Given Hazards: Corrosive, Visual, Explosive
Given Image: here- Public Domain
This was surreal and creepy and interesting and really really good.
Reread this. Its very interesting and really leaves a lot to the imagination.
Its haunting in a sense you don't really normally see in these sorts of articles.
reduced beyond third-, second-, and first-dimensional meaningfulness
Kill this zombie noun. KILL IT. Just use “meaning.”
the anomaly was technically sufficiently contained already
I would drop “technically.” It makes the sentence awkward to read and doesn’t add any information.
A log was selected
I would specify that it’s a tree log and not a research log as I think most would assume. I think “spruce log” has a nice ring to it.
A stack of logs supplied for additional testing if it was needed.
I would drop “it was.”
Upon microscopic interrogation
You mean investigation? I can’t imagine these researchers are holding an interrogation with a microscopic person, although that is a good premise.
If this is an intentional mistake to show the memetic effects on the researchers, I would clarify that in a footnote as you did with the carbon atoms.
all but one of the research personnel displayed ongoing an extreme unease
This reads weirdly. Maybe remove “an” and add a comma?
something happened we were attacked by the anomaly, it's like… we were suddenly and instantly deformed, these… disgusting strands of tissue just… latched on to us and attacking and not letting go, like some sort of iron-jawed worm. I grabbed my pistol because I was ready; they had told us hostiles were a possibility. So I pointed right at the fucker and shot the shit out of it, and it was not happy, I guess it grabbed or bit down, I don't know, harder because it hurt like hell to me as well.
I get that the run on sentences are supposed to represent the character’s disturbed speech pattern, but it isn’t believable that the Authority would do this in a transcription. I would throw in some semicolons and dashes to serve as breaks between sentences without hurting the flow too much. This mostly applies to the first half but I’d also add a semicolon after “not happy.”
He is the first person in history to willfully have an arm (his right) amputated when not medically necessary and for psychological and palliative purposes.
This strikes me as a really weird footnote to have in here. It doesn’t relate to the article at all. You might as well precede it with “The Guinness Book of World Records Fun Fact #23:”
It shook me as unbelievable that they wouldn’t come to the conclusion, or at least hypothesize, that looking at the thing causes you to become disassociated with whatever the thing is dissolving.
I also think it’s weird that they would run a human experiment on the 990 researcher when they know this anomaly can fuck you up. Why would you be sending Authority staff to look at this thing earlier in the article. It should have been obvious by the second incident—at least a footnote in there saying that it’s a drawn conclusion from the incident would be sufficient.
I have a looming thought in the back of my mind that all the believability issues I have were some result of the visual hazard on whoever wrote the document, but I feel like that wouldn’t be intentional. I can’t really explain what could have been forgotten by the researchers that would cause such a sequence of events.
No-vote until I’ve read the other frontrunners. If the unbelievability was unintended then I think the article is on the weaker side, but would be solid if refined. If it was intentional, then this article is way beyond solid—I just think it would need a bit more of a hint toward the author of the document itself being compromised by the anomaly.
