Four Flush / Discussion

This is the discussion related to the wiki page Four Flush.

AKAM80 07 Jul 2024 18:38

I never found the man inside you, it’s true.
Yeah, I've got the rockaway blues.

20.8k words… someone shoot me if I ever try to do something like this again.

A humongous thank you is in order to Gawain777 for being willing to crit this absolute monster of a piece. Seriously, thank you homie.

A second, even bigger one, is for Vishardsh for her Ironband canon, her willingness to throw together a rough canon lore doc for me, answering my endless questions, and also critting it. You are the hero of this piece.

This is a piece that's occupied my thoughts for a long, long while now. I've wanted to do a dialogue focused piece around a game of poker for a good while, and that happened to collide with my desire to make an Ironband piece around February of this year. Thus, this monstrosity. I hope you enjoyed reading it because otherwise I will have wasted so much of your time. (And if I did, I apologize!)

Some fun facts about this piece, if you care to know...

• This was originally going to be titled "ANOVA" but I thought that "Four Flush" sounded a bit better and wasn't a reference that would escape most people.

• The art style of the playing cards is a bit divorced from my usual style. I knew I wanted a simple, angular style for them and it ended up becoming an homage to a good friend from high school, closely mimicking my memory of his style somewhat. You'll likely never read this, but if through some wild cosmic serendipity you are, howdy Noah! Miss you man.

• If you're curious, here's the template sheet for the face cards. (The image is a bit blurry since it's a screengrab of the drawings as I had them in multiple layers and it's zoomed in.)

• A majority of the hands in the piece were drawn randomly with the help of https://deck.of.cards/old/. Of course, occasional tweaks and scripted hands were used, but most were actually random. (Clicking the four Kings adds three Jokers to the deck— the Thaumaturges— which means the digital deck had a slightly higher chance of producing a wildcard than the deck in the story, but here's my thoughts on that discrepancy: I do not care.)

Oh, also, all drawing are by me and released under CC-BY-SA 4.0. Alright that's it now bye.

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Goodbye, Zion.

Last edited on 24 Jul 2024 05:55 by AKAM80 Show more

Stygian Blue 07 Jul 2024 19:41

Small spot of SPaG for you!

"Richter willingly lost all but one of the hands were he was dealer"
were -> where

"his mind slowly drug itself back to reality"
drug -> dragged

"performed his usual utilitarian shuffle before dolling out the cards."
dolling -> doling (x3)

a few commas

-Styg

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What is life if not the contrast between what has been and what will become?

Last edited on 07 Jul 2024 20:03 by Stygian Blue Show more

AKAM80 07 Jul 2024 21:31

Can't believe I got SPaGed… terrible day.

But seriously, thank you. It's so easy for things to slip through the cracks no matter how hard you comb.

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Goodbye, Zion.

Stygian Blue 08 Jul 2024 06:48

No problem! Always love to help when I spot a few snags. Especially in longer works where the author has been just. exhaustedly combing through and really isn't gonna notice a few tiny errors when the work just needs to get OUT, y'know. Goat cheese

-Styg

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What is life if not the contrast between what has been and what will become?

Stygian Blue 07 Jul 2024 20:05

Gorgeous work! The cards went a little over my head, but the SCENERY! the ATMOSPHERE! I've bee longing for another of this world ever since Motormage burrowed its way into my brain and stayed there, and by golly I got what I have been craving. What a show you made! How gorgeous, all of it. Well done. It's white linen splattered with succulent heart juices after steaming, or the stains liver leaves on teeth when caught in the gums, reminiscent but not the same as coffee held in the mouth for hours and deeply alarming. I applaud you. Neon snorted from broken tubing, still electrified. Decadent.

-Styg

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What is life if not the contrast between what has been and what will become?

FleshMaddAvalon 12 Jul 2024 03:42

MOTORMAGE REFERENCE

gorgeous piece dripping with atmosphere. A few hitches in prose but I echo Stygs sentiments entirely. Drugged up rides down cardboard streets. City boy in the undergrowth. Failure unbelievably precious. I hope your sandbox feels lighter.

-Avalon

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I watch the yonder hills
See foodwrenches toil in dust
Let their cacophonous calls
Rend our bodies to rust

meltedbee 22 Jul 2024 06:09

Never have I been on the edge of my seat for the whole of such a lengthy piece. Truly incredible what you've managed to do here - the tension ratchets further, yet further, straining metal-grains and overbearing springs. Violence I only wish I'd been able to capture in such exquisite detail in Magnifique. Exceptionally beautiful work, and a great addition to Ironband.

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radiance, glorious and cold and blistering all at once, like a star behind the eyes

Maxyfran73 27 Jul 2024 04:21

Holy shit this was an amazing adventure. Loved the world you put us in (Gotta read more of this stuff; ocular haze has been on my TBR for a while now), the disgustingly palpable atmosphere that exists here, and just, everything else. The characters are great, the game played tells so much about the world, and the art/presentation of said art is beautiful, and the action and ending are incredible. What a beautiful piece.

Easy +1~

zipzipskins 10 Dec 2024 15:58

i finally got to reading this.

so, this is unreal both in ambition at the outset and in delivery on the concept. you've heard it before from others but god damn this is so good, man. there are so many things that absolutely boggle the mind about it. for one, you drop us into this world that we might only know bits and pieces of, but it doesn't matter because you get us lost in it basically instantly. the images of the cards are an absolutely perfect highlight — they break up the text in a way that's so pleasant, and watching the poker hands flip and being able to get a feel for the direction of the way a given block of dialogue is going to sway based on who we know is holding what is a treasure. the game itself and the designs of the cards are finely-tuned worldbuilding. the level of details in what you've thought about (uppers being red and depressants being black, the face cards representing different social strata within the world, thaumaturge jokers, just to name a few) — it's all just dazzling. the prose is tense and urgent, incisive.

but all of that, which is all, to be very clear, excellent, doesn't hold a candle to your dialogue, which is pitch-perfect. each character's voice sings. it feels so easy, so natural. just four real-feeling people of various freak-levels, fitting in their unique ways into this high-stakes game. and you know it's all going to go south; there was no way it wouldn't, and they all know it too. and you can feel that from the very first word and the very first ways they interact with each other.

like, damn, dude. damn.

Snapdragon133 10 May 2025 03:29

I need Pal to have lived this and show up again sometime in the future. I love him. Gave me serious Star Wars droid vibes in all the best ways.

This story was awesome! I was seriously impressed with the tricks you pulled to make a story that was majority card-playing and shit talking so engaging and not overly wordy. I did roll my eyes a little bit at the full explanation of the rules, which ended up being mostly poker, but it was fine and didn't fully take me out - other than that everything card-wise either was inoffensive, hype, or had some really interesting play with the obvious highlight of this piece - the characters. I adore your choice to give them all different ways of talking, it made the card stuff so much easier to read since you often didn't have to clarify who was saying what, and it all immediately gave us a sense of the type of people these characters were.

All the set-ups you did paid off perfectly, and I'll also compliment you on Richter especially for writing a clear underdog that still seemed like he had the undeniable advantage. It remains that way for very long, up until Fifty finally reveals his trump card. I did wonder why Richter didn't grab the controller after shooting Fifty the first time, but I think that could be excused for rush the moment type stuff.

I have two main criticisms. First, for a story about gambling we never really get a sense for Richter's finances. Everything seems to point to Richter being poor, so it's strange that he was able to play all those games and not even sweat (heh) about the money he might lose. Now it's an interesting character choice for someone to only care about the cards being good, money second, but Richter is at a fundamental monetary disadvantage to the other three and I was surprised to not see it play into things. Now for the other, for most of the story your action feels impeccable to me. I was totally caught off-guard with Fifty's first stab and the whole melee with Pal using his three Chekhov's shotguns was so good. And the dialogue with Shoveside and then their fight was so well-paced and gruesome as well. However, while the fake out pause did work, it also seriously diffused most of your earned tension and the fight afterwords didn't help regain it because of how overly wordy it was, the only part of the story I felt was so. Oh and one nitpick - when describing the hole in Shoveside's face, you use the words depths in quick succession and I think you could get some better word choice in there for one of the times.

I loved the ending, even tho I hate Richter for throwing away the packet. Those are literally my boys. Did we learn nothing today bro. But it's so perfect for the story you set out to tell. I wish we could've known what Fifty's high ticket item was… Oh and before I forget very nice crosslinking! It felt impactful and necessary both times you did, especially for motormage which I am shocked to learn I haven't read yet. This is definitely the definitive card game story on the site now. Well done!