Lyttle Lytton Contest

My all time favorite:

> 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.

My favorite:

    "Detective Joe found the body slumped against the alley wall like a deflated bouncy castle, its limp limbs a sad parody of childhood joy."

This one I think is too clever to be awful:

    "She had a face like a chair, in all the best ways."

I presume this is related to the Bullwer Lytton Contest?

https://www.bulwer-lytton.com/

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.

  "One day a month go there was a huge accident on the left side of town involving some people and some stuff."

By far my favourite from this year - it just tickles me in the right way.

The line "She had a face like a chair, in all the best ways." is also fantastic.