The Friday Challenge - 4/16/10

 
This Week in The Friday Challenge

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Henry Vogel takes a political turn and ventures off into a nightmarish near-future world where personal rights are paramount and absolute. Can you imagine how this would quickly become a world in which one person's obligation to work for the good of society is more important than society's obligation to allow the person to work for himself? Join the discussion...

Kersley Fitzgerald takes a moral turn and throws down a challenge: instead of ranting and spamming the web with diatribes about the failings of other people's parties, countries, or faiths, do you think you can be an effective representative of your own? More to the point, do you think you can work it into your fiction without getting preachy? Join the discussion...

Claymore reviews Teaching the Trivium: Christian Homeschooling in a Classical Style, by Harvey and Laurie Bluedorn. Are you interested in homeschooling? Are you looking for good reference materials and a good pedagogical technique? Join the discussion...

Bruce Bethke, after months of empty promises, finally reveals the primary methodology that drives The Friday Challenge, and explains the difference between people who want to write and those who want to be writers. Well, huh. So that is what this site is all about? Join the discussion...

Ultimate Geek Fu asks a simple question with staggering theological implications: is there PowerPoint in Hell? Or is it PowerPoint that makes it Hell? Join the discussion...

Kersley Fitzgerald officially retires from Friday Challenge competition, not coincidentally with the announcement of her ascension to the ruling troika, and Miko and Rigel Kent end up a photo finish in the 4/2/10 Friday Challenge, "I'm in Love with My Car." The judges' ruling this week requires explanation of the rarely used Ben Richards Rule, but as for knowing what a troika is—I'm afraid that there, you're on your own, tovarich.

Also this week, Splattering Guts for Fun & Profit is rained out, Kersley Fitzgerald explains The Four Seasons of Writing, the inmates discuss the view from their respective locations in the asylum, and remarkably, despite overwhelming temptation, not one person reviews Ed Gein: The Musical (which features our very own KTown)!


The 4/9/10 Friday Challenge

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Just a reminder that the 4/19/10 Friday Challenge, Folk Tales of the Final Frontier, is a Greater Challenge, and therefore the deadline is Thursday, 4/29/10. Consequently there are no entries awaiting judgment this week—which, frankly, is a great relief to us, as yesterday we also celebrated a joyous Render Unto Caesar Day.

For those of you who are not U.S. subjects: Render Unto Caesar Day is a sort of great national holiday, on which we celebrate all the many blessings that are rained down upon we unworthy plebeians by the Almighty FedGov, blessed be its name.

Or something like that.


Meanwhile, back in Hell...

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This week's Friday Challenge is a direct spinoff from this week's Ultimate Geek Fu: Is There PowerPoint in Hell? We had some other ideas, but ultimately, this one promised to be too much fun to resist.

Kersley suggested doing either a Screwtape Letters-like scenario, in which an elder demon is coaching his young nephew on how to use PowerPoint to torment souls on Earth, or else perhaps a scenario in which someone thinks he's in The Meeting From Hell only to have it slowly dawn on him that he's died during the meeting, and is actually in Hell, and can't tell the difference. Henry ruminated a bit and proposed a challenge in which the object is to write the text for the first three to five slides in a "Welcome to Hell: Orientation for Damned Souls" presentation, while I put my best ideas into the Comments on the original thread.

So in the end, we decided to make this a wide-open challenge. PowerPoint. Hell. As long as your entry includes both elements, it's in. Go wild!

The deadline for this challenge is midnight Central time, Thursday, 4/22/10. As always, we are playing by the highly aleatoric Official Rules of the Friday Challenge and playing for whatever is behind Door #3, and especially as always, remember: the object here is to have fun!