Lessons of life.

[The anti-anthropocentrist]

Hi Bodhi,

I am going to be honest in that I do not get your piece.  I thought maybe it had to do with the American identity or America because of the red, white, and blue.  I was almost seeing reference to America muscling her way into other nations, but then I was not able to make that work in my reading.  The presentation itself was fine.  So if you pick the white card, the instructions are to pick blue or red?  One issue is that there are many abstract ideas in this, such as stoicism and optimism.  Those are "mental ideas" rather than concrete details.  Sometimes it helps to convey a mental idea with concrete details and let the reader make impressions.

I am sorry not to be able to offer more.  I do not think I understand enough at this time to even be able to offer any real suggestions in the form of critique.  

Hey, thanks for the feedback. I was not going for anything to do with America. I can see the idea with the cards did not come across as the way I thought it would. It is my understanding that the Stoics were very anti-hope. Enduring optimism represents that they would not agree with. Instead of "oh, you will be fine", they would say "Well of course it's going to be hard, and it may get harder." This idea I find useful at times. Again I can see this did not come across.

Anyway, thank you.

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Huh?

I am not sure what distinction you are making between format and structure. What I mean is do you consider the unusual spacing the structure or the format?

That was my first response, and I actually had written a lot more, then I realized it was all one big acrostic. You'll likely have trouble getting extensive comments; while I am really new here, most people at workshop-type sites have a genetic and marked dislike for acrostics. Sad to say, I tend that way myself. You'd probably be better off stating up front and clearly that "Hey guys, this is an acrostic I am trying to do for a personal special occasion." This way, the response when it is noticed won't be "F***er tricked me into reading an acrostic" followed by a trip to this thread.

Maybe this is betraying old fashioned gender bias, but I'll leave it to the woman to judge whether the potential romantic cuteness under the circumstances outweighs the gimmicky-ness of it, especially with that day in February approaching.

That said, you have a problem with some minor inconsistency in layout that I think is due to the problems of lining things up with proportionally-spaced fonts. If you look in the formatting controls, there is probably a tag for displaying text in a fixed-width typewriter style, so you could line things up perfectly. Still, given what I see, I am not sure how much that will help: each little phrase varies so much in length, it just comes across as a bit of a mess to me. Perhaps with more vertical spacing it could work. I'd need to see it.

I wasn't looking at content.

Yeah I can feel the cringe lol.

Well, I can see the structure did not come across as I'd hoped as well. My choice of words when referring to the formating was not the right one.

The red part is in the present tense, the blue part is in the past tense. Also, because I (probably naively) thought it would be a good idea, the structure is deliberately disjointed in that way to highlight selected letters. A bad cryptic message. Again, in the past and the present tense. 

Above all, I do really appreciate your feedback. I will get better and clearer I promise!