 experience point for each point of net reputation2.
  • 10 experience points for each Ching.
To illustrate: Noder X submits a piece of fiction. It earns a reputation of +20 and 3 cools. 200 + 20 + (3 × 10) = 250 experience points. Easy money.


But why the bonus point system?
Because this is a contest.


Again, now — we want fiction. We want fiction from low-level users. We want to see, again, what you can do.

Upon quest closing, bonus points from all fiction entries from users level 5 and below will be tallied. The author of the single piece with the highest score will receive

500 experience points & homenode image privileges for six months.

Don't have it in you to post a single piece of brilliant fiction? Level 7? No problem. We'll also be monitoring which user earns the most points cumulatively, from any genre of writeup(s). The user with the highest cumulative score will receive

500 experience points & a frightful gift, in the mail, from me.





To make tallying easier, entries will be sorted by author.

Each time you submit an entry, send a message to FearQuest with its title and it will be added to this writeup. Direct any questions to Bitriot or LaggedyAnne.


Happy Halloween!


Sontra

izubachi xraygoggles artman2003 Demerick Evil Catullus Serjeant's Muse etouffee The Custodian Angela henry flower aionaever Danneeness Jet-Poop Junkill Dimview Apollyon npecom Swift Rancid_Pickle creases SyntaxVorlon Bitriot eyeofthebeholder BookReader DejaMorgana GrouchyOldMan Excalibre ColonelFubster GentlemanJim Braunbeck oakling JellyfishGreen turboeye joes3029 pjd kanoodle


Your name here

  • Your writeup here
  • Your writeup here

1 Editors and administrators are not eligible for any prizes or bonuses.

2 If you post a writeup that accumulates a negative reputation, your XP prize will not fall below the minimum 100 or 200 for that writeup. However, your points for the contest for the mailed prize will be deducted accordingly from your cumulative score.

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