#thread: indie

[detweilerboy]

Twin Threads is a 2021 crime thriller film written and directed by Shelley Parker-Chan. The film follows a group of young assassins, lead by Zhu Yuanzhang, sent to eliminate the heir to a rival criminal syndicate. Between them and their target stands Ouyang, a bodyguard with a mysterious past and conflicting loyalties.

From left to right: Ouyang & Zhu, Wang Baoxiang, Esen, Ma Xiuying, Xu Da and Chang Yuchun

I ended up leaning more into the noir poster aesthetic than I originally planned so I changed things around in regards to this AU. Noir isn't a particularly Chinese genre for historical reasons, but there are a few contemporary mainland Chinese neo noirs (I recommend Black Coal, Thin Ice). The contemporary western neo noir on the other hand is heavily inspired by Hong Kong action cinema, or East Asian action/crime cinema in general.

This AU turned into a love letter for Raymond Chandler (in spirit and fic writing that started this whole project), Hong Kong action thrillers, especially Johnnie To films but John Woo, Tsui Hark and Ringo Lam as well. Not a small part of this is also stolen from Wong Kar-wai, as well as the film Infernal Affairs.

The poster here owes more to classic noir posters as well as Takeshi Kitano's yakuza movies but also City on Fire (and Reservoir Dogs). But Johnnie To's The Mission, Election and Exiled have black and red color schemes as well.

Consider this a movie that probably wouldn't exist but is pulling from a pool influences between East & West and is just stuff i think is cool. Organized crime AU because it is a way to write a modern AU that keeps the brutality and violence of the original, as well as the pressure of hierarchy and tradition & games of thrones.

[luca-street-chris-deacon-rp]

Open to Anyone

Muse- Dominique Luca

Relationship- Boyfriend/Girlfriend, Husband/Wife

Mun's Notes - This can go across any fandom, any ships, with any muse of your choice

Plot - Luca is home after work and just out of the shower before date night, whether it's a romantic quiet night or a wild night is entirely up to you 😉

Luca only really took long showers whenever his back was hurting and because he had been overdoing it at the gym to keep in shape, and in the field as a SWAT officer, he had done something to aggravate his back. But that didn't mean he wasn't going to be attending date night. Sometimes, it felt like they barely spent any time together, so date night's were always special.

"Hey, babe." He called over to the bed where his partner was lying on top of the bed. "Have you decided if we're going out or staying in? Cause I'm good with either. Just let me get some of that medicated cream and take some painkillers, and I'm good to go." He looked over their body, smiling to himself because he was the luckiest guy on earth.

[darlinghearts]

OPEN TO : M (gimmie a Is.ra.el Bro.ussa.rd type of nerdy / cute, doesn't have to be HIS fc just the type for added bonus lol) CONNECTION : Greek life / college peer / lab partner type / stranger at a party / etc idk just gimmie something sweet for Twy please lol, she deserves it after being so grumpy

❝I swear to GOD if you hit me with some stupid pick up line right now, I'm GOING to punch you in the face.❞ Excuse her, she's been having a BAD day. Stoic expression lifted just SLIGHTLY then as a brow quirked upward and her head cocked to the side, POISED for his next reaction. Her fist wasn't clenched YET, but God was she ready.

[dunanana]

My first set of fanarts for the game Threads of You: Beyond the Bay also made during the first part of this year!

This has been a game i didn't expect to fall in love with and stuck by till now TT I met alot of long time friends cause of this game and this has cemented a place in my heart ❤️ check out the demo when you can! https://lavendeerstudios.itch.io/threads-of-you-beyond-the-bay

absolutely amazing and the art? DIVINE

[theoddest1]

Hey guys, check out this thread on twitter! Has all the vital info and everything. Also has some people share even more info of Viv being a fucking ass

Like this, for example. Here, we have Viv's sister having to speak for her to talk with Starvader, someone Viv quite literally fucked over....Vuv refused to speak to her herself in dms and refused to properly apologize.

[cherrygrxves]

open to f | about jordan | muses are out to eat.

"babe, please don't trip on this waitress - she's just being friendly."

[tyliocellier]

Open to f muses | TW: body image issues | Plot: y/m has a job that requires looking good (could be model/actress/celebrity/influencer/etc) and has recently changed her appearance in some way and received a lot of unnecessary hate for it.

"I don't know what you're talking about. Look at you, you're beautiful", Tylio told her, and he was starting to feel a bit like a broken record. He must have told her this at least five times today but somehow, the message didn't seem to land. When he found her crying in the bathroom that morning, it took him an hour to calm her down and he still hadn't figured out what set her off. "Did somebody say something to you?"

[isat-script-project]

Your amazing work here has inspired me to want to try doing a script project for DQB2 and I was wondering if you had any advice for me?

I'm gonna assume that's some sorta dragon quest game?

Well, ISAT really is a blessing in this regard, because the game is not encrypted at all. Accessing files and all text via rpgmaker MV and VSC is incredibly easy.

okay this got really long i'm putting it under the cut.

But before you get started, there really are some things you need to ask yourself first:

How am I going to get the text from this game?

If your answer is "write it down by hand as I play" then already know that there HAS to be a better way. If you're choosing that method, get yourself emulation, save states, or endless patience, because hooh boy, I've done a little bit of that for a different project (no, I will not elaborate) but save scumming on original hardware to get different dialogue options is agony.

Is there a text dump for your game? Is there a file dump or decomp for your game? Do you have the technical know how to access it? If not, are you confident in your knowledge of the game to accurately identify where all dialogue may occur? If not, are you satisfied missing out on nothing lines and just focusing on the non-optional? Is your game linear enough to not need a closer look at the code to figure out what happens when, as isat does?

2. What's my scope?

Again, do you truly want every line from this game, or just what's "important"? I personally cannot rest until I've exhausted the fucking Menus (which is why there's a script page for those, too) because I'm a completionist with delusions of grandeur, but some people are satisfied transcribing the cutscenes and nothing else (MUCH TO MY ANNOYANCE WHEN I NEED THE OTHER STUFF.... nobody cares about the optional collectible npc dialogue BUT I CARE!!! I CARE!!!!!)

Anyways, what exactly your scope is is gonna significantly influence what your next step looks like.

3. How am I going to present this?

Making the isat script project an individual website mainly came down to how finicky the dialogue in isat is. There's conditionals stacked on conditionals and I wanted a space where I had total control over how to present these factors without influence.

For more linear games, like, say, that time I made all the fewiki scripts for Fire Emblem 6 from chapter 12 onward, it was easy enough to present the scripts on a wiki page just because the game is much more linear, there's less dialogue to begin with, and all conditional text could be nicely divided up into similar groups, like boss dialogue where the condition is just "fight boss with x character".

isat script project would not exist without my fire emblem fixation, fun fact. other fun facts include that as a child i attempted to novelize Mario Party DS by transcribing all story mode text into a booklet by hand, and I did not finish this for reasons that are hopefully obvious.

This is, as you may figure, way easier to do. There is significantly less burden on you to actually understand how a website works - I cannot stress enough that the current state of the script project is only possible thanks to Gold, and without them, we'd still be at all dialogue being formatted as <p><b>Siffrin:</b> Says some text.</p>

For a lot of older games, you can also find whole game scripts being put up into a single document. Tis common on gamefaqs, I've used those plenty. There I believe you're just working with plain ol txt.

The rule is always though look at examples and if they do something cool figure out whether you can copy it. i did not create the website layout myself, i used a base and fiddled with it for a whole weekend until it stopped exploding.

Again, like, using an existing structure like a wiki or gamefaqs or just google docs or a spreadsheet is a significantly eased burden. One of my favorite things ever is actually a text dump on github, of all places. For this one, the person putting it up chose to leave all text in as close to original state as possible, doing no trimming of things like character emotes and leaving in all original string titles of every line. This is also incredibly useful, even if it is more difficult to use for your average schmoe! (This has fucking saved me doing wiki stuff for engage. engage text dump i ADORE you)

Do you want to be as accurate to the code as possible, or as accurate to the game? Do you have the time, energy, and skills to make the visual presentation nice? Or do you want to keep it rudimentary to streamline your process?

If you ARE doing something like making your own website, it is crucial that you figure out your visuals early, lest you be like us, and be stuck in Reformatting Hell for several months, because someone figured out how to make a thing prettier and nicer to read, and now you need to update the 100+ pages you've already created.

Reformatting code like that takes just as long as making a page in the first place, by the by, because you're just not getting around copy-pasting everything line by agonizing line.

This stuff takes HOURS. If I went at it alone, I doubt I'd have finished by now, or within the next like, two years. This is a really time consuming hobby, and I love doing it a lot, it scratches my exact fixation itch, but if your game is huge, consider seeing if people would be interested in joining you? I will also say being autistic about your game of choice is also a bonus in the sustainability department.

Many a times there were just no updates (as they are now) cuz I am just. Distracted by something else. Like yes on one hand I'm going to uni now and have less time but it's not really less time if I can still put 17hrs into a new video game in three days.

Stuff like this is ALWAYS a long-term project and you WILL need to take time off from it or else you'll start seeing html in your dreams and get burnout.

STREAMLINE YOUR PROCESS!!! FIGURE OUT HOW TO DO THIS WITH AS LITTLE EFFORT AS POSSIBLE!!!! Gold introduced me to Espanso, which is a program that lets you set up keyboard shortcuts to insert phrases, which was a MAAAAAASSIVE time saver in the html department, as it allowed me to just rapid fire paste in all the many html classes we stacked for the presentation of the site. even if you are doing a script on a wiki where everything does look like ['''Siffrin:''' says a thing] you will still be doing yourself a favor if you can shorten that '''Siffrin:''' to just typing :s .

As a side note, I also wanna say like. The popularity of isat script project is a complete outlier. Other game scripts may be used by a maniac like me to overanalyze the plot structure of Sonic 06, but you're very likely not going to see that recognition. I love doing this, because I want these resources to exist for myself. I don't do this for the good of the fandom, but because it is useful to me. I started this because I was writing isat fanfic, and got tired of looking up dialogue on youtube or booting up my own game.

Do I know if anyone found my FE6 scripts useful? No. Do I know if anyone is going through Veyle/Quotes and appreciating that I transcribed all the fucking battle voice clips? No. Do I know if someone appreciates me accurately labelling all voice lines from the ring polishing minigame in engage? Hell no. I don't know, I'm never going to get feedback on that. Those are wiki pages, anyone can edit them, they don't have viewcounts or comments I can look at, and the fandom just isn't as prone to taking screenshots and posting about them line by line as isat.

Isat blew the fuck up on tumblr. I'm not saying you'll get no recognition at all, but if you are relying on external motivators, you are probably going to peter out. There are pages I've worked on for other script things that I've genuienly not touched in two years because I just didn't feel like it, and that's also okay.

TLDR:

Figure out how to get the text you need with the least effort possible (and figure out whether doing that is even possible at all!), figure out what scope you're actually willing to put up with, and present it with the least effort possible, because everything else just isn't sustainable. Streamline streamline streamline. Be prepared to spend hours on this and maybe like find a new favorite podcast to just copy paste text to, because honestly, doing this is also pretty zen.

And most importantly, sparkle on, don't forget to have fun! Even if it seems big and intimidating, you can still make it just a fun side project, and slowly chip away at it over time. Rome wasn't built in a day, and with all the advantages going for isat script project (additional manpower, unencrypted files, easy tools for game examination) it still took over a year to complete.

(loop voice) Don't make the same mistakes I did, okay?

oh, yeah, one last thing, if you're not putting it on a wiki and ARE making your own website, ABSOLUTELY PUT IT ON GITHUB!!!! setting up so any changes to the main branch on github get reflected onto neocities is pretty easy and you only need to do it once, and what this allows is to just have random strangers show up and fix your problems for you. sometimes someone will just show up and fix five bajillion typos and then leave. or they'll stick around and help with more stuff and wowie you have a semblance of a team now.

if you're doing it on a wiki, find like, the wiki discord, if someone is interested in chipping in. if you're doing your own website, put it on github. do it. do it do it do it.

[wickcdmindz]

open to all genders your muse meets cain for the first time after coming over to hook up with/hang out with her sibling/roommate/etc.

"i'm cain--they didn't tell you that they had errands? a little rude."

[aroaessidhe]

The Third Eternal Library book, The Flame That Sings, is available to back/preorder on backerkit now!

an adult fantasy quintet about an intergenerational found family of magic bookbinders. Featuring an all queer, mostly neurodivergent cast of lovable characters using storytelling and art to heal from trauma.

I like this series a lot! you should check it out 📚

[cherryblossms]

"i'm just saying meeting this guy is a really bad idea, you don't really even know who this he is. i mean, people lie all the time... right? what if he's some psycho organ thief that's only interested in how much he could sell your kidneys for on the black market?"

muse: bosung im, sang heon lee, twenty three open to: any. plot: bosung has been catfishing y/m for a number of months because he's had feelings for them for years. he is convinced y/m wouldn't ever like him like that and he was desperate. now y/m is wanting to finally meet up with who he's claiming to be but that person doesn't exist and he's gotta do what he can to convince y/m not to meet. assume connection, just nothing romantic bc it'd work against the plot.

[invcntions]

open to all (m/f/nb) ! taken from here

“ they know you're taken, right? ”

[darlinghearts]

Open to : m / f Connection : ex that didn't end well, fwb, person who has a crush on her, etc

❝I don't really DO relationships. You KNOW that ... ❞

[birdmuse]

open to : females ❲ mutual or non-mutuals ❳. muse : ryle sullivan, twenty-nine ៸ bartender ❲ drug dealer ❳.

“i could keep you safe. they’re all afraid of me.”

[blcssom]

hiiiiiiii to celebrate finally getting my life together (rp life no one ask abt my work life) i decided i want more things so !!!! like this for a wishlist starter <3

i'll come to you for a muse or two, so i've put the ones i'm feeling under the cut -- or if we're mutuals and you have a particular ship/muse (who may or may not be on my main muse list!!) you wanna revisit, just lmk !!!

alden richter || 40 - retired boxer/gym owner (assassin au) / bisexual / theo james

beau greer || 32 - librarian/cam boy / bisexual / drew starkey

brianne barlowe || 30 - personal stylist / bisexual / sarah catherine hook

clover beckett || 27 - fitness instructor / bisexual / michelle randolph

damini somerset || 32 - matchmaker / bisexual / simone ashley

esther devlin || 34 - sex therapist / bisexual / willa fitzgerald

ethan greer || 29 - intimacy coordinator / bisexual / harris dickinson

felix beckett || 45 - mechanic/ex-con / heterosexual / ryan gosling

gemma curtis || 30 - etsy store owner (crafter) / bisexual / aimee lou wood

katherine taylor || 53 - publicist / bisexual / jennifer connelly

paloma rubino || 25 - professional cuddler / bisexual / maia reficco

roxanne evans || 26 - stage sound designer / homosexual / ruby cruz

seth barlowe || 35 - sports journalist / heterosexual / glen powell

travis bell || 30 - stuntman / bisexual / nick robinson

virginia brooks || 29 - scam artist (serial thief) / bisexual / margaret qualley

[prophvtics-a]

"listen, he's my brother so i don't want to talk too much shit about him but... you can do so much better." paloma wasn't even entirely sure how her socially awkward, nervous wreck of a younger brother had managed to bag someone as hot as his new girlfriend was but she assumed pity had something to do with it. he was like the old, dying cat you adopted from the shelter because you wanted it to experience a little bit of joy before they died, clearly she was doing some serious charity work to make up for whatever wrongdoings had led her into his arms. "you're so sexy and it's like... i love arlo and everything but girl to girl, you've gotta get out before he starts asking to call you mommy or something."