Ratings and Reviews by Dawn S.

I enjoyed this, and was content to let the music wash over me, and the associations cohere and dissolve as I clicked through the story. It reminded me of my weirdo MFA program, which I really enjoyed. There is a flatness or generic-ness to the references--fields, tornadoes, school, parents, tv, birds, God, cigarettes--that became interesting when they were juxtaposed in such odd ways. I did find myself wanting a little more variety or tension. I don't know anything about GPT-2, but I wonder what would happen if different seeds or corpora (like with different styles of writing, or period-specific cultural references, or references to a specific place) were used within the same piece to modulate the tone a little bit more.

Surprising, odd, well written, and nicely designed, with an allusion to something like climate change and changing demographics (unless "kids" refers to goats and not children). For such a small, contained story, the number, type, and scale of the choices felt appropriate to me.