> Gerald began – but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them “permanently” meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash – to pee.
I can't find that one under any of the years. Is that from the Bulwer-Lytton contest rather than the Lyttle Lytton contest? It sounds a bit long to be an entry in the latter.
Kinda loosely related: I've always wanted to create a site that shows the opening sentence of any book you can imagine, which would be useful for people who don't know what to read and want to get inspired. I'm quite sure it's entirely possible from a legal point of view (fair use), but I have no idea how to find the data.
> He slammed the door in my face, loud and sharp, like an acoustic lemon.
I think its not really about the sound, it is about the response you might make after a big hit of lemon flavor: puckering up, wincing, pulling your neck back - I can definitely imagine responding to a distasteful and loud sound in the same way.
tl;dr This points to the 2024 ranking of the Lyttle Lytton contest, noting that the judge separated llm generated from human written responses. The Lyttle Lytton contest imitates the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, but limits the entrants to 200 characters. The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is a challenge to write the worst first sentence for a novel. The judge felt the latter tended toward run on sentences that tried to pack in lots of context.
Thanks! I've been a fan of the Bullwer-Lytton contest since the 1980s. I did notice that some of the "one sentence" entries in the Little Lytton contest did, in fact, comprise two sentences separated by a dreaded period.
> Gerald began – but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them “permanently” meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash – to pee.