[Dominate]

Halo,
A more linear story than what I'm used to seeing from you and for me that was a big improvement. I don't mean say that you have to conform to that format to write well, but it is one way for all your bars to be working together which I've felt has been lacking in previous pieces of yours. So yeah, for me this was one of your strongest entries this season. And you still brought your usual flair for painting the details of a scene. The sights, sounds, smells. Really good. I liked the take on the topic - a character with something like an Eleven from Stranger Things power, but more nefarious. I wasn't totally clear if your character was intentionally doing these evil acts or if he/she was a victim of some power they couldn't control. I think the former but maybe some lines that gave us some more insight into the character's thoughts here and there would have helped clarify. My biggest gripe though was that I was enjoying the story and then it just stopped really abruptly. Like not in an end-of-episode cliffhanger type of way, it was like if you're watching TV and suddenly the power goes out right in the middle of a scene. A little unsatisfying to have a lack of ending but I did enjoy the beginning and middle of the story you wrote and thought it was a cool take on the topic. Good work.


MR,
I liked this take too. Literally describing your brainstorm of what to write in this battle against hal0 but in a voice like you're watching your own brain do it. Meta af. The beginning few lines especially, describing what's going on physically/chemically I thought were super dope. I'm not up enough on neurology to know if what you wrote is legit but it definitely sounded good. Also thought your closing line - "a beautiful mess refined in this structural bind" was a perfect descriptor to sum up what you wrote about. This was less emotion driven and more abstract and colourful compared to what I'm used to seeing from you, cool to see you branch out and experiment with another genre here. That middle section became very abstract and I didn't really follow everything, but I think you did a good enough job of setting up the idea of "brainstorming" that a bunch of random and disconnected ideas actually made sense here, so I could dig it. There were some issues here and there with coherence at a more micro level though which were jarring. It's mostly grammatical things - some missing punctuation (which Halo does too) but that doesn't bother me as much as the instances where your nouns/verbs/adjectives/adverbs just aren't assembled into a structure that conforms to the rules of language. For example, "perception's dimensional of insight" should be "perception's dimension of insight" or "perception's dimensional insight". That's aside from deciphering the meaning of the fragment - what is perception's dimensional insight? - but I'm more cool with that as a valid stylistic choice. Something abstract/poetic/interesting that the reader can pause to consider and ascribe their own meaning to. It's not my personal preference - I like to just read and understand, with the writer having done the work of conveying meaning and intention already, but it's not "bad", per se. Overall though this was a very cool take on the topic and there was a lot here I did like here. Good job man.


So the reason I didn't vote on this a couple days ago when I did my other votes was that I found it really hard to pick a winner here. Figured I'd give it some time to marinate and maybe that would help, but honestly it hasn't really. I really could go either way on this. I think objectively these are two pretty evenly matched pieces in terms of quality of writing. Subjectively though, in terms of enjoyment of reading I slightly preferred Halo's more tangible approach. Voting for him.